Interesting Articles/News Updates...

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=stor...cizedbysenators

 

Plan to Keep Detainees in Jail for Life Criticized by Senators

 

Mon Jan 3, 7:55 AM ET Top Stories - Los Angeles Times

 

WASHINGTON — The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Sunday dismissed as "a bad idea" a reported U.S. government plan to keep some suspected terrorists in custody for their lifetime, even if there was not enough evidence to bring them before a judge.

 

Both Sen. Richard G. Lugar (news, bio, voting record) (R-Ind.), the Foreign Relations Committee chairman, and Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (news - web sites), suggested that the proposal, reported in Sunday's Washington Post, was unconstitutional.

 

"There must be some modicum, some semblance of due process … if you're going to detain people, whether it's for life or whether it's for years," Levin said on "Fox News Sunday."

 

Detaining individuals for life without judicial review "is a bad idea," Lugar said on the same program. "So we ought to get over it, and we ought to have a very careful, constitutional look at this."

 

The Post reported that the Pentagon (news - web sites) and CIA (news - web sites) had asked the White House to decide on a more permanent approach for handling detainees, including hundreds of individuals currently in custody but with insufficient evidence against them to bring to a court.

 

The State Department is also involved in reviewing possible approaches, the Post said, and any new proposals would affect those captured in future counter-terrorism operations as well as those now in custody.

 

Among the proposals, the Post reported, is one to fund construction of prisons in Afghanistan (news - web sites), Saudi Arabia and Yemen to house detainees from those nations. The prisons would be operated by those countries but monitored by the State Department for compliance with international human rights standards, the Post said, citing a senior administration official.

 

Also proposed, the Post said, was construction of a 200-bed prison where detainees who authorities believe have no more intelligence to offer would have a greater level of comfort and freedom, more akin to that found in U.S. prisons.

 

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, asked about the reported plans on NBC's "Meet the Press," said he was "not familiar with that and I can't talk to it…. I just don't have the facts on that one."

 

 

 

Now i'm not even talking about whether or not these dudes are guilty.. Just the idea is super creepy.

On second thought maybe we could turn this into an 'interesting article' thread.. Stuff that is interesting to read but perhaps don't constitute an entire thread devoted to the subject?

 

I can't delete this thread nor can I c change the title.. The new board is confusing.

 

What do you say mods?

we'll try this out and see how it works.

I like this idea... so here is a contribution:

 

I didn't even know that Somalia was hit by the tsunami....

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/news/sho...ontent=w010363A

 

 

 

January 3, 2005 - 19:38

 

Somalia still waiting for food, shelter, medical help for victims of tsunamis

 

RODRIQUE NGOWI

 

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) - At least 50,000 people in Somalia urgently need food, water, shelter and medical care a week after deadly tsunamis slammed African shores, officials said Monday.

 

Some 24 countries have pledged to send relief supplies to Somalia, but nothing has arrived on the ground, said Somali presidential spokesman Yusuf Mohamed Ismail. He said survivors urgently need help after losing their homes and livelihoods.

 

"We are very happy that relief supplies have arrived in Asia, which was hit the hardest by the tragedy, but Somalia - which has been ravaged from a 13-year civil war, drought and political neglect - also needs emergency help to deal with the latest calamity," Yusuf said.

 

At least 200 people were killed and many others are missing after violent waves hammered the Somali coast on Dec. 26, Yusuf said.

 

Some of those affected have begun receiving food aid from United Nations agencies that diverted supplies intended for Somalis suffering from a four-year drought, Yusuf and UN officials said.

 

But Kazimiro Rudolf, acting head of the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said those supplies need to be restored to the drought-relief program.

 

The latest UN assessment showed that some 54,000 people in the country were badly affected by the tsunami, Rudolf said.

 

Most of the victims are from the Indian Ocean coastline of the semiautonomous region of Puntland, including the northeastern Hafun island that was hardest hit by the tsunami.

 

The waves were triggered by the undersea quake centred off the Indonesian island of Sumatra, about 4,500 kilometres across the Indian Ocean.

 

The tsunami hit during fishing season, when Somalis set up temporary fishing settlements closer to the coast, Rudolf said.

 

They lost fishing equipment, personal belongings and livelihoods. The few cattle herders along the coast have also been affected, as their grazing has now been partly damaged, said Laura Melo, spokeswoman of the UN food aid agency.

 

All fishery activities along Somalia's coast seem to have been suspended, Melo said.

 

Members of the Somali community abroad are raising funds to help compatriots affected by the deadly waves, Yusuf said.

 

Unlike other affected countries in Asia, Somalia lacks the capacity to assess the damage.

 

The UN food aid agency has sent out four teams to determine humanitarian needs and distribute aid to Somalis affected by the waves, Melo said.

 

The presence of large numbers of anti-aircraft guns owned by local warlords prevented UN officials from flying over parts of the Somali coastline to assess the damage in those areas last week.

 

 

Copyright by Rogers Media Inc.

May not be reprinted or republished without permission.

 

 

This story can be found at:

http://www.macleans.ca/topstories/news/sho...ontent=w010363A

Somalia WAS hit by the tsunami.

Thanks Symbols..

 

This thread can be like the news.. on 12oz.

 

The nobody reads.

 

 

 

Thanks for your contribution Villain.

 

Here's an article from the villagevoice.. About hiphop turning 30 years old and the politics surrounding the 'culture' and what it has turned into today..

 

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HIPHOP TURNS 30

 

 

 

Hiphop Turns 30

Whatcha celebratin' for?

 

by Greg Tate

January 4th, 2005 3:23 PM E-Mail Story

Printer Friendly

 

 

 

Brooklyn, 1980

photo: Jamel Shabazz

Related:

 

The Numbers Beyond the Bling

In the streets of America, people are worse off, and more of them are in jail

By Ward Harkavy

 

 

We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.

Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more.

 

Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.

 

True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don't separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that's like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.

 

 

 

Washington Square Park, 1991

photo: Jamel Shabazz

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture—literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the '80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz's photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment "Rapper's Delight" went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.

 

No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people's notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let's be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.'s basketball coach dad likes to say, "They don't pay niggas to sit on the bench," hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer's market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller's market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.

 

The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there's still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can't say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop's ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn't easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain't about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

 

 

 

Harlem, 1995

photo: Jamel Shabazz

But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn't even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren't still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial "niggas." By which I mean if we weren't all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain't no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.

 

Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the '70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It's equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America's Ellis Island. It's our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous.

 

Only because this convergence of ex-slaves and ch-ching finally happened in the '80s because hey, African Americans weren't allowed to function in the real economic and educational system of these United States like first-generation immigrants until the 1980s—roughly four centuries after they first got here, 'case you forgot. Hiphoppers weren't the first generation who ever thought of just doing the damn thang entreprenurially speaking, they were the first ones with legal remedies on the books when it came to getting a cut of the action. And the first generation for whom acquiring those legal remedies so they could just do the damn thang wasn't a priority requiring the energies of the race's best and brightest.

 

If we woke up tomorrow and there was no hiphop on the radio or on television, if there was no money in hiphop, then we could see what kind of culture it was, because my bet is that hiphop as we know it would cease to exist, except as nostalgia. It might resurrect itself as a people's protest music if we were lucky, might actually once again reflect a disenchantment with, rather than a reinforcement of, the have and have-not status quo we cherish like breast milk here in the land of the status-fiending. But I won't be holding my breath waiting to see.

 

Because the moment hiphop disappeared from the air and marketplace might be the moment when we'd discover whether hiphop truly was a cultural force or a manufacturing plant, a way of being or a way of selling porn DVDs, Crunk juice, and S. Carter signature sneakers, blessed be the retired.

 

That might also be the moment at which poor Black communities began contesting the reality of their surroundings, their life opportunities. An interesting question arises: If enough folk from the 'hood get rich, does that suffice for all the rest who will die tryin'? And where does hiphop wealth leave the question of race politics? And racial identity?

 

 

 

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Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.

 

Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we'd translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular's cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z's John Hancock? Or that the vernacular's seductive powers would drive Estée Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute's shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?

 

 

 

Lower East Side, 1984

photo: Jamel Shabazz

Hiphop's effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into air" (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world's people—urbanized and institutionalized—whom it will claim till its dying day to "represent." And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community's AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?

 

All of which is not to say "Vote or Die" wasn't a wonderful attempt to at least bring the phantasm of Black politics into the 24-hour nonstop booty, blunts, and bling frame that now has the hiphop industry on lock. Or to devalue by any degree Russell Simmons's valiant efforts to educate, agitate, and organize around the Rockefeller drug-sentencing laws. Because at heart, hiphop remains a radical, revolutionary enterprise for no other reason than its rendering people of African descent anything but invisible, forgettable, and dismissible in the consensual hallucination-simulacrum twilight zone of digitized mass distractions we call our lives in the matrixized, conservative-Christianized, Goebbelsized-by-Fox 21st century. And because, for the first time in our lives, race was nowhere to be found as a campaign issue in presidential politics and because hiphop is the only place we can see large numbers of Black people being anything other than sitcom window dressing, it maintains the potential to break out of the box at the flip of the next lyrical genius who can articulate her people's suffering with the right doses of rhythm and noise to reach the bourgeois and still rock the boulevard.

 

Call me an unreconstructed Pan-African cultural nationalist, African-fer-the-Africans-at-home-and-abroad-type rock and roll nigga and I won't be mad at ya: I remember the Afrocentric dream of hiphop's becoming an agent of social change rather than elevating a few ex-drug dealers' bank accounts. Against my better judgment, I still count myself among that faithful. To the extent that hiphop was a part of the great Black cultural nationalist reawakening of the 1980s and early '90s, it was because there was also an anti-apartheid struggle and anti-crack struggle, and Minister Louis Farrakhan and Reverend Jesse Jackson were at the height of their rhetorical powers, recruitment ambitions, and media access, and a generation of Ivy League Black Public Intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic had come to the fore to raise the philosophical stakes in African American debate, and speaking locally, there were protests organized around the police/White Citizens Council lynchings of Bumpurs, Griffiths, Hawkins, Diallo, Dorismond, etc. etc. etc. Point being that hiphop wasn't born in a vacuum but as part of a political dynamo that seems to have been largely dissipated by the time we arrived at the Million Man March, best described by one friend as the largest gathering in history of a people come to protest themselves, given its bizarre theme of atonement in the face of the goddamn White House.

 

The problem with a politics that theoretically stops thinking at the limit of civil rights reform and appeals to white guilt and Black consciousness was utterly revealed at that moment—a point underscored by the fact that the two most charged and memorable Black political events of the 1990s were the MMM and the hollow victory of the O.J. trial. Meaning, OK, a page had been turned in the book of African American economic and political life—clearly because we showed up in Washington en masse demanding absolutely nothing but atonement for our sins—and we did victory dances when a doofus ex-athlete turned Hertz spokesmodel bought his way out of lethal injection. Put another way, hiphop sucks because modern Black populist politics sucks. Ishmael Reed has a poem that goes: "I am outside of history . . . it looks hungry . . . I am inside of history it's hungrier than I thot." The problem with progressive Black political organizing isn't hiphop but that the No. 1 issue on the table needs to be poverty, and nobody knows how to make poverty sexy. Real poverty, that is, as opposed to studio-gangsta poverty, newly-inked-MC-with-a-story-to-sell poverty.

 

You could argue that we're past the days of needing a Black agenda. But only if you could argue that we're past the days of there being poor Black people and Driving While Black and structural, institutionalized poverty. And those who argue that we don't need leaders must mean Bush is their leader too, since there are no people on the face of this earth who aren't being led by some of their own to hell or high water. People who say that mean this: Who needs leadership when you've got 24-hour cable and PlayStations. And perhaps they're partly right, since what people can name and claim their own leaders when they don't have their own nation-state? And maybe in a virtual America like the one we inhabit today, the only Black culture that matters is the one that can be downloaded and perhaps needs only business leaders at that. Certainly it's easier to speak of hiphop hoop dreams than of structural racism and poverty, because for hiphop America to not just desire wealth but demand power with a capital P would require thinking way outside the idiot box.

 

Consider, if you will, this "as above, so below" doomsday scenario: Twenty years from now we'll be able to tell our grandchildren and great-grandchildren how we witnessed cultural genocide: the systematic destruction of a people's folkways.

 

We'll tell them how fools thought they were celebrating the 30th anniversary of hiphop the year Bush came back with a gangbang, when they were really presiding over a funeral. We'll tell them how once upon a time there was this marvelous art form where the Negro could finally say in public whatever was on his or her mind in rhyme and how the Negro hiphop artist, staring down minimum wage slavery, Iraq, or the freedom of the incarcerated chose to take his emancipated motor mouth and stuck it up a stripper's ass because it turned out there really was gold in them thar hills.

Some anti-globalization dilly.. An interview with a 'US Economic Hit Man'

 

This is a super long interview.. But dude has some crazy shit to say, and I think this article is worth reading.

 

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http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/31/1546207

 

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man: How the U.S. Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

 

We spend the hour with John Perkins, a former respected member of the international banking community. In his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man he describes how as a highly paid professional, he helped the U.S. cheat poor countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars by lending them more money than they could possibly repay and then taking over their economies. [includes rush transcript]

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John Perkins describes himself as a former economic hit man - a highly paid professional who cheated countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.

20 years ago Perkins began writing a book with the working title, "Conscience of an Economic Hit Men."

 

Perkins writes, "The book was to be dedicated to the presidents of two countries, men who had been his clients whom I respected and thought of as kindred spirits - Jaime Roldós, president of Ecuador, and Omar Torrijos, president of Panama. Both had just died in fiery crashes. Their deaths were not accidental. They were assassinated because they opposed that fraternity of corporate, government, and banking heads whose goal is global empire. We Economic Hit Men failed to bring Roldós and Torrijos around, and the other type of hit men, the CIA-sanctioned jackals who were always right behind us, stepped in.

 

John Perkins goes on to write: "I was persuaded to stop writing that book. I started it four more times during the next twenty years. On each occasion, my decision to begin again was influenced by current world events: the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1980, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and the rise of Osama bin Laden. However, threats or bribes always convinced me to stop."

 

But now Perkins has finally published his story. The book is titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. John Perkins joins us again in our Firehouse studios for an extended discussion.

 

 

John Perkins, from 1971 to 1981 he worked for the international consulting firm of Chas T. Main where he was a self-described "economic hit man." He is the author of the new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

 

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RUSH TRANSCRIPT

This transcript is available free of charge, however donations help us provide closed captioning for the deaf and hard of hearing on our TV broadcast. Thank you for your generous contribution.

Donate - $25, $50, $100, more...

 

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins joins us now in our firehouse studio for the hour. Welcome to Democracy Now!

 

JOHN PERKINS: Thank you, Amy. It is wonderful to be here.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well, it is a remarkable story that you tell. And welcome to non-sound bite radio and TV. We don't just give people the sound bite. We give them the whole meal. And so we are going to spend the hour talking about your life, which --

 

JOHN PERKINS: What a great opportunity.

 

AMY GOODMAN: -- affects millions of people around the world. The system that you were a part of and Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is quite remarkable in giving us the details of what you did. So, why don't you start at the beginning. Maybe not where you were born, but how you came to be recruited first by the National Security Agency - far larger than the C.I.A. - and then this so-called international consulting firm of Chas T. Main.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Right. Yeah, it was in the late 1960s, 1968. I was a student at business school and was recruited by the National Security Agency. They ran me through a series of tests - personality tests, lie detector tests -- very sensitive barrage of testing. And during that process, they discovered that I would be a great candidate for an economic hit man. I was in business school at the time. And also they discovered a number of weaknesses in my character. I think, I have weaknesses that are pretty typical of our culture, the three big drugs of our culture: money, power and sex. And they discovered these weaknesses in me. There's a lot in my book about my personal background that gets into that. Then they encouraged me to go into the Peace Corps. I lived in Ecuador for three years as a Peace Corps volunteer with indigenous people there, who today are at war with the oil companies. We were starting that process then, so I got some very good on-the-job training, so to speak. While I was still in Ecuador in the Peace Corps, a vice president from this private consulting firm in Boston that worked closely with the National Security Agency and the other intelligence communities came to Ecuador and continued my recruitment. When I got out of the Peace Corps, he recruited me. I went to work for his company in Boston, Charles T. Main and went through an extensive training program there with a remarkable woman, who is described in detail in the book, Claudine was her name. And she was extremely intelligent, extremely sharp, extremely seductive, and she hooked me. She knew exactly how to hook me. She benefited from all the tests that I'd gone through, knew my weaknesses. And she made it -- she, first of all, hooked me into becoming an economic hit man and at the same time, warned me that this is a very dirty business and you must be completely committed to it or you shouldn't take your first assignment in Indonesia.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Now, already people are going to be wondering, What is he talking about, economic hit man? Explain.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, really, over the past 30 to 40 years, we economic hit men have created the largest global empire in the history of the world. And we do this, typically -- well, there are many ways to do it, but a typical one is that we identify a third-world country that has resources, which we covet. And often these days that's oil, or might be the canal in the case of Panama. In any case, we go to that third-world country and we arrange a huge loan from the international lending community; usually the World Bank leads that process. So, let's say we give this third-world country a loan of $1 billion. One of the conditions of that loan is that the majority of it, roughly 90%, comes back to the United States to one of our big corporations, the ones we've all heard of recently, the Bechtels, the Halliburtons. And those corporations build in this third-world country large power plants, highways, ports, or industrial parks -- big infrastructure projects that basically serve the very rich in those countries. The poor people in those countries and the middle class suffer; they don't benefit from these loans, they don't benefit from the projects. In fact, often their social services have to be severely curtailed in the process of paying off the debt. Now what also happens is that this third-world country then is saddled with a huge debt that it can't possibly repay. For example, today, Ecuador. Ecuador's foreign debt, as a result of the economic hit man, is equal to roughly 50% of its national budget. It cannot possibly repay this debt, as is the case with so many third-world countries. So, now we go back to those countries and say, look, you borrowed all this money from us, and you owe us this money, you can't repay your debts, so give our oil companies your oil at very cheap costs. And in the case of many of these countries, Ecuador is a good example here, that means destroying their rain forests and destroying their indigenous cultures. That's what we're doing today around the world, and we've been doing it -- it began shortly after the end of World War II. It has been building up over time until today where it's really reached mammoth proportions where we control most of the resources of the world.

 

AMY GOODMAN: John Perkins, talk about your experience in Panama. You had the opportunity to meet the Head of Panama before he was killed, Omar Torrijos. How did you end up there?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Panama was one of these pivotal countries at the time and Omar Torrijos, who was the President of Panama. He followed a long line of oligarchy dictators that basically were puppets of the U.S. government that we had installed 50 years prior when we took over the country. Omar Torrijos was the first one to break that cycle, and he was a very, very popular president. He was popular throughout much of the world. Many people believed he should have won the Nobel Peace Prize and might have had he not died or been killed. He protected the downtrodden everywhere. And the United States was at the time, President Carter was negotiating a new Canal treaty with Torrijos and ultimately that Canal treaty went through. But it caused a tremendous amount of turmoil in our own country. In fact, it was passed in Congress by only one vote, that won the ratification of the Canal. So, we economic hit men were really looking beyond that process, or how we could win Panama over regardless of what happened to the Canal Treaty. I was there before the treaty was signed in 1972 and I was trying to bring Torrijos around. I was trying to catch him. I was trying to get him. I was trying to hook him the way we hooked everybody else. He arranged for me to meet with him in this private bungalow one day, and this is described in detail, the conversation, in the book. But basically what he said to me is, Look, I know the game you guys are playing. I know what you're trying to do here. You're trying to saddle us with huge debts. You're trying to make us totally dependent upon you, and you're trying to corrupt me. I know what this game is and I'm not playing. I don't need the money. I'm not looking to get personally wealthy out of this. I want to help my poor people. I want you to build the projects that you're supposed to build, that you build in other countries, but I want you to build them for our poor people, not for our rich people. And he said, if you do that, I'll see to it that you and your company get a lot more work in this country. Good work that will help our people. Well, I was really conflicted at this because, as an economic hit man, I was supposed to get him under our control. I was supposed to hook him. But as a partner in this company and as the chief economist for this firm, I also wanted to get the work for the firm, and in this case it was very obvious that the economic hit men weren't going to get through to Torrijos, so I went along with him. But at the time, I was deeply concerned because I knew that this system is built on the assumption that leaders like Torrijos are corruptible and they are all over the world for the most part. When one stands up to the system as Torrijos was doing, it's not only a threat in his country, like Panama, that we're not going to get our way there, but it also may be seen as setting a very bad example for the rest of the world that once one leader stands up -- and at that time there was another leader standing up, too, who was the President of Ecuador, Jaime Roldos. They were both standing up to the U.S. government. They were both standing up to the oil companies and the economic hit men, and it was a very big concern to me. I knew in my heart that if this continued, something was going to give. Of course, it did. Both of these men were assassinated by what we call the jackals, C.I.A.-sanctioned assassins.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. The conversation you had with Omar Torrijos as he goes through history, your conversation in the early 1970s. But talking about what happened in Guatemala, the overthrow of the democratically elected leader Arbenz by United Fruit and the C.I.A-backed coup there in 1954, and you reconstruct this conversation about George Bush's company Zapata Oil eventually taking over United Brands, which was United Fruit, and then he talks about giving your company the business, Omar Torrijos, saying that he believed the Japanese would finance the canal that would be built, though turning to your company. And he says "They provide the money, they will do the construction." And you write, "It struck me, Bechtel will be out in the cold." The biggest construction job in recent history. Omar Torrijos paused. Bechtel's President is George Schultz, Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury. You can imagine the clout he's got and the notorious temper. Bechtel is loaded with Nixon, Ford, and Bush cronies. I've been told that the Bechtel family pulls the strings of the Republican Party. You talk about the corporatocracy, the bringing together of government and corporate power.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yes. Well, it got worse, of course. At that time, George Schultz was President of Bechtel. Casper Weinberger was their Chief Counsel, a senior officer in the corporation. They were opposed to Torrijos, not only on the U.S. turning the Canal over to Panama, but even more importantly perhaps because Torrijos was actively negotiating with the Japanese to build a new sea level canal. As you know, the current canal is based on locks and the larger ships in the world can't go through it. So, the idea was to build a sea level canal where every ship could go through, and the Japanese were offering to finance this. But if they financed it, it would be their construction companies, their engineering companies that would build it. Bechtel was incensed over this. They absolutely could not tolerate the idea of this happening. We knew this very strongly, we had to win Torrijos over. Now, then --

 

AMY GOODMAN: And then, as you said, Schultz becomes Secretary of State under Reagan, Casper Weinberger becomes Secretary of Defense under Reagan. They're the, you know, the heads of Bechtel Corporation.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah. Yes. Carter negotiated the treaty and then lost the election, partly because of this treaty, partly because of what happened in Iran, which is another story that I was involved in. And then when Reagan became President, Schultz went from President of Bechtel to Secretary of State and Weinberger went from Chief Counsel of Bechtel to Secretary of Defense. They went back to Panama and said, Okay, Omar, now let's talk. We want the canal back, we want the military bases back in the canal zone and more than anything, we want you to stop talking to the Japanese. And Torrijos said, No, I'm a sovereign country. I am not opposing the United States. I'm not a socialist, I'm not a communist, I'm not siding with Cuba or Russia or China, I'm simply standing up for the rights of my people. We have the right to negotiate with whoever can build us the best canal. I have the right to negotiate with the Japanese. He took a very strong stand and within a few months, his plane crashed into a mountain, blew up and crashed into a mountain, and it was very strong evidence that it had been blown up by a tape recorder which was handed to him at the end that was full of explosives. There is no question in my mind and in the mind of much of the world that this was the jackals, the C.I.A.-sanctioned assassins. I've seen them work in many places. Just a couple of months before that, they had done the same thing to Jaime Roldos, President of Ecuador, the first democratically elected president of Ecuador in decades, had replaced a military junta, democratically elected, and he stood up to the U.S. oil companies. We economic hit men couldn't get through to him and his helicopter blew up then and there.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Why was he standing up to U.S. oil companies?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Because cnce again, he ran in the first democratic elections in Ecuador in many decades. He ran on a platform of sovereignty for his country. And if there is oil in Ecuador then, he said, the Ecuadoreans should benefit from it. And once he became president, he began to introduce this. He set up a Hydrocarbons Act, he called it, which was basically a petroleum act that would ensure that if oil came out of Ecuador, the majority of the funds from that oil would go to his people. The oil companies would get a reasonable payment. But the majority would go to his people. He was setting a precedent that the oil companies couldn't stand, because throughout the world, they were exploiting all these countries, as they still are. And Roldos said, I'm not going to let that happen to my country. The oil companies couldn't bear to see that, not just because of Ecuador but, again, because of the precedent this would establish. And Roldos and Torrijos were really partners in a way. At the same time, they were supporting each other, and they both had to go. And they both went.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And what were your thoughts at the time? I mean, you continued doing this work.

 

JOHN PERKINS: It was a very pivotal point for me that -- throughout my work, as I describe in the book, my conscience was torn. And to me this is one of most interesting parts of my own personal story. I think of myself as a pretty good person. I grew up 300 years a yankee Calvinist in Vermont and New Hampshire. I come from a very patriotic background. I grew up in a very strictly Republican family, very conservative. I have very strong values. I'm very loyal to my country. And --

 

AMY GOODMAN: Descendant of Tom Paine and Ethan Allen?

 

JOHN PERKINS: That's right. They're distant relatives. And my parents steeped me in American history and in the values of our founding fathers of our country. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all people, all over the world. I believed very strongly in this. And yet at the same time, I was very seduceable to money, power, sex. All these things came my way, and I was doing things that I was patted on the back for by the president of the World Wank, Robert MacNamara. And I was Chief Economist of a big consulting firm in Boston. I had 50 people working for me, PHDs, MBAs. I was doing work that macroeconomics in college had taught me was good work to do. It's all a scam.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Why have very few people heard of this company, Main?

 

JOHN PERKINS: We were a very quiet company. We had about 2,000 professional employees, which is not small. We were a closely held company, that means we were owned like a partnership, about 5% of us owned the company so we didn't have to disclose our books to the S.E.C. or anybody. We were a very private, very quiet company and we were serving the interests of empire. The company no longer exists. In the early 1980s, the partners sold out to a larger engineering construction firm, and so the company essentially went out of existence at that point. I think it was getting a little too hot for us at this point. But it was intentional. We were very strictly forbidden from talking to the press. I broke that rule at one point. I wrote an op-ed piece on the Panama Canal for the Boston Globe and was severely chastised within the company. So, it was intentional that we were very quiet.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We have to break. When we come back, I do want to ask you about Robert MacNamara. As you talk about the corporatocracy, certainly he embodied that, from becoming C.E.O. of Ford to Secretary of Defense, ultimately the President of the World Bank, and what those different roles did and how similar they may well have been from Secretary of Defense, you make the argument, to head of the World Bank in some ways doing the same thing. We're talking to John Perkins. He is author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Our website is democracynow.org, if you'd like to get a copy of this conversation. We'll be back with him in a minute.

 

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AMY GOODMAN: As we continue our conversation with John Perkins, his book is called Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. He joins us in our firehouse studio here at Downtown Community Television, just blocks from where the towers of the World Trade Center once stood, from ground zero, and we're going to talk about the effect of September 11 and how it -- the role it played in John Perkins writing this book. But before we do that, Robert MacNamara, you write about him. Talk about his roles from Ford to Secretary of Defense to World Bank.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Amy, I think that what we have here is a world empire that's controlled by a very few men I call the corporatocracy, and these are the heads of the big corporations, big banks and government, and they tend to be the same person. You know, they jump across these lines and MacNamara is a great example of that. He was president of Ford and then he became Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson and then he became president of the World Bank. And in all three roles, his main job was to promote American business, to promote the corporatocracy, to bring the goodies home, to exploit the world. And he was in democratic regimes, Kennedy and Johnson. Today we've got Dick Cheney who's basically in the same picture. We had George Schultz under the former President Bush. So, the two Bushes both have these types of people, too. Condoleezza Rice. Government is filled with these people. But it is not just a republican issue. It's a bipartisan issue. It goes across all the lines, and MacNamara is a very good example of that. I think, at the same time, MacNamara was one of the most important people in terms of framing the new economics, what he called aggressive management, and it was aggressive about going out and basically taking the world and bringing it into us so that today we have, out of the 100 largest economies in the world, 52 are corporations. 47 are U.S. corporations, and they're not countries, they're corporations. Here we are 5% of the world's population reaching out like a great octopus and sucking in 25% or more of the world's resources. But it's not really 5% of the world's population, the American people. 1% of the American population owns more of the material wealth than 90% of our population. So, it's that 1% that are the corporatocracy that are sucking all this in and the rest of us are supporting it through our taxes, through our purchases, through our silence, through going along with this system. Like me, as an economic hit man, I went along with the system. I did more than go along with the system, I promoted the system. But I did so legally, for the most part, and I did so while being patted on the back by all the people that I was taught to look up to.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So you worked for this international consulting firm called Main in Boston. You became chief economist there. 2,000 people employed there, working closely with the international financial institutions like the World Bank. You begin your book in Indonesia. Talk about your training there and what you were trying to accomplish.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Indonesia, this is 1970, 1971, in that area. We know that at this point Vietnam is going to go. We're going to lose Vietnam.

 

AMY GOODMAN: The midst of the war.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yes. It's the midst of the war. But at this point, the people at the top knew we were going to lose, although they weren't admitting it. They knew. So with the domino theory was in effect that if Indonesia went, the rest of Southeast Asia would go like dominos one country at a time. And Indonesia was seen as the key to stopping that process. We didn't want communism to go there. Also, Indonesia happened to have a lot of oil, which we needed or wanted, and it had the largest Muslim population of any country in the world. So, if we could win Indonesia over and basically get Indonesia as our slave in our clutches, we'd accomplished a lot. So I was sent there to make that happen, to arrange a huge loan to Indonesia for Indonesia to build a big electrical system or several large electrical systems that would serve the very wealthy people of Indonesia -- didn't help the poor much at all -- and to make very inflated forecasts so that we would build a huge system, much bigger than anybody could possibly have imagined that a country -- an island like Java, which is the most heavily populated piece of real estate in the world, but we were building this huge electrical system and it did serve the industry in those countries, but it didn't serve the people. At the same time, putting Indonesia in tremendous debt to us, a debt that it would have a hard time getting out of, and therefore, become part of our empire.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Shoring up Suharto, the dictator there for so many years.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Right. Right. And an interesting aspect of that whole thing was at that time I was part of a team of 11, and the other 10 men on that team had no idea that we were doing the economic hit man thing. They were engineers. They were designing transmission lines, fuel systems to bring the fuel into the power plants. They were designing the power plants, big power plants, distribution lines. They were engineers. I was the one that made the forecast. I was the one that said that the electrical demand was going to grow at 17% a year for 20 years, which is unheard of, but I was -- that was my job, was to inflate these numbers as much as I possibly could. I mean, that's a huge number when you compound it annually. And they were just going along. You know, for them it was great. They get to design this huge, amazing system, an engineer's dream.

 

AMY GOODMAN: You were really replacing a man who was in Indonesia who had warned you, said don't make these economic forecasts that you can't support. It's a con game. It's just, you know, you putting it forward and saying you were confident that this is the case, because it would destroy the country. But he was taken out.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Right. Howard Parker retired from the New England Electric System, load forecast, forecasting electric demand. He was a very bitter man, and he saw what was going on, but he was also a very bitter man, and nobody really got along very well with Howard. And it was -- my job was to forecast the economy of the country. His job was then to forecast the electrical needs of the country. But the two are very highly correlated, so if i would come up with 17 or 18% economic growth in the economic sector, then his load forecast for the electricity would have to be roughly the same, and he told me I'm not going to go along with this. This is a scam. You are buying into the system. This is all based on greed and I'm not going along with it. And in a way that let me off the hook. I felt very relieved. At one point, I realized, my gosh, I can do what my handlers have trained me to do, what Claudine has told me I must do, and that is come up with these high electrical load forecasts, but my conscience is going to be clear, because Howard is not going to pay any attention to them anyway. He's going to come up with much lower electric load forecasts so we're really not going to scam the country. And then, of course, when I get back to Boston, I found that my boss had fired Howard, called me into the office, said Howard didn't do his job. He has got these ridiculous low forecasts. We fired him. We're going to give you his job as well as your own. We're going to make you a department head. You're going to get rich. You know, da da da da da da. But you have got to come up with the kind of forecast that we were looking for from him and we know you can do that because you do that for the economy.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What about Iran?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Iran was under the Shah at the time. Iran is where economic hit men really get started because in the early 1950s, Iran democratically elected a man named Mossadeq as premier. And he was held out -- he was Time magazine's man of the year in 1951, I believe it was. And he was held out for the hope of the Middle East and, in fact, the whole world of democratically elected president. But as soon as he got into power, he went up against the oil companies. And foreshadowing what Roldos and Torrijos would do later on, he really stood up for his people. And he said, particularly British Petroleum, if you are going to be here, you are going to give your fair share to our people. The oil companies were very upset, so the United States made the decision to go in and do something about this. Now, at the time, we were terrified of thermal nuclear war. Russia was the enemy after World War II, and Iran is on the Russian border. So we didn't dare send in troops to get rid of Mossadeq, again, a democratically elected president, held up as an example, but we've decided we have got to get rid of him because he is opposing the oil companies. Instead of sending in the troops, we sent in Kermit Roosevelt, a C.I.A. agent who happened to be Teddy's grandson, and we sent him in with a few million dollars, and he managed to create riots, protest, havoc, and to make a long story short, he overthrew Mossadeq, the premier, and brought the Shah back into power. We all know about the Shah. So, in a way, I was back in this country where economic hit men started. One of lessons we learned, however, from Kermit Roosevelt was that he was a C.I.A. agent, government employee. Had he been found out, the government would have been in trouble. So, shortly after that, the decision was made that economic hit men needed to be hired by private firms. The N.S.A., the C.I.A. could identify us, could run all the tests on us, could hook us, but in the end, we had to work for private companies so that if we were caught, it would be chocked up to corporate greed, rather than government policy.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Deniability. So Kermit Roosevelt goes from Iran, the fall of Mossadeq in 1953, which continues to inform the population of Iran 50 years later in their attitudes to the United States, yet few Americans know about this. Going from Iran, he is then offered the job to go into Guatemala a year later to help overthrow Arbenz by the Dulles brothers, and he refuses. But that happens. And the next coup the next year is the overthrow by United Fruit and the C.I.A. of Arbenz in Guatemala, so the model got started.

 

JOHN PERKINS: The model got started and continued to grow tremendously. By the time I got to Iran, which was in the early 1970s, after Indonesia, one of my next assignments, I went to Panama, and then Iran. I was working under the Shah and --

 

AMY GOODMAN: When you say everyone knows what happened there, I don't take that for granted. What happened in Iran under the Shah, and can you talk about the SAVAK?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yes. In the book, I describe this meeting I had with one of the Shah's top advisers who had been tortured by the SAVAK and turned against the Shah. Iran was this pivotal country for us. Its location was very important on the Russian border. And it had all this oil. And we needed to control oil. We wanted desperately to control all the Middle Eastern oil. We saw the Shah as being the person who could make this happen for us. The Shah -- you know, the plan was that the Shah would help take over the rest of the Middle East, including Syria and Iraq, and we all know there was a war between Iraq and Iran much later. But from the very beginning, the idea was to become allies with the Shah. We did everything we could to shore him up. And at the same time, we realize that he had a lot of oil money and so our companies were benefiting tremendously. Once again, all those engineering firms that we've talked about, my own, Charles T. Main, and Bechtel and Halliburton, and everybody else who was in there building cities, building power plants, building highways, getting very, very, very rich and making a lot of Muslims around the world -- the Iranians are not Arabs, but they are very -- they're Muslim and they're Middle Eastern. And we were making tremendous numbers of people angry. Even to this day, Osama bin Laden cites what happened with the Shah, how we overthrew Mossadeq and brought the Shah in as one of the reasons for his anger.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So, he, Mossadeq, went after Anglo American just to say that this is our oil and we should control it. Anglo American, the British government, not allowing for any Iranian ownership, but then forcing -- Anglo American eventually becoming British Petroleum, B.P.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Correct. Yes. Yes, at that time, I believe the numbers were that 85 cents of every dollar of oil drilled in Iran went out of the country to Anglo American or B.P. And, of course, Mossadeq was incensed by this, as he should have been. There's no reason why the people who sit on the resources, whose land is being drilled to provide it, shouldn't get the lion's share of what comes out of it, and that's what he was fighting for, as Torrijos did later, as Arbenz did in Guatemala as you pointed out, as Allende did in Chile.

 

AMY GOODMAN: If I remember correctly, Truman refused to be a part of this, but then Eisenhower came in and decided to support Britain in this.

 

JOHN PERKINS: That's correct. Truman took a very integritous stand. He said we're not going to mingle in these affairs. This is a democratically elected premier, Mossadeq, and he is doing what he's doing, and we're not going to step in on the side of private industry. But very shortly after that, he was out of office and Eisenhower came into office, and he went along with the C.I.A.'s plan to overthrow Mossadeq and replace him with the Shah.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Oil is the source of so much pain.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Oh, you know, every country in the world that has major supplies of oil, every third-world country or what -- some of them no longer are, like Saudi Arabia, have suffered. Oil is not a benefit for these countries. It's a benefit for a few of the very wealthy people at the top of the economic totem pole in these countries. But for everybody else, it's a curse. Oil is a curse to the world. It may be the greatest curse the world has ever experienced. It's destroying our environment, it's destroyed a lot of world economies, it's destroyed tremendous numbers of indigenous people who are suffocating from the results of the carbon dioxide that oil has produced. It's amazing. And isn't it also amazing, Amy, that when the first President Bush went into Iraq in 1990, we were importing about eight million barrels of oil a day. When the second President Bush went in, that had gone up by 50% to twelve. In that period of time, our imports had increased.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. He's author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. We're talking about oil, empire, what he calls the corporatocracy, and being an economic hit man. So you were involved in Iran. You also were tied up in Saudi Arabia. Explain.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Saudi Arabia was probably -- not probably, there's no question, it was our greatest success as economic hit men. I mean, that's how we judge ourselves. In the early 1970s, OPEC really flexed its muscle. It didn't like U.S. policies in Israel supporting Israel, and decided to do something about it. So it shut down oil production significantly. And as a result, the U.S. economy went into a tail spin. There were long lines of cars at gas stations, many of us still remember that. And we were afraid that it was going to be another crash like 1929 as a result of OPEC. And so the treasury department came to me and some other economic hit men and said this must never happen again. You have got to devise a plan. What are you going to do about this? How can you make sure this never happens? And we knew the key was Saudi Arabia. For one thing, it had more oil than anybody else. Even at that point in time, the Shah was getting a little bit shaky, and we'd seen that he wasn't probably going to take over the rest of the Middle East. We knew that the House of Saud, the royal Saudi family, was corruptible. They were corrupt, they are corrupt, and they were corruptible. So, to make a long story short, we put together this deal whereby they agreed, the House of Saud, to send most of their petro dollars, the money we paid for petroleum, back to the United States and invest it in U.S. securities. The interest from those securities would be dealt out by the treasury department to U.S. engineering construction firms to build Saudi Arabia in the Western image, to build huge cities out of the desert, which we've done, power plants, highways, McDonald's, the whole works, to make Saudi Arabia a very westernized country. And the House of Saud would guarantee to keep oil prices within acceptable limits, limits acceptable to us, and we would guarantee to keep the House of Saud in power. And we have done -- all those things have followed since the early 1970s. The policy still holds. Even to the point where, you know, we know that the House of Saud supports Osama bin Laden, supported him at our encouragement, of course, in Afghanistan, continues to support him and a lot of terrorist movements. We knew that the House of Saud provided sanctuary to Edie Amin, the Hitler of Africa. In fact, that's where he spend the last years of his life, living in a mansion, just died a little over a year ago there. And we've supported the House of Saud throughout all of this, despite the fact they've done a lot of things that ostensibly we disagree with. But they have provided us with these stabilized oil prices and a huge market for our engineering construction companies.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What was your personal involvement there?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, I structured -- I was one of the people that structured this plan. I like to think I was one of the-- I was the primary person that structured it and may have been. But there were a number of other people involved. And then we sent an envoy to Saudi Arabia -- I was never officially told who it was, but I'm almost positive it was Henry Kissinger -- to convince the House of Saud to accept our plan.

 

AMY GOODMAN: What makes you think it was him?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, because that's what he was doing in those days and at that point in time, he disappeared for a while from the TV screens and everything and he would have been the type of person to do this. And in any case, the message came back to us that the House of Saud had accepted the plan, but now a number of princes had to be convinced because even though Saudi Arabia is not a democracy, apparently there was a certain amount of democratic consensus building within the family, anyway. So, I was assigned to one of the princes and told that I needed to bring him around. He was a very, very strict conservative, Wahabi, and he didn't really want to see his country become westernized. He saw this coming. And so I knew my job was a challenge. He made it a little easier for me, because, in some respects because he, at the beginning, let me know that every time he came to boston or i visited him in new york or washington, he would expect to have a companion, a blue-eyed blonde, beautiful blue-eyed, blonde woman. He described exactly what he was looking for. And if I couldn't provide him with this, I could forget about meeting with him. And I was fortunate in that I found a woman who was married to a United Airlines pilot who had been a very promiscuous hippie a few years before then, was not happy with her husband who was having a lot of extramarital affairs, wanted a little extra cash on the side and said to me, Well, I'll go along with this, provided I like the guy. Fortunately for me, she did like him. And, Amy, it was one of the few illegal things that I did. Most of my job as an economic hit man was, strictly speaking, legal. It shouldn't be legal, what we did to the other countries should not be legal, but it is. Pimping is not legal. So I was pimping in Massachusetts at the time, and the only way I could pay for these services was by basically padding my expense accounts, and that also is illegal. So I stretched the legality thing here, and I hope we're beyond the statutes of limitations on these crimes. I think we are.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And so what happened with this?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, eventually the prince was very happy with Sally, this blonde, blue-eyed woman, and he did at one point say, now he would like her to come and live in his little cottage on the Arabian peninsula, which is a big mansion, of course. And this provided me with a concern because I knew she wouldn't go along with that and I wouldn't be able to afford it anyway. But we eventually worked it out whereby we provided him with another blonde, blue-eyed woman from one of the Scandinavian countries. At that time, there was a large trade in white traffic of women to the Middle East, and we arranged for that for him. He became quite happy with all this and eventually he agreed to the plan that we wanted. He supported it. And the House of Saud completely supported it, and it went into place.

 

AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to John Perkins. His book is Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

 

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AMY GOODMAN: As we come to the conclusion in this last segment of our interview with John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is his book. He was chief economist at an international consulting firm in Massachusetts called Main. He made deals in Indonesia, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, traveled to Ecuador and to Panama and to many other places, as well. It tells a remarkable story about the relationship between these international consulting firms, the U.S. government and the international financial institutions like the World Bank. You tried to write this book over several decades. What happened?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, yeah, it always bothered my conscience, what I was doing, and I really wanted to expose it because I didn't like what was going on in the world, what I saw my country doing. And I'm a very loyal American and I believe very deeply in the principles of this country, the founding fathers. And as time went on, I began to see how we were cheating those principles, how we were distorting them, how we're losing our sense of democracy almost completely and becoming such a capitalistic corporatocracy-oriented country, a great empire, an imperialistic country. And so I felt that if I wrote about how this has happened, because we've created this empire in the most subtle way possible. Other empires have been created militarily and everybody in the country knows the armies are going out there and creating empire. But this one has been done so subtly that most Americans have no idea that it is going on.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Although it's not so subtle anymore, which interestingly, at least at the beginning, is why some of corporate America was actually opposed to the invasion of Iraq, because it's not so subtle anymore.

 

JOHN PERKINS: That's right. It's coming out more and more. And probably that's one of the reasons why I could write the book, too. Because when I first started writing it, and the word would get out because I would start talking to people who had been involved with me. I wanted to have them help me remember certain things. I wanted to interview them and talk to them about it. And so i would receive subtle threats, but more importantly, bribes. So in the early 1990s, for example, when I started writing the book called Conscience of an Economic Hit Man, a large engineering company, Stoner-Webster Corporation, also of Boston, came to me and basically gave me about a half a million dollar bribe with a complete understanding I wouldn't write the book and I wouldn't have to do much work at all. I would be on their roster.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Why did Stoner-Webster care?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Because they were very much involved in the business, too, and many of the people who had left Charles T. Main at that time, my old company which had been bought out, had gone to work for Stoner-Webster. And they were very much involved in doing the same thing. It's all part of the family. And I call it a bribe, but legally speaking it isn't a bribe. I was hired to be a consultant to them, pay the fee to be a consultant with a very strong understanding that I was not to talk about my former life in this business or my current life at that time. I used a lot of that money to form a nonprofit organization called Dream Change that helped indigenous people in many of the countries that I had screwed, basically, as an economic hit man. So I was -- I used this money that I was making to assuage my guilt and to do good things, things I'm very, very proud of.

 

AMY GOODMAN: How much money were you making?

 

JOHN PERKINS: I ended up taking about a half a million dollars from Stoner-Webster over a period of several years, basically for doing nothing.

 

AMY GOODMAN: But you didn't write the book.

 

JOHN PERKINS: But I didn't write the book, and I went off and had a few dinners in Rio de Janeiro and other places with some of their clients. Tough assignment. Flew around in a corporate private jet a few times. But always -- even though, you know, I justified on one level that I was using this money to do good work in the nonprofit sector, which was true, I knew deep in my heart I needed to write this book. I needed to expose the truth behind what's going on in the world. I had a young daughter. She was born in 1982. So during the 1990s, she was very young. I was concerned about her safety and comfort, but I was also concerned about her future. But I could justify constantly not writing this book on many, many levels. And I was sworn to secrecy on it. But when 9/11 struck, I was in the Amazon at the time. But shortly after that, I came up here and went next door to you to ground zero and experienced a couple of weeks after what you so eloquently write about in your book about the people coming out of ground zero and coming here to the fire station where we're sitting today. Well, I went up there a few weeks later and sat there and it was close enough to the time that I could still smell the burning flesh and see the smoke coming out of that hole, and I sat there and I knew that I had to take responsibility for what had happened there. I knew that I had to expose the truth because what happened at ground zero is a direct result of what -- of the empire building, of what we economic hit men did, and I knew as I sat there that if we don't do something to change the course we're on in the world, my daughter basically has no future and certainly her children don't, and I'm leaving them a much worse world than the one I inherited. And so at that point, I knew that no matter what the consequences, no matter how big a noose I was sticking my head into, I had to expose what's been going on in the world. This empire that we've created that's made so many people around the planet angry, that's resulted in destitution for billions of people on this planet. 24,000 people starve to death every day. 30,000 children die every single day from lack of medicines for diseases that could be cured and we have to take responsibility for that. We can change that and we will change it. But we'll only change it when we really come to understand what's going on.

 

AMY GOODMAN: So you wrote the book, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and searched around for a publisher, and you write about a top corporate publisher, who was interested in the manuscript.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Right. Read the manuscript, president of one of the major publishing houses, invited me to New York, we had dinner together. He said this is a great book, it's riveting, it's very well-written, it's a story that needs to be told, but I can't tell it because I'm owned by a major international corporation that doesn't want this kind of story getting out there. And I'll tell you, Amy, I had a good -- very good New York literary agent, still do, and he submitted this book to all the major publishing houses and got back letters. He kept reading them to me over the phone, these letters that said things very much like that. This is a really good book, we really enjoy it, but it is not for us right now.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Hmm. So, this major publisher you had dinner with offered to publish one of your books, but said it had to be fictionalized?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Right. He said, Why don't you fictionalize this book, why don't you be John LeCarre or Graham Green or Dan Brown with The Da Vinci Code, fictionalize it, then we can consider publishing it. And I'm considering fictionalizing it, too. I think it would make a good novel. But what that said to me was what kind of a country is this that we're in where the press, where the main publishers won't publish the truth when it's written as the truth. They'll only publish it if it's fictionalized? What does that say about our freedom of the press? And, of course, subsequently a very brave publisher, family-owned firm in San Francisco, a great publisher, Berrett-Koehler, published the book. But it has been very interesting that I still haven't been on what we call the mainstream press. Kudlow & Cramer and a number of other programs have invited me on; at the last moment, told me i'm disinvited. They didn't like the politics. Somebody, an advertiser, somebody objected. I don't know the details behind it, but I'm yanked off at the last minute.

 

AMY GOODMAN: And you, as a chief economist of the Main international consulting firm, you are the type that get on these shows.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Yeah. I was. But now I'm dangerous, you know? And the truth is coming out. But what's interesting is, and I was on your show about a month ago and the next day the book went to number one on Amazon.com. Thank you very much. The word got out there. And what that said to me is once people know that this story is out there to be told, they want to read it. You got the information out that the story was out there. Went to number one on Amazon.com the next day. It's now gone on to the New York Times best seller list. In its fifth week of publication, it went into its fifth printing. I mean, the publisher hasn't been able to keep up.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Yet no major corporate network outside of independent media, which is major, but no major corporate network has interviewed you.

 

JOHN PERKINS: Exactly. Nobody who is owned by a big corporation or depends on big corporations for their advertising has interviewed me at this point. Isn't that interesting?

 

AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to John Perkins. Iraq. How does that fit into the stories you have told us during this hour?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, Iraq followed Saudi Arabia. After our tremendous success in Saudi Arabia, we decided we should do the same thing in Iraq. And we figured that Saddam Hussein was corruptible. And, of course, we had been involved with Saddam Hussein anyway for some time. And so the economic hit men went in and tried to bring Saddam Hussein around, tried to get him to agree to a deal like the royal House of Saud had agreed to. And he didn't. So, we sent in the jackals to try to overthrow him or to assassinate him. They couldn't. His Republican Guard was too loyal and he had all these doubles. We couldn't do it. So, when the economic hit men and the jackals both failed, then the last line of defense that the United States, the empire, uses these days, is the military. We send in our young men and women to die and to kill, and we did that in Iraq in 1990. We thought Saddam Hussein at that point was sufficiently chastised that now he would come around, so the economic hit men went back in in the 1990s, failed once again. The jackals went back in, failed once again, and so once again the military went in -- the story we all know -- because we couldn't bring him around any other way. Iraq had become very, very important to us for many reasons. Its strategic location, the fact it controls a great deal of the water of the Middle East, the Tigris and Euphrates both flow through and out of Iraq and, of course, its oil. And now we're not so sure we can keep the House of Saud in control. It's become extremely unpopular amongst its own people. Over 100 assassinations this year. We've been recently reading about the U.S. Consulate being attacked in Saudi Arabia. The House of Saud is losing control. It's very unpopular, partly because it accepted this deal with the West. It did a lot like what the Shah of Iran has done. And Osama bin Laden, of course, is very against it. But so are a tremendous number of Muslims around the world. The seat of the Muslim faith, Mecca, is in Saudi Arabia, very upset with what the House of Saud has done. So we've been afraid that we're going to lose the grip on the House of Saud. One way to protect against that is by taking over Iraq oil fields, which may be larger than those in Saudi Arabia. We're not sure exactly how large they are.

 

AMY GOODMAN: On the jacket of your book, it says that your job as an economic hit man was to convince countries that are strategically important to the U.S., from Indonesia to Panama, to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development and to make sure that the lucrative projects were contracted to U.S. corporations. Saddled with huge debts, these countries came under the control of the U.S. government, World Bank, and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies that acted like loansharks, dictating repayment terms and bullying foreign governments into submission. You work with a lot of people in other countries and right here in the international financial institutions, for example, like the World Bank. What do they say? What understanding do they have? Do a lot of people feel the same way you do?

 

JOHN PERKINS: Well, that's a good question. It's hard to answer for a lot of other people. Within those organizations, most of the people don't realize what's going on. The engineers at Bechtel and Halliburton and the financial specialists at the World Bank and so on and so forth don't really realize what's going on. They should. They ought to look into it and find out. But there is every excuse not to on their part. They do their job. My father-in-law was chief architect at Bechtel Corporation. He has since retired, and you know, and he built big cities in Saudi Arabia. He was in charge of that. For him, it was a plum. He was an architect. To be given, basically, you know, all the money that he wanted to build huge cities out of the desert was a dream for an architect. He never thought what was going on beneath the surface, and unfortunately, too many of us don't. I'm struck by the fact that as I travel around the world -- I just got back recently from Nepal and Tibet, I travel a lot to South America -- about how many people in these countries, even people we consider illiterate, question their government. They assume their government is corrupt, they assume ours is corrupt, but we don't. It is amazing to me how many of us don't, at least not openly. And as I speak, I've been on this tour with this book for the last month, people keep saying, gee, I knew that was going on. Some place in my heart, I knew that was going on, but I really didn't understand it. And the fact is that Americans, for the most part, we don't really want to know, I'm afraid, what's going on. But we need to. We really need to question that. So within these organizations, you've got tremendous numbers of people that are just going along with the system, getting paid really well to do it, and getting jobs that they were trained to do. And fascinating. But then you always have a number of people like me at the top of the organizations that know what's going on. They are part of this and they use every means they can to keep the system moving.

 

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you very much, John Perkins, for joining us. His book is called Confessions of a Economic Hit Man.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/01/05/children...g.ap/index.html

 

ROCHESTER, New York (AP) -- A Family Court judge who last year stirred debate about parental responsibilities ordered a second drug-addicted woman to have no more children until she proves she can look after the seven she already has.

 

The 31-year-old mother, identified in court papers only as Judgette W., lost custody of her children, ranging in age from eight months to 12 years, in child-neglect hearings dating back to 2000. Six are in foster care at state expense and one lives with an aunt.

 

The youngest child and two others tested positive for cocaine at birth and all seven "were removed from her care and custody because she could not and did not take care of them," Judge Marilyn O'Connor said in a December 22 decision made public Tuesday.

 

"Because every child born deserves a mother and a father, or at the very least a mother or a father, this court is once again taking this unusual step of ordering this biological mother to conceive no more children until she reclaims her children from foster care or other caretakers," O'Connor wrote.

 

In a similar ruling last March, O'Connor ordered a drug-addicted, homeless mother of four to refrain from bearing children until she won back care of her children. The decision, the first of its kind in New York, is being appealed.

 

Wisconsin and Ohio have upheld similar rulings involving "deadbeat dads" who failed to pay child support. But in other states, judges have turned back attempts to interfere with a person's right to procreate.

 

O'Connor said she was not forcing contraception or sterilization on the mother, who had children with seven different men, nor requiring her to get an abortion should she become pregnant. But she warned that the woman could be jailed for contempt if she has another child.

 

The New York Civil Liberties Union maintained that the opinion cannot be enforced because it "tramples on a fundamental right -- the right to procreate."

 

"There is no question the circumstances of this case are deeply troubling," said the group's executive director, Donna Lieberman. "But ordering a woman under threat of jail not to have any more babies ... puts the court squarely in the bedroom. And that's no place for the government."

I recently picked up John Perkins book "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"

http://www.rense.com/general61/outof.htm

 

Debunking The Out Of Africa

Origin Of HIV & AIDS

The Greatest Conspiracy

Story Ever Told

By Alan Cantwell © 2005

Alan Cantwell, M.D.

 

Well I guess this is a Interesting Article, and I didn't really want to blow up the board with my crazy conspiracy , cause satan knows. I'm full of them..

robj..

we need to talk about that one.

there is a crazy fucking guy out there that has spawned all sorts of disgusting ideas about the origins of AIDS and how it came out of engineered vaccines made in chimpanzees and given to humans.

 

i went to a very long lecture about this topic given by one of the world authorities on the origins of AIDS. there is actual genetic evidence in the DNA of the virus that shows the lineage of the disease, even tracable to a geographical area and a specific group of simians. it is a vast amount of research that needs more time than i can give it now.

 

the sad thing is, this conspiracy theory has led to some widespread doubts about the safety of vaccines in places like africa. and mistrust of scientific research, as usual. it makes regular health care even more difficult. people don't want to trust vaccines now and it is going to lead to consequences.

 

the real conspiracy of AIDS is in the denial of treatment to those who need it the most, the denial of statistics telling us that black women in america are at increasingly high risk and the government is doing nothing about it, the relationship between drug companies and our government etc etc.

on another note.

 

when posting in this thread, pleasae limit the articles to a reasonable size.

 

no one is going to read 10,000 words right here.

 

please select some parts, or highlight some choice parts in bold

or simply provide a link and a bit of info

 

 

otherwise, it's just overload.

thanks.

President Bush announces emergency shipments of snacks and X Boxes to aid tsunami victims at American Idle.

 

 

http://babelogue.citypages.com:8080/canderson/2005/01/04

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration paid a prominent black journalist to promote President Bush's education law and give Education Secretary Rod Paige media time, records show.

 

Armstrong Williams, a nationally syndicated radio, print and television personality, was paid $240,000 by the Education Department to promote the No Child Left Behind Act.

 

The law, the centerpiece of President Bush's domestic agenda, aims to raise achievement among poor and minority children, with penalties for many schools that don't make progress.

 

Three Democratic senators -- Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Harry Reid of Nevada -- wrote Bush Friday to demand he recover the money paid to Armstrong. The lawmakers contended that "the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy."

 

The department's contract with Williams, through the public relations firm Ketchum, dates to 2003 and 2004. It is billed as a "minority outreach campaign" with the goal of "educating the African-American community" about the education law.

 

Williams called criticism of his relationship with the department "legitimate."

 

"It's a fine line," he told The Associated Press on Friday. "Even though I'm not a journalist -- I'm a commentator -- I feel I should be held to the media ethics standard. My judgment was not the best. I wouldn't do it again, and I learned from it."

 

This is not the first time the department has come under fire for its publicity efforts.

 

The Bush administration has promoted No Child Left Behind with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. It has also has paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the law, with points awarded for stories that say Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education. The Government Accountability Office, Congress' auditing arm, is investigating those spending decisions.

 

"There is no defense for using taxpayer dollars to pay journalists for 'fake news' and favorable coverage of a federal program," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that has tracked the department's spending. "It's a scandalous waste."

 

 

damn.

Originally posted by hobo knife@Jan 7 2005, 01:50 PM

"the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy."

 

 

"There is no defense for using taxpayer dollars to pay journalists for 'fake news' and favorable coverage of a federal program," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that has tracked the department's spending. "It's a scandalous waste."

 

 

damn.

Quoted post

 

 

A similar article from CNN:

 

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/07/...t.ap/index.html

 

http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/world/story/1...-10007006c.html

Secret Israel nuclear site shown...

 

http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/...cle_14852.shtml

The Mighty US GI's: Lied To, Used, and Losin

 

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/01/04/...ain664652.shtml

In the biggest Pentagon scandal in 20 years

Originally posted by hobo knife@Jan 7 2005, 04:50 PM

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration paid a prominent black journalist to promote President Bush's education law and give Education Secretary Rod Paige media time, records show.

Quoted post

 

usatoday,,link

i saw that ballsuckin boeing bitch on 60 minutes the other night.

 

fuckin a.

 

are these people going to hell or what?

 

:yuck:

Evidence Of Presidential Approval Of Torture

 

 

http://www.aclu.org/SafeandFree/SafeandFre...?ID=17216&c=206

 

FBI E-Mail Refers to Presidential Order Authorizing Inhumane Interrogation Techniques

 

December 20, 2004

 

 

 

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact: media@aclu.org

 

Newly Obtained FBI Records Call Defense Department’s Methods "Torture," Express Concerns Over "Cover-Up" That May Leave FBI "Holding the Bag" for Abuses

 

NEW YORK -- A document released for the first time today by the American Civil Liberties Union suggests that President Bush issued an Executive Order authorizing the use of inhumane interrogation methods against detainees in Iraq. Also released by the ACLU today are a slew of other records including a December 2003 FBI e-mail that characterizes methods used by the Defense Department as "torture" and a June 2004 "Urgent Report" to the Director of the FBI that raises concerns that abuse of detainees is being covered up.

 

"These documents raise grave questions about where the blame for widespread detainee abuse ultimately rests," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Top government officials can no longer hide from public scrutiny by pointing the finger at a few low-ranking soldiers."

 

The documents were obtained after the ACLU and other public interest organizations filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act request.

 

The two-page e-mail that references an Executive Order states that the President directly authorized interrogation techniques including sleep deprivation, stress positions, the use of military dogs, and "sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc." The ACLU is urging the White House to confirm or deny the existence of such an order and immediately to release the order if it exists. The FBI e-mail, which was sent in May 2004 from "On Scene Commander--Baghdad" to a handful of senior FBI officials, notes that the FBI has prohibited its agents from employing the techniques that the President is said to have authorized.

 

Another e-mail, dated December 2003, describes an incident in which Defense Department interrogators at Guantánamo Bay impersonated FBI agents while using "torture techniques" against a detainee. The e-mail concludes "If this detainee is ever released or his story made public in any way, DOD interrogators will not be held accountable because these torture techniques were done [sic] the ‘FBI’ interrogators. The FBI will [sic] left holding the bag before the public."

 

The document also says that no "intelligence of a threat neutralization nature" was garnered by the "FBI" interrogation, and that the FBI’s Criminal Investigation Task Force (CITF) believes that the Defense Department’s actions have destroyed any chance of prosecuting the detainee. The e-mail’s author writes that he or she is documenting the incident "in order to protect the FBI."

 

"The methods that the Defense Department has adopted are illegal, immoral, and counterproductive," said ACLU staff attorney Jameel Jaffer. "It is astounding that these methods appear to have been adopted as a matter of policy by the highest levels of government."

 

The June 2004 "Urgent Report" addressed to the FBI Director is heavily redacted. The legible portions of the document appear to describe an account given to the FBI’s Sacramento Field Office by an FBI agent who had "observed numerous physical abuse incidents of Iraqi civilian detainees," including "strangulation, beatings, [and] placement of lit cigarettes into the detainees ear openings." The document states that "[redacted] was providing this account to the FBI based on his knowledge that [redacted] were engaged in a cover-up of these abuses."

 

The release of these documents follows a federal court order that directed government agencies to comply with a year-old request under the Freedom of Information Act filed by the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans for Peace. The New York Civil Liberties Union is co-counsel in the case.

 

Other documents released by the ACLU today include:

 

An FBI email regarding DOD personnel impersonating FBI officials during interrogations. The e-mail refers to a "ruse" and notes that "all of those [techniques] used in these scenarios" were approved by the Deputy Secretary of Defense. (Jan. 21, 2004)

Another FBI agent’s account of interrogations at Guantánamo in which detainees were shackled hand and foot in a fetal position on the floor. The agent states that the detainees were kept in that position for 18 to 24 hours at a time and most had "urinated or defacated [sic]" on themselves. On one occasion, the agent reports having seen a detainee left in an unventilated, non-air conditioned room at a temperature "probably well over a hundred degrees." The agent notes: "The detainee was almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him. He had apparently been literally pulling his own hair out throughout the night." (Aug. 2, 2004)

An e-mail stating that an Army lawyer "worked hard to cwrite [sic] a legal justification for the type of interrogations they (the Army) want to conduct" at Guantánamo Bay. (Dec. 9, 2002)

An e-mail noting the initiation of an FBI investigation into the alleged rape of a juvenile male detainee at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. (July 28, 2004)

An FBI agent’s account of an interrogation at Guantánamo - an interrogation apparently conducted by Defense Department personnel - in which a detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag and bombarded with loud music and strobe lights. (July 30, 2004)

The ACLU and its allies are scheduled to go to court again this afternoon, where they will seek an order compelling the CIA to turn over records related to an internal investigation into detainee abuse. Although the ACLU has received more than 9,000 documents from other agencies, the CIA refuses to confirm or deny even the existence of many of the records that the ACLU and other plaintiffs have requested. The CIA is reported to have been involved in abusing detainees in Iraq and at secret CIA detention facilities around the globe.

 

The lawsuit is being handled by Lawrence Lustberg and Megan Lewis of the New Jersey-based law firm Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione, P.C. Other attorneys in the case are Jaffer, Amrit Singh and Judy Rabinovitz of the ACLU; Art Eisenberg and Beth Haroules of the NYCLU; and Barbara Olshansky and Jeff Fogel of CCR.

 

The documents referenced above can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/torturefoia/released/fbi.html.

THE ARTICLE DOESN'T FULLY OUTLIEN THE EVIDENCE, BUT IT IS INTERESTING...

 

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6809982/

 

 

U.S. tried to bury pollutant study, group says

NRDC challenges report on rocket fuel in drinking water

Updated: 7:04 p.m. ET Jan. 10, 2005WASHINGTON - A new report from the National Academy of Sciences raises by 20 times the amount of rocket fuel pollution in drinking water considered “safe,” but environmentalists Monday accused the government of influencing the report’s findings.

 

The environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council challenged the report even before it was issued, saying the authors had been influenced by the Pentagon and defense contractors and it had evidence to prove it.

 

The pollutant from rocket fuel, a chemical called perchlorate, can affect thyroid function. There are no federal limits on how much is safe but independent groups have said the chemical could affect developing babies.

 

How much is safe?

The Academy’s National Research Council, which advises the government on scientific and environmental matters, was asked by the Department of Defense, NASA and other agencies to review evidence that perchlorate in drinking water or food crops was harmful and if so, how much was safe.

 

Its report says people could drink up to up to 0.0007 milligrams per kilogram of body weight without harming even the most sensitive populations -- about 20 times more than the ’reference dose’ proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection.

 

“The most recent EPA risk assessment, published in 2002, proposes a daily reference dose of 0.00003 milligrams per kilogram of body weight, which the agency said would correspond to a drinking-water concentration of 1 part per billion based on certain assumptions about body weight and daily water consumption,” the Academy noted.

 

It also said that although there is clear evidence the chemical can dampen thyroid function, leading to a serious condition called hypothyroidism, there was not enough evidence to show it could lead to thyroid cancer, as the EPA has suggested.

 

A health threat to babies?

“Scientists at the EPA, in state agencies, and in academia have all concluded that very low levels of perchlorate threaten the health of babies,” said NRDC scientist Jennifer Sass. ”Scientists should not be strong-armed by unqualified, partisan bureaucrats and corporate polluters to skew the evidence.”

 

The NRDC said federal agencies had tried to influence the report’s conclusions and published documents that it said showed just how extensive the government’s attempts were.

 

“The Defense Department’s job is to protect Americans, not threaten our health, but these documents show that it is conspiring with its contractors and the White House to twist the science and avoid cleaning up a chemical that threatens our children’s health,” said NRDC lawyer Erik Olson.

 

“We’ve never seen such a brazen campaign to pressure the National Academy of Sciences to downplay the hazards of a chemical, but it fits the pattern of this administration manipulating science at the expense of public health,” the NRDC said.

 

White House and EPA officials were not available for comment.

 

The National Academy of Sciences report said perchlorate had been discovered in 35 states and more than 11 million people have “perchlorate in their drinking water at concentrations of 4 parts per billion or higher.”

velocet, good reads dude.

i'm also diggin' that laura owens shit large.

its time for me to let the dog in

that segment on The Daily Show last night about the 'Go Canada' pack was great!

 

Ed Helms is just too much.

 

'gotta thaw oUT my balls'

"It's $24."

Helms:"Does it come with a 23 dollar bill?"

I have to say, I sympathise with the Canadian.

The urban legend about american backpackers in europe

putting Canadian patches on their gear has come true.

 

'and what kind oh an anthem is that? oh... canada?

 

* and Samantha Bee should have followed it up. She's Canadian.

I didnt like her at first but she's getting funnier and funnier all the time.

Another shitty article I found on CNN...funny how much slips under the radar on CNN, this should be a huge scandal showing how corrupt most world leaders are. (and their offspring)

 

CAPE TOWN, South Africa -- Mark Thatcher has pleaded guilty to unwittingly bankrolling an alleged coup plot in oil-rich Equatorial Guinea in a plea bargain deal that allows him to avoid jail.

 

The son of former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher appeared in court in South Africa on Thursday and agreed to pay a 3 million rand ($500,000) fine instead of facing five years in jail.

 

Mark Thatcher admitted he paid for a military helicopter used by mercenaries in the alleged coup plot but claims he believed it was to be used as an air ambulance for humanitarian purposes, according to a source close to his family.

 

After entering his plea, Thatcher said: "There is no price too high for me to be reunited with my family and I am sure all of you who are husbands and fathers would agree with that."

 

to be reunited with your family? I think your paying money to keep your ass out of jail...not just to reunite yourself with your family....yeah Mark you're right,except most husbands or fathers don't have the luxury of buying themselves out of trouble...so I guess, for most people there IS a price that is too high.

 

Equatorial Guinea alleges Thatcher and other mainly British financiers worked with the tiny country's opposition figures, scores of African mercenaries and six Armenian pilots in a takeover attempt foiled in March.

 

He was scrutinized by Britain's Parliament in 1994 over reports that he was involved in arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Iraq while his mother was prime minister -- allegations he denied, AP reported.

 

huh, selling arms to Iraq after the first gulf war?

some crazy shiznacks.

This article is crazy, he is being forced to sleep in a closet and they're wondering why he is trying to kill them...

 

 

 

http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/01/27/family.p...d.ap/index.html

 

Teen accused of putting rat poison in family's food

 

The 15-year-old was charged with three counts of attempted first-degree intentional homicide. A judge set bail at $25,000 cash Wednesday.

 

........

 

 

The boy's stepfather and mother said he had threatened them before and that he "sleeps on a mattress in the walk-in closet off the master bedroom so they can 'watch him,"' according to the complaint.

Originally posted by KING BLING@Jan 7 2005, 02:20 PM

Quoted post

Another columnist paid to help promote Bush policy

 

(AP) -- The Department of Health and Human Services said Friday that a third conservative columnist was paid to assist in promoting a Bush administration policy.

 

Columnist Mike McManus received $10,000 to train marriage counselors as part of the agency's initiative promoting marriage to build strong families, said Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families.

 

The disclosure came as the Government Accountability Office sent a letter to the Education Department on Friday asking for all materials related to its contract dealings with a prominent conservative media commentator.

 

That department, through a contract with the public relations firm Ketchum, hired commentator Armstrong Williams to produce ads that featured former Education Secretary Rod Paige and promoted President Bush's No Child Left Behind law. The contract also committed Williams, who is black, to provide media access for Paige and to persuade other black journalists to talk about the law.

 

Federal law bans the use of public money on propaganda.

 

The Education Department received the GAO's letter and is reviewing it, said department spokeswoman Susan Aspey. "Secretary Spelling has made it very clear she is getting to the bottom of this."

 

Margaret Spellings started this week, replacing Paige.

 

In a letter to Sens. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, and Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, dated Friday, Spellings wrote, "At this point, what I can say is that at a minimum, there were errors of judgments at the Department, and I am diligently working to get to the bottom of it all."

 

The lawmakers are the chairman and the ranking member of a panel that oversees education spending, and their subcommittee is looking into the matter.

 

Spellings also said the department has directed Ketchum to stop all work under the contract.

 

Earlier this week, Bush ordered his Cabinet secretaries not to hire columnists to promote administration agendas. The declaration was prompted by reports that Williams and another columnist, Maggie Gallagher, had been paid by the administration.

 

All three columnists failed to disclose to their readers their relationships with the administration.

 

Health and Human Services' Horn stressed McManus was not paid to write favorably to about the administration. Still, he said, HHS has now implemented a rule to prohibit the use of outside consultants or contractors who have any connection with the press.

 

"There's a growing misperception that taxpayers' money is being used to pay columnists to use their position in the media to portray the administration in a positive light," Horn said. "I felt a compelling need to draw a bright line in order to restore the public's confidence that we are not doing that."

 

McManus was hired by the Lewin Group, which had a contract with HHS to support community-based programs. As co-founder and president of the nonprofit group Marriage Savers, his expertise was applied to help the community-based programs to build "the capacity to develop healthy marriage initiatives," Horn said.

 

The Institute for Youth Development, which got a grant from HHS, also is paying Marriage Savers $49,000 to offer guidance to unmarried couples who are having children, Horn said.

 

McManus has written supportively about the HHS marriage initiative in many of his columns since the consulting work began in January 2003.

 

McManus' weekly column appears in about 50 newspapers. He would not comment Friday but said he planned to issue a statement.

 

HHS spokesman Bill Pierce said he was unaware of any other columnists or commentators who were being paid to do work for the department.

 

Determining who is considered a journalist isn't always easy, Horn said.

 

"Oftentimes they will be experts in an area, write op-eds, be a media personality, write columns," he said. "The question really is: Is it legitimate for the government to draw upon that?"

 

Gallagher apologized this week to readers for not disclosing a $21,500 contract with HHS to help create materials promoting the marriage initiative.

 

The Education Department paid Williams $240,000 to produce television and radio ads promoting the No Child Left Behind Act. Williams has apologized and called it a mistake in judgment not to disclose that the administration was paying him.

 

Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Massachusetts, and Frank Lautenberg, D-New Jersey, had requested the GAO to expand a continuing inquiry into the matter.

 

"The issue here isn't just whether a journalist violated ethics, but whether the Bush Administration broke the law," Lautenberg said Friday. "If the GAO finds that the payment to Armstrong Williams was an illegal use of taxpayer dollars, then the money should be returned and Education Department officials should be held accountable."

 

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/01/28/...s.ap/index.html