Why doing good sometimes makes you into a bad person

Researchers have found that, after doing something ethically sound, people are more - not less - likely to do something immoral, or even illegal

by Aditya Chakrabortty

 

Green is good. You think before you print; you buy your organic whatever; you sort-of sympathise with the bumper sticker injunction to "live simply so that others may simply live". It might not be as cheap or as easy – but it's the right thing to do. Isn't it?

Well, consider this: a person who makes the decent, green choice is much more likely to behave badly afterwards, according to researchers at the University of Toronto. Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong split 156 students between two online shops: one a conventional store, the other mainly selling green alternatives. Within both groups, some could actually buy things while others were allowed only to browse.

All the students were then handed cash to share with an anonymous person however they chose. The students who had looked around the eco-shop but not bought anything gave most generously; mere exposure to the goods prompted them to behave better. However, those who had actually made green purchases were far stingier than even the conventional shoppers.

Next, all the guinea pigs sat a simple computer test to identify repeatedly which side of the screen was showing more dots, with the twist that picking the right-hand side always earned them more money – even if it was incorrect. Finally, the students were told the amount they'd won, and invited to take that exact amount out of an envelope full of money.

What happened? The conventional shoppers played it reasonably straight, whereas the green consumers cheated far more and even stole extra cash, pocketing nearly a third more money than they were entitled to. Having done their good deed, the greens apparently felt they'd proved their moral worth – allowing them to behave immorally and illegally. Psychologists call this "the licensing effect". Another recent study from Stanford University showed that white Americans who supported Obama were much more willing than others to express racist opinions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2009/sep/22/brain-food

Unemployment Lines

Magazines: The Other Media Implosion

By paulgillin

The newspaper industry's malaise has spread to the magazine business. Ad pages were off 20.1% in the most recent month, according to Media Industry Newsletter (Min), and those figures are down from an already depressed October last year. Of the 155 titles tracked by Min, 143 are down for the year. The carnage is worst in luxury titles like Architectural Digest (down 49.4%), Veranda (down 47.4%), W (down 45.5%), Town & Country (down 45.2%), Conde Nast Traveler (down 45.1%) and Gourmet (down 42.7%). Bucking the trend is Family Circle (up 13.9%) and several fitness titles.

The magazine industry's troubles can be traced to the alarming trends in newsstand sales, which are off 37% since 2001, according to MediaPost. Newsstand sales are important because they're far more profitable than subscription sales and are also a significant source of circulation promotion. However, it appears that not many people are buying magazines on newsstands any more. Check out these numbers covering total annual newsstand sales:

Title	2001	2009	Change
Woman's Day	1,610,000	410,147	-74.5%
Redbook	556,355	154,609	-72%
Playboy	522,804	203,245	-71%
Country Living	380,192	134,884	-64.5%
National Enquirer	1,648,554	591,269	-64%
Reader's Digest	749,099	270,045	-64%
ESPN The Magazine	54,346	25,154	-63%

One title that's gone against the grain over the last eight years is The Economist, which is up 82% in that time. One reason might be innovations like a new service that enables New York City residents who receive text alerts from the magazine to order single copies delivered overnight. As long as the order is placed by 9 p.m. on Thursday, the customer can have a hard copy of that week's new issue in hand in time for the Friday commute. That's before the newsstands are even stocked. The Economist says it can provide the service at no additional charge over the newsstand price because it doesn't have to pay distribution middlemen.

Not that magazines' troubles are any solace to beleaguered newspaper publishers. Fitch Ratings says the decline in newspaper ad revenues will continue for at least another year, due to continued weakness in the print advertising market. The forecast is especially dour because it comes off terrible 2008 numbers and because most media markets are expected to enjoy a modest upturn in 2010 off of dismal results this year. PriceWaterhouseCoopers earlier forecast incremental newspaper advertising declines of 4.5% a year through 2013, noting that circulation revenue is falling in line with readership. Meanwhile, publishers are relying more and more upon circulation revenue to boost the bottom line. MediaPost documents several recent price increases by daily publishers and notes that circulation now makes up 39% of The New York Times revenue, compared to 27% five years ago.

Coupon Clipping

We somehow missed writing about this two months ago, when the survey was released, but the Newspaper Association of America just spent a lot of money on research that demonstrates that consumers rely upon newspaper advertising as an essential shopping tool. The survey of more than 3,000 consumers found that 59% cited newspapers as the "medium they use to help plan shopping or make purchase decisions," while 82% "took action as a result of newspaper advertising." Other media were way behind.

When you think about it, these results aren't surprising. Retail purchases are local, and newspapers still do the best job of delivering local advertising. It's also less convenient for a consumer to print and clip a coupon from the Internet than it is to cut it out of the newspaper. Finally, local display advertising has a better chance of catching the attention of passersby than an online banner ad, which many people block anyway. One thing the research makes clear is the importance of coupons: 90% of respondents said the presence of a coupon made it more likely they would read or look at an ad, making it the single most important influencing factor in stimulating an action. The NAA released the research as a series of short reports, all of which can be downloaded here.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/magazines-the-other-media-implosion.html

The Media Void Lives

by Case Wagenvoord

Back when we were a nation, death didn't upset us. It was a fact of life best expressed by Gus in Lonesome Dove, "Life is short; some are shorter than others." Middle class homes all had parlors where the bodies of love ones were displayed before burials.

When we went to war, we honored the dead through photographs and drawings. Mathew Brady brought the Civil War home to America with his horrific photographs of corpse-strewn battlefields. World Wars, Korea and Vietnam featured film footage and photographs of the fallen.

It kept our leaders honest. The public accepted the death of the young only as long as they felt the war was necessary. But if, as in Vietnam, the war appeared to be unnecessary, the public, shocked by scenes of carnage, turned against it.

But, that was when we were a nation. Now that we are a corporate state, things are different. Corporate states thrive on dishonest wars. In dishonest wars, public support is tenuous at best' so wars must be sanitized and reduced to video games.

This means no more dead bodies, no more film clips of grieving parents of children killed in airstrikes. In the public's eye, war now takes place in a sterile void where there is neither blood nor death. It's war that isn't really war, a make-believe Noh drama in which the public quickly loses interest, especially if it's been going on for eight years.

Our corporate masters like it that way. It gives them a great deal of latitude to wreak havoc on the world while its citizens sit comatose and unaware.

But, God help the media that allows reality to dribble into this void!

Recently, the Associated Press released a photograph of a wounded Marine who later died.

The outcry showed that hypocrisy is the cement that hold the corporate state together. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said the Associated Press lacked "common decency." He spoke of the "pain and suffering inflicted upon the Marine's family."

I hate stating the obvious, but I have no choice here. Since when did bombing civilians cease to display a lack of "common decency?" Which caused the Marine's family more anguish, the photograph or the death of their son in an unnecessary war?

 

http://belacquajones.blogspot.com/2009/09/media-void-lives.html

Will Ferrell stands up for the real health care victims

GOP health care plan

The One-Sided War on the Streets of Honduras

"They're the Only Ones Using Violence," Human Rights Leader Bertha Oliva Observes of the Coup Regime on Day Two of Zelaya's Return

By Jeremy Kryt

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS, SEPTEMBER 22, 2009: Government forces attacked a peaceful crowd outside the Brazilian Embassy Tuesday morning, in an apparent attempt to dispel support for deposed President Mel Zelaya. Mr. Zelaya had returned to the country on Monday after almost three months in exile.

Mel Zelaya addresses a crowd of thousands in front of Brazilian Embassy on Monday. D.R. 2009, Jeremy Kryt.

"It was terrible repression," said National Congressman Marvin Ponce, who was with Zelaya in the Embassy until around nine o'clock the night before. "This is a reflection of their philosophies, this government of putchists. They don't respect human rights. They don't want a political dialogue," said Ponce, and he ought to know: The Congressman was himself assaulted during a nonviolent protest last month, suffering several broken bones, including his right arm, which was fractured in three places.

Eye-witness testimony indicated that the soldiers and police fired tear gas, rubber bullets, and live rounds into the crowd.

"It was brutal," said resistance organizer Juan Barahona, director of El Bloque Popular. "I was outside the embassy when the police began their dispersal. Afterwards we reorganized, and marched through some of the poor barrios. But the police attacked us there as well."

The day before, thousands had gathered in front of the Brazilian Consulate in the Colonia Palmira, to welcome home Mr. Zelaya with chanting and songs. The de facto government imposed a curfew starting at four p.m., and cut power to the Embassy; but Zelaya's supporters stayed on in the streets all night long, defying orders to disperse.

This reporter spent most of Monday inside the embassy with Mr. Zelaya. The ousted President addressed the thousands gathered outside, urging them to pursue a nonviolent resistance to "Los Golpistas."

"We will continue the struggle for democracy," said Zelaya, as the crowd voiced their desire for a new constitution. "This time I won't be caught napping," joked Zelaya, referring to the episode on June 28, when the military accosted him in his pajamas.

http://www.narconews.com/Issue60/article3822.html

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, Dead Hand.

 

By Nicholas Thompson

 

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

Chart source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

Natural Resources Defense Council

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand?currentPage=all

House on fire

by Mark in Santa Rosa

 

My own thoughts on the subject suggest that there's no real intent among Dems to actually implement ANY  policy or program which might somehow infringe on corporate profit. There's a ROLE to be played, rhetoric to be repeated.  The masses need to be placated.

 

I KNOW - without question - that politicians understand what most "Joe Six-pack" Americans want because they know  what to promise on the campaign trail. I believe I understand enough about the technical workings of Congress to know that  the party in power can pretty much do what it wants to do - most especially when the party in power also controls the White House.

 

To me, that means we COULD have had reform for Wall Street. We COULD have ended evil george's wars. We COULD have  restored this to a nation of laws. We COULD have repealed evil george's tax cuts for the rich and made Social Security solvent.  We COULD simply open Medicare to all Americans. Many of those things COULD have been done by now. No, not all of them,  at least not completely. But by now, it SHOULD look as though we're heading in the right direction.

 

So if I can easily win a fight but I don't, what does that mean? I think it means I chose not to. It's like when I wrestle with my  four-year-old grandson. I put on a good show - play the role. I tell him I'm going to win this time - repeat the rhetoric.  It LOOKS (to him) like I'm trying to pin him. HE thinks he "won" - hey, he's four. But the truth is, if for some reason I felt it  was in my own best interest to pin him, I could do so without effort. I think this quote from Douglas Adams sums it up nicely,  even though Adams is ostensibly writing about the President of the Galaxy:

 

"The President in particular is very much a figurehead - he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the  government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason  the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to  draw attention away from it." - Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe 

 

His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.

 

http://www.bartcop.com/house-on-fire-mark.htm

Justice for True Patriots

Yesterday, Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) introduced the Justice Act, which would provide much-needed fixes to the three provisions of the Patriot Act that expire at the end of this year. This is good news, because on Tuesday the Department of Justice said in a letter to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) (PDF) that it was open to reforming parts of the Patriot Act. We're going to hold you to that, DOJ!

Earlier this year, the ACLU's Washington Legislative Office released a report, called Reclaiming Patriotism (PDF), that details the parts of the Patriot Act that need fixing most. Since the 38-page report isn't exactly light fare, we'll sum up the must-know parts for the upcoming Patriot Act debate:

First, the three provisions that will expire at the end of the year:

1. Section 206, a.k.a. the "roving wiretap" provision: Section 206 allows the FBI to get an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to wiretap a target without having to provide the target's name or even their phone number. The provision only requires that the target is described "with particularity," and that the FBI tell FISC why it had to tap the phone after it was tapped. It basically lacks any kind of specificity that, you know, a real warrant would need.
   
2. Section 6001, a.k.a. the "lone wolf" provision of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act (IRTPA): Section 6001 authorizes the government to get secret surveillance orders against individuals who are not associated with any international terrorist group or foreign nation. As the report points out, an international terrorist acting independently of any organization or country is pretty pie-in-the-sky unlikely.
   
3. Section 215, a.k.a. the "library provision": The term "any tangible thing" should raise your hackles. Like the previous two provisions, Section 215 also lowers the bar on the standard of proof needed to get a court order to surveill. Before the Patriot Act was passed, probable cause showing that the target of surveillance was the agent of a foreign power was required. After Patriot, Section 215 allows the FBI to only claim that the items or information sought is relevant to an investigation. That means the person being surveilled doesn't necessarily have to be the target of the investigation or even be suspected of involvement in terrorism.

The ACLU is also concerned about provisions of the Patriot Act that are not expiring, but which would be amended under Sen. Feingold's bill. For example, the National Security Letter statute, which permits the FBI to secretly demand sensitive and private customer records from Internet service providers, banks, and credit companies, without any suspicion or prior judicial approval. To make matters even worse, the statute allows the FBI to put gag orders on NSL recipients, prohibiting them from discussing the record demand. The ACLU have filed three lawsuits on behalf of NSL recipients, and most recently, a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that the NSL statute's gag provisions violated the First Amendment.

The Justice Act would also fix the worst parts of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA). You remember the FAA, right? That was the law Congress passed last year that immunized telecoms from lawsuits for wiretapping innocent Americans, in collusion with the National Security Agency. In passing the FAA, Congress — with the help of then-Sen. Obama — basically signed away our Fourth Amendment rights by allowing the government to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications.

We hope Congress and the president will take this opportunity to not only right that wrong, but also fix the overbroad sections of the Patriot Act by passing the Justice Act and signing it into law, restoring Americans' privacy rights.

http://blog.aclu.org/2009/09/18/justice-for-true-patriots/

Twitteleh

From toxic waste to toxic assets, the same people always get dumped on

Trafigura is just another case of global fly-tipping. It's all too easy for firms to protect profit and pass risk to the poor world

by George Monbiot

It was revolting, monstrous, inhumane – and scarcely different from what happens in Africa almost every day. The oil trading company Trafigura has just agreed to pay compensation to 31,000 people in Ivory Coast, after the Guardian and the BBC's Newsnight obtained emails sent by its traders. They reveal that Trafigura knew that the oil slops it sent there in 2006 were contaminated with toxic waste. But the Ivorian contractor it employed to pump out the hold of its tanker dumped them around inhabited areas in the capital city and the countryside. Tens of thousands of people fell ill and 15 died. While the settlement says that the slops could at worst have caused a range of short-term low-level flu-like symptoms, and anxiety, it is one of the world's worst cases of chemical exposure since the gas leak at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal. But in all other respects the Trafigura case is unremarkable. It's just another instance of the rich world's global fly-tipping.

On the day that the Guardian published the company's emails, it also carried a story about a shipwreck discovered in 480 metres of water off the Italian coast. Detectives found the ship after a tip-off from a mafioso. It appears to have been carrying drums of nuclear waste when the mafia used explosives to scuttle it. The informant, Francesco Fonti, said his clan had been paid £100,000 to get rid of it. What makes this story interesting is that the waste appears to be Norwegian. Norway is famous for its tough environmental laws, but a shipload of nuclear waste doesn't go missing without someone high-up looking the other way.

Italian prosecutors are investigating the scuttling of a further 41 ships.

But most of them weren't sunk, like Fonti's vessel, off the coast of Italy; they were lost off the coast of Somalia. When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland. According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste. People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages. The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost "something like $1,000 a tonne." On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe's picture of Dorian Gray: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.

The only people who have sought physically to stop this dumping are Somali pirates.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cif-green/2009/sep/21/global-fly-tipping-toxic-waste

Micropayments for news: The holy grail or just a dangerous delusion?

By Mathew Ingram

No matter how many times people like Clay Shirky or Mike Masnick try to pop the bubble of faith around micropayments as a cure for what ails the newspaper industry (or even the media industry as a whole), another believer emerges to argue that a secure and extensible micropayment system is a big part of the answer. The latest to make an impassioned plea is Jeff Reifman, the co-founder of NewsCloud, a "community-driven news aggregator" funded by the Knight Foundation.

In a recent blog post, Reifman outlines why he believes that micropayments can solve the newspaper industry's problems. His post is a response to one by Steve Outing at Editor & Publisher, which carried the somewhat argumentative title "Your News Content Is Worth Zero To Digital Consumers," and argued that charging people for news isn't going to work unless that news is highly targeted to a specific niche. (Google CEO Eric Schmidt made a similar point recently about why The Wall Street Journal has been able to charge, and Paul Graham echoes that point as well.)

If you want to go back through some of the reams of text that have been written about micropayments for news, Clay's essay from 2003 is a good place to start — especially since it lists the half-dozen or so attempts to create such a system that failed miserably. (Are you listening, Steve Brill?) There's also a good roundup at the Freakonomics blog from awhile back that is well worth reading.

Reifman defends his approach by pointing to several successful models of payment for services, including iTunes, text messaging, TiVo, and broadband Internet. The first thing that leaped out at me is that three of those four things — iTunes, text messaging and broadband Internet — are a result of something approaching a monopoly (or an oligopoly or cartel, in the case of text messaging and broadband Internet). Apple can charge for music because it controls access to the songs from all the major record labels. Phone companies and cable companies can charge usurious rates for text messaging and Internet because they have little or no real competition. How does any of that apply to newspapers?

In his comments at the Freakonomics blog, Clay Shirky says the "fantasy that small payments will save publishers…is really a fantasy that monopoly pricing power can be re-established over users." I think there's a lot of truth to that. Newspapers have spent the past 100 years or so with a stranglehold on both the tools of mass publishing and the means of distribution, and much of what has happened to them over the past decade is a result of them losing both of those things. The unfortunate reality is that even the best micropayment system is not going to recreate that system of artificial scarcity and control — and some have argued that micropayments could even be bad for journalism as a whole, putting pressure on individual stories to be revenue generators.

Does that mean newspapers can't make any money? Not at all. I think Mike Masnick has done a great job of pointing out how a media business can make money even if it gives content away for free — his company Techdirt does it, plenty of musicians and artists do it. And they do it by using the free content to promote the aspects of their business that have *real* scarcity rather than artificial scarcity.

http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/09/micropayments-for-news-the-holy-grail-or-just-a-dangerous-delusion/

Crystal Lee Sutton

UK Anti-Piracy Plans Cost More Than Music Industry ‘Losses’

by enigmax

As the UK file-sharing debate reaches fever pitch, with opinionated artists being shipped in by the bus load to condemn it, inevitably attention is turning to the costs associated with trying to end it. According to a boss at ISP BT, not only are the government's plans doomed to fail, but could end up costing ISPs a staggering £1m a day.

As Lily Allen leads a procession of artists showing a united front against online music piracy and calls ever louder for the government to do something about it, the cold light of day has kicked in. Just how much is the hoped-for crackdown on illicit file-sharers going to cost?

Yesterday, speaking with the UK's The Mirror, John Petter, boss of ISP BT's consumer division, said that measures to tackle Internet piracy will be costly.

Noting that ISP profit margins are already small, Petter said he fears that the process could cost ISPs a staggering £365m a year.

However, according to Jupiter Reseach, whose figures the BPI uses when trying to convince others how much money they lose, the British music industry will lose £200m worth of business to online piracy in 2009.

If the BPI's 'losses' figures are to be believed (and we have to go along with the ridiculous premise of 1 download = 1 lost sale in order to do so), saving £200m worth of business will end up costing ISPs almost double that amount.

"Their [music industry] claims are melodramatic and assume people would buy all the music that is illegally downloaded, which is nonsense," said Petter, adding that laws are already in place to deal with illicit file-sharing, but the industry doesn't want to use those particular ones because it would hurt their public image.

Petter's final point is possibly the most important one. He believes that the war against file-sharing will lead to a technological arms race as Internet users find new ways to hide their activities.

Indeed, by spending a measly £3.00 per month on a cheapo VPN service from the likes of SwissVPN, it's possible for any user to tunnel right out of the UK and no-one in the country will have a clue what they are doing on their connection. Not the BPI, not ISPs, not the government.

That's around 10p per day to defeat a £1m a day system that isn't even in place yet. Something doesn't add up.

http://torrentfreak.com/uk-anti-piracy-plans-cost-more-than-music-industry-losses-090922/

A nasty acorn

ACORN: The Most Cost-Effective Investment the Government (and Foundations) Have Ever Made

The real purpose of the right's attacks on ACORN is to destroy a remarkably successful 50-year-old grassroots model for defending the poor and workers.

By David Morris

To understand the current attacks on ACORN, and the organization itself, we need to go back more than 60 years, to the 1930s and the New Deal, when for the first time, the federal government accepted responsibility for directly helping the non-working poor.

These programs were expanded in the 1940s, but in the 1950s, a backlash erupted against the poor, driven by several factors.

The postwar prosperity dramatically reduced the number of poor families, and an increasing number of black women were added to the welfare rolls, injecting race into the debate.

Meanwhile, a Republican White House mostly left welfare matters to the states.

The myth of welfare recipients as lazy, immoral chiselers began to circulate. States adopted punitive laws to reduce welfare rolls. Special units of welfare departments conducted "midnight raids" to see if the recipients were involved in a relationship with a man, something that would result in a cut-off of benefits. The average grant declined.

In desperation, low-income mothers in dozens of big cities organized for survival. They came together to collectively negotiate not only with welfare offices for benefits, but with utilities to eliminate deposits required from low-income households and with the post office to install locks on mailboxes in apartment houses to prevent the theft of welfare checks.

Several veterans of the civil rights movement worked to bring local welfare-rights organizations together into a national organization.

In June 1966, a coordinated national day of action brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in 16 major cities. Two months later, representatives of 75 local welfare-rights organizations convened in Chicago to create the National Welfare Rights Organization.

Led by George Wiley, a Ph.D. chemist and leader of the Congress of Racial Equality, NWRO was an unusual organization. It was a federation of local groups that coordinated local and national actions. Black women comprised a majority of its leadership.

NWRO's successes led to rapid growth. By 1969, it boasted over 500 chapters with 22,500 dues-paying families.

In the late 1960s, a growing number of people looked to create a broad-based anti-poverty movement, an idea embraced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Poor People's Campaign, in which NWRO played an important role.

In 1972, when Wiley left NWRO, he told the New York Times, "The welfare-rights movement created a political and economic crisis around the issue of welfare which could have led to reform or repression. What we are witnessing is repression, and we need a broad, organized movement to counter it."

Wiley wanted to use the NWRO model to build a coalition of the working poor, unemployed, seniors and the lower middle class around issues such as national health insurance, consumer rights, housing and tax reform.

After a tragic accident took Wiley's life in 1973, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, created by two former NWRO organizers Wiley had sent to Little Rock, Ark., in 1970, became the primary vehicle for implementing his vision.

Led by Wade Rathke, ACORN had affiliates in 20 cities by 1980. Today, it has about 400,000 low- and moderate-income members in more than 100 cities in 40 states.

ACORN is one of the few grassroots neighborhood organizations capable of wielding power on a national scale.

It is unique in the combination of strategies it uses: organizing, direct action, lawsuits, lobbying and the provision of direct services.

That ACORN is a federation of self-governing locals with a national board comprised largely of poor people seems to both amaze and gall the right.

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/142812/acorn:_the_most_cost-effective_investment_the_government_%28and_foundations%29_have_ever_made

ACORN could have gotten away with it if they said this

Drunk, near-naked Yeltsin found hunting pizza near White House

Boris Yeltsin's drinking 'almost created an international incident', according to Bill Clinton.

Russian leader Boris Yeltsin was once found near the White House late at night dressed in his underwear, seemingly drunk and looking for pizza, according to a new book detailing Bill Clinton's presidency.

The claim comes in a 700-page expose, parsed from hours of secret recordings made by the former US president and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Taylor Branch, excerpts of which were published in USA Today.

Clinton "relayed how Boris Yeltsin's late-night drinking during a visit to Washington in 1995 nearly created an international incident" Taylor told the paper.

Yeltsin had been staying at Blair House, metres from the White House, when he was discovered roaming by secret service agents. When confronted trying to hail a taxi, the former president slurred that he was looking for pizza.

Yeltsin, who died in 2007, is remembered for embarrassing drunken incidents, once seizing the baton from a bandmaster in Germany to conduct and playing the spoons on the president of Kyrgyzstan's bald head.

The book, by a long-time Clinton friend, also details the then president's views of candidates vying to succeed him. In Clinton's view George W Bush "was unqualified to be president ... but he had shrewd campaign instincts".

John McCain, who would eventually lose to Bush and again to Barack Obama in 2008, "might make a good president, but he had no idea how to run."

The book, released next week, is based on 79 taped interviews, which where kept largely secret from Clinton's staff, despite being conducted in the Treaty Room and other locations around the White House.

The tapes were apparently hidden in Clinton's sock drawer.

http://www.theage.com.au/world/drunk-nearnaked-yeltsin-found-hunting-pizza-near-white-house-20090923-g0vv.html

Zen GPS

Dick: the secret house organ of the Republican Party

 

Everyone seems to be agreeing with Bin Laden these days

 

Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message that we're losing Afghanistan

by Robert Fisk

Obama and Osama are at last participating in the same narrative. For the US president's critics – indeed, for many critics of the West's military occupation of Afghanistan – are beginning to speak in the same language as Obama's (and their) greatest enemy.

There is a growing suspicion in America that Obama has been socked into the heart of the Afghan darkness by ex-Bushie Robert Gates – once more the Secretary of Defence – and by journalist-adored General David Petraeus whose military "surges" appear to be as successful as the Battle of the Bulge in stemming the insurgent tide in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.

No wonder Osama bin Laden decided to address "the American people" this week. "You are waging a hopeless and losing war," he said in his 9/11 eighth anniversary audiotape. "The time has come to liberate yourselves from fear and the ideological terrorism of neoconservatives and the Israeli lobby." There was no more talk of Obama as a "house Negro" although it was his "weakness", bin Laden contended, that prevented him from closing down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, Muslim fighters wold wear down the US-led coalition in Afghanistan "like we exhausted the Soviet Union for 10 years until it collapsed". Funny, that. It's exactly what bin Laden told me personally in Afghanistan – four years before 9/11 and the start of America's 2001 adventure south of the Amu Darya river.

Almost on cue this week came those in North America who agree with Obama – albeit they would never associate themselves with the Evil One, let alone dare question Israel's cheerleading for the Iraqi war. "I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan," announces Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the senate intelligence committee. "I believe it will remain a tribal entity." And Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, does not believe "there is a great deal of support for sending more troops to Afghanistan".

Colin Kenny, chair of Canada's senate committee on national security and defence, said this week that "what we hoped to accomplish in Afghanistan has proved to be impossible. We are hurtling towards a Vietnam ending".

Close your eyes and pretend those last words came from the al-Qa'ida cave. Not difficult to believe, is it? Only Obama, it seems, fails to get the message.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fiskrsquos-world-everyone-seems-to-be-agreeing-with-bin-laden-these-days-1790058.html

British army "widespreadly torture Iraqi civilians"

 

British army used widespread torture methods in Iraq, a British government lawyer said on Monday in an aknowledgement on a public inquiry into the 2003 death of hotel receptionist Baha Mousa.

The British soldiers responsible for the death of Baha Mousa were "not just a few bad apples," Singh told the inquiry. "There is something rotten in the whole barrel," he said.

Baha Mousa, a 26-year old Iraqi, was beaten and killed in the custody of British troops following a raid on his hotel in the southern Iraq city of Basra in September 2003.

He died after suffering up to 100 injuries in the course of 36 hours of beating during which he screamed constantly, the inquiry heard.

British troops in Iraq routinely used harsh interrogation methods banned by the government in 1972 after they were used against civilians in Northern Ireland and clearly did not think they were doing anything illegal, Rabinder Singh, a lawyer for the Mousa family said.

An autopsy concluded that Mousa died of asphyxia, caused by a stress position that soldiers forced him to maintain.

In 2006, British army corporal Donald Payne was convicted of a war crime after pleading guilty to torturing civilians at a court martial.

Six soldiers were cleared of wrongdoing at a court martial in 2007, but a seventh pleaded guilty to inhumanely treating Iraqi civilians and was jailed and dismissed from the military.

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) has apologized for the death and last year agreed to pay 2.83 million pounds (4.58 million dollars) in compensation to the families of Mousa and nine other men.

David Barr, counsel for the MoD, said "The brutality was completely unacceptable. It has stained the reputation of the British army.

Singh said the inquiry should determine why and on whose authority previously banned interrogation techniques were used against Iraqi civilians.

 

http://www.worldbulletin.net/news_detail.php?id=47510

Obama Foreign Policy Advisor Calls For US to Shoot Down Israeli Jets

Last year Zbigniew Brzezinski, adviser to former US president Jimmy Carter, described the Bush administration's policy of maintaining the option of military action against Iran as "counterproductive."

Now Brzezinski, who advises Obama on foreign policy, is calling for the US to shoot down Israeli jets.
Brzezinski is known to be anti-Israel.
The Weekly Standard Blog reported:

In a little noticed interview with the Daily Beast (presumably little noticed because serious people don't read the Daily Beast), Zbigniew Brzezinski suggests that Barack Obama do more than just refuse to support an Israeli strike on Iran's nuclear sites -- the American president must give the order to shoot down Israeli aircraft as they cross Iraqi airspace:

DB: How aggressive can Obama be in insisting to the Israelis that a military strike might be in America's worst interest?

Brzezinski: We are not exactly impotent little babies. They have to fly over our airspace in Iraq. Are we just going to sit there and watch?

DB: What if they fly over anyway?

Brzezinski: Well, we have to be serious about denying them that right. That means a denial where you aren't just saying it. If they fly over, you go up and confront them. They have the choice of turning back or not. No one wishes for this but it could be a Liberty in reverse.

No wonder the Iranian regime is so impressed with Brzezinski.

 

http://gatewaypundit.blogspot.com/2009/09/obama-foreign-policy-advisor-calls-for.html

On Paywall Issue, Combatants Basically Agree

By paulgillin

 

Mark Glaser invites two big thinkers on opposite sides of the micropayment debate – Techdirt's Mike Masnick and The New York Times' David Carr – to spar with each other and try to reach some common ground. The result is what you'd expect when you put two talented writers into competition with each other: Great wordplay and eventual meeting in the middle.

Both combatants agree that putting paywalls in front of existing content is suicidal, although Carr believes that citizens will shell out once they realize that the alternative is cacophony. Masnick wins the award for best imagery: Paywalls are "putting up a tollbooth on a 50-lane highway where the other 49 lanes have no tollbooth," he writes. He sees no merit in paywalls whatsoever, while Carr believes they can work in some scenarios.

Carr suggests that micropayments should be looked upon "as payments for news applications instead." In fact, the Times' media columnist never suggests that charging readers for what they now get for free is a viable strategy. But since the status quo is no longer viable, shouldn't publishers experiment aggressively with hybrid models?

In the end, that's where the debaters end up. Both agree that blended paid and ad-supported models have the greatest chance of success. And if you re-read the first part of the two part series, you see that both basically suggested that approach at the outset. So maybe the "debate" was a bit of a fabrication to begin with, but at least it got our attention. And isn't that the goal after all?

Media Employment Trend Not All Bleak

Over at BusinessWeek, Michael Mandel is looking at employment in US information industries. Using Bureau of Labor Statistics figures, he finds evidence that "someone is hiring out there," but it isn't newspapers, which have seen employment fall by about 40% since 1990. Mandel's analysis goes beyond newspaper employment to look at job trends in broadcast, Internet and "other information services." What's interesting is the growth in the "other" category. It's the only segment of the market that's above Internet bubble employment levels (although the actual numbers are quite small). Mandel promises more analysis in future posts.

Jeff Jarvis takes issue with Mandel's whole premise, calling it "measuring the wrong economy: the old, centralized, big economy. In both cases, he misses new value elsewhere in the small economy of entrepreneurs and the noneconomy of volunteers." In Jarvis's view, media isn't dying so much as restructuring itself in a "post-industry" model characterized by vastly more efficient means of production, a distributed workforce and a decentralized approach to nearly everything. Innovation hasn't left the building, he says, it has merely left the buildings where priesthoods dwell. To see the new media economy taking shape, you have to look at Wikipedia and eBay for guidance, not The New York Times and Macy's.

http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com/on-paywall-issue-combatants-basically-agree.html

What do we call insurance that's mandatory?

They Might Be Giants - Science is Real

AIG's Payback to Taxpayers in Doubt

Government Watchdog Says Disgraced Insurance Giant AIG May Not Repay All of Its $182B Taxpayer Tab

By MATTHEW JAFFE

 

One year after the biggest corporate bailout in the country's history, a government watchdog office Monday warned that American taxpayers may not recoup the full $182 billion given to embattled insurance giant American International Group.

One year after the biggest corporate bailout in the country's history, a government watchdog Monday warned that American taxpayers may not recoup the full $182 billion given to insurance giant AIG.

"AIG's ability to restructure its business and repay the government is unclear at this time," the Government Accountability Office said in a new report released Monday.

As of the start of September, the company's outstanding balance of taxpayer aid was $120 billion.

It was a year ago this month that AIG received the first chunk of a government bailout that has since grown to $182 billion. The federal money, noted the GAO, has since helped stabilize the insurance giant, which this year posted a $1.8 billion second-quarter profit, its first profit since 2007.

However, the GAO said that the company still relies heavily on government help as its source of liquidity and capital.

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/aigs-payback-taxpayers-doubt/story?id=8632375

Cannabis Cancer Treatment Successes Being Ignored. Why?

Posted by hempnewstv

The healing properties of cannabis have long been touted amongst the British cannabis community, who have done everything in their power to bring word of the cancer curing properties of cannabis to a wider audience. And at face value it would be fair to expect the worlds press to get pretty excited over even 'a suspicion' of a cure for cancer, a disease which will strike down almost 1 in every 2 people.

Cannabis can cure certain types of cancer. So why are we not researching it further? Because the pharma industry cannot get a patent on a plant so law enforcement holds the patent whilst the pharma's try to build a chemical version..and that's no longer good enough to keep it outlawed.

Unfortunately that's not the case. Cancer is on the rise statistically, yet the people who control health issues at a national and international level (the pharmaceutical industry), are simply not prepared to let it be known that people can cure their own ailments, as it would cost them trillions of dollars in over-the-counter pain-relief sales, amongst a great many other products which cannabis has been proven as a safe, natural alternative.

Indeed Canadian Rick Simpson went one further. Instead of telling people about it, he started to use a cannabis-derived oil to cure his own skin-cancer. A cancer his doctor had attempted (and failed) to cure using more mainstream methods like strong drugs and surgery.

Its a truly mind-blowing story which explains in laymans terms the lengths which the establishment surrounding pharmaceutical drugs, will go to stop news of this getting out. Even going so far as to close down a Canadian Legion office and sacking the entire management team for promoting Rick Simpsons marijuana based hemp-oil.

Rumour has it the pharmaceutical industry is attempting to synthesise the active ingredients in cannabis so they may make use of its healing properties whilst at the same time, keeping it firmly outlawed, to stop people treating themselves. Just another conspiracy theory?

http://hempnewstv.wordpress.com/2009/09/22/cannabis-cancer-treatment-successes-being-ignored-why/

IAEA denies report it is sure Iran is seeking bomb

VIENNA — The UN atomic watchdog said Thursday it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapons programme in Iran.

The International Atomic Energy Agency rejected a US media report which claimed its experts believed Tehran had the ability to make a nuclear bomb and was on the way to developing a missile system able to carry an atomic warhead.

"With respect to a recent media report, the IAEA reiterates that it has no concrete proof that there is or has been a nuclear weapon programme in Iran," a statement said.

According to the media report, the proof was contained in a so-called "secret annex" to the IAEA's latest report on Iran, but was deliberately being withheld by the agency's director general Mohamed ElBaradei.

"At the board of governors meeting on September 9, Director General ElBaradei warned that continuing allegations that the IAEA was withholding information on Iran are politically motivated and totally baseless," it said.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hpiOh8HRiFE6Sa_idQiCow5EBu1A

Barack Obama ready to slash US nuclear arsenal

Pentagon told to map out radical cuts as president prepares to chair UN talks

 

by Julian Borger

President Obama's decision to order a review comes as he takes the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council. Photograph: Reuters

Barack Obama has demanded the Pentagon conduct a radical review of US nuclear weapons doctrine to prepare the way for deep cuts in the country's arsenal, the Guardian can reveal.

'A multilateral process in which weapons states agree to radical disarmament': Julian Borger Link to this audio

Obama has rejected the Pentagon's first draft of the "nuclear posture review" as being too timid, and has called for a range of more far-reaching options consistent with his goal of eventually abolishing nuclear weapons altogether, according to European officials.

Those options include:

• Reconfiguring the US nuclear force to allow for an arsenal measured in hundreds rather than thousands of deployed strategic warheads.

• Redrafting nuclear doctrine to narrow the range of conditions under which the US would use nuclear weapons.

• Exploring ways of guaranteeing the future reliability of nuclear weapons without testing or producing a new generation of warheads.

The review is due to be completed by the end of this year, and European officials say the outcome is not yet clear. But one official said: "Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

The move comes as Obama prepares to take the rare step of chairing a watershed session of the UN security council on Thursday. It is aimed at winning consensus on a new grand bargain: exchanging more radical disarmament by nuclear powers in return for wider global efforts to prevent further proliferation.

That bargain is at the heart of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, which is up for review next year amid signs it is unraveling in the face of Iranian and North Korean nuclear ambitions.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/20/barack-obama-us-nuclear-weapons

Yes Men: “We’re Screwed”

From The Yes Men:

"We're Screwed": Media Heist Blankets City with
"Special Edition" New York Post

---

---

PRESS RELEASE: September 21, 2009
Tabloid Tells Truth About Climate Change and How It Will Affect City, World

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a "special edition" New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has "less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet," adding that Copenhagen is a "once-in-a-generation opportunity."

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

"This could be, and should be, a real New York Post," said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. "Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem."

The fake Post's cover story ("We're Screwed") reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor's office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time.

Other lead articles describe the Pentagon's alarmed response to global warming ("Clear & Present Disaster"), the U.S. government's sadly minuscule response to the crisis ("Congress Cops Out on Climate"), China's alternative energy program ("China's Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S."), and how if the US doesn't quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks this December could be a "Flopenhagen."

The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article ("Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools") reveals that Deutsche Bank – which erected a seven-story "carbon counter" in central Manhattan – not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal trading itself.

The paper has the world's gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days. The "Around the World" section describes the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer parts of the world, including extreme droughts, floods, famines, water shortages, mass migrations and conflicts. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate change effects even though they have done very little to cause the problem.

But the paper isn't all doom and gloom. An article called "New York Fights Back" notes that the carbon emissions of Big Apple residents are only one third the national average, and that the city is building 1800 miles of bike paths, planting one million trees, and replacing its fleet of police cars with hybrids. There's also a page of black-humor cartoons (in one, Charlie Brown finds Snoopy drowned), a gossip section that takes no prisoners, and a number of truly cheerful ads – for sex ("Awesome. No carbon emissions."), tote bags, bicycles, and tap water
("Literally comes right out of your faucet!").

Another ad promotes civil disobedience, encouraging readers to visit http://BeyondTalk.net and pledge to risk arrest in a planned global action November 30, just before the conference in Copenhagen.

"We need strong action on climate change," said David Solnit of Mobilization for Climate Justice West, one of the partners in BeyondTalk.net. "But history shows that leaders act only when people take to the streets to demand it. That's what needs to happen now."

This paper is one of 2500 initiatives taking place in more than 130 countries as a response to the "Global Wake-up Call" on climate change. For more information, visit www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup.

Contact:

The Yes Men tabloid@theyesmen.org, 347-254-7054, 646-220-4137

Fake New York Post

 

http://artoftheprank.com/2009/09/21/yes-men-were-screwed/

You're The Principal - Start The Semester With A New Playbook

by Marilynn Preston

It was a recent Sunday morning, and I was exercising my brain in front of the morning news shows. This edition of "Meet the Press" featured Katherine Sebelius, our secretary of health and human services. She spent most of her time serving up lackluster answers about health care reform, but at the end of the segment, host David Gregory mentioned swine flu and the millions of kids at risk as they go back to school. He asked Sebelius how kids could best protect themselves.

Her answer gave me sharp, shooting pains. Kids have to wash their hands often, she said first — familiar advice and absolutely essential. And then she advised them to sneeze into their sleeve instead of blowing the germs into the air.

Sneeze into their sleeves! This is a sickening back-to-school tip and does not reflect the current thinking among health care specialists who prefer children sneeze into ... what? Their jeans? Sneezing into their neighbor's hair has also been put forward as a way to keep your child healthier, and happier, but it is not what I am suggesting here.

Here are three more back-to-school tips for parents, who are, after all, their kids' No. 1 teachers when it comes to healthy lifestyle:

This semester, insist on a sport. Don't take klutz for an answer. There is a sport or physical activity for every girl and boy, and you get a gold star if you help your child discover what it is.

Look around. It may not be the obvious schoolyard stuff — basketball, soccer ... God-forbid, football. One of my favorite youngsters lucked into a passion for Irish dancing. Another young man I know — overweight and insecure, a miserable combo — came to love his judo practice. As his strength and confidence grew, he lost the extra weight without even trying.

Your job as a parent is to teach your little one to try, try and try again, until she finds a sport or game that brings joy. Encourage participation and detach from results. Win or lose, playing sports builds character, teaches team play and gives a kid a perfectly good excuse for not smoking, drinking, snorting or sneezing into his shirt sleeve.

Don't cheat on breakfast and lunch. The research is in: Hearty and healthy breakfasts and lunches are basic to your child's performance in school.

If this is news to you, give yourself an F in parenting and sign up for a tutor. Real food in appropriate amounts energizes the brain in a measured way. Sugar donuts and sweetened cola drinks force it to spike and plummet, and fight against calmness and clarity. So does text messaging during class, but please don't get me started.

The lesson here is simple: involve yourself in school food reform. It's one of the real success stories of the last 20 years — new laws poised and ready to require schools to stop fattening our little ones with toxic food and drinks.

The change will take time to spread, but it is happening. If it's not happening for your kids, at your school, starting this semester, find out why.

In the meantime, reform your habits at home. Send your kids to school with lunches that nourish instead of numbify. And enforce the Eat Breakfast rule to the best of your ability. No excuses, no drama, no fake food. If you have reached this point in the article and do not know what a healthy breakfast consists of, time for you to hit the books.

Treat your child for MPA. Swine flu may come and go, but Mobile Phone Addiction is here to stay, I fear. It's especially dangerous to our little ones with thin skulls and vulnerable brains. In several European countries where the negative effects of mobile phone radiation are less hidden, parents are advised to restrict kids' cell phone use to emergencies. What if every cell phone had to carry a little sticker that read, "This Cell Phone May Cause Brain Cancer, Eye Cancer and Other Nasties"? Would parents stop buying them for their kids? Cut down their own use? It's a question for the final exam, that's for sure.

http://www.creators.com/health/marilynn-preston-energy-express/you-re-the-principal-start-the-semester-with-a-new-playbook.html

Heads I Win, Tails I'm Bailed Out

by Froma Harrop

President Obama was on Wall Street, calling for a new regulatory regime to prevent a financial panic like the one set off a year ago. "We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis," he said.

But there are doubters. Far from the granite canyons of southern Manhattan comes sharp criticism about the plans for new regulations and, not unrelated, who would do the regulating. The skeptics argue that the too-big-to-fail philosophy that saved the hides of CitiGroup, Bank of America and AIG remains in force and will make another meltdown inevitable.

The president of the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, Thomas Hoenig, turned heads last June when he characterized the lack of action in addressing this fundamental weakness as "regulatory malpractice."

And he warned, "If we hesitate to make needed changes, we will perpetuate an oligarchy of interest." In other words, the financial Mr. Bigs will be running everything from their East Coast party circuit.

On Wall Street, Obama outlined some fine reforms, but he gave only lip service to ending the assumption that some institutions are too big to fail. He mainly said that stockholders in these financial companies would have to bear the cost of their poor management.

Well, stockholders already do. The crisis sent their shares plunging to single digits. (Your writer speaks from sad experience.) The bailout did stop the stock prices from going to zero and enabled a partial recovery of their earlier value, but believe me, the shareholders didn't get away with much.

The big bucks went to the executives who vanished with their kingly bonuses and let others clean up the mess made by their reckless risk-taking. I don't recall their reimbursing the taxpayers.

If anything, the government's response over the last year has made the players more smug. The proven deal is "heads I win, tails I'm bailed out."

And that's Hoenig's point.

When the feds stepped in to save the largest institutions, the argument went that America was facing a financial Armageddon. Their collapse would have unleashed another Great Depression.

But Hoenig doesn't endorse letting big banks go splat on the pavement, but rather letting them fail in an orderly manner. That could mean putting them under new ownership or closing them by stages. There are ways to do it.

Instead, sick banks were merged into larger ones. That made the big banks bigger. The top 20 banks now own 70 percent of banks' assets. Therefore, they would expose the system to even more risk if they should get into trouble.

As already noted, banks deemed too big to fail enjoy an implied subsidy. They get sweeter terms from lenders and investors, who know that however badly the companies are managed, the government won't let them go under. That sends money flowing not to the safer banks but to the bigger ones.

http://www.creators.com/liberal/froma-harrop/-heads-i-win-tails-i-m-bailed-out.html

Policy advice from Fox News

Obama's plan to give everyone a free Maserati

Why haven't any Wall Street tycoons been sent to the slammer?

By Kevin G. Hall

WASHINGTON — More than a year into the gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression, millions of Americans have seen their home values and retirement savings plunge and their jobs evaporate.

What they haven't seen are any Wall Street tycoons forced to swap their multi-million dollar jobs and custom-made suits for dishwashing and prison stripes.

There are plenty of civil and class-action lawsuits from aggrieved investors angered by the losses in their mortgage bonds, hedge funds or pensions. Regulators have stepped up their vigilance after the fact. But to date, no captain of finance tied to the crisis has walked the plank.

There have been some high-profile arrests and federal convictions of financial giants — such as Ponzi scheme king Bernard Madoff and Stanford Financial Group chairman Robert Allen Stanford. They weren't among the causes of the financial meltdown, however, just poster boys for an era of lax enforcement, weak regulation and devout faith in free markets.

"A lot of people who are responsible (for the crisis) seem to have gotten awfully rich in the process," said Barbara Roper, the director of investor protection for the Consumer Federation of America.

The absence of what many would call justice stands out all the more because past financial crises always had their villains. The depression-era had electricity and railroad magnate Samuel Insull, who partly inspired the movie "Citizen Kane." The savings and loan crisis of the 1980's had banker Charles Keating. Energy giant Enron Corp.'s spectacular collapse offered the late CEO Kenneth Lay, a Texas crony of President George W. Bush.

Yet there's no such poster child for the Great Recession, as today's crisis is now called.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/75720.html