mensacalgary.org » For Your Contemplation

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 00:28:04 +0000

How do you feel when you have to sell some of your precious books? Read: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/07/16/f-vp-mallick.html

And here is a list of the best fitness applets:
http://lifehacker.com/5607322/five-best-mobile-fitness-apps?skyline=true&s=i

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 03:29:08 +0000

From the personal to social, business to IT, this how-to url contains it all:

http://lifehacker.com/

Capitalism in Crisis? Here’s a fun look at how we do things:

http://lifehacker.com/

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:27:52 +0000

STROKE

These are some signs of a stroke:

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/c.ikIQLcMWJtE/b.3483937/k.772A/Stroke__Warning_Signs.htm?src=home

The above is more accurate than the following four tips. We’re told to:

S – ask the person to…Smile. )
T – ask the person to Talk – to speak a simple coherent sentence. “It’s a sunny day outside”
R – ask the person to Raise both arms (like in a stickup)
T – ask the person to stick their tongue out straight

HEART ATTACK

These are some signs of a heart attack:

http://www.heartandstroke.com/site/c.ikIQLcMWJtE/b.3483917/k.171E/Heart_disease__Heart_Attack_Warning_Signals.htm#warningsignals

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:25:33 +0000

Cancer Research
http://alturl.com/dykd

This is the research url of InspireHealth in Vancouver. The monthly issues track studies on cancer and preventative measures as well as potential cures through diet, acupuncture, stress reduction, and many other techniques. The strength of the url is that it largely relies on the research to tell its own story. If you want to pursue a study, you can hunt it down. If you want to disregard it, you have to analyze the study itself to find the flaws.

Political Chicanery, or are Canadians as Naïve as They Think?
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/05/31/oliphant-report-release-mulroney-schreiber.html provides further reason why Canadians have contempt for their politicians. After spending millions on this two-year investigation of the cash-payments-to-mullroney story, Mr Justice Oliphant’s commission with its ponderous methods gave birth to mouse. Obeying its mealy-mouthed mandate, the commission found no one responsible for any wrong-doing of any kind. Can you imagine Oliphant’s surprise one day at being old, having accomplished so little?

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Sat, 01 May 2010 00:29:50 +0000

Cancer Research

(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/health/research/20cancer.html?ref=todayspaper) focusses primarily on breast cancer and demonstrates a difficulty doctors and patients currently encounter. It is nigh impossible to determine exactly what kind of cancer is present and therefore what treatment regimes and risk factor profiles apply. Not only is there a high rate of false positives/negatives, but many tumours have a mosaic or composite nature. Research is too new for testing protocols to have firmed up, and there is a sore lack of professional/administrative supervision. Not a pretty picture. But intense work in a field may create this situation at the cutting edge. Better chaos at the frontier, I suppose, than no frontier at all. Good luck to all readers with cancer; our hearts are with you.

The Next Money Crisis

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/columnists/article7107780.ece and http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article7107857.ece explain how the Greek financial crisis could trigger a global problem. Financial gnomes calculate how to stick it to countries. That’s what they do. It’s what they’re paid for. The gnomes will be hired as consultants by a country, misrepresent the country’s finances, bet against the state through the derivatives market (debt insurance etc), and rake it in.

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Fri, 02 Apr 2010 00:26:44 +0000

This snippet on rare coins is a gem
Rare Coins

Read up on mysteries of science
Mysteries

Read still more mysteries of science
More Mysteries

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:26:23 +0000

This snippet on rare coins is a gem
Rare Coins

Read up on mysteries of science
Mysteries

Read still more mysteries of science
More Mysteries

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:26:56 +0000

IQ Tests (tip of the hat to Vicki Herd)
IQ Test

Pigeon Humour (tip of the hat to Jeff Pugh):
Pigeon

Afghanistan, Lessons Unlearned from the Soviet War
Lessons Unlearned

Stone Age Amputation
Stone Age

Radiation Treatment
Radiation

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:26:16 +0000

This column is under review.

FOR YOUR CONTEMPLATION

editor — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:28:59 +0000

This column is under review.

ForYourContemplation

editor — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 00:27:57 +0000

This column is under review.

ForYourContemplation

editor — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 00:26:43 +0000

This column is under review.

editor — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 00:31:10 +0000

FORYOURCONTEMPLATION1

This column is in the shop for adjustment. We look forward to a revival in the October issue.

FORYOURCONTEMPLATION1

editor — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:24:11 +0000

This column is in the shop for repairs. We look forward to a revival in the September issue.

ForYourContemplation1

editor — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 00:25:27 +0000

This column is in the shop for adjustment. We look forward to a revival in the August issue.

Tra-la, as the elves work on the column..

ForYourContemplation1 The Demons of War

editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:31:23 +0000

Folks -

I’m currently reading Patrick J. Buchanan’s powerful "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War", which is subtitled: "How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World".

His Preface is especially powerful, and thought provoking. It starts with:

All about us we can see clearly now that the West is passing away.

In a single century, all the great houses of continental Europe fell. All the empires that ruled the world have vanished. Not one European nation, save Muslim Albania, has a birthrate that will enable it to survive through the century. As a share of the world’s population, peoples of European ancestry have been shrinking for three generations. The character of every Western nation is being irremediably altered as each undergoes an unresisted invasion from the Third World. We are slowly disappearing from the Earth.

What happened to us? What happened to our world?

When the twentieth century opened, the West was everywhere supreme. For four hundred years, explorers, missionaries, conquerors, and colonizers departed Europe for the four corners of the Earth to erect Empires that were to bring the blessings and benefits of Western civilization to all mankind. These empires were the creations of a self-confident race of men.

Whatever became of these men?

There were World Wars I & II, two phases of a Thirty Years’ War future historians will call the Great Civil War of the West.

The questions this book addresses are huge but simple: Were these two world wars, the mortal wounds we inflicted upon ourselves, necessary wars? Or were they wars of choice? And if they were wars of choice, who plunged us into these hideous and suicidal world wars that advanced the death of our civilization? Who are the statesmen responsible for the death of the West?

Buchanan’s premise is one that an increasing number of historians have studied: That World Wars I & II were not necessary – irresponsible, fratricidal battles which killed tens of millions of European peoples – but fatal to Western Civilization.

Human psychology is a fascinating study, when trying to comprehend how peoples can follow, lemming-like, the siren song of leaders seeking to rally their populations against one another.

Nicholson Baker’s "Human Smoke: The beginnings of World War II, the end of Civilization", also published in 2008, shows how politicians herd their peoples to the abyss; the darkest of human behavior; into lust of mass killing; all of which is justified on the highest moral grounds.

Who among those peoples of the former British Empire has not heard that the soldiers, in our nations’ uniforms during these wars, "fought for our freedom", when there is precious little evidence that our freedoms were at risk? Such is the power of myth, that this message is continually spread to school children every Remembrance Day and Memorial Day.

In America, Canada, Australia and Britain, the Latin phrases of Horace, signifying the duty of young men to die for one’s country are rarely heard in school corridors today, but the sentiments are presented in modern terms, which are as powerful and seductive.

Young men have always been attracted to the concept of battle, like moths to a flame, in the hope of winning recognition for valor; to prove their worthiness for membership in their tribe. Ironically, the young men these days are joined by young women, too. What soldiers throughout history have failed to understand is that nations rarely fight for survival, but for the interests of the rich and powerful.

When some event or condition impairs the ability of soldiers to function, they are discarded like so much garbage after a political rally.

When wars are short, the damage to the youth of any society is limited. When wars drag on, the cumulative effect becomes a significant factor in that nation’s ability to function in a healthy, productive manner.

We are witnessing such a phenomenon develop in the United States. Given the added stress of economic crisis, diminishing production of fossil fuels, and an aging population, it becomes clear that a major tipping point is approaching.

It bears careful study. How that nation copes will have an impact on the resulting global power structure. We, on the sidelines, may do little but observe and ponder; it is important for us to do so, whatever else we accomplish.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/19/opinion/19herbert.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

May 19, 2009

War’s Psychic Toll, by Bob Herbert

I couldn’t have been less surprised to read last week that an American G.I. had been charged with gunning down five of his fellow service members in Iraq. The fact that this occurred at a mental health counseling center in the war zone just served to add an extra layer of poignancy and a chilling ironic element to the fundamental tragedy.

The psychic toll of this foolish and apparently endless war has been profound since day one. And the nation’s willful denial of that toll has been just as profound.

According to authorities, John Russell, a 44-year-old Army sergeant who had been recognized as deeply troubled and was on his third tour in Iraq, went into the counseling center on the afternoon of May 11 and opened fire – killing an Army officer, a Navy officer and three enlisted soldiers. The three enlistees were 19, 20 and 25 years old.

This is what happens in wars. Wars are about killing, and once the killing is unleashed it takes many, many forms. Which is why it’s so sick to fight unnecessary wars, and so immoral to send other people’s children off to wars – psychic as well as physical – from which one’s own children are carefully protected.

The fallout from the psychic stress of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been vast, but there was no reason for its destructive effects to have surprised anyone. There was plenty of evidence that this would be an enormous problem. Speaking of Iraq back in 2004, Dr. Stephen C. Joseph, who had been an assistant secretary of defense during the Clinton administration, said, "I have a very strong sense that the mental health consequences are going to be the medical story of this war."

I remember writing a column about Jeffrey Lucey, a 23-year-old Marine who was deeply depressed and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, or P.T.S.D., when he returned from Iraq after serving in the earliest months of the war. He described gruesome events that he had encountered and was harshly critical of himself. He drank to excess, had nightmares, withdrew from friends and wrecked the family car.

On the afternoon of June 22, 2004, he wrote a note that said, "It’s 4:35 p.m. and I am near completing my death." He then hanged himself with a garden hose in the basement of his parents’ home.

Because we have chosen not to share the sacrifices of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrible burden of these conflicts is being shouldered by an obscenely small portion of the population. Since this warrior class is so small, the same troops have to be sent into the war zones for tour after harrowing tour.

As the tours mount up, so do the mental health problems. Combat is crazy-making to start with. Multiple tours are recipes for complete meltdowns.

As the RAND Corporation reported in a study released last year:

"Not only is a higher proportion of the armed forces being deployed, but deployments have been longer, redeployment to combat has been common, and breaks between deployments have been infrequent."

Recent attempts by the military to deal with some of the most egregious aspects of its deployment policies have amounted to much too little, much too late. The RAND study found that approximately 300,000 men and women who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan were already suffering from P.T.S.D. or major depression. That’s nearly one in every five returning veterans.

The mass-produced tragedies of war go far beyond combat deaths. Behind the abstract wall of RAND’s statistics is the immense real-life suffering of very real people. The toll includes the victims of violence and drunkenness and broken homes and suicides. Most of the stories never make their way into print. The public that professes such admiration and support for our fighting men and women are not interested.

Other studies have paralleled RAND’s in spotlighting the psychic toll of these wars. A CBS News survey found that veterans aged 20 to 24 were two to four times as likely to commit suicide as nonveterans the same age. A Time magazine cover story last year disclosed that "for the first time in history, a sizable and growing number of U.S. combat troops are taking daily doses of antidepressants to calm nerves strained by repeated and lengthy tours in Iraq and Afghanistan."

We’re brutally and cold-bloodedly sacrificing the psychological well-being of these men and women, which should be a scandal. If these wars are so important to our national security, we should all be engaging in some form of serious sacrifice, and many more of us should be serving.

But the country soothes its conscience and tamps down its guilt with the cowardly invocation: "Oh, they’re volunteers. They knew what they were getting into."

ForYourContemplation2 The Political Blank-Cheque

editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:30:21 +0000

Folks -

Howard Zinn is a historian whose work needs to be more widely discussed.

http://howardzinn.org/default/

Here is how he sees the relationship between the citizens of the United States and the President.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22639.htm

Changing Obama’s Mindset, by Howard Zinn

May 17, 2009 "The Progressive" — We [Americans] are citizens, and Obama is a politician. You might not like that word. But the fact is he’s a politician. He’s other things, too-he’s a very sensitive and intelligent and thoughtful and promising person. But he’s a politician.

If you’re a citizen, you have to know the difference between them and you-the difference between what they have to do and what you have to do. And there are things they don’t have to do, if you make it clear to them they don’t have to do it.

From the beginning, I liked Obama. But the first time it suddenly struck me that he was a politician was early on, when Joe Lieberman was running for the Democratic nomination for his Senate seat in 2006.

Lieberman-who, as you know, was and is a war lover-was running for the Democratic nomination, and his opponent was a man named Ned Lamont, who was the peace candidate. And Obama went to Connecticut to support Lieberman against Lamont.

It took me aback. I say that to indicate that, yes, Obama was and is a politician. So we must not be swept away into an unthinking and unquestioning acceptance of what Obama does.

Our job is not to give him a blank check or simply be cheerleaders. It was good that we were cheerleaders while he was running for office, but it’s not good to be cheerleaders now. Because we want the country to go beyond where it has been in the past. We want to make a clean break from what it has been in the past.

I had a teacher at Columbia University named Richard Hofstadter, who wrote a book called The American Political Tradition, and in it, he examined presidents from the Founding Fathers down through Franklin Roosevelt. There were liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats. And there were differences between them. But he found that the so-called liberals were not as liberal as people thought-and that the difference between the liberals and the conservatives, and between Republicans and Democrats, was not a polar difference. There was a common thread that ran through all American history, and all of the presidents-Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative-followed this thread.

The thread consisted of two elements: one, nationalism; and two, capitalism. And Obama is not yet free of that powerful double heritage.

We can see it in the policies that have been enunciated so far, even though he’s been in office only a short time.

Some people might say, "Well, what do you expect?"

And the answer is that we expect a lot.

People say, "What, are you a dreamer?"

And the answer is, yes, we’re dreamers. We want it all. We want a peaceful world. We want an egalitarian world. We don’t want war. We don’t want capitalism. We want a decent society.

We better hold on to that dream-because if we don’t, we’ll sink closer and closer to this reality that we have, and that we don’t want.

Be wary when you hear about the glories of the market system. The market system is what we’ve had. Let the market decide, they say. The government mustn’t give people free health care; let the market decide.

Which is what the market has been doing-and that’s why we have forty-eight million people without health care. The market has decided that. Leave things to the market, and there are two million people homeless. Leave things to the market, and there are millions and millions of people who can’t pay their rent. Leave things to the market, and there are thirty-five million people who go hungry.

You can’t leave it to the market. If you’re facing an economic crisis like we’re facing now, you can’t do what was done in the past. You can’t pour money into the upper levels of the country-and into the banks and corporations-and hope that it somehow trickles down.

What was one of the first things that happened when the Bush Administration saw that the economy was in trouble? A $700 billion bailout, and who did we give the $700 billion to? To the financial institutions that caused this crisis.

This was when the Presidential campaign was still going on, and it pained me to see Obama standing there, endorsing this huge bailout to the corporations.

What Obama should have been saying was: Hey, wait a while. The banks aren’t poverty stricken. The CEOs aren’t poverty stricken. But there are people who are out of work. There are people who can’t pay their mortgages. Let’s take $700 billion and give it directly to the people who need it. Let’s take $1 trillion, let’s take $2 trillion.

Let’s take this money and give it directly to the people who need it. Give it to the people who have to pay their mortgages. Nobody should be evicted. Nobody should be left with their belongings out on the street.

Obama wants to spend perhaps a trillion more on the banks. Like Bush, he’s not giving it directly to homeowners. Unlike the Republicans, Obama also wants to spend $800 billion for his economic stimulus plan. Which is good-the idea of a stimulus is good. But if you look closely at the plan, too much of it goes through the market, through corporations.

It gives tax breaks to businesses, hoping that they’ll hire people. No-if people need jobs, you don’t give money to the corporations, hoping that maybe jobs will be created. You give people work immediately.

A lot of people don’t know the history of the New Deal of the 1930s. The New Deal didn’t go far enough, but it had some very good ideas. And the reason the New Deal came to these good ideas was because there was huge agitation in this country, and Roosevelt had to react. So what did he do? He took billions of dollars and said the government was going to hire people. You’re out of work? The government has a job for you.

As a result of this, lots of very wonderful work was done all over the country. Several million young people were put into the Civilian Conservation Corps. They went around the country, building bridges and roads and playgrounds, and doing remarkable things.

The government created a federal arts program. It wasn’t going to wait for the markets to decide that. The government set up a program and hired thousands of unemployed artists: playwrights, actors, musicians, painters, sculptors, writers. What was the result? The result was the production of 200,000 pieces of art. Today, around the country, there are thousands of murals painted by people in the WPA program. Plays were put on all over the country at very cheap prices, so that people who had never seen a play in their lives were able to afford to go.

And that’s just a glimmer of what could be done. The government has to represent the people’s needs. The government can’t give the job of representing the people’s needs to corporations and the banks, because they don’t care about the people’s needs. They only care about profit.

In the course of his campaign, Obama said something that struck me as very wise-and when people say something very wise, you have to remember it, because they may not hold to it. You may have to remind them of that wise thing they said.

Obama was talking about the war in Iraq, and he said, "It’s not just that we have to get out of Iraq." He said "get out of Iraq," and we mustn’t forget it. We must keep reminding him: Out of Iraq, out of Iraq, out of Iraq-not next year, not two years from now, but out of Iraq now.

But listen to the second part, too. His whole sentence was: "It’s not enough to get out of Iraq; we have to get out of the mindset that led us into Iraq." What is the mindset that got us into Iraq?

It’s the mindset that says force will do the trick. Violence, war, bombers-that they will bring democracy and liberty to the people.

It’s the mindset that says America has some God-given right to invade other countries for their own benefit. We will bring civilization to the Mexicans in 1846. We will bring freedom to the Cubans in 1898. We will bring democracy to the Filipinos in 1900. You know how successful we’ve been at bringing democracy all over the world.

Obama has not gotten out of this militaristic missionary mindset. He talks about sending tens of thousands of more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is a very smart guy, and surely he must know some of the history. You don’t have to know a lot to know the history of Afghanistan has been decades and decades and decades and decades of Western powers trying to impose their will on Afghanistan by force: the English, the Russians, and now the Americans. What has been the result? The result has been a ruined country.

This is the mindset that sends 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, and that says, as Obama has, that we’ve got to have a bigger military. My heart sank when Obama said that. Why do we need a bigger military? We have an enormous military budget. Has Obama talked about cutting the military budget in half or some fraction? No.

We have military bases in more than a hundred countries. We have fourteen military bases on Okinawa alone. Who wants us there? The governments. They get benefits. But the people don’t really want us there. There have been huge demonstrations in Italy against the establishment of a U.S. military base. There have been big demonstrations in South Korea and on Okinawa.

One of the first acts of the Obama Administration was to send Predator missiles to bomb Pakistan. People died. The claim is, "Oh, we’re very precise with our weapons. We have the latest equipment. We can target anywhere and hit just what we want."

This is the mindset of technological infatuation. Yes, they can actually decide that they’re going to bomb this one house. But there’s one problem: They don’t know who’s in the house. They can hit one car with a rocket from a great distance. Do they know who’s in the car? No.

And later-after the bodies have been taken out of the car, after the bodies have been taken out of the house-they tell you, "Well, there were three suspected terrorists in that house, and yes, there’s seven other people killed, including two children, but we got the suspected terrorists." But notice that the word is "suspected." The truth is they don’t know who the terrorists are.

So, yes, we have to get out of the mindset that got us into Iraq, but we’ve got to identify that mindset. And Obama has to be pulled by the people who elected him, by the people who are enthusiastic about him, to renounce that mindset. We’re the ones who have to tell him, "No, you’re on the wrong course with this militaristic idea of using force to accomplish things in the world. We won’t accomplish anything that way, and we’ll remain a hated country in the world."

Obama has talked about a vision for this country. You have to have a vision, and now I want to tell Obama what his vision should be.

The vision should be of a nation that becomes liked all over the world. I won’t even say loved-it’ll take a while to build up to that. A nation that is not feared, not disliked, not hated, as too often we are, but a nation that is looked upon as peaceful, because we’ve withdrawn our military bases from all these countries. We don’t need to spend the hundreds of billions of dollars on the military budget. Take all the money allocated to military bases and the military budget, and-this is part of the emancipation-you can use that money to give everybody free health care, to guarantee jobs to everybody who doesn’t have a job, guaranteed payment of rent to everybody who can’t pay their rent, build child care centers.

Let’s use the money to help other people around the world, not to send bombers over there. When disasters take place, they need helicopters to transport people out of the floods and out of devastated areas. They need helicopters to save people’s lives, and the helicopters are over in the Middle East, bombing and strafing people.

What’s required is a total turnaround. We want a country that uses its resources, its wealth, and its power to help people, not to hurt them. That’s what we need. This is a vision we have to keep alive. We shouldn’t be easily satisfied and say, "Oh well, give him a break. Obama deserves respect."

But you don’t respect somebody when you give them a blank check. You respect somebody when you treat them as an equal to you, and as somebody you can talk to and somebody who will listen to you.

Not only is Obama a politician. Worse, he’s surrounded by politicians. And some of them he picked himself. He picked Hillary Clinton, he picked Lawrence Summers, he picked people who show no sign of breaking from the past.

We are citizens. We must not put ourselves in the position of looking at the world from their eyes and say, "Well, we have to compromise, we have to do this for political reasons." No, we have to speak our minds.

This is the position that the abolitionists were in before the Civil War, and people said, "Well, you have to look at it from Lincoln’s point of view." Lincoln didn’t believe that his first priority was abolishing slavery. But the anti-slavery movement did, and the abolitionists said, "We’re not going to put ourselves in Lincoln’s position. We are going to express our own position, and we are going to express it so powerfully that Lincoln will have to listen to us."

And the anti-slavery movement grew large enough and powerful enough that Lincoln had to listen. That’s how we got the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth and Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

That’s been the story of this country. Where progress has been made, wherever any kind of injustice has been overturned, it’s been because people acted as citizens, and not as politicians. They didn’t just moan. They worked, they acted, they organized, they rioted if necessary to bring their situation to the attention of people in power. And that’s what we have to do today.

Thanks to Alex Read and Matt Korn for transcribing Zinn’s talk on February 2 at the Busboys and Poets restaurant in Washington, D.C., from which this is adapted.

ForYourContemplation3 Tasers

editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:29:15 +0000

Folks -

This would be funny, if it were a skit on television.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

—– Original Message —–

Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2009 10:13 PM

Subject: Police short changed by the almighty deity? Or do they check their brains at the curb when they put on their uniform.

Kids Visiting Prisons Get Stun-Gunned, by Jessica Gresko

http://news.aol.com/article/florida-prison-shock/485960?icid=main|netscape|dl1|link4|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fflorida-prison-shock%2F485960

MIAMI (May 16) – Demonstrations at three Florida prisons where more than 40 children were shocked with stun guns have led to the dismissal of three employees and the resignation of two others, the Department of Corrections said Friday. The incidents took place on April 23, national "Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day." As part of demonstrations at two prisons, children held hands in a circle, and one was shocked with the stun gun, passing the shock around the circle. At another prison, children were shocked individually.

Other Taser incidents:

The police chief of a small Central Texas town was arrested April 6 after he allegedly used a Taser on his wife. Oly Ivy, 30, was charged with aggravated assault. The Oakwood City Council voted to fire him immediately. Ivy’s attorney said his client "is taking these allegations very seriously."

A cell phone video released in January shows actors Josh Brolin and Jeffrey Wright being arrested after they refused to leave a bar. Wright was repeatedly hit by a Taser. "What are you doing? Why are you still shocking him?" someone yells in the recording. The incident occurred in July 2008. The prosecutor later agreed to drop all charges.

Sheriff’s deputies Tasered Gladwyn Taft Russ III while trying to arrest the man at his father’s funeral. The incident occurred Nov. 15 in Wilmington, N.C., as Russ, who was a pallbearer, was helping to load his father’s casket into a hearse. The sheriff later apologized.

A pastor filed suit in July against a Toledo, Ohio, hospital after being hit by a Taser and beaten by security guards at the facility. Much of last year’s incident outside St. Vincent Mercy Hospital was recorded on video.

Campus police wielded Tasers against University of Florida student Andrew Meyer as they tried to remove him from a forum featuring Sen. John Kerry. Meyer cried out, "Don’t Tase me, bro!" but was shocked anyway. After video of the Sept. 17, 2007, incident was posted on the Internet, the university opened an investigation that found the campus police officers were justified.

A Warren, Ohio, police officer repeatedly jolted Heidi Gill with a Taser during a traffic stop on Sept. 2, 2007. Dashboard video from his cruiser captured Patrolman Richard Kovach hitting Gill with the stun gun while she was handcuffed. She was knocked unconscious. All charges against Gill were dropped. Kovach was later fired from the police force.

Police were summoned to the airport in Vancouver, British Columbia, in

October 2007 after Robert Dziekanski became upset. A series of mix-ups had left the Polish immigrant stranded there for hours. Although witnesses — including a man who recorded the confrontation on video — said they warned police that Dziekanski didn’t understand English, officers hit him with a Taser at least twice. Dziekanski died. (Sources: AP, CBS, CBC, TMZ)

Also see the story “Letter a Scathing Indictment of RCMP” by Gary Mason, Globe and Mail, May 15, 2009 http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090515.wmason0515/BNStory/National/home

It started out as an apology for the role Canada’s national police force played in the death of her son, Robert. But in its writing, police psychologist Mike Webster’s open letter to Zofia Cisowski became a scathing indictment of the force’s leadership.

"So how could this happen?" Mr. Webster writes in his letter to Ms. Cisowski. “The short answer is an inept, insular and archaic group of RCMP executives has let the Force fall out of step with 21st Century policing." [from an Open Letter to Zofia Cisowski] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20090515.wmasonletter0515/BNStory/National

ForYourContemplation4 Bombing Your Home

editor — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 00:28:25 +0000

Folks -

The United States is using terror tactics with its drone attacks, thus arousing the Pakistani population in fear and anger. The proof is as David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum explain:

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/opinion/17exum.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=all

May 17, 2009

Death From Above, Outrage Down Below, by David Kilcullen and Andrew McDonald Exum

In recent days, the Pentagon has made two major changes in its strategy to defeat the Taliban, Al Qaeda and their affiliates in Afghanistan and Pakistan. First came the announcement that Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal would take over as the top United States commander in Afghanistan. Next, Pentagon officials said that the United States was giving Pakistan more information on its drone attacks on terrorist targets, while news reports indicated that Pakistani officers would have significant future control over drone routes, targets and decisions to fire weapons (though the military has denied that).

While we agree with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates that "fresh eyes were needed" to review our military strategy in the region, we feel that expanding or even just continuing the drone war is a mistake. In fact, it would be in our best interests, and those of the Pakistani people, to declare a moratorium on drone strikes into Pakistan.

After the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and following much internal debate, President George W. Bush authorized a broad expansion of drone strikes against a wide array of targets within Pakistan: Qaeda operatives, Pakistan-based members of the Afghan Taliban insurgency and – in some cases – other militants bent on destabilizing Pakistan.

The use of drones in military operations has steadily grown – we know from public documents that from last September to this March alone, C.I.A. operatives launched more than three dozen strikes.

The appeal of drone attacks for policy makers is clear. For one thing, their effects are measurable. Military commanders and intelligence officials point out that drone attacks have disrupted terrorist networks in Pakistan, killing key leaders and hampering operations. Drone attacks create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers. And, because they kill remotely, drone strikes avoid American casualties.

But on balance, the costs outweigh these benefits for three reasons.

First, the drone war has created a siege mentality among Pakistani civilians. This is similar to what happened in Somalia in 2005 and 2006, when similar strikes were employed against the forces of the Union of Islamic Courts. While the strikes did kill individual militants who were the targets, public anger over the American show of force solidified the power of extremists. The Islamists’ popularity rose and the group became more extreme, leading eventually to a messy Ethiopian military intervention, the rise of a new regional insurgency and an increase in offshore piracy.

While violent extremists may be unpopular, for a frightened population they seem less ominous than a faceless enemy that wages war from afar and often kills more civilians than militants.

Press reports suggest that over the last three years drone strikes have killed about 14 terrorist leaders. But, according to Pakistani sources, they have also killed some 700 civilians. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, a hit rate of 2 percent – hardly "precision." American officials vehemently dispute these figures, and it is likely that more militants and fewer civilians have been killed than is reported by the press in Pakistan. Nevertheless, every one of these dead noncombatants represents an alienated family, a new desire for revenge, and more recruits for a militant movement that has grown exponentially even as drone strikes have increased.

Second, public outrage at the strikes is hardly limited to the region in which they take place – areas of northwestern Pakistan where ethnic Pashtuns predominate. Rather, the strikes are now exciting visceral opposition across a broad spectrum of Pakistani opinion in Punjab and Sindh, the nation’s two most populous provinces. Covered extensively by the news media, drone attacks are popularly believed to have caused even more civilian casualties than is actually the case. The persistence of these attacks on Pakistani territory offends people’s deepest sensibilities, alienates them from their government, and contributes to Pakistan’s instability.

Third, the use of drones displays every characteristic of a tactic – or, more accurately, a piece of technology – substituting for a strategy. These attacks are now being carried out without a concerted information campaign directed at the Pakistani public or a real effort to understand the tribal dynamics of the local population, efforts that might make such attacks more effective.

To be sure, simply ending the drone strikes is no more a strategy than continuing them. Stabilizing Pakistan will require a focus on securing areas, principally in Punjab and Sindh, that are still under government control, while building up police and civil authorities and refocusing aid on economic development, security and governance. Suspending drone strikes won’t fix Pakistan’s problems – but continuing them makes these problems much harder to address.

Governments typically make several mistakes when attempting to separate violent extremists from populations in which they hide. First, they often overestimate the degree to which a population harboring an armed actor can influence that actor’s behavior. People don’t tolerate extremists in their midst because they like them, but rather because the extremists intimidate them. Breaking the power of extremists means removing their power to intimidate – something that strikes cannot do.

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the "air control" methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

The drone campaign is in fact part of a larger strategic error – our insistence on personalizing this conflict with Al Qaeda and the Taliban. Devoting time and resources toward killing or capturing "high-value" targets – not to mention the bounties placed on their heads – distracts us from larger problems, while turning figures like Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban umbrella group, into Robin Hoods. Our experience in Iraq suggests that the capture or killing of high-value targets – Saddam Hussein or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi – has only a slight and fleeting effect on levels of violence. Killing Mr. Zarqawi bought only 18 days of quiet before Al Qaeda returned to operations under new leadership.

This is not to suggest that killing terrorists is a bad thing – on the contrary. But it’s not the only thing that matters, and over-emphasizing it wastes resources. The operation that killed Mr. Zarqawi, for example, was not a one-day event. Thousands of hours of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance were devoted to the elimination of one man, when units on the ground could have used this time to protect the people from the insurgency that was tearing Iraq apart.

Having Osama bin Laden in one’s sights is one thing. Devoting precious resources to his capture or death, rather than focusing on protecting the Afghan and Pakistani populations, is another. The goal should be to isolate extremists from the communities in which they live. The best way to do this is to adopt policies that build local partnerships. Al Qaeda and its Taliban allies must be defeated by indigenous forces – not from the United States, and not even from Punjab, but from the parts of Pakistan in which they now hide. Drone strikes make this harder, not easier.

David Kilcullen, the author of "The Accidental Guerrilla," was a counterinsurgency adviser to Gen. David Petraeus from 2006 to 2008. Andrew Exum, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was an Army officer in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004.

ForYourContemplation1 The Cause of the Crisis

editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:30:59 +0000

Folks -

For those interested, a cogent "second look" at the phenomenon of economic "Bubbles". There is a lot of material in this short essay, which has implications for future economic thinking.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123897612802791281.html#mod=djemEditorialPage

From Bubble to Depression?

Bubbles have been frequent in economic history, and they occur in the laboratories of experimental economics under conditions which — when first studied in the 1980s — were considered so transparent that bubbles would not be observed.

We economists were wrong: Even when traders in an asset market know the value of the asset, bubbles form dependably. Bubbles can arise when some agents buy not on fundamental value, but on price trend or momentum. If momentum traders have more liquidity, they can sustain a bubble longer.

But what sparks bubbles? Why does one large asset bubble — like our dot-com bubble — do no damage to the financial system while another one leads to its collapse? Key characteristics of housing markets — momentum trading, liquidity, price-tier movements, and high-margin purchases — combine to provide a fairly complete, simple description of the housing bubble collapse, and how it engulfed the financial system and then the wider economy.

In just the past 40 years there were two other housing bubbles, with peaks in 1979 and 1989, but the largest one in U.S. history started in 1997, probably sparked by rising household income that began in 1992 combined with the elimination in 1997 of taxes on residential capital gains up to $500,000. Rising values in an asset market draw investor attention; the early stages of the housing bubble had this usual, self-reinforcing feature.

The 2001 recession might have ended the bubble, but the Federal Reserve decided to pursue an unusually expansionary monetary policy in order to counteract the downturn. When the Fed increased liquidity, money naturally flowed to the fastest expanding sector. Both the Clinton and Bush administrations aggressively pursued the goal of expanding homeownership, so credit standards eroded. Lenders and the investment banks that securitized mortgages used rising home prices to justify loans to buyers with limited assets and income. Rating agencies accepted the hypothesis of ever rising home values, gave large portions of each security issue an investment-grade rating, and investors gobbled them up.

But housing expenditures in the U.S. and most of the developed world have historically taken about 30% of household income. If housing prices more than double in a seven-year period without a commensurate increase in income, eventually something has to give. When subprime lending, the interest-only adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM), and the negative-equity option ARM were no longer able to sustain the flow of new buyers, the inevitable crash could no longer be delayed.

The price decline started in 2006. Then policies designed to promote the American dream instead produced a nightmare. Trillions of dollars of mortgages, written to buyers with slender equity, started a wave of delinquencies and defaults. Borrowers’ losses were limited to their small down payments; hence, the lion’s share of the losses was transmitted into the financial system and it collapsed.

During the 1976-79 and 1986-89 housing price bubbles, the effective federal-funds interest rate was rising while housing prices rose: The Federal Reserve, "leaning against the wind," helped mitigate the bubbles. In January 2001, however, after four years with average inflation-adjusted house price increases of 7.2% per year (about 6% above trend for the past 80 years), the Fed started to decrease the fed-funds rate. By December 2001, the rate had been reduced to its lowest level since 1962. In 2002 the average fed-funds rate was lower than in any year since the 1958 recession. In 2003 and 2004 the average fed-funds rates were lower than in any year since 1955 when the rate series began.

Monetary policy, mortgage finance, relaxed lending standards, and tax-free capital gains provided astonishing economic stimulus: Mortgage loan originations increased an average of 56% per year for three years — from $1.05 trillion in 2000 to $3.95 trillion in 2003!

By the time the Federal Reserve began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the Case-Shiller 20-city composite index had increased 15.4% during the previous 12 months. Yet the housing portion of the CPI for those same 12 months rose only 2.4%.

How could this happen? In 1983, the Bureau of Labor Statistics began to use rental equivalence for homeowner-occupied units instead of direct home-ownership costs. Between 1983 and 1996, the price-to-rental ratio increased from 19.0 to 20.2, so the change had little effect on measured inflation: The CPI underestimated inflation by about 0.1 percentage point per year during this period. Between 1999 and 2006, the price-to-rent ratio shot up from 20.8 to 32.3.

With home price increases out of the CPI and the price-to-rent ratio rapidly increasing, an important component of inflation remained outside the index. In 2004 alone, the price-rent ratio increased 12.3%. Inflation for that year was underestimated by 2.9 percentage points (since "owners’ equivalent rent" is about 23% of the CPI). If home-ownership costs were included in the CPI, inflation would have been 6.2% instead of 3.3%.

With nominal interest rates around 6% and inflation around 6%, the real interest rate was near zero, so household borrowing took off. As measured by the Case-Shiller 10 city index, the accumulated inflation in home-ownership costs between January 1999 and June 2006 was 151%, but the CPI measured a mere 23% increase. As the Federal Reserve monitored inflation in the early part of this decade, home-price increases were no longer visible in the CPI, so the lax monetary policy continued. Even after the Fed began to slowly raise the fed-funds rate in May 2004, the average rate remained low and the bubble continued to inflate for two more years.

The unraveling of the bubble is in many ways the most fascinating part of the story, and the most painful reality we are now experiencing. The median price of existing homes had fallen from $230,000 in July to $217,300 in November 2006. By the beginning of 2007, in 17 of the 20 cities in the Case-Shiller index, prices were falling. Serious price declines had not yet begun, but the warning signs were there for alert observers.

Kate Kelly, writing in this newspaper (Dec. 14, 2007), tells the story of how Goldman Sachs avoided the fate of many of the other investment banks that packaged mortgages into securities. Goldman loaded up on the Markit ABX index of credit default swaps between early December 2006 and late February 2007, as their price dropped from 97.70 on Dec. 4 to under 64 by Feb. 27. But the market was not yet in free-fall: The insurance on AAA-rated parts of the mortgage-backed securities (MBS) remained inexpensive. By mid-summer 2007, concern spread to the AAA-rated tranches of MBS.

At the end of February 2007, the cost of $10 million of insurance on the AAA-rated portion of a mortgage-backed security was still only $68,000 plus a $9,000 annual premium. Housing-market conditions deteriorated further in the first half of 2007. Case-Shiller tiered price sequences in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Miami all show serious declines by the summer of 2007. Prices in the low-price tier in San Francisco were down almost 13% from their peak by July 2007; in San Diego they were off 10% by July 2007. Startling developments began to unfold that month. Between July 9 and Aug. 3, 2007, the cost of insuring AAA MBS tranches went from $50,000 upfront plus a $9,000 annual premium for $10 million of insurance to over $900,000 upfront (plus the annual premium).

Once the cost of insuring new mortgage-backed securities skyrocketed, mortgage financing from MBS rapidly declined. Subprime originations plummeted from $160 billion in the third quarter of 2006 to $28 billion in the third quarter of 2007. Mortgage-backed security issuance fell comparably, from $483 billion in all of 2006 to only $30.7 billion in the third quarter of 2007. Other measures of new loan originations were falling at the same time. The liquidity that generated the housing market bubble was evaporating.

Trouble quickly spread from the cost of insuring mortgage-backed securities to problems with credit markets generally, as the spread between short-term U.S. Treasury debt and the LIBOR rate increased to 2.40% from 0.44% between Aug. 8 and Aug. 20, 2007. Since U.S. Treasury debt is generally considered secure, but a bank’s loans to another bank carry some risk of default, the spread between these rates serves as an indicator of perceived risk in financial markets.

In one city after another, prices of homes in the low-price tier appreciated the most and then fell the most; prices in the high-priced tier appreciated least and fell the least. The price index graphs for Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Miami show that in all of these cities, prices in the low-price tier have fallen between 50% and 57%. Moreover, housing prices have continually declined in every market in the Case-Shiller index. According to First American CoreLogic, 10.5 million households had negative or near negative equity in December 2008. When housing prices turned down, many borrowers with low income and few assets other than their slender home equity faced foreclosure. The remaining losses had to be absorbed by the financial system. Consequently, the financial system has suffered a blow unlike anything since the Great Depression, and the source is the weak financial position of the people holding declining assets.

Earlier, during the downturn in the equities market between December 1999 and September 2002, approximately $10 trillion of equity was erased. But a measure of financial system performance, the Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods BKX index of financial firms, fell less than 6% during that period. In the current downturn, the value of residential real estate has fallen by approximately $3 trillion, but the BKX index has now fallen 75% from its peak of January 2007. The financial sector has been devastated in this crisis, whereas it was almost completely unaffected by the downturn in the equities market early in this decade.

How can one crash that wipes out $10 trillion in assets cause no damage to the financial system and another that causes $3 trillion in losses devastate the financial system?

In the equities-market downturn early in this decade, declining assets were held by institutional and individual investors that either owned the assets outright, or held only a small fraction on margin, so losses were absorbed by their owners. In the current crisis, declining housing assets were often, in effect, purchased between 90% and 100% on margin. In some of the cities hit hardest, borrowers who purchased in the low-price tier at the peak of the bubble have seen their home value decline 50% or more. Over the past 18 months as housing prices have fallen, millions of homes became worth less than the loans on them, huge losses have been transmitted to lending institutions, investment banks, investors in mortgage-backed securities, sellers of credit default swaps, and the insurer of last resort, the U.S. Treasury.

In an important paper in 1983, Ben Bernanke argued that during the Depression, severe damage to the financial system impeded its ability to perform its economic role of lending to households for durable goods consumption and to firms for production and trade. We are seeing this process playing out now as loan funds for automobile purchases have withered. Auto sales fell 41% between February 2008 and February 2009. Retail and labor markets too are now part of the collateral damage from the housing debacle. Housing peaked in early 2006. Losses from the mortgage market began to infect the financial system in 2006; asset prices in that sector began to decline at the end of 2006. Meanwhile, equities and the broader economy were performing well, but as the financial sector deteriorated, its problems blindsided the rest of the economy.

The events of the past 10 years have an eerie similarity to the period leading up to the Great Depression. Total mortgage debt outstanding increased from $9.35 billion in 1920 to $29.44 billion in 1929. In 1920, residential mortgage debt was 10.2% of household wealth; by 1929, it was 27.2% of household wealth.

The Great Depression has been attributed to excessive speculation on Wall Street, especially between the spring of 1927 and the fall of 1929. Had the difficulties of the banking system been caused by losses on brokers’ loans for margin purchases in 1929, the results should have been felt in the banks immediately after the stock market crash. But the banking system did not show serious strains until the fall of 1930.

Bank earnings reached a record $729 million in 1929. Yet bank exposures to real estate were substantial; as the decline in real estate prices accelerated, foreclosures wiped out banks by the thousands. Had the mounting difficulties of the banks and the final collapse of the banking system in the "Bank Holiday" in March 1933 been caused by contraction of the money supply, as Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz argued, then the massive injections of liquidity over the past 18 months should have averted the collapse of the financial market during this current crisis.

The causes of the Great Depression need more study, but the claims that losses on stock-market speculation and a monetary contraction caused the decline of the banking system both seem inadequate. It appears that both the Great Depression and the current crisis had their origins in excessive consumer debt — especially mortgage debt — that was transmitted into the financial sector during a sharp downturn.

What we’ve offered in our discussion of this crisis is the back story to Mr. Bernanke’s analysis of the Depression. Why does one crash cause minimal damage to the financial system, so that the economy can pick itself up quickly, while another crash leaves a devastated financial sector in the wreckage? The hypothesis we propose is that a financial crisis that originates in consumer debt, especially consumer debt concentrated at the low end of the wealth and income distribution, can be transmitted quickly and forcefully into the financial system. It appears that we’re witnessing the second great consumer debt crash, the end of a massive consumption binge.

(by Steven Gjerstad and Vernon L. Smith. Wall Street Journal. April 6, 2009. Gjerstad is a visiting research associate at Chapman University. Smith is a professor of economics at Chapman University and the 2002 Nobel Laureate in Economics.)

ForYourContemplation2 Why America Fights

editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:29:34 +0000

Folks -

What the war in Afghanistan says about the U.S. and NATO.

"What are you gonna do, Joe, when this is all over?" one would ask.

Years ago, we had the answer.

Joe stayed in the Army. He couldn’t give it up. Soldiering is all he knew. Just like Uncle Sam. We can’t give up NATO because, if we do, we would no longer be the "indispensable nation," the leader of the Free World.

And, if we’re not that, then who are we? And what would we do?

Pat Buchanan, for years, has seen through the myths and propaganda that fueled much of what Canadians and Americans accept as "The Truth".

His views are not popular among the mainstream of public opinion. That is of no consequence. The West is dying, and what arises from the ashes will not bear much resemblance to what has been before.

Europe won’t be long in Afghanistan. Given the massive sea of debt that America is sinking into, the era of U.S. engagement in foreign wars is drawing to a close. When the U.S. goes, there will be no reason – or capacity – for Canada to have troops in Afghanistan, either.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22387.htm

Why Europe Won’t Fight, by Pat Buchanan

"No one will say this publicly, but the true fact is we are all talking about our exit strategy from Afghanistan. We are getting out. It may take a couple of years, but we are all looking to get out." Thus did a "senior European diplomat" confide to The New York Times during Obama’s trip to Strasbourg.

Europe is bailing out on us. Afghanistan is to be America’s war.

During what the Times called a "fractious meeting," NATO agreed to send 3,000 troops to provide security during the elections and 2,000 to train Afghan police. Thin gruel beside Obama’s commitment to double U.S. troop levels to 68,000.

Why won’t Europe fight? Because Europe sees no threat from Afghanistan and no vital interest in a faraway country where NATO Europeans have not fought since the British Empire folded its tent long ago.

Al-Qaida did not attack Europe out of Afghanistan. America was attacked. Because, said Osama bin Laden in his "declaration of war," America was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia, choking Muslim Iraq to death and providing Israel with the weapons to repress the Palestinians.

As Europe has no troops in Saudi Arabia, is exiting Iraq and backs a Palestinian state, Europeans figure they are less likely to be attacked than if they are fighting and killing Muslims in Afghanistan.

Madrid and London were targeted for terror attacks, they believe, because Spain and Britain were George W. Bush’s strongest allies in Iraq. Britain, with a large Pakistani population, must be especially sensitive to U.S. Predator strikes in Pakistan.

Moreover, Europeans have had their fill of war.

In World War I alone, France, Germany and Russia each lost far more men killed than we have lost in all our wars put together. British losses in World War I were greater than America’s losses, North and South, in the Civil War. Her losses in World War II, from a nation with but a third of our population, were equal to ours. Where America ended that war as a superpower and leader of the Free World, Britain ended it bankrupt, broken, bereft of empire, sinking into socialism.

All of Europe’s empires are gone. All her great navies are gone. All her million-man armies are history. Her populations are all aging, shrinking and dying, as millions pour in from former colonies in the Third World to repopulate and Islamize the mother countries.

Because of Europe’s new "diversity," any war fought in a Muslim land will inflame a large segment of Europe’s urban population.

Finally, NATO Europe knows there is no price to pay for malingering in NATO’s war in Afghanistan. Europeans know America will take up the slack and do nothing about their refusal to send combat brigades. For Europeans had us figured out a long time ago.

They sense that we need them more than they need us.

While NATO provides Europe with a security blanket, it provides America with what she cannot live without: a mission, a cause, a meaning to life.

Were the United States, in exasperation, to tell Europe, "We are pulling out of NATO, shutting down our bases and bringing our troops home because we are weary of doing all the heavy lifting, all the fighting and dying for freedom," what would we do after we had departed and come home?

What would our foreign policy be?

What would be the need for our vaunted military-industrial complex, all those carriers, subs, tanks, and thousands of fighter planes and scores of bombers? What would happen to all the transatlantic conferences on NATO, all the think tanks here and in Europe devoted to allied security issues?

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the withdrawal of the Red Army from Eastern Europe and the breakup of the Soviet Union, NATO’s mission was accomplished. As Sen. Richard Lugar said, NATO must "go out of area or out of business."

NATO desperately did not want to go out of business. So, NATO went out of area, into Afghanistan. Now, with victory nowhere in sight, NATO is heading home. Will it go out of business?

Not likely. Too many rice bowls depend on keeping NATO alive.

You don’t give up the March of Dimes headquarters and fund-raising machinery just because Drs. Salk and Sabin found a cure for polio.

Again, one recalls, in those old World War II movies, the invariable scene where two G.I.s are smoking and talking.

"What are you gonna do, Joe, when this is all over?" one would ask.

Years ago, we had the answer.

And, if we’re not that, then who are we? And what would we do?

(by pat buchanan)

ForYourContemplation3 Afghanistan, Not

editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:28:58 +0000

Folks -

I’ve never bought the concept that Afghanistan was worth fighting over.

It appears that now others are saying the same thing – just as the Americans are ramping up their military campaign to crush the Taliban.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64932/john-mueller/how-dangerous-are-the-taliban

How Dangerous Are the Taliban? Why Afghanistan Is the Wrong War

by john mueller

[JOHN MUELLER is Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University. Among his books are Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them and the forthcoming Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to Al Qaeda]

George W. Bush led the United States into war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam Hussein might give his country’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Now, Bush’s successor is perpetuating the war in Afghanistan with comparably dubious arguments about the danger posed by the Taliban and al Qaeda.

President Barack Obama insists [1] that the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is about "making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack the U.S. homeland and U.S. interests and our allies" or "project violence against" American citizens. The reasoning is that if the Taliban win in Afghanistan, al Qaeda will once again be able to set up shop there to carry out its dirty work. As the president puts it [2], Afghanistan would "again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can." This argument is constantly repeated but rarely examined; given the costs and risks associated with the Obama administration’s plans for the region, it is time such statements be given the scrutiny they deserve.

Multiple sources, including Lawrence Wright’s book The Looming Tower, make clear that the Taliban was a reluctant host to al Qaeda in the 1990s and felt betrayed when the terrorist group repeatedly violated agreements to refrain from issuing inflammatory statements and fomenting violence abroad. Then the al Qaeda-sponsored 9/11 attacks — which the Taliban had nothing to do with — led to the toppling of the Taliban’s regime. Given the Taliban’s limited interest in issues outside the "AfPak" region, if they came to power again now, they would be highly unlikely to host provocative terrorist groups whose actions could lead to another outside intervention. And even if al Qaeda were able to relocate to Afghanistan after a Taliban victory there, it would still have to operate under the same siege situation it presently enjoys in what Obama calls its "safe haven" in Pakistan.

The very notion that al Qaeda needs a secure geographic base to carry out its terrorist operations, moreover, is questionable. After all, the operational base for 9/11 was in Hamburg, Germany. Conspiracies involving small numbers of people require communication, money, and planning — but not a major protected base camp.

At present, al Qaeda consists [3] of a few hundred people running around in Pakistan, seeking to avoid detection and helping the Taliban when possible. It also has a disjointed network of fellow travelers around the globe who communicate over the Internet. Over the last decade, the group has almost completely discredited [4] itself in the Muslim world due to the fallout from the 9/11 attacks and subsequent counterproductive terrorism, much of it directed against Muslims. No convincing evidence has been offered publicly to show that al Qaeda Central has put together a single full operation anywhere in the world since 9/11. And, outside of war zones, the violence perpetrated by al Qaeda affiliates, wannabes, and lookalikes combined has resulted [5] in the deaths of some 200 to 300 people per year, and may be declining [6]. That is 200 to 300 too many, of course, but it scarcely suggests that "the safety of people around the world is at stake," as Obama dramatically puts it.

In addition, al Qaeda has yet to establish a significant presence in the United States. In 2002, U.S. intelligence reports asserted that the number of trained al Qaeda operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000, and FBI Director Robert Mueller assured [7] a Senate committee that al Qaeda had "developed a support infrastructure" in the country and achieved both "the ability and the intent to inflict significant casualties in the U.S. with little warning." However, after years of well funded sleuthing, the FBI and other investigative agencies have been unable [8] to uncover a single true al Qaeda sleeper cell or operative within the country. Mueller’s rallying cry has now been reduced [9] to a comparatively bland formulation: "We believe al Qaeda is still seeking to infiltrate operatives into the U.S. from overseas."

Even that may not be true. Since 9/11, some two million foreigners have been admitted to the United States legally and many others, of course, have entered illegally. Even if border security has been so effective that 90 percent of al Qaeda’s operatives have been turned away or deterred from entering the United States, some should have made it in — and some of those, it seems reasonable to suggest, would have been picked up by law enforcement by now. The lack of attacks inside the United States combined with the inability of the FBI to find any potential attackers suggests that the terrorists are either not trying very hard or are far less clever and capable than usually depicted.

Policymakers and the public at large should keep in mind the words [10] of Glenn Carle, a 23 year veteran of the CIA who served as deputy national intelligence officer for transnational threats: "We must see jihadists for the small, lethal, disjointed and miserable opponents that they are." Al Qaeda "has only a handful of individuals capable of planning, organizing and leading a terrorist operation," Carle notes, and "its capabilities are far inferior to its desires."

President Obama has said that there is also a humanitarian element to the Afghanistan mission. A return of the Taliban, he points out, would condemn the Afghan people "to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralyzed economy, and the denial of basic human rights." This concern is legitimate — the Afghan people appear to be quite strongly opposed to a return of the Taliban, and they are surely entitled to some peace after 30 years of almost continual warfare, much of it imposed on them from outside.

The problem, as Obama is doubtlessly well aware, is that Americans are far less willing to sacrifice lives for missions that are essentially humanitarian than for those that seek to deal with a threat directed at the United States itself. People who embrace the idea of a humanitarian mission will continue to support Obama’s policy in Afghanistan — at least if they think it has a chance of success — but many Americans (and Europeans) will increasingly start to question how many lives such a mission is worth.

This questioning, in fact, is well under way. Because of its ties to 9/11, the war in Afghanistan has enjoyed considerably greater public support [11] than the war in Iraq did (or, for that matter, the wars in Korea or Vietnam). However, there has been a considerable dropoff in that support of late. If Obama’s national security justification for his war in Afghanistan comes to seem as spurious as Bush’s national security justification for his war in Iraq, he, like Bush, will increasingly have only the humanitarian argument to fall back on. And that is likely to be a weak reed.

——————————————————————————–

Source URL: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64932/john-mueller/how-dangerous-are-the-taliban

Links:

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/03/24/60minutes/main4890687.shtml#ccmm

[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/us/politics/27obama-text.html?_r=1

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/02/080602fa_fact_wright?currentPage=all

[4] http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6622

[5] http://psweb.sbs.ohio-state.edu/faculty/jmueller/ISA2007T.PDF

[6] http://www.humansecuritybrief.info/HSRP_Brief_2007.pdf

[7] http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress03/mueller021103.htm

[8] http://www.newsweek.com/id/32962

[9] http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress07/mueller011107.htm

[10] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/11/AR2008071102710.html

[11] http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61196/john-mueller/the-iraq-syndrome

ForYourContemplation4 1984-2009

editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:27:00 +0000

Folks -

Three points about a long series of articles, which may not be to everyone’s taste.

1. The Bush Administration worked covertly to influence public attitudes of Americans toward the war in Iraq.

2. A very brave reporter brought this project to the public, and has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting.

3. You will not hear about this on the major television networks.

Below are several articles.

1. A column by a constitutional law litigator, which appeared in Information Clearing House.

2. A New York Times biographical sketch of David Barstow.

3. The two Articles which won Barstow the Pulitzer.

4. A follow-up article describing the cessation of Pentagon briefings for retired military officers who had appeared on various television networks.

This is an important piece of news for Americans – and those who believe in learning the truth, everywhere. My respect for the Pulitzer committees is renewed.

Jim Szpajcher

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22471.htm

The Pulitzer-Winning Investigation That Dare Not Be Uttered on TV

By Glenn Greenwald

April 21, 2009 "Salon.com" — The New York Times‘ David Barstow won a richly deserved Pulitzer Prize yesterday for two articles that, despite being featured as major news stories on the front page of The Paper of Record, were completely suppressed by virtually every network and cable news show, which to this day have never informed their viewers about what Barstow uncovered. Here is how the Pulitzer Committee described Barstow’s exposés:

Awarded to David Barstow of The New York Times for his tenacious reporting that revealed how some retired generals, working as radio and television analysts, had been co-opted by the Pentagon to make its case for the war in Iraq, and how many of them also had undisclosed ties to companies that benefited from policies they defended.

By whom were these "ties to companies" undisclosed and for whom did these deeply conflicted retired generals pose as "analysts"? ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN and Fox — the very companies that have simply suppressed the story from their viewers. They kept completely silent about Barstow’s story even though it sparked Congressional inquiries, vehement objections from the then-leading Democratic presidential candidates, and allegations that the Pentagon program violated legal prohibitions on domestic propaganda programs. The Pentagon’s secret collaboration with these "independent analysts" shaped multiple news stories from each of these outlets on a variety of critical topics. Most amazingly, many of them continue to employ as so-called "independent analysts" the very retired generals at the heart of Barstow’s story, yet still refuse to inform their viewers about any part of this story.

And even now that Barstow yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting — one of the most prestigious awards any news story can win — these revelations still may not be uttered on television, tragically dashing the hope expressed yesterday (rhetorically, I presume) by Media Matters’ Jamison Foser that "maybe now that the story has won a Pulitzer for Barstow, they’ll pay attention." Instead, it was Atrios’ prediction that was decisively confirmed: "I don’t think a Pulitzer will be enough to give the military analyst story more attention." Here is what Brian Williams said last night on his NBC News broadcast in reporting on the prestigious awards:

The Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and the arts were awarded today. The New York Times led the way with five, including awards for breaking news and international reporting. Las Vegas Sun won for the public service category for its reporting on construction worker deaths in that city. Best commentary went to Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, who of course was an on-air commentator for us on MSNBC all through the election season and continues to be. And the award for best biography went to John Meacham, the editor of Newsweek magazine, for his book "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House."

No mention that among the five NYT prizes was one for investigative reporting. Williams did manage to promote the fact that one of the award winners was an MSNBC contributor, but sadly did not find the time to inform his viewers that NBC News’ war reporting and one of Williams’ still-featured premiere "independent analysts," Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was and continues to be at the heart of the scandal for which Barstow won the Pulitzer. Williams’ refusal to inform his readers about this now-Pulitzer-winning story is particularly notable given his direct personal involvement in the secret, joint attempts by NBC and McCaffrey to contain P.R. damage to NBC from Barstow’s story, compounded by the fact that NBC was on notice of these multiple conflicts as early as April, 2003, when The Nation first reported on them.

Identically, CNN ran an 898-word story on the various Pulitzer winners — describing virtually every winner — but was simply unable to find any space even to mention David Barstow’s name, let alone inform their readers that he won the Prize for uncovering core corruption at the heart of CNN’s coverage of the Iraq War and other military-related matters. No other television news outlet implicated by Barstow’s story mentioned his award, at least as far as I can tell.

The outright refusal of any of these "news organizations" even to mention what Barstow uncovered about the Pentagon’s propaganda program and the way it infected their coverage is one of the most illuminating events revealing how they operate. So transparently corrupt and journalistically disgraceful is their blackout of this story that even Howard Kurtz and Politico – that’s Howard Kurtz and Politico — lambasted them for this concealment. Meaningful criticisms of media stars from media critic (and CNN star) Howie Kurtz is about as rare as prosecutions for politically powerful lawbreakers in America, yet this is what he said about the television media’s suppression of Barstow’s story: "their coverage of this important issue has been pathetic."

Has there ever been another Pulitzer-Prize-winning story for investigative reporting never to be mentioned on major television — let alone one that was twice featured as the lead story on the front page of The New York Times? To pose the question is to answer it.

UPDATE: Media Matters has more on the glaring omissions in Brian Williams’ "reporting" and on the pervasive impact of the Pentagon’s program on television news coverage. Williams’ behavior has long been disgraceful on this issue, almost certainly due to the fact that some of the "analysts" most directly implicated by Barstow’s story are Williams’ favored sources and friends.

On a different note, CQ’s Jeff Stein responds today to some of the objections to his Jane-Harman/AIPAC/Alberto-Gonazles blockbuster story — quite convincingly, in my view — and, as Christy Hardin Smith notes, the New York Times has now independently confirmed much of what Stein reported.

UPDATE II: For some added irony: on his NBS News broadcast last night suppressing any mention of David Barstow’s Pulitzer Prize, Brian Williams’ lead story concerned Obama’s trip to the CIA yesterday. Featured in that story was commentary from Col. Jack Jacobs, identified on-screen this way: "Retired, NBC News Military Analyst." Jacobs was one of the retired officers who was an active member of the Pentagon’s "military analyst" program, and indeed, he actively helped plan the Pentagon’s media strategy at the very same time he was posing as an "independent analyst" on NBC (h/t reader gc; via NEXIS). So not only did Williams last night conceal from his viewers any mention of the Pentagon program, he featured — on the very same broadcast — "independent" commentary from one of the central figures involved in that propaganda program.

On a related note, Howard Kurtz was asked in his Washington Post chat yesterday about Mike Allen’s grant of anonymity to a "top Bush official" that I highlighted on Saturday, and Kurtz — while defending much of Allen’s behavior — said: "I don’t believe an ex-official should have been granted anonymity for that kind of harsh attack."

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/david_barstow/index.html

David Barstow

David T. Barstow has been an investigative reporter for The New York Times since May 2002. In 2009, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for "Message Machine," two articles that exposed a covert Pentagon campaign to use retired military officers, working as analysts for television and radio networks, to reiterate administration "talking points" about the war on terror. Mr. Barstow also received the SPJ’s (Society for Professional Journalism) 2008 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Washington Correspondence for the series, as well as the George Polk National Reporting award.

Mr. Barstow joined The Times in April 1999, as a reporter for the Metro desk. He covered the presidential election in 2000, particularly the Florida recount, and wrote extensively about financial aid for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks. In April, articles written by Mr. Barstow and Lowell Bergman, which examined death and injury among American workers and exposed employers who break basic safety rules, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Public Service.

Before joining the paper, Mr. Barstow worked for The St. Petersburg Times in Florida beginning in 1990, reporting on a wide range of issues. While there, he was a finalist for three Pulitzer Prizes: in 1997, he was the lead writer for coverage of race riots and was a finalist for spot news reporting; in 1998, he helped lead coverage of financial wrongdoing at the National Baptist Convention and was a finalist for investigative reporting; and, that same year, he wrote a series of stories about tobacco litigation and was a finalist for explanatory journalism.

Before joining The St. Petersburg Times, Mr. Barstow was a reporter for The Rochester Times-Union in upstate New York.

In 2002 and 2003, Mr. Barstow reported extensively on workplace safety in America, leading a team of journalists that produced two series for The Times and an hour-long documentary for the PBS program "Frontline." The two series, "Dangerous Business" and "When Workers Die,” won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2004. The two series and the documentary were also recognized with a George Polk Award for labor reporting; the Goldsmith Award for investigative reporting; the duPont Silver Baton, an award long regarded as the Pulitzer Prize of television reporting; a Peabody Award; and a certificate from Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Mr. Barstow was and grew up in Concord, Mass. He received a B.S. degree from Northwestern University in 1986. He is married, has two children and lives in Glen Ridge, N.J.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9501E7DF103CF933A15757C0A96E9C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

April 20, 2008

MESSAGE MACHINE; Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

By DAVID BARSTOW

Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

PHOTOS: A PENTAGON CAMPAIGN: Retired officers have been used to shape terrorism coverage from inside the TV and radio networks.(pg. A1); (pg. 24)
CHARTS: Describing the Program: In memorandums and e-mail messages obtained by The Times, Defense Department officials describe the goals and mission of a program to shape public opinion about the Iraq war through retired military officers who are media analysts. Key passages are highlighted by The Times.; Molding the Message: The Defense Department has supplied military analysts with thousands of talking points since 2002. Many were echoed on TV. Charts detail associated newspaper clippings detailing the following: From a Nov. 1, 2006, e-mail message about ”media experts visit proposal”; From a May 16, 2006, e-mail message about ”Taking groups to Iraq/Afghanistan”; From a Sept. 14, 2006, memorandum titled ”Itinerary for Defense Analysts”; and Talking points issued in December 2002 and February 2003. (pg. 24)

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded ”the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ”military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized.

Records and interviews show how the Bush administration has used its control over access and information in an effort to transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse — an instrument intended to shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks.

Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior military leaders, including officials with significant influence over contracting and budget matters, records show. They have been taken on tours of Iraq and given access to classified intelligence. They have been briefed by officials from the White House, State Department and Justice Department, including Mr. Cheney, Alberto R. Gonzales and Stephen J. Hadley.

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

”It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Kenneth Allard, a former NBC military analyst who has taught information warfare at the National Defense University, said the campaign amounted to a sophisticated information operation. ”This was a coherent, active policy,” he said.

As conditions in Iraq deteriorated, Mr. Allard recalled, he saw a yawning gap between what analysts were told in private briefings and what subsequent inquiries and books later revealed.

”Night and day,” Mr. Allard said, ”I felt we’d been hosed.”

The Pentagon defended its relationship with military analysts, saying they had been given only factual information about the war. ”The intent and purpose of this is nothing other than an earnest attempt to inform the American people,” Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said.

It was, Mr. Whitman added, ”a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be ”wound up” and turned into ”puppets of the Defense Department.”

Many analysts strongly denied that they had either been co-opted or had allowed outside business interests to affect their on-air comments, and some have used their platforms to criticize the conduct of the war. Several, like Jeffrey D. McCausland, a CBS military analyst and defense industry lobbyist, said they kept their networks informed of their outside work and recused themselves from coverage that touched on business interests.

”I’m not here representing the administration,” Dr. McCausland said.

Some network officials, meanwhile, acknowledged only a limited understanding of their analysts’ interactions with the administration. They said that while they were sensitive to potential conflicts of interest, they did not hold their analysts to the same ethical standards as their news employees regarding outside financial interests. The onus is on their analysts to disclose conflicts, they said. And whatever the contributions of military analysts, they also noted the many network journalists who have covered the war for years in all its complexity.

Five years into the Iraq war, most details of the architecture and execution of the Pentagon’s campaign have never been disclosed. But The Times successfully sued the Defense Department to gain access to 8,000 pages of e-mail messages, transcripts and records describing years of private briefings, trips to Iraq and Guantánamo and an extensive Pentagon talking points operation.

These records reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts as ”message force multipliers” or ‘’surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration ”themes and messages” to millions of Americans ”in the form of their own opinions.”

Though many analysts are paid network consultants, making $500 to $1,000 per appearance, in Pentagon meetings they sometimes spoke as if they were operating behind enemy lines, interviews and transcripts show. Some offered the Pentagon tips on how to outmaneuver the networks, or as one analyst put it to Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, ”the Chris Matthewses and the Wolf Blitzers of the world.” Some warned of planned stories or sent the Pentagon copies of their correspondence with network news executives. Many — although certainly not all — faithfully echoed talking points intended to counter critics.

”Good work,” Thomas G. McInerney, a retired Air Force general, consultant and Fox News analyst, wrote to the Pentagon after receiving fresh talking points in late 2006. ”We will use it.”

Again and again, records show, the administration has enlisted analysts as a rapid reaction force to rebut what it viewed as critical news coverage, some of it by the networks’ own Pentagon correspondents. For example, when news articles revealed that troops in Iraq were dying because of inadequate body armor, a senior Pentagon official wrote to his colleagues: ”I think our analysts — properly armed — can push back in that arena.”

The documents released by the Pentagon do not show any quid pro quo between commentary and contracts. But some analysts said they had used the special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he ”is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told investors that Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him ”to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten ”information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. ”You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, ”If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. ”That’s good for everybody.”

At the same time, in e-mail messages to the Pentagon, Mr. Garrett displayed an eagerness to be supportive with his television and radio commentary. ”Please let me know if you have any specific points you want covered or that you would prefer to downplay,” he wrote in January 2007, before President Bush went on TV to describe the surge strategy in Iraq.

Conversely, the administration has demonstrated that there is a price for sustained criticism, many analysts said. ”You’ll lose all access,” Dr. McCausland said.

With a majority of Americans calling the war a mistake despite all administration attempts to sway public opinion, the Pentagon has focused in the last couple of years on cultivating in particular military analysts frequently seen and heard in conservative news outlets, records and interviews show.

Some of these analysts were on the mission to Cuba on June 24, 2005 — the first of six such Guantánamo trips — which was designed to mobilize analysts against the growing perception of Guantánamo as an international symbol of inhumane treatment. On the flight to Cuba, for much of the day at Guantánamo and on the flight home that night, Pentagon officials briefed the 10 or so analysts on their key messages — how much had been spent improving the facility, the abuse endured by guards, the extensive rights afforded detainees.

The results came quickly. The analysts went on TV and radio, decrying Amnesty International, criticizing calls to close the facility and asserting that all detainees were treated humanely.

”The impressions that you’re getting from the media and from the various pronouncements being made by people who have not been here in my opinion are totally false,” Donald W. Shepperd, a retired Air Force general, reported live on CNN by phone from Guantánamo that same afternoon.

The next morning, Montgomery Meigs, a retired Army general and NBC analyst, appeared on ”Today.” ”There’s been over $100 million of new construction,” he reported. ”The place is very professionally run.”

Within days, transcripts of the analysts’ appearances were circulated to senior White House and Pentagon officials, cited as evidence of progress in the battle for hearts and minds at home.

Charting the Campaign

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called ”information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

And so even before Sept. 11, she built a system within the Pentagon to recruit ”key influentials” — movers and shakers from all walks who with the proper ministrations might be counted on to generate support for Mr. Rumsfeld’s priorities.

In the months after Sept. 11, as every network rushed to retain its own all-star squad of retired military officers, Ms. Clarke and her staff sensed a new opportunity. To Ms. Clarke’s team, the military analysts were the ultimate ”key influential” — authoritative, most of them decorated war heroes, all reaching mass audiences.

The analysts, they noticed, often got more airtime than network reporters, and they were not merely explaining the capabilities of Apache helicopters. They were framing how viewers ought to interpret events. What is more, while the analysts were in the news media, they were not of the news media. They were military men, many of them ideologically in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust, many of them important players in a military industry anticipating large budget increases to pay for an Iraq war.

Even analysts with no defense industry ties, and no fondness for the administration, were reluctant to be critical of military leaders, many of whom were friends. ”It is very hard for me to criticize the United States Army,” said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and ABC analyst. ”It is my life.”

Other administrations had made sporadic, small-scale attempts to build relationships with the occasional military analyst. But these were trifling compared with what Ms. Clarke’s team had in mind. Don Meyer, an aide to Ms. Clarke, said a strategic decision was made in 2002 to make the analysts the main focus of the public relations push to construct a case for war. Journalists were secondary. ”We didn’t want to rely on them to be our primary vehicle to get information out,” Mr. Meyer said.

The Pentagon’s regular press office would be kept separate from the military analysts. The analysts would instead be catered to by a small group of political appointees, with the point person being Brent T. Krueger, another senior aide to Ms. Clarke. The decision recalled other administration tactics that subverted traditional journalism. Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments. The Pentagon itself has made covert payments to Iraqi newspapers to publish coalition propaganda.

Rather than complain about the ”media filter,” each of these techniques simply converted the filter into an amplifier. This time, Mr. Krueger said, the military analysts would in effect be ”writing the op-ed” for the war.

Assembling the Team

From the start, interviews show, the White House took a keen interest in which analysts had been identified by the Pentagon, requesting lists of potential recruits, and suggesting names. Ms. Clarke’s team wrote summaries describing their backgrounds, business affiliations and where they stood on the war.

”Rumsfeld ultimately cleared off on all invitees,” said Mr. Krueger, who left the Pentagon in 2004. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Rumsfeld declined to comment for this article.)

Over time, the Pentagon recruited more than 75 retired officers, although some participated only briefly or sporadically. The largest contingent was affiliated with Fox News, followed by NBC and CNN, the other networks with 24-hour cable outlets. But analysts from CBS and ABC were included, too. Some recruits, though not on any network payroll, were influential in other ways — either because they were sought out by radio hosts, or because they often published op-ed articles or were quoted in magazines, Web sites and newspapers. At least nine of them have written op-ed articles for The Times.

The group was heavily represented by men involved in the business of helping companies win military contracts. Several held senior positions with contractors that gave them direct responsibility for winning new Pentagon business. James Marks, a retired Army general and analyst for CNN from 2004 to 2007, pursued military and intelligence contracts as a senior executive with McNeil Technologies. Still others held board positions with military firms that gave them responsibility for government business. General McInerney, the Fox analyst, for example, sits on the boards of several military contractors, including Nortel Government Solutions, a supplier of communication networks.

Several were defense industry lobbyists, such as Dr. McCausland, who works at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney, a major lobbying firm where he is director of a national security team that represents several military contractors. ”We offer clients access to key decision makers,” Dr. McCausland’s team promised on the firm’s Web site.

Dr. McCausland was not the only analyst making this pledge. Another was Joseph W. Ralston, a retired Air Force general. Soon after signing on with CBS, General Ralston was named vice chairman of the Cohen Group, a consulting firm headed by a former defense secretary, William Cohen, himself now a ”world affairs” analyst for CNN. ”The Cohen Group knows that getting to ‘yes’ in the aerospace and defense market — whether in the United States or abroad — requires that companies have a thorough, up-to-date understanding of the thinking of government decision makers,” the company tells prospective clients on its Web site.

There were also ideological ties.

Two of NBC’s most prominent analysts, Barry R. McCaffrey and the late Wayne A. Downing, were on the advisory board of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, an advocacy group created with White House encouragement in 2002 to help make the case for ousting Saddam Hussein. Both men also had their own consulting firms and sat on the boards of major military contractors.

Many also shared with Mr. Bush’s national security team a belief that pessimistic war coverage broke the nation’s will to win in Vietnam, and there was a mutual resolve not to let that happen with this war.

This was a major theme, for example, with Paul E. Vallely, a Fox News analyst from 2001 to 2007. A retired Army general who had specialized in psychological warfare, Mr. Vallely co-authored a paper in 1980 that accused American news organizations of failing to defend the nation from ”enemy” propaganda during Vietnam.

”We lost the war — not because we were outfought, but because we were out Psyoped,” he wrote. He urged a radically new approach to psychological operations in future wars — taking aim at not just foreign adversaries but domestic audiences, too. He called his approach ”MindWar” — using network TV and radio to ‘’strengthen our national will to victory.”

The Selling of the War

From their earliest sessions with the military analysts, Mr. Rumsfeld and his aides spoke as if they were all part of the same team.

In interviews, participants described a powerfully seductive environment — the uniformed escorts to Mr. Rumsfeld’s private conference room, the best government china laid out, the embossed name cards, the blizzard of PowerPoints, the solicitations of advice and counsel, the appeals to duty and country, the warm thank you notes from the secretary himself.

”Oh, you have no idea,” Mr. Allard said, describing the effect. ”You’re back. They listen to you. They listen to what you say on TV.” It was, he said, ”psyops on steroids” — a nuanced exercise in influence through flattery and proximity. ”It’s not like it’s, ‘We’ll pay you $500 to get our story out,’ ” he said. ”It’s more subtle.”

The access came with a condition. Participants were instructed not to quote their briefers directly or otherwise describe their contacts with the Pentagon.

In the fall and winter leading up to the invasion, the Pentagon armed its analysts with talking points portraying Iraq as an urgent threat. The basic case became a familiar mantra: Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, was developing nuclear weapons, and might one day slip some to Al Qaeda; an invasion would be a relatively quick and inexpensive ”war of liberation.”

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

”You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. Krueger said. ”You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, ”We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

On April 12, 2003, with major combat almost over, Mr. Rumsfeld drafted a memorandum to Ms. Clarke. ”Let’s think about having some of the folks who did such a good job as talking heads in after this thing is over,” he wrote.

By summer, though, the first signs of the insurgency had emerged. Reports from journalists based in Baghdad were increasingly suffused with the imagery of mayhem.

The Pentagon did not have to search far for a counterweight.

It was time, an internal Pentagon strategy memorandum urged, to ”re-energize surrogates and message-force multipliers,” starting with the military analysts.

The memorandum led to a proposal to take analysts on a tour of Iraq in September 2003, timed to help overcome the sticker shock from Mr. Bush’s request for $87 billion in emergency war financing.

The group included four analysts from Fox News, one each from CNN and ABC, and several research-group luminaries whose opinion articles appear regularly in the nation’s op-ed pages.

The trip invitation promised a look at ”the real situation on the ground in Iraq.”

The situation, as described in scores of books, was deteriorating. L. Paul Bremer III, then the American viceroy in Iraq, wrote in his memoir, ”My Year in Iraq,” that he had privately warned the White House that the United States had ”about half the number of soldiers we needed here.”

”We’re up against a growing and sophisticated threat,” Mr. Bremer recalled telling the president during a private White House dinner.

That dinner took place on Sept. 24, while the analysts were touring Iraq.

Yet these harsh realities were elided, or flatly contradicted, during the official presentations for the analysts, records show. The itinerary, scripted to the minute, featured brief visits to a model school, a few refurbished government buildings, a center for women’s rights, a mass grave and even the gardens of Babylon.

Mostly the analysts attended briefings. These sessions, records show, spooled out an alternative narrative, depicting an Iraq bursting with political and economic energy, its security forces blossoming. On the crucial question of troop levels, the briefings echoed the White House line: No reinforcements were needed. The ”growing and sophisticated threat” described by Mr. Bremer was instead depicted as degraded, isolated and on the run.

”We’re winning,” a briefing document proclaimed.

One trip participant, General Nash of ABC, said some briefings were so clearly ”artificial” that he joked to another group member that they were on ”the George Romney memorial trip to Iraq,” a reference to Mr. Romney’s infamous claim that American officials had ”brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War during a tour there in 1965, while he was governor of Michigan.

But if the trip pounded the message of progress, it also represented a business opportunity: direct access to the most senior civilian and military leaders in Iraq and Kuwait, including many with a say in how the president’s $87 billion would be spent. It also was a chance to gather inside information about the most pressing needs confronting the American mission: the acute shortages of ”up-armored” Humvees; the billions to be spent building military bases; the urgent need for interpreters; and the ambitious plans to train Iraq’s security forces.

Information and access of this nature had undeniable value for trip participants like William V. Cowan and Carlton A. Sherwood.

Mr. Cowan, a Fox analyst and retired Marine colonel, was the chief executive of a new military firm, the wvc3 Group. Mr. Sherwood was its executive vice president. At the time, the company was seeking contracts worth tens of millions to supply body armor and counterintelligence services in Iraq. In addition, wvc3 Group had a written agreement to use its influence and connections to help tribal leaders in Al Anbar Province win reconstruction contracts from the coalition.

”Those sheiks wanted access to the C.P.A.,” Mr. Cowan recalled in an interview, referring to the Coalition Provisional Authority.

Mr. Cowan said he pleaded their cause during the trip. ”I tried to push hard with some of Bremer’s people to engage these people of Al Anbar,” he said.

Back in Washington, Pentagon officials kept a nervous eye on how the trip translated on the airwaves. Uncomfortable facts had bubbled up during the trip. One briefer, for example, mentioned that the Army was resorting to packing inadequately armored Humvees with sandbags and Kevlar blankets. Descriptions of the Iraqi security forces were withering. ”They can’t shoot, but then again, they don’t,” one officer told them, according to one participant’s notes.

”I saw immediately in 2003 that things were going south,” General Vallely, one of the Fox analysts on the trip, recalled in an interview with The Times.

The Pentagon, though, need not have worried.

”You can’t believe the progress,” General Vallely told Alan Colmes of Fox News upon his return. He predicted the insurgency would be ”down to a few numbers” within months.

”We could not be more excited, more pleased,” Mr. Cowan told Greta Van Susteren of Fox News. There was barely a word about armor shortages or corrupt Iraqi security forces. And on the key strategic question of the moment — whether to send more troops — the analysts were unanimous.

”I am so much against adding more troops,” General Shepperd said on CNN.

Access and Influence

Inside the Pentagon and at the White House, the trip was viewed as a masterpiece in the management of perceptions, not least because it gave fuel to complaints that ”mainstream” journalists were ignoring the good news in Iraq.

”We’re hitting a home run on this trip,” a senior Pentagon official wrote in an e-mail message to Richard B. Myers and Peter Pace, then chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Its success only intensified the Pentagon’s campaign. The pace of briefings accelerated. More trips were organized. Eventually the effort involved officials from Washington to Baghdad to Kabul to Guantánamo and back to Tampa, Fla., the headquarters of United States Central Command.

The scale reflected strong support from the top. When officials in Iraq were slow to organize another trip for analysts, a Pentagon official fired off an e-mail message warning that the trips ”have the highest levels of visibility” at the White House and urging them to get moving before Lawrence Di Rita, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s closest aides, ”picks up the phone and starts calling the 4-stars.”

Mr. Di Rita, no longer at the Defense Department, said in an interview that a ”conscious decision” was made to rely on the military analysts to counteract ”the increasingly negative view of the war” coming from journalists in Iraq. The analysts, he said, generally had ”a more supportive view” of the administration and the war, and the combination of their TV platforms and military cachet made them ideal for rebutting critical coverage of issues like troop morale, treatment of detainees, inadequate equipment or poorly trained Iraqi security forces. ”On those issues, they were more likely to be seen as credible spokesmen,” he said.

For analysts with military industry ties, the attention brought access to a widening circle of influential officials beyond the contacts they had accumulated over the course of their careers.

Charles T. Nash, a Fox military analyst and retired Navy captain, is a consultant who helps small companies break into the military market. Suddenly, he had entree to a host of senior military leaders, many of whom he had never met. It was, he said, like being embedded with the Pentagon leadership. ”You start to recognize what’s most important to them,” he said, adding, ”There’s nothing like seeing stuff firsthand.”

Some Pentagon officials said they were well aware that some analysts viewed their special access as a business advantage. ”Of course we realized that,” Mr. Krueger said. ”We weren’t naïve about that.”

They also understood the financial relationship between the networks and their analysts. Many analysts were being paid by the ”hit,” the number of times they appeared on TV. The more an analyst could boast of fresh inside information from high-level Pentagon ‘’sources,” the more hits he could expect. The more hits, the greater his potential influence in the military marketplace, where several analysts prominently advertised their network roles.

”They have taken lobbying and the search for contracts to a far higher level,” Mr. Krueger said. ”This has been highly honed.”

Mr. Di Rita, though, said it never occurred to him that analysts might use their access to curry favor. Nor, he said, did the Pentagon try to exploit this dynamic. ”That’s not something that ever crossed my mind,” he said. In any event, he argued, the analysts and the networks were the ones responsible for any ethical complications. ”We assume they know where the lines are,” he said.

The analysts met personally with Mr. Rumsfeld at least 18 times, records show, but that was just the beginning. They had dozens more sessions with the most senior members of his brain trust and access to officials responsible for managing the billions being spent in Iraq. Other groups of ”key influentials” had meetings, but not nearly as often as the analysts.

An internal memorandum in 2005 helped explain why. The memorandum, written by a Pentagon official who had accompanied analysts to Iraq, said that based on her observations during the trip, the analysts ”are having a greater impact” on network coverage of the military. ”They have now become the go-to guys not only on breaking stories, but they influence the views on issues,” she wrote.

Other branches of the administration also began to make use of the analysts. Mr. Gonzales, then the attorney general, met with them soon after news leaked that the government was wiretapping terrorism suspects in the United States without warrants, Pentagon records show. When David H. Petraeus was appointed the commanding general in Iraq in January 2007, one of his early acts was to meet with the analysts.

”We knew we had extraordinary access,” said Timur J. Eads, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and Fox analyst who is vice president of government relations for Blackbird Technologies, a fast-growing military contractor.

Like several other analysts, Mr. Eads said he had at times held his tongue on television for fear that ‘’some four-star could call up and say, ‘Kill that contract.’ ” For example, he believed Pentagon officials misled the analysts about the progress of Iraq’s security forces. ”I know a snow job when I see one,” he said. He did not share this on TV.

”Human nature,” he explained, though he noted other instances when he was critical.

Some analysts said that even before the war started, they privately had questions about the justification for the invasion, but were careful not to express them on air.

Mr. Bevelacqua, then a Fox analyst, was among those invited to a briefing in early 2003 about Iraq’s purported stockpiles of illicit weapons. He recalled asking the briefer whether the United States had ‘’smoking gun” proof.

” ‘We don’t have any hard evidence,’ ” Mr. Bevelacqua recalled the briefer replying. He said he and other analysts were alarmed by this concession. ”We are looking at ourselves saying, ‘What are we doing?’ ”

Another analyst, Robert L. Maginnis, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who works in the Pentagon for a military contractor, attended the same briefing and recalled feeling ”very disappointed” after being shown satellite photographs purporting to show bunkers associated with a hidden weapons program. Mr. Maginnis said he concluded that the analysts were being ”manipulated” to convey a false sense of certainty about the evidence of the weapons. Yet he and Mr. Bevelacqua and the other analysts who attended the briefing did not share any misgivings with the American public.

Mr. Bevelacqua and another Fox analyst, Mr. Cowan, had formed the wvc3 Group, and hoped to win military and national security contracts.

”There’s no way I was going to go down that road and get completely torn apart,” Mr. Bevelacqua said. ”You’re talking about fighting a huge machine.”

Some e-mail messages between the Pentagon and the analysts reveal an implicit trade of privileged access for favorable coverage. Robert H. Scales Jr., a retired Army general and analyst for Fox News and National Public Radio whose consulting company advises several military firms on weapons and tactics used in Iraq, wanted the Pentagon to approve high-level briefings for him inside Iraq in 2006.

”Recall the stuff I did after my last visit,” he wrote. ”I will do the same this time.”

Pentagon Keeps Tabs

As it happened, the analysts’ news media appearances were being closely monitored. The Pentagon paid a private contractor, Omnitec Solutions, hundreds of thousands of dollars to scour databases for any trace of the analysts, be it a segment on ”The O’Reilly Factor” or an interview with The Daily Inter Lake in Montana, circulation 20,000.

Omnitec evaluated their appearances using the same tools as corporate branding experts. One report, assessing the impact of several trips to Iraq in 2005, offered example after example of analysts echoing Pentagon themes on all the networks.

”Commentary from all three Iraq trips was extremely positive over all,” the report concluded.

In interviews, several analysts reacted with dismay when told they were described as reliable ‘’surrogates” in Pentagon documents. And some asserted that their Pentagon sessions were, as David L. Grange, a retired Army general and CNN analyst put it, ”just upfront information,” while others pointed out, accurately, that they did not always agree with the administration or each other. ”None of us drink the Kool-Aid,” General Scales said.

Likewise, several also denied using their special access for business gain. ”Not related at all,” General Shepperd said, pointing out that many in the Pentagon held CNN ”in the lowest esteem.”

Still, even the mildest of criticism could draw a challenge. Several analysts told of fielding telephone calls from displeased defense officials only minutes after being on the air.

On Aug. 3, 2005, 14 marines died in Iraq. That day, Mr. Cowan, who said he had grown increasingly uncomfortable with the ”twisted version of reality” being pushed on analysts in briefings, called the Pentagon to give ”a heads-up” that some of his comments on Fox ”may not all be friendly,” Pentagon records show. Mr. Rumsfeld’s senior aides quickly arranged a private briefing for him, yet when he told Bill O’Reilly that the United States was ”not on a good glide path right now” in Iraq, the repercussions were swift.

Mr. Cowan said he was ”precipitously fired from the analysts group” for this appearance. The Pentagon, he wrote in an e-mail message, ‘’simply didn’t like the fact that I wasn’t carrying their water.” The next day James T. Conway, then director of operations for the Joint Chiefs, presided over another conference call with analysts. He urged them, a transcript shows, not to let the marines’ deaths further erode support for the war.

”The strategic target remains our population,” General Conway said. ”We can lose people day in and day out, but they’re never going to beat our military. What they can and will do if they can is strip away our support. And you guys can help us not let that happen.”

”General, I just made that point on the air,” an analyst replied.

”Let’s work it together, guys,” General Conway urged.

The Generals’ Revolt

The full dimensions of this mutual embrace were perhaps never clearer than in April 2006, after several of Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals — none of them network military analysts — went public with devastating critiques of his wartime performance. Some called for his resignation.

On Friday, April 14, with what came to be called the ”Generals’ Revolt” dominating headlines, Mr. Rumsfeld instructed aides to summon military analysts to a meeting with him early the next week, records show. When an aide urged a short delay to ”give our big guys on the West Coast a little more time to buy a ticket and get here,” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office insisted that ”the boss” wanted the meeting fast ”for impact on the current story.”

That same day, Pentagon officials helped two Fox analysts, General McInerney and General Vallely, write an opinion article for The Wall Street Journal defending Mr. Rumsfeld.

”Starting to write it now,” General Vallely wrote to the Pentagon that afternoon. ”Any input for the article,” he added a little later, ”will be much appreciated.” Mr. Rumsfeld’s office quickly forwarded talking points and statistics to rebut the notion of a spreading revolt.

”Vallely is going to use the numbers,” a Pentagon official reported that afternoon.

The standard secrecy notwithstanding, plans for this session leaked, producing a front-page story in The Times that Sunday. In damage-control mode, Pentagon officials scrambled to present the meeting as routine and directed that communications with analysts be kept ”very formal,” records show. ”This is very, very sensitive now,” a Pentagon official warned subordinates.

On Tuesday, April 18, some 17 analysts assembled at the Pentagon with Mr. Rumsfeld and General Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

A transcript of that session, never before disclosed, shows a shared determination to marginalize war critics and revive public support for the war.

”I’m an old intel guy,” said one analyst. (The transcript omits speakers’ names.) ”And I can sum all of this up, unfortunately, with one word. That is Psyops. Now most people may hear that and they think, ‘Oh my God, they’re trying to brainwash.’ ”

”What are you, some kind of a nut?” Mr. Rumsfeld cut in, drawing laughter. ”You don’t believe in the Constitution?”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was ”brilliant” and ”very successful.”

”Frankly,” one participant said, ”from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.”

An analyst said at another point: ”This is a wider war. And whether we have democracy in Iraq or not, it doesn’t mean a tinker’s damn if we end up with the result we want, which is a regime over there that’s not a threat to us.”

”Yeah,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, taking notes.

But winning or not, they bluntly warned, the administration was in grave political danger so long as most Americans viewed Iraq as a lost cause. ”America hates a loser,” one analyst said.

Much of the session was devoted to ways that Mr. Rumsfeld could reverse the ”political tide.” One analyst urged Mr. Rumsfeld to ”just crush these people,” and assured him that ”most of the gentlemen at the table” would enthusiastically support him if he did.

”You are the leader,” the analyst told Mr. Rumsfeld. ”You are our guy.”

At another point, an analyst made a suggestion: ”In one of your speeches you ought to say, ‘Everybody stop for a minute and imagine an Iraq ruled by Zarqawi.’ And then you just go down the list and say, ‘All right, we’ve got oil, money, sovereignty, access to the geographic center of gravity of the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.’ If you can just paint a mental picture for Joe America to say, ‘Oh my God, I can’t imagine a world like that.’ ”

Even as they assured Mr. Rumsfeld that they stood ready to help in this public relations offensive, the analysts sought guidance on what they should cite as the next ”milestone” that would, as one analyst put it, ”keep the American people focused on the idea that we’re moving forward to a positive end.” They placed particular emphasis on the growing confrontation with Iran.

”When you said ‘long war,’ you changed the psyche of the American people to expect this to be a generational event,” an analyst said. ”And again, I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job…”

”Get in line,” Mr. Rumsfeld interjected.

The meeting ended and Mr. Rumsfeld, appearing pleased and relaxed, took the entire group into a small study and showed off treasured keepsakes from his life, several analysts recalled.

Soon after, analysts hit the airwaves. The Omnitec monitoring reports, circulated to more than 80 officials, confirmed that analysts repeated many of the Pentagon’s talking points: that Mr. Rumsfeld consulted ”frequently and sufficiently” with his generals; that he was not ”overly concerned” with the criticisms; that the meeting focused ”on more important topics at hand,” including the next milestone in Iraq, the formation of a new government.

Days later, Mr. Rumsfeld wrote a memorandum distilling their collective guidance into bullet points. Two were underlined:

”Focus on the Global War on Terror — not simply Iraq. The wider war — the long war.”

”Link Iraq to Iran. Iran is the concern. If we fail in Iraq or Afghanistan, it will help Iran.”

But if Mr. Rumsfeld found the session instructive, at least one participant, General Nash, the ABC analyst, was repulsed.

”I walked away from that session having total disrespect for my fellow commentators, with perhaps one or two exceptions,” he said.

View From the Networks

Two weeks ago General Petraeus took time out from testifying before Congress about Iraq for a conference call with military analysts.

Mr. Garrett, the Fox analyst and Patton Boggs lobbyist, said he told General Petraeus during the call to ”keep up the great work.”

”Hey,” Mr. Garrett said in an interview, ”anything we can do to help.”

For the moment, though, because of heavy election coverage and general war fatigue, military analysts are not getting nearly as much TV time, and the networks have trimmed their rosters of analysts. The conference call with General Petraeus, for example, produced little in the way of immediate coverage.

Still, almost weekly the Pentagon continues to conduct briefings with selected military analysts. Many analysts said network officials were only dimly aware of these interactions. The networks, they said, have little grasp of how often they meet with senior officials, or what is discussed.

”I don’t think NBC was even aware we were participating,” said Rick Francona, a longtime military analyst for the network.

Some networks publish biographies on their Web sites that describe their analysts’ military backgrounds and, in some cases, give at least limited information about their business ties. But many analysts also said the networks asked few questions about their outside business interests, the nature of their work or the potential for that work to create conflicts of interest. ”None of that ever happened,” said Mr. Allard, an NBC analyst until 2006.

”The worst conflict of interest was no interest.”

Mr. Allard and other analysts said their network handlers also raised no objections when the Defense Department began paying their commercial airfare for Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq — a clear ethical violation for most news organizations.

CBS News declined to comment on what it knew about its military analysts’ business affiliations or what steps it took to guard against potential conflicts.

NBC News also declined to discuss its procedures for hiring and monitoring military analysts. The network issued a short statement: ”We have clear policies in place to assure that the people who appear on our air have been appropriately vetted and that nothing in their profile would lead to even a perception of a conflict of interest.”

Jeffrey W. Schneider, a spokesman for ABC, said that while the network’s military consultants were not held to the same ethical rules as its full-time journalists, they were expected to keep the network informed about any outside business entanglements. ”We make it clear to them we expect them to keep us closely apprised,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Fox News said executives ”refused to participate” in this article.

CNN requires its military analysts to disclose in writing all outside sources of income. But like the other networks, it does not provide its military analysts with the kind of written, specific ethical guidelines it gives its full-time employees for avoiding real or apparent conflicts of interest.

Yet even where controls exist, they have sometimes proven porous.

CNN, for example, said it was unaware for nearly three years that one of its main military analysts, General Marks, was deeply involved in the business of seeking government contracts, including contracts related to Iraq.

General Marks was hired by CNN in 2004, about the time he took a management position at McNeil Technologies, where his job was to pursue military and intelligence contracts. As required, General Marks disclosed that he received income from McNeil Technologies. But the disclosure form did not require him to describe what his job entailed, and CNN acknowledges it failed to do additional vetting.

”We did not ask Mr. Marks the follow-up questions we should have,” CNN said in a written statement.

In an interview, General Marks said it was no secret at CNN that his job at McNeil Technologies was about winning contracts. ”I mean, that’s what McNeil does,” he said.

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. ”I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

”We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

Correction: April 22, 2008, Tuesday An article on Sunday about the Pentagon’s relationship with news media military analysts misidentified the military affiliation of one analyst, John C. Garrett. He retired as a colonel from the Marines, not the Army.

Correction: April 24, 2008, Thursday The continuation of an article on Sunday about a Pentagon effort to use military analysts to generate favorable news coverage carried 10 paragraphs that were partly obscured in some editions by a chart.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html

One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex

Photo Illustration by The New York Times

Barry R. McCaffrey is among the retired military officers working as network analysts.

By DAVID BARSTOW

Published: November 29, 2008

In the spring of 2007 a tiny military contractor with a slender track record went shopping for a precious Beltway commodity.

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BROAD INFLUENCE Barry R. McCaffrey, left, and Wayne A. Downing, a retired general and NBC analyst, in 2006 after speaking with President Bush.

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Clockwise from top left: Jason Reed/Reuters, Win McNamee/Getty Images, Ron Edmonds/Associated Press

TOP RANKS General McCaffrey recommended a contractor he worked for to Gen. David H. Petraeus, top left, and Gen. James M. Dubik, right. He clashed with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, above left, but later offered praise for Mr. Rumsfeld after his Pentagon access was cut off.

The company, Defense Solutions, sought the services of a retired general with national stature, someone who could open doors at the highest levels of government and help it win a huge prize: the right to supply Iraq with thousands of armored vehicles.

Access like this does not come cheap, but it was an opportunity potentially worth billions in sales, and Defense Solutions soon found its man. The company signed Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star Army general and military analyst for NBC News, to a consulting contract starting June 15, 2007.

Four days later the general swung into action. He sent a personal note and 15-page briefing packet to David H. Petraeus, the commanding general in Iraq, strongly recommending Defense Solutions and its offer to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles from Eastern Europe. "No other proposal is quicker, less costly, or more certain to succeed," he said.

Thus, within days of hiring General McCaffrey, the Defense Solutions sales pitch was in the hands of the American commander with the greatest influence over Iraq’s expanding military.

"That’s what I pay him for," Timothy D. Ringgold, chief executive of Defense Solutions, said in an interview.

General McCaffrey did not mention his new contract with Defense Solutions in his letter to General Petraeus. Nor did he disclose it when he went on CNBC that same week and praised the commander Defense Solutions was now counting on for help – "He’s got the heart of a lion" – or when he told Congress the next month that it should immediately supply Iraq with large numbers of armored vehicles and other equipment.

He had made similar arguments before he was hired by Defense Solutions, but this time he went further. In his testimony to Congress, General McCaffrey criticized a Pentagon plan to supply Iraq with several hundred armored vehicles made in the United States by a competitor of Defense Solutions. He called the plan "not in the right ballpark" and urged Congress to instead equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

"We’ve got Iraqi army battalions driving around in Toyota trucks," he said, echoing an argument made to General Petraeus in the Defense Solutions briefing packet.

Through seven years of war an exclusive club has quietly flourished at the intersection of network news and wartime commerce. Its members, mostly retired generals, have had a foot in both camps as influential network military analysts and defense industry rainmakers. It is a deeply opaque world, a place of privileged access to senior government officials, where war commentary can fit hand in glove with undisclosed commercial interests and network executives are sometimes oblivious to possible conflicts of interest.

Few illustrate the submerged complexities of this world better than Barry McCaffrey.

General McCaffrey, 66, has long been a force in Washington’s power elite. A consummate networker, he cultivated politicians and journalists of all stripes as drug czar in the Clinton cabinet, and his ties run deep to a new generation of generals, some of whom he taught at West Point or commanded in the Persian Gulf war, when he rose to fame leading the "left hook" assault on Iraqi forces.

But it was 9/11 that thrust General McCaffrey to the forefront of the national security debate. In the years since he has made nearly 1,000 appearances on NBC and its cable sisters, delivering crisp sound bites in a blunt, hyperbolic style. He commands up to $25,000 for speeches, his commentary regularly turns up in The Wall Street Journal, and he has been quoted or cited in thousands of news articles, including dozens in The New York Times.

His influence is such that President Bush and Congressional leaders from both parties have invited him for war consultations. His access is such that, despite a contentious relationship with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the Pentagon has arranged numerous trips to Iraq, Afghanistan and other hotspots solely for his benefit.

At the same time, General McCaffrey has immersed himself in businesses that have grown with the fight against terrorism.

The consulting company he started after leaving the government in 2001, BR McCaffrey Associates, promises to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors like Defense Solutions for up to $10,000 a month. He has also earned at least $500,000 from his work for Veritas Capital, a private equity firm in New York that has grown into a defense industry powerhouse by buying contractors whose profits soared from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In addition, he is the chairman of HNTB Federal Services, an engineering and construction management company that often competes for national security contracts.

Many retired officers hold a perch in the world of military contracting, but General McCaffrey is among a select few who also command platforms in the news media and as government advisers on military matters. These overlapping roles offer them an array of opportunities to advance policy goals as well as business objectives. But with their business ties left undisclosed, it can be difficult for policy makers and the public to fully understand their interests.

On NBC and in other public forums, General McCaffrey has consistently advocated wartime policies and spending priorities that are in line with his corporate interests. But those interests are not described to NBC’s viewers. He is held out as a dispassionate expert, not someone who helps companies win contracts related to the wars he discusses on television.

The president of NBC News, Steve Capus, said in an interview that General McCaffrey was a man of honor and achievement who would never let business obligations color his analysis for NBC. He described General McCaffrey as an "independent voice" who had courageously challenged Mr. Rumsfeld, adding, "There’s no open microphone that begins with the Pentagon and ends with him going out over our airwaves."

General McCaffrey is not required to abide by NBC’s formal conflict-of-interest rules, Mr. Capus said, because he is a consultant, not a news employee. Nor is he required to disclose his business interests periodically. But Mr. Capus said that the network had conversations with its military analysts about the need to avoid even the appearance of a conflict, and that General McCaffrey had been "incredibly forthcoming" about his ties to military contractors.

General McCaffrey declined to be interviewed but released a brief statement.

"My public media commentary on the war labeled me as an early and serious critic of Rumsfeld’s arrogance and mismanagement of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan," the statement said. "The New York Times noted my strong on-air criticism as an NBC commentator. My op-ed objections to the execution of the war were published in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The L.A. Times, USA Today and other media. Hardly the stuff of someone shilling a war for the administration – or privately pushing his business interests with the Pentagon. Thirty-seven years of public service. Four combat tours. Wounded three times. The country knows me as a nonpartisan and objective national security expert with solid integrity."

In earlier e-mail messages, General McCaffrey played down his involvement in lobbying for contracts, suggesting he mainly gave companies "strategic counsel." His business responsibilities, he wrote, simply do not conflict with his duty to provide objective analysis on NBC. "Never has been a problem," he wrote. "Period."

General McCaffrey did in fact emerge as a tough critic of Mr. Rumsfeld, describing him as reckless and incompetent. His central criticism – that Mr. Rumsfeld fought the Iraq war "on the cheap" – reflected his long-stated views on waging war. But it also dovetailed with his business interests. And his clashes with Mr. Rumsfeld were but one facet of a more complex and symbiotic relationship with the Bush administration and the military’s uniformed leaders, records and interviews show.

With a few exceptions General McCaffrey has consistently supported Mr. Bush’s major national security policies, especially the war in Iraq. He advocated invasion, urged building up the military to sustain the occupation and warned that premature withdrawal would invite catastrophe.

In an article earlier this year, The New York Times identified General McCaffrey as one of some 75 military analysts who were the focus of a Pentagon public relations campaign that is now being examined by the Pentagon’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office and the Federal Communications Commission. The campaign, begun in 2002 but suspended after the article’s publication, sought to transform the analysts into "surrogates" and "message force multipliers" for the Bush administration, records show. The analysts, many with military industry ties, were wooed in private briefings, showered with talking points and escorted on tours of Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Pentagon inspector general is investigating whether special access gave any of these analysts an improper edge in the competition for contracts.

General McCaffrey offers a case study of the benefits that can flow from favored access: an inside track to sensitive information about strategy and tactics; insight into the priorities of ground commanders; a private channel to officials who oversaw war spending, as the Defense Solutions example shows. In that case the company has yet to win the contract it hired General McCaffrey to champion.

More broadly, though, his example reveals the myriad and often undisclosed connections between the business of war and the business of covering it.

A Move to Television

General McCaffrey made his debut as a military analyst in the weeks after 9/11. NBC anchors typically introduced him by describing his medals or his exploits in the gulf war. Or they noted he was a West Point professor, or the youngest four-star general in the history of the Army.

They did not mention his work for military contractors, including a lucrative new role with Veritas Capital.

Veritas was a relatively small player in 2001, looking to grow through acquisitions and Pentagon contracts. Competing for contracts is a complex and subtle sport, governed by highly bureaucratic bidding rules and the old-fashioned arts of access and influence.

Veritas would compete on both fronts.

Just days before the terrorist attacks – on Sept. 6, 2001 – Veritas had announced the formation of an "advisory council" of well-connected retired generals and admirals, including General McCaffrey. "They can really pick up the phone and call someone," Robert B. McKeon, the president of Veritas, would later tell The Times.

Access was also part of what drew NBC to General McCaffrey. Mr. Capus said General McCaffrey "opens doors with generals and others who we would not otherwise be able to talk to."

Veritas gave its advisers board seats on its military companies, along with profit sharing and equity stakes that were all the more attractive because Veritas intended to turn quick profits through initial public offerings. On Sept. 6, this might have been considered a gamble. Revenue growth – a key to successful I.P.O.’s – required sustained increases in military spending. But after Sept. 11, the only question was just how big those increases would be.

From his first months on the air, General McCaffrey called for huge, sustained increases in military spending for a global campaign against terrorism. He also advocated spending for high-tech weapons, including some like precision-guided munitions and unmanned aerial vehicles that were important to the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 cargo plane – also a source of Veritas contracts – a "national treasure."

In a statement, Veritas said it had gained no "discernible benefit" from General McCaffrey’s television appearances and called his TV work "completely independent" from his role with Veritas.

In their corporate filings, Veritas military companies told investors they were well positioned to benefit from a widening global struggle against terrorism. The approaching conflict with Iraq, though, would create new areas of tension between General McCaffrey’s fiduciary obligations to Veritas and his duties to NBC.

General McCaffrey harbored significant doubts about the invasion plan. An informal participant in the war planning, he was troubled by Mr. Rumsfeld’s resistance to an invasion force of several hundred thousand, he acknowledged months and years later in interviews. Mr. Rumsfeld’s team, he said, was bent on making an "ideological" point that wars could be fought "on the cheap." There were not enough tanks, artillery or troops, he would say, and the result was a "grossly anemic" force that unnecessarily put troops at risk.

That is not what General McCaffrey said when asked on NBC outlets to assess the risks of war. As planning for a possible invasion received intense news coverage in 2002, he repeatedly assured viewers that the war would be brief, the occupation lengthy but benign.

"These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less," he told Brian Williams on MSNBC.

In the fall of 2002 General McCaffrey joined the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group formed with White House encouragement to fan support for regime change. He also participated in private Pentagon briefings in which network military analysts were armed with talking points that made the case for war, records show.

In early 2003 Forrest Sawyer asked General McCaffrey on CNBC what could go wrong after an invasion. Anticipating this very question, the Pentagon had invited General McCaffrey and other analysts to a special briefing. Years later General McCaffrey would say he knew that the post-invasion planning was a disaster. "They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war," he said.

Given a chance by Mr. Sawyer to raise an alarm, the general reiterated Pentagon talking points about the "astonishing amount" of postwar planning.

And when Tom Brokaw asked him, days before the invasion, "What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?" he replied, "Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones."

Only when the invasion met unexpected resistance did General McCaffrey give a glimpse of his misgivings. "We’ve placed ourselves in a risky proposition, 400 miles into Iraq with no flank or rear area security," he told Katie Couric on "Today."

Mr. Rumsfeld struck back. He abruptly cut off General McCaffrey’s access to the Pentagon’s special briefings and conference calls.

General McCaffrey was stunned. "I’ve never heard his voice like that," recalled one close associate who asked not to be identified. He added, "They showed him what life was like on the outside."

Robert Weiner, a longtime publicist for General McCaffrey, said the general came to see that if he continued his criticism, he risked being shut out not only by Mr. Rumsfeld but also by his network of friends and contacts among the uniformed leadership.

"There is a time when you have to punt," said Mr. Weiner, emphasizing that he spoke as General McCaffrey’s friend, not as his spokesman.

Within days General McCaffrey began to backpedal, professing his "great respect" for Mr. Rumsfeld to Tim Russert. "Is this man O.K.?" the Fox News anchor Brit Hume asked, taking note of the about-face.

For months to come, as an insurgency took root, General McCaffrey defended the Bush administration. "I am 100 percent behind what the administration, what the president of the United States, is doing in Iraq," he told Mr. Williams that June.

A Corporate Troubleshooter

Mr. Rumsfeld’s swift reaction underscored the administration’s appreciation of General McCaffrey’s influence. His comments were catalogued and circulated at the White House and Pentagon.

Other network analysts were monitored, too, but not the way General McCaffrey was. He was different. He was one of the few retired four-star generals on television, and his well-known friendships with men like General Petraeus and Gen. John P. Abizaid gave him added currency.

As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan dragged on, General McCaffrey increasingly gave public expression to the private frustrations of generals pressing their civilian bosses for more troops, weapons and reconstruction money. The Army, he repeatedly warned, could break under the strain.

These were politically charged topics, and so the administration worked to influence his commentary, using carrots and sticks alike. In 2005, for example, Mr. Rumsfeld took umbrage at remarks General McCaffrey made to The Washington Times about the impact of unchecked poppy production in Afghanistan. Mr. Rumsfeld wrote to Gen. Peter Pace, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, demanding to know where General McCaffrey "got his information," records show. No less than an assistant secretary of defense was dispatched to speak with General McCaffrey, who said he had been misquoted.

In a letter to The Times, General McCaffrey’s lawyer, Thomas A. Clare, said the general’s recurring criticisms had cost him "business opportunities with defense contractors." NBC executives said they, too, fielded high-level complaints, and General McCaffrey was not invited back to the Pentagon’s analyst briefings.

On the other hand, when Pentagon officials noticed that General McCaffrey was scheduled to appear on programs like "Meet the Press," they asked generals close to him to suggest themes, records show. The Pentagon also began paying for General McCaffrey to travel to Iraq and Afghanistan. Other military analysts were invited on trips, but only in groups. General McCaffrey went by himself under the sponsorship of Central Command’s generals.

The stated purpose was for General McCaffrey to provide an outside assessment in his role as a part-time professor at West Point. But his trips were also an important public relations tool, meticulously planned to arm him with anecdotes of progress. Records show that Central Command’s generals expected him to "publicly support their efforts" upon his return home and solicited his advice on how to "reverse the perception" in Washington of a lost war.

After each trip General McCaffrey embarked on a news media campaign, writing opinion articles, granting interviews, publishing "after action" reports on his firm’s Web site. Each time he extolled Central Command’s generals and called for a renewed national commitment of money and support.

At the same time, General McCaffrey used his access to further business interests, as he did during the summer of 2005, when Americans were turning against the Iraq war in droves.

Veritas had been on a shopping spree, buying military contractors deeply enmeshed in the war. Its biggest acquisition was of DynCorp International, best known for training foreign security forces for the United States government. By 2005 operations in Iraq and Afghanistan accounted for 37 percent of DynCorp’s revenues.

The crumbling public support, though, posed a threat to Veritas’s prize acquisition. The changing political climate and unrelenting violence, DynCorp warned investors, could force a withdrawal from Iraq.

What is more, some of DynCorp’s Iraq contracts were in trouble, plagued by cost overruns, inept work by subcontractors and ineffective training programs. So when DynCorp executives learned that General McCaffrey was planning to travel to Iraq that June, they asked him to sound out American commanders and reassure them of DynCorp’s determination to make things right.

"It is useful both ways," Gregory Lagana, a DynCorp spokesman, said in an interview. "If there were problems, and there were, then we could get an independent judgment and fix them."

Mr. Lagana said General McCaffrey had been a troubleshooter for DynCorp on other trips. "He’ll say: ‘I’m going over. Is there anyone you want me to see?’ " Mr. Lagana said. "And then he’d go in and say, ‘I’m on the board. What can you tell me?’ "

The Pentagon had its own agenda. For eight days, General McCaffrey was given red-carpet treatment. Iraqi commandos even staged a live-fire demonstration for him. But General McCaffrey also was given access to officials whose decisions were important to his business interests, including DynCorp, which was planning an I.P.O. He met with General Petraeus, who was then in charge of training Iraqi security forces and responsible for supervising DynCorp’s 500 police trainers. He also met with officials responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of contracts in Iraq.

General McCaffrey would not discuss these sessions, and General Petraeus said in an e-mail message to The Times that he had no reason to discuss DynCorp with General McCaffrey because he would have gone directly to DynCorp’s executives in Iraq.

Back home, General McCaffrey undertook a one-man news media blitz in which he contradicted the dire assessments of many journalists in Iraq. He bore witness to progress on all fronts, but most of all he vouched for Iraq’s security forces. A year earlier, before joining DynCorp’s board, he had described these forces as "badly equipped, badly trained, politically unreliable." Just months before, Gary E. Luck, a retired four-star Army general sent to assess progress in Iraq, had reported to Mr. Bush that security training was going poorly. Yet General McCaffrey now emphasized his "surprising" conclusion that the training was succeeding.

After Mr. Bush gave a speech praising Iraq’s new security forces, Brian Williams asked General McCaffrey for an independent assessment. "The Iraqi security forces are real," General McCaffrey replied, without noting the concerns about DynCorp.

His financial stake in the policy debates over Iraq was not mentioned. He did not disclose that he owned special stock that allowed him to share in DynCorp’s profits, up 87 percent that year largely because of the Iraq war.

"I took as objective a look at it as I could," he told David Gregory, the NBC correspondent.

A Contract in Iraq

In his written statements to The Times, General McCaffrey said his role with Veritas was "governance, not marketing," and Veritas insisted that he never "solicited new or existing government contracts."

General McCaffrey did, however, play an indirect role in helping Veritas win one of its largest contracts, to supply more than 8,000 translators to the war in Iraq. The contract had been held by L-3 Communications, but when General McCaffrey got wind that the Army was considering seeking new bidders, he called his friend James A. Marks, a major general in the Army who was approaching retirement and was versed in the uses of translators, having served as intelligence chief for land forces during the Iraq invasion.

As General Marks recalls it, General McCaffrey asked him to lead an effort to win the contract for Veritas.

General Marks, who became a CNN military analyst after his retirement in 2004, would be named president of a new DynCorp subsidiary, Global Linguist Solutions, created in July 2006 to bid for the translation contract. In August 2006 Veritas designated General McCaffrey as chairman of Global Linguist. According to a 2007 corporate filing, General McCaffrey was promised $10,000 a month plus expenses once Global Linguist secured the contract. He would also be eligible to share in profits, which could potentially be significant: the contract was worth $4.6 billion over five years, but only if the United States did not pull out of Iraq first.

In the fall of 2006, that was hardly a sure thing. With casualties rising, the nation’s discontent had been laid bare by the November elections. Then, in December, the Iraq Study Group recommended withdrawing all combat brigades by early 2008.

That month, in a flurry of appearances for NBC, General McCaffrey repeatedly ridiculed this recommendation, warning that it would turn Iraq into "Pol Pot’s Cambodia."

The United States, he said, should keep at least 100,000 troops in Iraq for many years. He disputed depictions of an isolated and deluded White House. After meeting with the president and vice president on Dec. 11 in the Oval Office, he went on television and described them as "very sober-minded."

General McCaffrey was hardly alone in criticizing the Iraq Study Group, and in his e-mail messages to The Times he said his objections reflected his judgment that it was folly to leave American trainers behind with no combat force protection. But in none of those appearances did NBC disclose General McCaffrey’s ties to Global Linguist.

NBC executives asserted that the general’s relationships with military contractors are indirectly disclosed through NBC’s Web site, where General McCaffrey’s biography now features a link to his consulting firm’s Web site. That site, they said, lists General McCaffrey’s clients.

While the general’s Web site lists his board memberships, it does not name his clients, nor does it mention Veritas Capital, by one measure the second-largest military contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan, after KBR. In any event, Mr. Capus, the NBC News president, said he was unaware of General McCaffrey’s connection to the translation contract. Mr. Capus declined to comment on whether this information should have been disclosed.

CNN officials said they, too, were unaware of General Marks’s role in the contract. When they learned of it in 2007, they said, they were so concerned about what they considered an obvious conflict of interest that they severed ties with him. (General Marks, who also spoke out against the withdrawal plan on CNN, said business considerations did not influence his comments.)

On Dec. 18, 2006, the Pentagon stunned Wall Street by awarding the translation contract to Global Linguist. DynCorp’s stock jumped 15 percent.

Hiring a General

After touring Iraq in March 2007 and meeting with American officials responsible for equipping Iraq’s military, General McCaffrey published a trip report recommending that the United States equip Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles.

This kind of access had strong appeal to Mr. Ringgold, Defense Solutions’ chief, who had a plan to rebuild Iraq’s decimated fleets of armored vehicles by culling "leftovers" from depots across Eastern Europe. "I was looking for an advocate," Mr. Ringgold recalled.

General McCaffrey soon arrived for an audition at the Defense Solutions headquarters outside Philadelphia. "Frankly," Mr. Ringgold recalled, "I had to get over the sticker shock of what he was going to cost me."

General McCaffrey liked his basic concept but told him to think bigger, Mr. Ringgold said. Instead of minimally refurbished equipment, he urged Mr. Ringgold to sell "Americanized" armored vehicles upgraded with thermal sights and other expensive extras. And why not also team up with DynCorp and others to supply the maintenance, logistics and training to keep them running?

The suggestions vastly increased the proposal’s scale and price tag, but the general seemed to have a read on the complex interplay between the Iraqi government and the American military leadership, Mr. Ringgold recalled. For a retainer and an undisclosed equity stake, General McCaffrey signed on weeks later, then promptly wrote to General Petraeus.

His letter, drafted with help from Defense Solutions, explained that in the three months since his trip to Iraq, he had found just one feasible way to equip Iraq with enough armored vehicles to permit a "phased redeployment" of American combat forces – the proposal by Defense Solutions. He urged General Petraeus to act quickly but did not disclose that he had just been hired by Defense Solutions.

In his e-mail message to The Times, General Petraeus said he received "innumerable" letters from "would be" contractors. In this case, he wrote, he simply sent General McCaffrey’s material "without any endorsement" to James M. Dubik, the general then responsible for training Iraq’s security forces.

General Dubik, now retired, said in an interview that he, too, received a letter and information packet, and as a result briefed Iraq’s defense minister. "Quite frankly," he said, "I thought it was a good idea."

General Dubik emphasized that although he used Defense Solutions briefing materials, he first "sanitized" them of any mention of the company. He said he presented the idea as his own, intending to ask Defense Solutions to bid if the Iraqis liked the concept. But the defense minister reacted coolly, he said, arguing that Iraq deserved advanced American-made vehicles.

General McCaffrey also sent letters to top lawmakers and approached contacts inside the Defense Department bureaucracy that oversees foreign military sales. His influence was immediately apparent. For example, General McCaffrey reached out to Maj. Gen. Timothy F. Ghormley, chief of staff at Central Command, who promptly invited Mr. Ringgold to a meeting in Tampa, Fla. Mr. Ringgold recalled General Ghormley’s first words: "Why aren’t we doing this already?"

Nevertheless, by late 2007, Defense Solutions still had no deal. General McCaffrey, Mr. Ringgold recalled, said the company needed to get to Baghdad and meet directly with Iraqi leaders and important Americans.

On Oct. 26, 2007, General McCaffrey wrote an e-mail message to General Petraeus proposing to return to Iraq. He said his "principal interest would be to document progress in standing up Iraqi security forces," and he proposed traveling soon, before the presidential primaries, so he could "speak objectively – before politics goes to roar level."

In early December General McCaffrey arrived in Baghdad, where he met with Generals Petraeus and Dubik, among others.

General Petraeus said he did not recall them discussing Defense Solutions. General Dubik recalled giving General McCaffrey a detailed briefing on the effort to equip Iraq’s army, including the plans for armored vehicles. He said it was a measure of General McCaffrey’s integrity that he did not raise Defense Solutions. "He’s not going to cross the line," General Dubik said.

Mr. Ringgold said General McCaffrey "made it perfectly clear" that he would not discuss their proposal with the two generals and even sent instructions that he was not to be contacted in Iraq "to avoid even the perception of conflict of interest."

But Defense Solutions used information General McCaffrey gleaned from his meetings to refine its proposal. Mr. Ringgold followed General McCaffrey to Baghdad in February 2008 and then made plans to return in the spring to meet with Generals Dubik and Petraeus. "General McCaffrey insisted that I see you," Mr. Ringgold wrote to General Petraeus in a March 20 e-mail message.

General Petraeus forwarded Mr. Ringgold’s message to General Dubik, who warned Mr. Ringgold that while he was happy to meet, Iraq’s defense minister was still hesitant. "They’ve gone back and forth on the refurbished stuff," General Dubik wrote.

Defense Solutions turned to the White House. On May 9, Mr. Ringgold and Tom C. Korologos, a Republican lobbyist, met with a military aide to Vice President Dick Cheney and two National Security Council officials.

The next day, in an e-mail memorandum to his staff, Mr. Ringgold discussed other ways to press Iraqi and American officials, including generating news media coverage to suggest that Iraq’s "failure to ready its Army" was prolonging the occupation. General McCaffrey had been making a similar argument for months on NBC and elsewhere. "The end of the game is that the Iraqis got to maintain internal order," he told Ann Curry, the NBC journalist.

Mr. Ringgold said he had never asked the general to take positions supporting Defense Solutions in his news media appearances. On the other hand, he added, "I hope he was thinking of us."

Mr. Weiner, the general’s longtime publicist, said General McCaffrey worked with clients "to get your mission achieved in the media." General McCaffrey, he said, often speaks out with the twin goals of shaping policy and generating favorable coverage for clients with worthy products or ideas.

"His motive is pure," Mr. Weiner said. "It is national interest."

Despite Defense Solutions’ efforts, Iraq recently placed orders for billions of dollars’ worth of American-made armored vehicles. But the company is not giving up, and it continues to rely on the advice of General McCaffrey, who returned to Iraq on Oct. 31 for another visit sponsored by the Pentagon.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 2, 2008
Because of a production error, an article on Sunday about Barry R. McCaffrey’s ties to a military contractor omitted, in some editions, the credit for one photograph and carried incorrect credits for three others. The photograph of General McCaffrey and Wayne A. Downing, another retired general, was taken by Brendan Smialowski for Getty Images. The photograph of Gen. David H. Petraeus was by Jason Reed for Reuters. The photograph of Donald H. Rumsfeld was by Ron Edmunds for The Associated Press. And the photograph of Gen. James M. Dubik was by Win McNamee for Getty Images.

More Articles in Washington » A version of this article appeared in print on November 30, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E7D71E3DF935A15757C0A96E9C8B63

April 26, 2008

Pentagon Suspends Briefings For Analysts

By DAVID BARSTOW

The Pentagon announced on Friday that it was suspending its briefings for retired military officers who often appear as military analysts on television and radio programs.

A spokesman for the Pentagon said the briefings and all other interactions with the military analysts had been suspended indefinitely pending an internal review.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that since 2002 the Pentagon has cultivated several dozen military analysts in a campaign to generate favorable coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. The retired officers have made tens of thousands of appearances for television and radio networks, holding forth on Iraq, Afghanistan, detainee issues and terrorism in general.

Records and interviews show that the Bush administration worked to transform the analysts into an instrument intended to shape coverage from inside the major networks.

The analysts, many with undisclosed ties to military contractors, have been wooed in hundreds of private briefings with senior government officials, given access to classified information and taken on Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq and Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, The Times reported.

Internal Pentagon documents showed that Defense Department officials referred to the retired officers as ‘’surrogates” or ”message force multipliers” who could be counted on to deliver administration ”themes and messages” in the form of their own opinions.

The documents, which included transcripts of private briefings between senior military leaders and the military analysts, also reveal a symbiotic relationship in which the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated.

Military analysts have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Several said they had used their special access as a marketing and networking opportunity or as a window into future business possibilities.

A Pentagon spokesman said the decision to halt the briefings, which was first reported on Friday by Stars and Stripes, was made by Robert Hastings, principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.

The decision came amid criticism and questions from members of Congress.

Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote Robert M. Gates, the defense secretary, this week asking the Pentagon to investigate the program.

Representative Ike Skelton, Democrat of Missouri and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a speech on Thursday that he and many other members of Congress were ”very angry” about the issues raised by the article. ”The story does not reflect well on the Pentagon, on the military analysts in question, or on the media organizations that employ them,” he said.

”There is nothing inherently wrong with providing information to the public and the press,” Mr. Skelton added. ”But there is a problem if the Pentagon is providing special access to retired officers and then basically using them as pawns to spout the administration’s talking points of the day.”

A third member of Congress, Representative Rosa L. DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote to the heads of the five major television networks this week asking each to provide more information on procedures for vetting and hiring military analysts.

”When you put analysts on the air without fully disclosing their business interests, as well as relationships with high-level officials within the government, the public trust is betrayed,” Ms. DeLauro wrote.

ForYourInformation5 OK to Kill if You’re a Kop

editor — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:26:33 +0000

Folks -

Imagine four members of an armed gang kill an innocent immigrant in a crowded airport.

Imagine that the members lie about what they did, and no charges were laid.

Imagine later that they cannot continue to lie, as there is a video of the killing.

Imagine then, that no charges are ever laid against them, because they are a powerful gang, and no one wants to face them.

That is what you have with the RCMP in Canada.

Jim Szpajcher

http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090422/rcmp_sorry_090422/20090422?hub=TopStories

RCMP sorry for inaccurate account of Dziekanski death

Updated Wed. Apr. 22 2009 7:15 AM ET The Canadian Press

VANCOUVER — The RCMP apologized Tuesday for what it says was inaccurate information that misled the public about the circumstances of Robert Dziekanski’s death.

The force has been under fire for almost two years since Dziekanski died after being stunned several times by a Taser at Vancouver International Airport.

The Mounties’ media strategy now is being dissected at the Braidwood Commission inquiry into Dziekanski’s death.

Spokesman Sgt. Tim Shields told reporters covering the commission hearings the RCMP strives to provide accurate information to the media.

"In this case, during the course of the investigation we found that there was some information that was provided and made public that was not accurate," Shields said. "And for those inaccuracies we apologize and we are sorry."

The apology came as the Mounties’ chief spokesman during the initial phase of incident insisted he never intentionally misled reporters about what happened to Dziekanski.

Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre testified he saw a crucial part of the video that recorded Dziekanski’s fatal confrontation with RCMP before he met reporters.

After the video was released publicly, Lemaitre came under fire from critics who allege he misled the media and the public about what prompted RCMP to stun Dziekanski with a Taser.

The video shows Dziekanski being shocked just seconds after four Mounties surrounded the agitated man at Vancouver airport’s international arrivals area.

Dziekanski died Oct. 14, 2007, after being stunned several times.

Just hours later, Lemaitre gave interviews that suggested Dziekanski was combative with officers who struggled with him.

But the video, shot by traveller Paul Pritchard, shows Dziekanski seeming to back away from the Mounties and holding an open stapler just before being stunned. He then staggers, flails his arms and falls to the ground, with the Taser repeatedly used on him until he is handcuffed.

Lemaitre insisted Dziekanski was stunned twice while the video — backed by a woman who witnessed the incident — indicated he was shocked more than twice. Evidence would reveal it was five times.

Lemaitre said he learned months later it was more than twice after investigators analyzed the Taser used on Dziekanski.

He clung to the incorrect figure despite reporters’ questions regarding what the woman witnessed.

"That’s the information I had and until I get a further update. . . the facts are going to remain the way they are," he told lawyer Walter Kosteckyj, who represents Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski.

Lemaitre said that even though he was senior media relations officer for the RCMP in the province, he had to defer to Cpl. Dale Carr, of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team, in a homicide case.

"Over my years of experience, in a homicide investigation IHIT calls the shots," he said. "That’s the way it is."

Lemaitre, who now works in the RCMP’s traffic division, admitted the furor over Dziekanski besmirched his reputation. But he had no way to publicly correct the inaccuracies.

"You know what," he told Kosteckyj, "being a police officer — and I believe that you were at one time — you grow a thicker skin.

"What was a greater concern is that a man had lost his life and an investigation had to be conducted to get to the bottom of it. Whether my feelings were hurt or not had absolutely nothing to do with it."

Lemaitre testified he viewed about a minute of the Pritchard recording on a laptop computer at the Richmond RCMP detachment before going to the airport to speak to reporters.

"The sequence that I can recall is the sequence where Mr. Dziekanski is Tasered," Lemaitre testified.

"What I saw were three (RCMP) members struggling with him."

Lemaitre said Carr called him around 4:30 a.m., a couple of hours after Dziekanski was declared dead, and asked him to assist with handling media because there would be "international interest" in the incident and Lemaitre was bilingual.

"My question to him, simply put, was `Dale, what is it that you want me to say?"’ Lemaitre testified.

He and Carr met at the Richmond detachment, whose jurisdiction includes the airport, two hours later and attended a meeting of dozen homicide investigators, where he saw part of the Pritchard video.

Also at the meeting was Cpl. Monty Robinson, the officer in charge of the Mounties who confronted Dziekanski.

Lemaitre said he doesn’t recall whether Robinson said anything at the meeting, adding he did not take any notes that day. He said his interaction was with Carr, trying to work out their media strategy.

"What is it that we want to do here?" he recalled.

"We wanted to get as much information as possible out to the public, because in the past we had had situations where the RCMP had been criticized for not coming forward and giving information."

Lemaitre admitted his comments after the incident might have left an impression with the public of a longer period of time between the Mounties’ initial contact with Dziekanski and the first use of the Taser.

The video shows it was shorter, he said.

Commission lawyer Art Vertlieb asked Lemaitre, a Mountie since 1986, if the video section he saw that morning gave him the impression violence was escalating.

"I can’t answer that," he said. "I wasn’t there."

Having dealt one-on-one with people during his career as an officer in small B.C. detachments, Lemaitre said he could not guess what the officers facing Dziekanski may have seen in his eyes that led them to use the Taser.

But he insisted that what he saw of the video that morning led him to conclude Dziekanski was combative.

ForYourContemplation1 Financialisation

editor — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:30:15 +0000

Folks -

An important interview, although a long read, which sheds light on what is occurring in the U.S.

Foster invokes Marx more than any writer I’ve cared to read, in the article below here – and manages to do it convincingly.

A couple of prominent points:

Regulation of this system was impossible, since the risk had to keep rising and any attempt to place any limits on the system once financialization got to a certain point risked a financial meltdown. The capitalist state therefore had no choice but gradually to dismantle the entire financial regulatory system and to allow risk to grow. Indeed, in every major financial crisis over the last thirty years the response was financial deregulation. The risk-prone structure that emerged was presented as "optimal" in the governing ideology and the IMF and other institutions worked at imposing the same supposedly advanced, high-risk "financial architecture" on all the countries of the world.

Rather we are experiencing one of the greatest robberies in history. I have written on the question of nationalization for the "Notes from the Editors" forthcoming in the March 2009 Monthly Review. All the attempts to rescue the financial system at this time go in the direction of nationalization. The federal government is providing more and more of the capital and assuming financial responsibility for the banks. However, they are doing everything they can to keep the banks in private hands, resulting in a kind of de facto nationalization with de jure private control. Whether the federal government is forced eventually toward full nationalization (that is, assuming direct control of the banks) is a big question. But even that is unlikely to change the nature of what is going on, which is a classic case of the socialization of losses of financial institutions while leaving untouched the massive gains still in the hands of those who most profited from the whole extreme period of financial speculation.

The first thing to recognize is that we are suddenly in a different historical period. One of my favorite quotes comes from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!, where the main character, William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) states: "Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of an entire century." We are living in such a period; not only because of the Great Financial Crisis and what the IMF is now calling a depression in the advanced capitalist economies, but also because of the global ecological crisis that during the last decade has accelerated out of control under business as usual, and due to the reappearance of "naked imperialism." What made sense ten years ago is nonsense now.

For your contemplation.

Jim Szpajcher

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22116.htm

The Great Financial Crisis:

Interview of John Bellamy Foster by Mike Whitney

John Bellamy Foster is editor of Monthly Review and professor of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is the coauthor with Fred Magdoff of The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences, recently published by Monthly Review Press.

February 27, 2009 "Information Clearing House" — MW: Do you think that the American people have been misled into believing that the current financial crisis is the result of subprime loans and toxic assets? Aren’t these merely the symptoms of a deeper problem; financialization? Can you explain financialization and how the economy became more and more detached from productive activity and more and more dependent on the accumulation of paper wealth?

JBF: I think it is true, as you say, that the American people have been misled by analyses of the crisis into focusing on mere symptoms, or on the straws that broke the camel’s back, such as subprime loans. There is still a great deal of toxic financial waste out there in the financial superstructure of the economy, but the real problems go much deeper. One reason for this failure to account realistically for the crisis is that those at the top of the system have very little clue themselves, given the near bankruptcy of orthodox economics. A second reason is that the dominant ideology is designed to naturalize any economic disaster, pretending it has nothing to do with the fundamental nature of the system but is simply the result of external forces, mistakes of federal regulators, deregulation, corruption of a few individuals, etc. Under these circumstances, what you get from the elites and the media is mostly nonsense, though there are individuals in the financial community, in particular, that are now analyzing the problem at a deeper, more realistic level.

The first thing to recognize is that this is a very serious crisis, of an order of magnitude comparable to the Great Depression. It is not a regular business cycle downturn or credit crunch. This should suggest that there are long-term forces at work. These include, over the last third of a century, stagnation, or the slowing down of the economy, and the financialization, the shift in the center of gravity of the economy from production to finance. Financialization refers not to just one or two financial bubbles (such as the New Economy bubble and the housing bubble) but to the growing reliance on financial speculation, which can be treated as a whole series of bubbles one after the other, each new one bigger than the last. This has been the dominant economic development since the 1970s, and especially since the 1980s. This financialization was occurring on top of a "real economy" or productive economy that was more and more stagnant. Given the rot below, financial speculation thus became the only game in town, serving to lift the economy. More and more economic activity was geared not to production but to the pursuit of paper claims to wealth. The last bubble-bursting episode, associated with the housing or subprime bubble, was so severe that it brought financialization to an end, generating what we call in the title of our new book The Great Financial Crisis.

The idea at the top was that the financial explosion could be managed, and a financial collapse prevented. The central banks as lenders of last resort could pour liquidity into the system at critical points to avoid a financial avalanche. And in fact they succeeded in doing this for decades. Ben Bernanke, the current head of the Federal Reserve, even referred a few years ago to "The Great Moderation," in which the business cycle had been overcome by monetary policy. Following the successful leveraging of the system out of the 2001 crisis that followed the 2000 bursting of the New Economy bubble he assumed that they now had discovered the elixir of indefinite financial-based growth. Yet, the scale of the financial superstructure of the economy kept on rising in relation to the stagnant production system underlying it and finally it overwhelmed the capacity of the Federal Reserve and other central banks to stave off the inevitable financial collapse.

From a long-term perspective we can say that there is a kind of mean reversion taking place whereby the financial system and the inordinate profits it generated over decades is reverting to the long-term trend of the overall stagnant economy, which means that trillions upon trillions upon trillions of dollars in capital assets are being lost. And with financialization no longer lifting the economy as it has in decades past we are face to face with the underlying forces of long-term stagnation. For this reason the best economists and financial analysts are now saying that when the recovery from this crisis begins, perhaps in 2011, it will be an L-shaped recovery, pointing toward long-term stagnation as in the depression decade. Without financialization there is nothing on the horizon to boost the U.S. and other advanced capitalist economies.

MW: Is the financial crisis the result of deregulation, lax lending standards and too much leveraging or are there more important factors involved? In your new book The Great Financial Crisis, you say that stagnation is unavoidable in mature capitalist economies because "a handful of corporations control most industries" which has ended "price warfare". How has "monopoly capital" paved the way for financialization and the creation of derivatives, structured debt instruments and other complex investments? Could you clarify what you mean by stagnation is and how it led to the present crisis?

JBF: The long-term process of the growth of financial speculation or financialization (the shift in gravity of the economy from production to finance) was a process that had to keep going because once it stopped you would have a financial avalanche. As increased debt is used more and more to leverage financial speculation the quantity of debt increases while its quality decreases. This means that the level of risk keeps rising. As speculation becomes more extreme various mechanisms are introduced to manage risk. Structured debt instruments like collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, and a host of other exotic financial instruments, were introduced supposedly to reduce the risk of the individual investor, but ended up expanding risk system-wide. Ideologically the increased risk is rationalized in various ways–for example the presumed high tech basis of the New Economy bubble and the notion that new financial instruments had sliced and diced risk and thereby lessened risk exposure in the subprime bubble. But eventually, the decrease in quality that goes along with the increase in quantity of debt has its effect. In this respect, the giving out of subprime loans was simply part of the normal evolution (though this time on a massive scale) of financial instability basic to speculative finance. This was well explained by economist Hyman Minsky in his various works on the "financial instability hypothesis," largely ignored by mainstream economists.

The real underlying problem, as indicated above, was stagnation. Explaining stagnation is a long and complex process. It was analyzed in depth by Paul Baran, Paul Sweezy, and Harry Magdoff. For a fuller understanding, beyond what I am able to give in this short space, I recommend our book The Great Financial Crisis and earlier works by Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, especially Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital. There are two factors basically to consider: maturity and monopoly. Maturity stands for the fact that industrialization is an historical process. In the beginning, i.e., the initial industrial revolution phase, there is a building up of industry virtually from scratch as in the United States in the nineteenth century and China today. During this period the demand for new investment seems infinite and if there are limits to expansion they lie in the shortage of capital to invest. Eventually, however, industry is built up in the core areas and after that production is geared more and more to mere replacement, which can be financed out of depreciation funds.

In a mature economy growth is increasingly dependent on finding investment outlets, and capital tends to generate more surplus (or investment-seeking capital) than can be absorbed in existing outlets. New industries arise (such as the computer, digital product industry of today), but normally the scale of such industries relative to the whole economy is too small to constitute a major boost to the entire economic system. Although the capitalist economy is not often discussed in terms of such a historical process of industrialization (which lies outside the governing ideology,) it is taken for granted in discussions of the world economy that the more mature economies of the United States, Europe, and Japan are only going to grow nowadays at, say, a 2.5 percent rate, while emerging economies may grow much faster. The maturity argument was influenced by Keynes and developed by Alvin Hansen in the late 1930s and early 1940s in such works as Full Recovery or Stagnation? and Fiscal Policy and Business Cycles. But the most powerful and clearest theoretical discussion of maturity was provided by Paul Sweezy, building on a Marxian frame of analysis, in his Four Lectures on Marxism.

The second factor is monopoly (or oligopoly). Marx was the first to discuss the tendency in capitalist economies toward the concentration and centralization of capital, an emphasis that has distinguished Marxian economics. In Marxian and radical institutionalist economics this led to the emergence by the last quarter of the nineteenth century (consolidated only in the twentieth century) of a new stage of capitalism that came to be known as the monopoly stage (or monopoly capitalism) displacing the earlier freely competitive stage of capitalism of the nineteenth century. In essence, the economy in the nineteenth century was dominated by small family firms (other than railroad capital). In the twentieth century this turns into an economy of big corporations. Although monopoly capital, remained a stage of capitalism, the laws of motion of the system were modified. The biggest change is the effective banning of price competition. Monopolistic (or oligopolistic) firms, as Paul Sweezy, then a young Harvard economist, famously explained in the 1930s in his theory of the kinked-demand curve of oligopolistic pricing, tend to shift prices in only one direction–up. Price competition among the majors is seen as self-defeating, and replaced by a steady upward movement of prices, usually a form of indirect collusion, following the price leader (usually the biggest firm in an industry).

With the effective banning of price competition in mature industries (there is still price competition in rising industries where a shakedown process is occurring) the main assumption of orthodox conceptions of the capitalist economy is violated. Competition continues over low cost position in an industry (i.e. over productivity), and in other areas aimed at market share, such as advertising and branding of products (referred to as "monopolistic competition"). But actual price competition under monopoly capital is usually treated as "price warfare," which is no longer acceptable. Throughout the nineteenth century in the United States the general price level fell with the exception of the Civil War years. Throughout the twentieth century the general price level rose with the exception of the Great Depression years.

The result of all of this is that, given rising productivity, monopolistic corporations end up grabbing as surplus a larger portion of the gains of productivity growth (and virtually all the gains when real wages are also stagnant), leading to a tendency of the surplus of monopoly capital to rise. There is then a vast and growing investment-seeking surplus, which, however, encounters relatively diminished investment outlets due to a number of factors: industrial maturity, growing inequality which negatively affects consumption (insofar as this is based on paychecks not debt), and persistent unused industrial capacity which discourages the further expansion of capacity. In Marxian terms, we can say that the rate of surplus value (or the rate of exploitation) within production is too high for all of the surplus value potentially generated through production to be realized in final sales.

As Keynes taught savings/surplus (ex ante) that is not invested simply disappears, so this slows down the economy as a whole. But the problem of surplus capital seeking investment is not thereby alleviated, since monopoly capital tends to adopt measures that continually pump up potential surplus even in a crisis. So the contradiction continues.

Baran and Sweezy summed up their argument by claiming that stagnation was the normal tendency of the monopoly capitalist economy. This was in sharp contradiction to received economic theory which assumed that capitalism by nature tended toward rapid economic growth and full employment. In the mainstream view, rapid growth and full employment were intrinsic to the system, so the emergence of slow growth required a specific explanation. In contrast, Baran, Sweezy, and Magdoff, building on a long line of thinkers before them (Marx, Veblen, Keynes, Hansen, Kalecki, Steindl), argued the opposite, that it was periods of rapid growth under monopoly capitalism, such as the now fabled Golden Age of the 1950s and ’60s, that needed to be explained as due to special factors. In their view, it was necessary to point to the specific historical stimuli that propelled extraordinary periods of rapid development (in the Golden Age: enormous consumer liquidity after the war, a second great wave of automobilization, military spending associated with two regional wars in Asia and the Cold War, the expansion of the sales effort, etc.). Stagnation itself was the normal tendency of the system and so could be accounted for simply by the waning of such special factors.

If investment and consumption are inadequate to maintain demand, as is the normal case under monopoly capitalism, the government is called into help. In the United States this has often taken the form of increased military spending (which is crucial the imperial goals of the system) and lately through financialization. Both of these means of maintaining demand, however, have reached their limits (the U.S. accounts for as much military spending as the whole rest of the world put together and cannot easily expand this at present), resulting in a deepening economic stagnation.

Baran and Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital had pointed to financial sector expansion as a possible countervailing factor to stagnation, but in the 1960s this was merely potential and had not emerged to any large extent. The evolution of the system from the 1970s on became so dependent on the growth of finance, and the incorporation of the giant corporations into this, that I have termed this later phase "monopoly-finance capital."

MW: As the economy has become more dependent on financialization for growth, the gap between rich and poor has grown wider and wider. As you point out in your book, "In the United States the top 1 percent of wealth holders in 2001 owned more than twice as much as the bottom 80 percent of the population. If this was simply measured in terms of financial wealth, the top 1 percent owned more than four times the bottom 80 percent." (p 130). How have working class people managed to keep their heads above water with all this wealth being shifted to the rich?

JBF: The answer is fairly obvious. If people cannot maintain their standard of living on the basis of their income, they will borrow against income and against whatever wealth they have. The result-if their incomes don’t rise, or if the value of whatever assets they have do not increase-is that they will simply get deeper and deeper in debt in an attempt simply to stand still. I became concerned about the growth of working-class household debt in 2000 and carried out a study of The Survey of Consumer Finances, which is published every three years by the federal government with a three year lag in the data. This is the only major federal government data source that we have on household debt broken down into income groups so that we can determine the debt burden of different classes. I published an article based on this research in the May 2000 issue of Monthly Review entitled "Working-Class Households and the Burden of Debt." I then followed this up six years later with an article in the May 2006 Monthly Review on "The Household Debt Bubble," which was to be incorporated into The Great Financial Crisis. There I wrote that "The housing bubble and the strength of consumption in the economy are connected to what might be termed the ‘household debt bubble,’ which could easily burst as a result of rising interest rates and the stagnation or decline of housing prices." This is of course what happened, and the reason why this crisis has turned out to be so severe was the destruction over decades of the finances of working-class households, on the back of which financialization took place.

MW: Will you define "debt-deflation" and explain its potential danger to the economy? As credit continues to tighten and housing prices sink; aren’t we slipping into a reinforcing deflationary spiral? Do you think that fiscal policy will reverse this trend or is the stimulus package too small to stop real estate and equities from continuing to slide?

The term "debt-deflation" is associated particularly with the work of Irving Fisher during the Great Depression. Fisher wrote an article for the journal Econometrica in 1933 entitled "The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions." Deflation as applied to the general economy is a drop in the general price level, something not seen in the United States since the Great Depression, and catastrophic in the economy of monopoly capital (and even more so under monopoly-finance capital). In the first place, deflation (or disinflation, i.e. the reduction of inflation to what the Federal Reserve calls "below optimal" levels) means that the profit margins of corporations are squeezed, even if the cost structure of production, and productivity remain the same. Under these circumstances price competition is reactivated with giant firms actually in a life and death struggle. This also generates pressure for heavy layoffs and wage reductions, creating all sorts of vicious cycles.

But the real fear of deflation has to do with the enormously bloated financial structure and the huge debt load of the economy. Under inflation, which is usually assumed to be built into the advanced capitalist economy, debts are paid back with smaller dollars (that is, worth less over time). In a deflationary economy, however, debt has to be paid back with bigger dollars (worth more over time). This then creates a debt-deflation spiral, enormously accelerating financial meltdown. As Fisher put it, "deflation caused by the debt reacts on the debt. Each dollar of debt still unpaid becomes a bigger dollar, and if the over-indebtedness with which we started was great enough, the liquidation of debt cannot keep up with the fall of prices which it causes." Stated differently, quoting from The Great Financial Crisis (p. 116), "prices fall as debtors sell assets to pay their debts, and as prices fall the remaining debts must be repaid in dollars more valuable than the ones borrowed, causing more defaults, leading to yet lower prices, and thus a deflationary spiral." In order to check this deflationary tendency, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury have been trying to reflate the economy by printing money (euphemistically called "quantitative easing"). But they have not succeeded and deflationary forces are still very strong, causing President Obama to warn shortly after his election that "we now risk falling into a deflationary spiral that could increase our massive debt even further."

It is also worth mentioning the effect that deflation has on investment. With capital faced with the fact that a few years down the line the price level could be lower than it is now, expected profits on investment in new productive capacity (given that this takes years to be built and has to paid for in current prices) are depressed, creating a deeper stagnation of accumulation.

The stimulus package introduced by the Obama administration is far too small to pump up demand and reflate the economy under these circumstances. It is less than $400 billion a year, forty percent of which is tax cuts, so that the increased governmental spending is miniscule compared to the size of the hole created by the drastic drop in consumption, investment, and state and local government spending. It is also dwarfed by the total federal government support programs, primarily to financial institutions, which now amount to more than $9.7 trillion in the form of cash infusions, debt guarantees, swaps of Treasuries for financial toxic waste, etc.

MW: Karl Marx seems to have anticipated the financial meltdown we are now facing. In Capital, he said, "The superficiality of political economy shows itself in the fact that it views the expansion and contraction of credit as the cause of the periodic alterations of the industrial cycle, while it is a mere symptom of them." Marx appears to agree with your theory that the real problem is deeper—economic stagnation which forces surplus capital to look for more profitable investments. While the monetarist theories of Milton Friedman are under withering attack, Keynes and Marx seem to have held up rather well. What does Marx mean when he talks about "political economy"?

JBF: Marx was an acute analyst of financial crises in his time and described their main features. However, he saw financial expansions (as economists in general have until recently) as occurring at the peak of a boom, not as a secular phenomenon. Financialization in the sense of a long-term shift in the center of gravity of the economy toward finance, with financial speculation building over decades, is a completely unprecedented situation.

Marx and Engels did place great emphasis on the growth of joint-stock companies/corporations and the appearance of a market for industrial securities that began to appear near the end of the nineteenth century. It was this creation of the modern market for industrial securities that was the real beginning of the emergence of finance as a relatively independent aspect of the monopoly capitalist economy. There are essentially two pricing structures to the economy: one in the real economy related to the production of goods and services, the other in the financial realm associated with the pricing of assets (paper claims to wealth). The two are interrelated but can be disassociated from each other for periods of time. Keynes in the 1930s singled-out the dangers of an economy that was increasingly governed by the speculative pricing of financial assets. Marx was such an acute observer of capitalism, that even in his time he began to see the contradictions emerging between money (or fictitious) capital and real capital.

One thing that Marx did argue in this context is that surges in financial speculation were responses to stagnation and decline in the real economy, as capital desperately sought a way to maintain and expand its surplus. Thus he wrote that the "plethora of money capital" in such periods was due to "difficulties in employment, through a lack of spheres of investment, i.e. due to a surplus in the branches of production" and showed nothing so much as the immanent barriers to capitalist expansion (quoted in The Great Financial Crisis, p. 39).

Marx remains the strongest foundation for the critique of the capitalist economy, down to our day. But the real Keynes (not to be confused with the bastardized Keynesianism of today) is also important, since he emphasized what he called the "outstanding faults" of the capitalist economy: the tendency to high inequality and high unemployment. He also pointed to the dangers of a system geared to speculative finance.

MW: Is wage stagnation and income inequality a direct result of financialization?

I would put it the other way around. Wage stagnation and growing income and wealth inequality are components of the underlying stagnation tendency. Both have shown a tendency to worsen over time, resulting in deepening stagnation tendencies within the overall economy. Real wages in the United States peaked in 1971, when Richard Nixon was president, and by 2008 had fallen back to 1967 levels, when Lyndon Johnson was president. This is in despite of the enormous growth of productivity and expansion of wealth over the intervening decades. Hence, this is a marker of "the tendency of surplus to rise," as Baran and Sweezy put it, or a rising rate of surplus value, in Marx’s own terms. This was accompanied by a massive growth of income and wealth at the top. As we stated in The Great Financial Crisis (p. 130), "From 1990 to 2002, for each added dollar made by those in the bottom 90 percent [of income] those in the uppermost 0.01 percent (today about 14,000 households) made an additional $18,000." By 2007 income/wealth inequality in the United States had reached 1929 proportions, i.e., the level reached just prior to the 1929 Stock Market Crash that led to the Great Depression.

I do think you are right, though, that financialization made income and wealth inequality worse, and contributed to the stagnation of wages. We can see neoliberalism as basically the ideology of monopoly-finance capital, introduced originally as the ruling class response to stagnation, and then increasingly geared to promoting the financialization of capital, itself a structural response to stagnation. Neoliberalism promoted incessant breaking of unions, forcing down wages, cutting state social welfare spending, deregulation, free mobility of capital, development of new financial architecture, etc. One way to understand this is the enormous need for new cash infusions to feed a financial superstructure that was voracious in its demand for new money capital, which it needed to leverage still more piling up of debt and financial speculation. Insurance companies, real estate, and mutual funds all provided infusions into this financial superstructure, as did the state. All limits were removed. Under these circumstances workers were encouraged to use their houses like piggy banks to finance consumption, credit cards were handed out to teenagers, subprime loans were pushed on those with little ability to pay. Individual retirement packages were shifted toward IRAs that were tied into the speculative financial system. This had all the signs of an addictive system. In these circumstances, too, the real economy, particularly production of goods and manufacturing, was decimated. In the introduction to The Great Financial Crisis we include a chart covering the period since 1960 showing production of goods as a percentage of GDP in a slow, long-term decline, while debt as a percentage of GDP is skyrocketing over the same period. All of this meant a massive redistribution away from working people to capital, and to those at the pinnacle of the financial pyramid.

MW: In your book The Great Financial Crisis, you are critical of Paulson’s capital injections into the banks saying that "at most they buy the necessary time in which the vast mass of questionable loans can be liquidated in an orderly fashion, restoring solvency but at a far lower rate of economic activity–that of a serious recession or depression." On Friday, Timothy Geithner told CNBC that "We will preserve the system that is owned and managed by the private sector." This suggests that the Treasury Secretary might not liquidate the toxic assets at all, but try maintain the appearance that these underwater banks are solvent. What do you think will happen if Geithner refuses to nationalize the banks?

I would not interpret Geithner’s statement that way. Rather we are experiencing one of the greatest robberies in history. I have written on the question of nationalization for the "Notes from the Editors" forthcoming in the March 2009 Monthly Review. All the attempts to rescue the financial system at this time go in the direction of nationalization. The federal government is providing more and more of the capital and assuming financial responsibility for the banks. However, they are doing everything they can to keep the banks in private hands, resulting in a kind of de facto nationalization with de jure private control. Whether the federal government is forced eventually toward full nationalization (that is, assuming direct control of the banks) is a big question. But even that is unlikely to change the nature of what is going on, which is a classic case of the socialization of losses of financial institutions while leaving untouched the massive gains still in the hands of those who most profited from the whole extreme period of financial speculation.

To get an idea of what is happening one has to understand that the federal government, as I have already indicated, has committed itself thus far in this crisis $9.7 trillion in support programs primarily for financial institutions. The Federal Reserve (together with the Treasury) now has converted itself into what is called a "bad bank." It has been swapping Treasury certificates for toxic financial waste, such as collateralized debt obligations. As a result the Federal Reserve has become the banker of last resort for toxic waste with the share of Treasuries in the Fed’s balance sheet dropping from about 90 percent to about 20 percent over the course of the crisis, with much of the rest now made up of financial toxic waste.

Obviously, full, straightforward nationalization would be more rational than this. But one has also to remember the system of power-both economic and political-that we are dealing with at present. The classic case of full bank nationalization was Italian corporatist capitalism of the 1920s and ’30s, and was carried out by the fascist regime. Without suggesting that we are headed this way now it should be clear from this that nationalization of banks itself is no panacea.

The fact that Geithner, Obama’s pick for Treasury Secretary, is overseeing the enormous robbery taking place, probably exceeding any theft in history, with the ordinary taxpayers picking up the tab, should certainly cause one to ask questions about the "progressive" nature of the new administration.

MW: Former Fed chief Alan Greenspan has dismissed criticism of his monetary policies saying that no one could have seen the humongous bubble developing in housing. In your book, however, you make this observation: "It was the reality of economic stagnation beginning in the 1970s…that led to the emergence of the ‘new financialized capitalist regime’s kind of ‘paradoxical financial Keynesianism’ whereby demand in the economy was stimulated primarily ‘thanks to asset bubbles.’" (p 129) The statement suggests that the Fed knew exactly what it was doing when it slashed rates and created a speculative frenzy. Debt-fueled asset bubbles are a way of shifting wealth from one class to another while avoiding the stagnation of the underlying economy. Can this problem be fixed through regulation and better oversight or is it something that is intrinsic to capitalism itself?

Greenspan is of course trying desperately to salvage his reputation and to remove any sense that he is culpable. I would agree that the Fed knew what it was doing up to a point, and deliberately promoted an asset bubble in housing-what Stephanie Pomboy called "The Great Bubble Transfer" following the bursting of the New Economy tech bubble in 2000. The view that no one saw the dangers of course is false. It reminds me of Paul Krugman’s face-saving claim in his The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 that while some people thought that financial and economic problems of the 1930s might repeat themselves, these were not "sensible people." According to Krugman, "sensible people" like himself (that is, those who expressed the consensus of those in power) knew that these things could never happen-but turned out to be wrong. It is true, as Greenspan says, no one could have foreseen precisely what really happened. And certainly there were a lot of blinders at the top. But there were lots of warnings and concerns. For example, I drafted an article ("The Great Fear") for the April 2005 issue of Monthly Review that referred to "rising interest rates (threatening a bursting of the housing bubble supporting U.S. consumption)" as one of the key "perils of a stagnating economy." Other close observers of the economy were saying the same thing.

The Federal Reserve Board, indeed, was internally debating in these years whether to adopt a policy of pricking the asset bubbles before they got further out of control. But Greenspan and Bernanke were both against such a dangerous operation, claiming that this could bring the whole rickety financial structure down. Since they didn’t know what to do about asset bubbles they simply sat on their hands and tried to talk the market up. The dominant view was that the Federal Reserve could stop a financial avalanche by putting a rock in the right place the moment there was a sign of trouble. So Bernanke went ahead, closed his eyes and prayed, raising interest rates to restrict inflation (an action demanded by the financial elite) and the rest is history.

At all times it was those at the commanding heights of the financial institutions that called the shots, and the Fed followed their wishes. Greenspan himself is no dummy. He wrote in Challenge Magazine in March-April 1988 of the dangers associated with housing bubbles. But as a Federal Reserve Board chairman he pursued financialization to the hilt, since there was no other option for the system. Needless to say, such financialization was associated with the growing disparities in wealth and income in the country. Debt itself is an instrument of power and those at the bottom were chained by it, while those at the top were using it to leverage rising fortunes. The total net worth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans (an increasing percentage of whom were based in finance) rose from $91.8 billion in 1982 to $1.2 trillion in 2006, while most people in the society were finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. None of this was an accident. It was all intrinsic to monopoly-finance capital.

MW: The financial crisis is quickly turning into a political crisis. Already governments in Iceland and Latvia have collapsed and the global slump is just beginning to accelerate. Riots and street violence have broken out in Greece, Latvia and Lithuania and worker-led protests have become commonplace throughout the EU. As unemployment skyrockets and economic activity stalls, countries are likely to experience greater social instability. Do you see this crisis as an opportunity political mobilization? How does one take deep-seated discontent and rage and shape it into a political movement for structural change?

JBF: The first thing to recognize is that we are suddenly in a different historical period. One of my favorite quotes comes from Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!, where the main character, William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) states: "Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of an entire century." We are living in such a period; not only because of the Great Financial Crisis and what the IMF is now calling a depression in the advanced capitalist economies, but also because of the global ecological crisis that during the last decade has accelerated out of control under business as usual, and due to the reappearance of "naked imperialism." What made sense ten years ago is nonsense now. New dangers and new possibilities are opening up. A whole different kind of struggle is emerging.

The sudden fall of the governments in Iceland and Latvia as a result of protests against financial theft is remarkable, as are the widespread revolts in Greece and throughout the EU, with millions in the streets. The general strikes in Guadeloupe and Martinique, the French Antilles, and the support given to these movements by the French New Anti-Capitalist Party is a breakthrough. In fact much of the world is in ferment. Latin Americans are engaged in a full-scale revolt against neoliberalism, led by Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, and the aspiration of a new socialism for the 21st century (as envisioned also in Bolivia, Ecuador and Cuba). The Nepalese revolution has offered new hope in Asia. Social struggles on a major scale are occurring in emerging economies such as Brazil, Mexico, and India. China itself is experiencing unrest.

The one place in the world where this world historical ferment appears to not be having telling effect at present is the United States. This can be traced to two reasons. First, the United States as the center of a world empire is a fortress of conservatism. Second, the election of the Obama administration has confused progressive forces, leading to absurd notions that the Democrats under Obama are going to create a New New Deal without renewed pressure arising from a revolt from below. Meanwhile, under Obama’s watch, and with the help of his chosen advisers, vast amounts of state funds are being infused into the financial system to benefit private capital.

What is needed in the United States today, we argue in The Great Financial Crisis, is a renewal of the classic concept of political economy (with its class perspective), whereby it comes to be understood that the economy is subject to public control, and should be wrested from the domination of the ruling class. The bailing out of the system right now is going on with taxpayer funds but without the say of the public. A revolt to gain popular control of the political economy is therefore necessary.

It is possible to start with the demand for a New New Deal rooted in the best legacy of the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, most notably the Works Progress Administration. But as Robert McChesney and I argued in "A New New Deal Under Obama?" in the February 2009 issue of Monthly Review, the struggle has to move quickly beyond that to an expansion of workers’ rights along socialist principles, breaking with the logic of capital. For this to occur there has to be a great revolt from below on at least the scale of the industrial unionization movement of the 1930s that created a new political force in the country (later destroyed in the McCarthy Era). The story of this struggle is told in David Milton’s classic account, The Politics of U.S. Labor, which also points out that the rising labor movement was led by socialists and radical syndicalists.

It is important, as István Mészáros explained in his Beyond Capital, that the radical politics opened up in this historical moment not be diverted into attempting to save the existing system, but be directed at transcending it. As Mészáros wrote: "To succeed in its original aim, radical politics must transfer at the height of the crisis its aspirations-in the form of effective powers of decision making at all levels and all areas, including the economy-to the social body itself from which subsequent material and political demands would emanate."

In the United States a primary goal of any radical politics should be to cut military spending, which is the imperial iron heel holding down the entire world, while corrupting the U.S. body politic and diverting surplus from pressing social needs.

The obvious weak link of the whole political, ideological and economic structure in command in the United States today, is that the system has clearly failed to meet peoples’ real needs. Rather than addressing these pressing needs in the crisis, the emphasis of the economic overlords is to bailout private capital at virtually any cost. Between October 2008 and January 2009 the federal government provided about $160 billion in capital and infusions and debt guarantees to the Bank of America, which had a total net worth in late January of only a small fraction of that amount. The rest had gone down the rat hole.

The robbing of public funds to bailout private capital is now on a scale probably never before seen. A politicized, organized working class capable of understanding and reacting to that theft, and choosing thereby to restructure society, to meet real social, egalitarian needs is what is now to be hoped for. The title of a recent cover story Newsweek declared: "We Are All Socialists Now." As it turned out, Newsweek’s editors were simply referring to the increase in public spending now taking place-hardly an indication of socialism. But the fact that this is said at all in the mainstream media points to the fact that we are in a different historical moment in which radical forces have the possibility of moving forward.