Check It Out for Friday, June 19th
Jason Leopold at Truthout writes that the Senate overwhelmingly passed a measure banning released of detainee abuse photos.
"The Senate overwhelmingly passed a measure on Wednesday evening to block the release of photos depicting US soldiers abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"The legislation will now be sent to the House, but it's unclear whether Democratic lawmakers will support it.
"The amendment was sponsored by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina). Graham and Lieberman have waged a public campaign to force President Barack Obama to block the release of the photos by appealing to the Supreme Court if the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected previous efforts by the Bush administration to keep the photos classified, upholds its previous rulings. They vowed to filibuster the supplemental spending bill if their measure was not passed.
"By opposing the release of photographic and other evidence of prisoner abuse, Obama is furthering a long-running cover-up that has protected senior Bush administration officials who set the harsh interrogation policies that led to torture and other misconduct.
"In effect, Obama's reversals on his earlier pledges of openness regarding alleged US war crimes means that he is shutting the door on new internal investigations that might go beyond the truncated inquiries allowed by President George W. Bush and his top aides.
"Obama's decision to fight to conceal the photos marks an about-face on the open-government policies that he proclaimed during his first days in office.
" Last September, in upholding a lower court ruling ordering the release of the photos, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit noted that past US administrations had championed the release of photos that showed prisoners of war being abused and tortured.
"Notably, after World War II, the US government publicized photos of prisoners in Japanese and German prisons and concentration camps, which the court noted "showed emaciated prisoners, subjugated detainees, and even corpses. But the United States championed the use of the photos as a means of holding the perpetrators accountable."
Dean Starkman at The Nation writes about Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times, and the most important financial journalist of her generation."On April 27, Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, sat down for a meeting at Goldman headquarters with Gretchen Morgenson, reporter, columnist and senior editor of the New York Times. The Wall Street titan and the Pulitzer Prize winner had never met, but this wasn't the usual polite getting-to-know-you session between reporter and source.
" 'I feel like I've been waterboarded,' Blankfein told her, according to people familiar with the discussion. Blankfein was being dramatic, but he had reason to feel that way. It was Morgenson, after all, who had written the story this past fall that stripped the veil of secrecy from the most momentous closed-door deal in the annals of US finance: the government rescue of fallen insurance colossus American International Group. The September 28 story, "Behind Insurer's Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk," was the first article published by a major news organization to reveal that the true beneficiaries of the bailout were the institutions to which AIG owed money, known as counterparties (mainly Wall Street investment banks). The 2,700-word piece said, among other things, that an AIG collapse "threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman's side" and that Blankfein attended a meeting at the Federal Reserve on September 15, the same day decisions were made to let Lehman Brothers fall and to save AIG.
"She breaks business-press taboos constantly. Her prose is blunt; some even say crude. ("Everybody knows that executive compensation at many companies has been obscene. What everybody does not know is how obscene obscene is now," she wrote in February 2006 in a not untypical column.) Morgenson doesn't just cover subjects but sometimes hammers them into submission, as when she banged out more than three dozen stories on Countrywide in 2007 and 2008 and almost single-handedly made CEO Angelo Mozilo the face of a rogue industry. Not coincidentally, on June 4 the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Mozilo with securities fraud, alleging that he misled investors about the increasing risks Countrywide was taking with loans that Mozilo privately called "toxic."
"At this point, it is almost impossible for business reporters and editors not to have an opinion about Morgenson. Supporters cheer her tell-it-like-it-is style; detractors call her simplistic and agenda-driven. In certain Wall Street and business circles, she is flatly detested.
"...what sets Morgenson apart, is that she combines the blunt writing style with a prodigious fact-gathering ability and an accountability mindset all too rare in the business-press culture. This allows her to go beyond merely reporting and commenting on the public agenda. She helps to set it."...Her fixes are meliorative and not particularly original--better regulation, more competition. Her radical idea is, basically, that regulators should regulate, rating agencies should rate according to the merits of the credit, corporate compensation committees should set executive pay at arm's length, directors should look to the interests of shareholders first, large shareholders should act like the owners they are and mortgage lending should be something other than a game of three-card monte. That these views are seen as "antibusiness" in some circles tells us less about Morgenson than about the ethical breakdown among this generation's corporate elites.
"Like newspaper crusaders of old, Morgenson has sided with the little guy over the big guy, revealing, for instance, that Countrywide's predations continued even after its borrowers had filed for bankruptcy. A series in 2007 and last year reported that the lender had destroyed or "lost" $500,000 in homeowners' mortgage payments, then imposed additional penalties and fees, and presented to the court "re-created" letters that had never been mailed to homeowners.
" 'It's really about fairness,' Morgenson says. 'It just seems that the playing field is so skewed in some cases that it's worthwhile to educate people to level the playing field a little bit.' "Nick Turse writes at Tomgram about ex-Bush loyalists cashing in.
"In May, the U.S. economy lost 345,000 nonfarm jobs, pushing the unemployment rate from 8.9% to 9.4%. According to official statistics, 14.5 million Americans are now looking for work and, as a recent headline at Time.com put it, "The jobs aren't coming back anytime soon." In fact, a team of economists at the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank recently reported that "the level of labor market slack could be higher by the end of 2009 than at any other time in the post-World War Two period."
"The news, however, is not altogether grim. While times are especially tough for teenagers (22.7% jobless rate) and blacks (14.9% jobless rate), one group is doing remarkably well. I'm talking about former members of the Bush administration who are taking up prestigious academic posts, inking lucrative book deals, signing up with speakers bureaus, joining big-time law firms and top public relations agencies, and grabbing spots on corporate boards of directors. While their high-priced wars, ruinous economic policies, and shredding of economic safety nets have proved disastrous for so many, for them the economic outlook remains bright and jobs are seemingly plentiful. In fact, many of them have performed the eye-opening feat of securing two or more potentially lucrative revenue streams at once during these tough financial times.
"While it would likely take a small book to catalogue the fates of all former "loyal Bushies,"
a look at just a few of these fortunate folks indicates that not everybody was harmed by the Bush era.
Julio Godoy writes at IPS News that climate change brings new diseases.
"As its name suggests, the West Nile virus, a leading cause of a form of meningitis and a neuro-invasive disease, has until recently been reported mostly in tropical and sub-tropical African regions. But it is now about to become a global virus.
" 'Due to climate change, regions with moderate temperatures, that is most of Europe and North America, are now facing diseases that were thought completely exotic in these areas,' says Thomas Mettenleiter, president of the German Federal Research Institute for Animal Health, also known as the Friedrich- Loefller Institute (FLI), based in the Riems, a Baltic Sea island 200 km north of Berlin.
"About 100 health experts who gathered at Riems last month for a conference on health challenges posed by climate change and globalisation agreed that the spread of disease was no longer only through air and sea travel. The acceleration of climate change has created conditions for these vectors, mostly mosquitoes, but also rodents and other species, to settle in habitats formerly inappropriate for them.
" 'Since the end of the last great ice age some 10,000 years ago, the average European temperature has risen by six degrees Celsius,' says Horst Aspoeck, head of the department of medical parasitology at the University of Vienna.
"This regional warming accelerated sharply after industrialisation began some 200 years ago, Aspoeck said. "For this century, we have to fear a new, rapid temperature jump of at least three degrees Celsius in Europe."
"Virologists expect a similar spread of the yellow fever mosquito, which can transmit diseases such as dengue, chikungunya, and yellow fever. "It is only a matter of time before the yellow fever mosquito becomes domestic in Spain, and with it maybe dengue and yellow fever," says Matthias Niedrig, a virologist at the German Robert-Koch-Institute for health research.
"In some cases, however, apparently negligible temperature changes suffice to spark a pandemic. In 1997, an observed rise of 0.5 degrees Celsius in the surface of the Indian Ocean waters provoked a massive outbreak of the Rift-Valley fever in East Africa. The warmer waters provoked heavy rains, and the high temperatures, the humidity and inadequate rainwater drainage created the perfect incubation conditions for mosquitoes transmitting the virus.
"The virus first killed hundreds of thousands of goats and sheep in Kenya, Somalia and Tanzania, provoking a famine in the region - without goats and sheep, the peasant population had less to eat. But then, humans contracted the virus. According to the World Health Organisation, several hundreds died of diseases caused by the virus in the three countries."
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