U.S. citizen believed to be writing for al Qaeda website, source says

(CNN) -- A senior U.S. law enforcement official has told CNN that U.S. intelligence believes the principal author of the new online al Qaeda magazine is an American citizen who left for Yemen in October 2009.

The magazine -- called "Inspire" -- appeared last week. Running to nearly 70 pages online, it included articles on bomb-making and encrypting electronic messages, as well as an interview with fugitive Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al Awlaki.

The source has identified the driving force behind "Inspire" as 23-year-old Samir Khan, who previously lived in North Carolina and was involved in radical Islamist blogs, including one he ran called "Jihad Recollections." The source says Khan traveled to Yemen on a round-trip ticket but has not come back to the United States.

Before moving to North Carolina, Khan lived in the New York area. U.S. law enforcement officials say he attended meetings of the Islamic Thinkers Society, but was not a central figure in the group. The Islamic Thinkers Society says its mission is to achieve the ideal Islamic society. On its website, it says: "Our struggle is always intellectual [and] political non-violent means."

Khan's online name was inshaAllhashaheed (Arabic for "God willing a martyr"). On his various blogs he distributed English translations of al Qaeda propaganda and links to videos produced by Iraqi insurgent groups and others. In a profile in 2007, the New York Times described him as "a kind of Western relay station for the multimedia productions of violent Islamic groups."

Khan was born in Saudi Arabia, and moved to Queens, New York, with his family when he was 7. The family later moved to Charlotte, North Carolina.

What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895...

Words fail to describe the magnitude of how much the American educational
system has been watered down!



What it took to get an 8th grade education in 1895...


Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only
had an 8th grade education? Well, check this out.



This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA
. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley
Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina
Journal.

8th Grade Final Exam:
Salina, KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one
hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph.
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of
'lie,''play,' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you
understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time,
1 hour and 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels
of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel,
deducting 1,050 lbs for tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to
carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for
incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per
metre?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which
is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History (Time, 45
minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell,Lincoln, Penn, and
Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following da tes: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849,
1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour)
[Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography,
etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: trigraph, subvocals,
diphthong, cognate letters, linguals & nbsp;
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions
under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi,
dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the
sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise,
blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain,
feign, vane , vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by
use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1 What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba,
Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S. Name all the
republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same
latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the
sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.

Gives the saying 'he only had an 8th grade education' a whole new meaning,
doesn't it?!

On the Edge with Max Keiser - July 18th, 2010

3 Vids: On the Edge with Paul Craig Roberts/Max Keiser

Part 1


Part 2


Part 3

European Banks’ Hidden Losses Threaten EU Stress Test

(Adds Rehn comment in 18th paragraph.)

By Andrew MacAskill and Aaron Kirchfeld

July 6 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. government’s bank stress tests a year ago helped financial stocks to rebound 36 percent over the next seven months. Europe’s plan to follow may not be as successful.

Investors say they don’t know if some banks are hiding bad loans, whether they have enough capital to withstand a debt default by a European state and whether governments can afford to rescue them. The European Union still hasn’t disclosed the tests’ criteria, including if they contain a sovereign default.

“There won’t be a rebound in European banks unless we have stress tests,” said Dirk Hoffmann-Becking, a senior research analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in London who tracks European banks including Barclays Plc, Deutsche Bank AG and UBS AG. “But stress tests won’t resolve the sovereign debt crisis.”

Protecting the senior bonds of 11 U.S. banks from default using credit default swaps costs an average of about 144 basis points, according to data compiled by CMA DataVision. In Europe, the average cost has climbed to about 224 basis points this year, the data show.

U.S. bank stocks surged last year after tests found that 10 banks needed to raise $74.6 billion of capital. The checks, which examined if lenders had enough capital to weather a recession and rising unemployment, helped to ease investor concerns that the overall health of the financial system was sound by shining a light on the weakest lenders.

“It turned out it was a very brilliant decision,” U.S. Bancorp Chief Executive Officer Richard Davis told reporters in London on June 29. “That changed the whole market’s belief that if the bottom is only this low then I can get back in as an investor.”

U.S. Banks Rebound

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Financials Index has slipped 6 percent this year, less than the Bloomberg Europe Banks and Financial Services Index’s 14 percent drop.

Europe’s largest banks are trading at a discount to their book value while their U.S. counterparts trade at a premium. Europe’s 20 largest lenders are trading at about 10 percent less than the net value of their assets. The 20 biggest U.S. banks trade at a 10 percent premium, Bloomberg data show.

Unlike the U.S. government, EU governments haven’t said if they’ll provide cash to banks that fail the tests, and economists say countries including Spain and Portugal could struggle to fund any bailout. European lenders had $2.29 trillion at risk in Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain at the end of 2009, including loans to governments, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

‘Real Worry’

“The question is whether governments can shoulder their sovereign debt if they had to bail out half their financial system on top of it,” said Lothar Mentel, chief investment officer at Octopus Investments Ltd. in London “That is the real worry.”

National Bank of Greece SA, Dexia SA and Commerzbank AG were the lenders whose tangible common equity was most eroded in a simulated stress test that Citigroup Inc. analysts ran on 13 European firms. Their test included sovereign debt and loan losses, they said in a June 21 report to clients.

Commerzbank spokeswoman Simone Fuchs said the lender’s regulatory Tier 1 ratio was 10.8 percent on March 31, and would still be close to 10 percent under the Citigroup test if it included 16.4 billion euros ($20.5 billion) of capital the Frankfurt-based bank received from the government last year, she said.

‘Prescribe Some Medicine’

Officials at National Bank of Greece, the country’s biggest lender, didn’t return calls seeking comment. Benoit Gausseron, a Paris-based spokesman for Dexia, declined to comment on the Citigroup test. The lender, which was rescued by France and Belgium in 2008, has the “capacity to take shocks,” CEO Pierre Mariani said in a July 4 interview in Aix-en-Provence, France.

“You can’t just have stress tests, you’d better prescribe some medicine as well, which is going be more capital-raising,” said Hank Calenti, a credit analyst at Royal Bank of Canada in London. “If some institutions need access to government recapitalization or other improvements, the market needs to know how that’s going to happen.”

Concern about European banks’ potential losses on bonds sold by the governments of Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain helped to increase borrowing costs for European banks this year.

The difference between the three-month euro interbank offered rate, set by 42 European banks, and the comparable euro London interbank offered rate, to which only seven European banks contribute alongside U.S. and U.K. lenders, widened to a record 7.5 basis points on June 28. The spread averaged about one tenth of a basis point in the decade to June 2009, according to Bloomberg data.

‘Full Transparency’

EU Economic and Monetary Affairs Commissioner Olli Rehn yesterday called for “full transparency” to determine banks’ resilience against financial shocks. The tests will include an assessment of a possible sovereign-debt “shock” and extend to “second-tier” banks, Rehn said. “Backstops” must be in place when the results are published, he said.

The EU has already pledged 750 billion euros to reassure markets and backstop the euro, which has fallen about 13 percent against the dollar this year.

“There are a lot of insolvent European banks and the question is whether we’ll see them because they give us decent data,” Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard University professor and former International Monetary Fund chief economist, said in a Bloomberg Television interview in Hong Kong. “They need a lot of restructuring. They’re in denial.”

Landesbanken and Cajas

Analysts say they are most concerned about Germany’s state- owned lenders and Spanish savings banks because of their souring real estate loans. Swiss, U.K. and Nordic banks are safer investments than many euro-zone lenders because they’re less exposed to the sovereign debt crisis, have raised more capital and booked more writedowns, Hoffmann-Becking said.

“There are entire segments in the European market that haven’t done anything close to U.S. banks in terms of putting their house in order -- especially the Landesbanken and Cajas,” the Bernstein analyst said.

Landesbanken, the state-owned regional wholesale banks, have been reluctant to write down their property investments, according to Julian Chillingworth, chief investment officer at Rathbone Brothers Plc, which manages about $21 billion.

“The Landesbanken system probably needs further reform,” said Chillingworth, who’s based in London.

German Writedowns

Spain’s 45 regional savings banks are facing rising losses after the country’s property crash. The lenders have 241 billion euros in Spanish property loans, the Bank of Spain said, some of which are souring as developers default and prices fall after a decade-long housing boom.

Spanish savings banks may be hiding losses on home loans by taking non-performing mortgages out of securitized transactions, according to CreditSights Inc. By carrying the bad loans on their own books the so-called cajas sidestep downgrades to their mortgage-backed securities, the independent bond research firm said in a report.

German banks’ writedowns on loans and securities will probably reach $314 billion by the end of 2010, with state-owned lenders and savings banks facing the bulk of the losses, the International Monetary Fund said in a report in April.

“There is a pattern in Europe of trying to muddle through without taking the hits with the hope if you don’t take the pain things will be ok,” said Raghuram Rajan, former IMF chief economist and a professor of finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago.

German Lenders

Unlike U.S. banks, German, Spanish and Italian lenders weren’t required to raise capital by their governments during the last two years of the credit crisis. Instead, German lenders could voluntarily tap a 480 billion-euro bank rescue fund created by the government in October 2008.

Europe’s banking system is the largest in the world, with total on-balance sheet assets of 31.1 trillion euros at the end of 2009, making it more than three-and-a-half times the size of the U.S. banking system, according to the Institute of International Finance, an industry lobby group.

The region’s banks have written down a proportionately lower percentage of their assets than their U.S. counterparts. U.S. banks will have written down 7 percent of their assets by the end of 2010 and euro-area banks 3 percent, according to the IMF. European banks still haven’t shown analysts they have completed their writedowns.

‘Buy Time’

“The general strategy of many European banks has been to buy time and limit the worst balance-sheet hits until earnings and asset values rebound, which has caused concern among some investors,” said Konrad Becker, a banking analyst at Merck Finck & Co. in Munich. “The reclassifying of assets is one example of this.”

Some European lenders used accounting-rule changes made in October 2008, about a month after Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s collapse, to allow them to avoid writedowns on assets based on plunging market values, unless a default was deemed likely. Under pressure from EU leaders, the International Accounting Standards Board approved changes letting financial institutions in more than 100 countries that use International Financial Reporting Standards to reclassify some investments so they no longer had to book paper gains and losses as credit markets fluctuated.

Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank, for example, used the change to shift about 38 billion euros of assets, including commercial real estate and leveraged finance, into its loan book from the third quarter of 2008 to the first quarter of 2009, saving them a net 3.2 billion euros in markdowns based on valuation gains and losses through the first quarter of 2010. ING Groep NV, the biggest Dutch financial-services company, reclassified 24.4 billion euros and Societe Generale SA shifted 25.3 billion euros in assets, escaping about 2.8 billion euros in losses.

ING reclassified the assets because it plans to hold them for “the foreseeable future,” Raymond Vermeulen, a spokesman for the Amsterdam-based company, said by telephone. Deutsche Bank spokesman Armin Niedermeier referred to the firm’s previous disclosures on which assets were reclassified and the writedowns and mark-ups the bank reported. Societe Generale spokeswoman Laura Schalk declined to comment.

European Union leaders pledged on June 17 to disclose the results of the stress tests by the end of July, showing how individual banks would hold up to economic and market shocks. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said it’s important to have “maximum transparency,” after doubts about Greece’s ability to repay its debts undermined confidence in the region’s banks.

“It was mistrust between the actors in the financial markets that caused the near-meltdown,” said Mentel of Octopus. “Unless in Europe we do everything we can to rebuild confidence we risk heading to a situation like they had in Japan where confidence gradually evaporates.”

--With assistance from Gavin Finch, Jon Menon, Simon Clark, Simon Kennedy and John Glover in London, Fabio Benedetti- Valentini in Paris, Martijn van der Starre in Amsterdam, Charles Penty in Madrid, Meera Louis in Brussels and Susan Li in Hong Kong. Editors: Edward Evans, Steve Bailey.

Big Pharma Makes Another Killing

The latest outrage against the health of humanity is the paltry fine levied against GlaxoSmithKline by our protectors, the Food and Drug Administration. The drug, Avandia, which was cited in 2007 as a potential danger, has indeed become one at the rate of around 500 heart attacks and 300 cases of heart failure per month. The fine of $2.1 billion after taxes -- which may seem large to most -- is less than a third of Glaxo's annual profit.

Avandia was not banned; by a 20-12 decision it can continue to be sold to the very same segment of the population that is likely to continue harming. The fine is nothing compared to the continued profits that will result from the FDA's current refusal to pull this killer drug off the market.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece rejoiced and investors cheered over the decision, while the New York Times reported:

Investors cheered the news, though, as stock analysts said the action by the Federal Drug Administration was better than expected and the $2.1 billion charge set a likely ceiling on the company’s legal liabilities.

The stock rose late Wednesday after the advisory committee voted, and again Thursday after the announcement of the charge for legal issues. The stock ended the day up 2.3 percent, to $37.21 in a market that declined slightly overall and rose slightly in most other pharmaceutical stocks. Since a low point on Wednesday afternoon before the F.D.A. vote, GlaxoSmithKline stock has risen nearly 5 percent.

Investors are delighted that, assuming the F.D.A. opts only for a stronger warning, Avandia will remain on the market, Jeremy Batstone-Carr, a pharmaceutical sector analyst at Charles Stanley & Company in London, said.

The FDA has a history of choosing the profits of Big Pharma over the safety of the American people. But, hey, it's a multi-trillion-dollar business. That's a very long gravy train. It is a gravy train that is long enough to allow for more deaths from conventional medicine than from terrorism and illegal drugs combined. Here is a small list of of the toll:

• Pain killers: 16,000 plus per year, and rising by double-digit percentages. This doesn't include the scandal of Vioxx that caused between 25,000 and 50,000 deaths alone.
• Antidepressants: The most frequently prescribed class of drugs; 60,000 prescriptions written every hour. Millions of adverse reactions. Hundreds of thousands of deaths.
• Stimulants: 2.5 million children receive stimulants to treat ADHD. The most popular is Ritalin -- linked to a 500% increase in sudden death among children.
• Over-the-counter drugs: Acetaminophen in medications such as Tylenol can be highly toxic, resulting in the #1 cause of liver and kidney damage. Cough and cold medications have been linked to an increase in infant deaths, as well as abuse by teens -- on par with marijuana use, but far more damaging.

Now, here is a list of the dangerous drugs actually banned by the FDA, called vitamins and supplements by health-oriented people:

• Ephedra: An herbal stimulant linked to a handful of deaths. Although Ephedra is natural, it was banned, while the mass-produced, chemical version known as Sudafed is sold legally in pharmacies.
• Vitamin B-6 (pyridoxaimine): Naturally occurring in fish and chicken.
• Raw foods: Apparently raw almonds are a risk to Americans. They have been made illegal by the FDA, despite much evidence to suggest they are effective in preventing cancer. A government war on raw milk has been declared, despite a several-thousand-year history of sound nutrition. Pasteurization leads to dead food (but a long shelf-life), which is the name of the game in a consumer-driven world.

This story is so similar to the recent SEC hand slap of Goldman Sachs, that both the Goldman Sachs stock price and Glaxo's stock price rose by the exact same five percent. How could it be that oversight committees supposedly created to protect us have ruled consistently in favor of criminals and killers? The same continues to be true of the nightmare in the Gulf that is being exacerbated by another Federal oversight agency, the EPA, which continues to lie about air quality, and allow Corexit to alter the environment in a way that even experts can't calculate.

We need to grow up and admit to ourselves that Big Business, and the agencies that protect them, will continue to make a killing for their investors by their manufactured overthrow of the natural world.

Global Warming Scam : 2010 is Not the Hottest Year

Warmers and Democrats are once again getting overheated by their own propaganda; claiming 2010 is the hottest year on record. The current Cap-n-Trade promotional reads something like this (from The Hill blogs):

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported Thursday that the January-June period was the warmest worldwide on record, based on average land and ocean temperatures.

The NOAA data, which is based on records dating to 1880, ....

From NOAA's webpage:

NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are Warmest on Record

The monthly analysis from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which is based on records going back to 1880, is part of the suite of climate services NOAA provides government, business and community leaders so they can make informed decisions.

If you'd like to see a graph, click here.

According to Marc Morano at Climate Depot, the 10th of a degree difference they're talking about is the result of cherry-picking data.

Besides – this is summer, and what they're talking about is weather, not climate change.

But aside from the normally expected counter-analysis to warmist claims from those who are actually scientifically competent, there is a particular phrase in the new promo that immediately catches my attention - on record.

What record?

Even the most recent fake British inquiry into the behavior of scientists at East Anglia had to admit that their data was “misleading.” Now one needs merely to take notice of the copy-paste arguments of rank and file warmers. NOAA has routinely presented results corresponding to those of East Anglia.

One of the most important facts discovered in relation to Climategate was that East Anglia's Phil Jones went to great effort to falsify temperature records throughout the world, asking its caretakers to replace their data with his fake data and for permission to present his fake data as original data from them. The United States, NOAA included, was not on the very short list of countries that said no. (And while we're at it, NASA – i.e. the godfather of the global warming hoax James Hansen at Columbia – is also not on that list.)

The Climategate conspirators have all gone back to work as if nothing happened. Warmers are once again using their products as talking points to promote arbitrary tax increases and government take-overs. Are they really expecting the rest of us to believe any of it? (Keywords: “hockey stick”, “trick”, “hide the decline”)

The Intelligence Industrial Complex Prepares for War

In my review of Tim Shorrock’s important Spies for Hire, I summarized one of the most important parts of the narrative he tells in the book.

Shorrock describes, for example, [Mike] McConnell’s key role in the formation of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade organization that serves as a bridge between large intelligence contractors (like Booz Allen, SAIC, Computer Sciences Corporation, and ManTech) and the officers from CIA, NSA, and DHS who join them on the board of the organization. “INSA,” Shorrock explains, “is one of the only business associations in Washington that include current government officials on their board of directors.” Shorrock describes how INSA worked with the DNI (back when John Negroponte was DNI and McConnell was head of INSA and a VP at Booz Allen) to foster information sharing in the intelligence community–including with contractors. He reports that, for the first time in 2006, INSA’s contractors were consulted on the DNI’s strategic plans for the next decade. And Shorrock describes one intelligence veteran wondering “if INSA has become a way for contractors and intelligence officials to create policy in secret, without oversight from Congress.”

McConnell, after nurturing this enhanced relationship between contractors and government intelligence services, ascended to serve as DNI. He was, Shorrock points out, “the first contractor ever to be named to lead the Intelligence Community.” Once confirmed, McConnell immediately buried a report assessing the practice of outsourcing intelligence. And he worked to further expand the ties between government spying and its contractors.

[snip]

[The warrantless wiretap program] not just about Bush and Cheney ignoring laws and spying on citizens (though it is that). It’s that, in the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush Administration is creating a monstrous new Intelligence-Industrial Complex in which intelligence contractors and the government collaborate–with little oversight–to snoop at home and abroad.

Now, Shorrock’s book got far too little attention, IMO. But he did lay out in great detail the many problems with the degree to which we have outsourced our national security infrastructure to contractors (and Jeremy Scahill has, of course, tirelessly chronicled that as well).

Which is why I’m amused by the panic revealed in a memo the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a few weeks ago preparing all members of the intelligence community for an upcoming Dana Priest series covering the same terrain. The memo reveals:

• The Director of Communications for ODNI, Art House, briefed Intelligence Community public affairs officers on the article back in January
• House briefed the Deputies Committee for the intelligence community on the Priest series the week the memo was released
• House has laid out a response plan to Priest’s article including his agency and the NSC, to be coordinated with all the IC agencies
• House is already planning “a meeting or conference call to review procedural action before, during and after publication, and to compare substantive points that might be offered in rebuttal to the article”

Perhaps that’s just good messaging strategy–the kind that (as it happens) becomes a lot less effective when it is laid out ahead of time.

But what I’m perhaps most amused by is this paragraph:

This series has been a long time in preparation and looks designed to cast the IC and the DoD in an unfavorable light. We need to anticipate and prepare so that the good work of our respective organizations is effectively reflected in communications with employees, secondary coverage in the media and in response to questions. [my emphasis]

Nowhere in this memo–at least as republished by Marc Ambinder–does House even hint that Priest has her details wrong (and given that she’s been working on it for two years, I’d be surprised if she did). The only real risk that House raises is the “unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified information.”

Yet the conclusion he draws from months of preparation for an article by Priest that is presumably factually correct is that it is “designed to cast the IC and the DoD in an unfavorable light.”

I’ve got a ton of respect for Priest’s reporting and therefore would guess that the article is designed to reveal the truth about the IC and DoD. And yet the intelligence community, inside its bunker, perceives a search for the truth as a design to portray it unfavorably.

What an apt explanation, then, for the problem with excessive contracting: when a reporter avails herself of Constitutionally protected rights to act as a watchdog on our government and its contractors, the government itself assumes that must be an attack. Hell, the IC has had time to preemptively respond to some of the problems Priest is about to reveal (and, as I said, Shorrock gave them a head start two years ago).

But instead, it has decided to go to war.

65th anniversary of first nuclear test

It started with a pen and paper, a letter written by Albert Einstein to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939, explaining the urgency of work on uranium fission.

Several nations in Europe had become entrenched in the Second World War, and the United States propelled itself into work on developing a nuclear bomb.

“Tens of thousands of people worked on it,” said Robert Norris, Senior Research Associate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The largest corporations in America were recruited. So it’s not something that can be done in a laboratory here.”

Instead a large bomb weighing almost 10,000 lbs was assembled at a top secret facility Los Alamos, New Mexico.

“The nicknames for the two bombs that ended World War Two – one was called Little Boy and that was a uranium fueled weapon,” Norris said. “And then Fat Man.”

The Fat Man, or implosion bomb, used plutonium instead of uranium. At the center of it was an initiating device encased in a highly explosive shell that made the blast wave go inward.

At 5:30 am only July 16, 1945, the test was carried out.

“July 16 is really the beginning of a new era in our history,” Norris said.

Disney will open Oahu resort in 2011

In a move that sends either shivers of delight or shudders of loathing among fans of Hawaii, Disney is set to open its first resort in Oahu next year.

The 800-plus-unit property, dubbed "Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa," is designed as a Polynesian village (albeit one with high-rise towers) that will include hotel rooms and two-bedroom Disney Vacation Club Villas.

The 21-acre resort is being built in Ko Olina, a golf and vacation development that already has a Marriott resort and a man-made beach carved out of the rocky coastline.

Aulani is a different kind of development for Disney, the first that isn't linked to a theme park or its cruise line. The hotel will be far from the famous tourist areas and beaches of Waikiki, which is on the other side of Honolulu, to the east, near Diamond Head. Ko Olina is the kind of self-contained environment Disney likes for many of its developments.

In a video presentation posted on YouTube, Joe Rohde, Disney's "executive designer and vice president, creative," explained the thinking behind the new resort.

"Now the word 'aulani' specifically means a messenger of a chief ... but when you use it to apply to a place like we are making, it means the place is going to speak, to speak on behalf of something greater than itself. In this case, that greater thing is Hawaiian culture."

The YouTube video is typical of the buzz-building word-of-mouth campaign Disney has put together for Aulani. Members of D23, the Disney super fan club, were invited to preview the project at a presentation June 30 in Anaheim.

An unkind complicatedness

In the end, nothing else would do for Scotiabank but that Amar Patel – 73 years old, bald from chemotherapy, in the throes of metastatic breast cancer – should drag her aching bones down to the bank’s head office in downtown Toronto.

The trip from her airy apartment above the Indian Rice Factory, the landmark restaurant she founded in 1970 and has run ever since, was an agony of no fewer than five transfers – from the hospital bed in her living room to a commode, from commode to the chair lift for the first set of stairs, from that chair to the next chair lift for the second set, from that chair to a walker, from walker to the car.

This exercise took 59 minutes and the best efforts of her son Aman, daughter-in-law Deepa and restaurant employee Chandan Sindhwal.

I should note that despite her illness and pain, Mrs. Patel, who hadn’t been out of the apartment for almost two months, was gracious, beautiful in a red-striped caftan and, but for occasional moans when the car hit a rough patch of road, remarkably uncomplaining.

All she wanted was to do was take delivery of the silver the bank was holding for her in the form of the certificates she’d bought decades earlier.

It was, or ought to have been, an uncomplicated transaction.

Another major financial institution, TD Bank, managed to handle the same transaction within a couple of days, and delivered the bullion to Mrs. Patel’s local branch for pickup.

By this Thursday, Mrs. Patel had done the following to obtain Scotiabank’s agreement to give her what is rightfully hers:

In early March, Aman, a Toronto criminal lawyer, had attended the downtown headquarters to explain his mom’s situation. He suggested that either a bank official go to her apartment to witness her signature (he even offered to pick up and drive back the official) or consider meeting his mother in the car outside the bank to save her a bit of the journey: Both requests were rejected.

On March 17, Aman faxed the silver certificates to his mom’s local Scotiabank branch and then drove his mother there; they were advised she would have to attend the King/Bay office downtown.

For a time, Mrs. Patel gave up; she was hoping she could tackle it in a few weeks or months, when she was better and had her strength back.

When that didn’t happen, she hired a Bay Street lawyer and, through him, signed a power of attorney appointing Aman as her attorney.

In early July, Scotiabank asked first to “pre-inspect” the POA, then demanded the original; then pronounced it unacceptable because it wasn’t sealed; then insisted that a notarized copy, with covering letter from the lawyer, be produced; finally, the notarized POA had to be submitted to the home branch, then the bank’s legal department.

Even with these various approvals finally in place, Aman was told (being a lawyer, he has notes of all these conversations and e-mails) that the bank could still deny the transaction if it was deemed not to be in Mrs. Patel’s “best interest.”

So she hired another lawyer, this time to help her get what was hers.

Then the bank said it had to decide if the transaction was to be for the benefit of the attorney, from a business point of view. In other words, Scotiabank would decide if the transaction made business sense – not Mrs. Patel, or her lawyer, or Aman, who had her POA.

This Thursday, having heard nothing from the bank about whether it would honour the now-approved and vetted POA, Aman called and got Judy McBride, the head of customer service at King and Bay Streets. She told him the bank would not honour the POA, and that Mrs. Patel had to come down in person.

Aman again explained how weak his mother was, to no avail.

That afternoon, Aman, his wife and Chandan managed to carry out the five transfers and get Mrs. Patel in the car.

Once they arrived downtown, Aman went in to ask, one last time, if Scotiabank would at least dispatch people outside to do the signing in the car; absolutely not, came the answer.

They got Mrs. Patel into the commode chair and into the lovely, high-ceilinged headquarters with its polished marble floors they went.

Ms. McBride asked a number of questions, in my presence. Among them, “Do you understand what this transaction is that is taking place? We’re taking your certificates and giving you the actual bullion? Why would you want to do that? It’s more difficult for you to cart around.”

At this point, Aman’s seemingly endless store of patience was exhausted and he said, mildly I thought in the circumstances, “That’s none of your business.”

Ms. McBride said that it was, that “simply putting a POA in place doesn’t give carte blanche,” that the bank had a responsibility too, and asked Mrs. Patel, “Why would you need the physical metal?”

Ms. McBride said the bank “reserves a right to ask questions” because, she said, “We need a comfort level.”

Bank spokesman Joe Konecny denied the bank ever insisted Mrs. Patel had to come in person, said they were “willing to act” on the POA, but that “a heightened level of due diligence was required for a number of reasons,” among them, bizarrely, that the transaction wasn’t initiated at her home branch, although that branch had directed her downtown.

In any case, after about an hour, Mrs. Patel finally got her silver.

But it must have been a mortifying experience for this very dignified woman to make such a trip in her bedclothes, and the whole thing struck me as a profoundly condescending and arbitrary intrusion of bank functionaries into Mrs. Patel’s and her family’s business. And what if her son wasn’t a lawyer who knew how to fight back? What if she’d had a stroke and wasn’t able to sign the documents?

If she wanted to buy crack cocaine with that silver, or sleep with it at her side, that’s her call, because it belongs to her, not the bank. The bully-boy functionaries might want to find a comfort level around that notion.

Goldman Sachs - The Great American Bubble Machine

This article originally appeared in RS 1082-1083 from July 9-23, 2009. This issue and the rest of the Rolling Stone archives are available via All Access, Rolling Stone's premium subscription plan. If you are already a subscriber, you can click here to see the full story. Not a member? Click here to learn more about All Access.

The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money. In fact, the history of the recent financial crisis, which doubles as a history of the rapid decline and fall of the suddenly swindled dry American empire, reads like a Who's Who of Goldman Sachs graduates.

By now, most of us know the major players. As George Bush's last Treasury secretary, former Goldman CEO Henry Paulson was the architect of the bailout, a suspiciously self-serving plan to funnel trillions of Your Dollars to a handful of his old friends on Wall Street. Robert Rubin, Bill Clinton's former Treasury secretary, spent 26 years at Goldman before becoming chairman of Citigroup — which in turn got a $300 billion taxpayer bailout from Paulson. There's John Thain, the asshole chief of Merrill Lynch who bought an $87,000 area rug for his office as his company was imploding; a former Goldman banker, Thain enjoyed a multi-billion-dollar handout from Paulson, who used billions in taxpayer funds to help Bank of America rescue Thain's sorry company. And Robert Steel, the former Goldmanite head of Wachovia, scored himself and his fellow executives $225 million in golden-parachute payments as his bank was self-destructing. There's Joshua Bolten, Bush's chief of staff during the bailout, and Mark Patterson, the current Treasury chief of staff, who was a Goldman lobbyist just a year ago, and Ed Liddy, the former Goldman director whom Paulson put in charge of bailed-out insurance giant AIG, which forked over $13 billion to Goldman after Liddy came on board. The heads of the Canadian and Italian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman — not to mention …

But then, any attempt to construct a narrative around all the former Goldmanites in influential positions quickly becomes an absurd and pointless exercise, like trying to make a list of everything. What you need to know is the big picture: If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain — an extremely unfortunate loophole in the system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.

The bank's unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere — high gas prices, rising consumer credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you're losing, it's going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it's going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

They achieve this using the same playbook over and over again. The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest, selling themselves as men above greed, just a bunch of really smart guys keeping the wheels greased. They've been pulling this same stunt over and over since the 1920s — and now they're preparing to do it again, creating what may be the biggest and most audacious bubble yet.

If you want to understand how we got into this financial crisis, you have to first understand where all the money went — and in order to understand that, you need to understand what Goldman has already gotten away with. It is a history exactly five bubbles long — including last year's strange and seemingly inexplicable spike in the price of oil. There were a lot of losers in each of those bubbles, and in the bailout that followed. But Goldman wasn't one of them.

BUBBLE #1 The Great Depression

Goldman wasn't always a too-big-to-fail Wall Street behemoth, the ruthless face of kill-or-be-killed capitalism on steroids —just almost always. The bank was actually founded in 1869 by a German immigrant named Marcus Goldman, who built it up with his son-in-law Samuel Sachs. They were pioneers in the use of commercial paper, which is just a fancy way of saying they made money lending out short-term IOUs to smalltime vendors in downtown Manhattan.

You can probably guess the basic plotline of Goldman's first 100 years in business: plucky, immigrant-led investment bank beats the odds, pulls itself up by its bootstraps, makes shitloads of money. In that ancient history there's really only one episode that bears scrutiny now, in light of more recent events: Goldman’s disastrous foray into the speculative mania of pre-crash Wall Street in the late 1920s.

This great Hindenburg of financial history has a few features that might sound familiar. Back then, the main financial tool used to bilk investors was called an "investment trust." Similar to modern mutual funds, the trusts took the cash of investors large and small and (theoretically, at least) invested it in a smorgasbord of Wall Street securities, though the securities and amounts were often kept hidden from the public. So a regular guy could invest $10 or $100 in a trust and feel like he was a big player. Much as in the 1990s, when new vehicles like day trading and e-trading attracted reams of new suckers from the sticks who wanted to feel like big shots, investment trusts roped a new generation of regular-guy investors into the speculation game.

Beginning a pattern that would repeat itself over and over again, Goldman got into the investmenttrust game late, then jumped in with both feet and went hogwild. The first effort was the Goldman Sachs Trading Corporation; the bank issued a million shares at $100 apiece, bought all those shares with its own money and then sold 90 percent of them to the hungry public at $104. The trading corporation then relentlessly bought shares in itself, bidding the price up further and further. Eventually it dumped part of its holdings and sponsored a new trust, the Shenandoah Corporation, issuing millions more in shares in that fund — which in turn sponsored yet another trust called the Blue Ridge Corporation. In this way, each investment trust served as a front for an endless investment pyramid: Goldman hiding behind Goldman hiding behind Goldman. Of the 7,250,000 initial shares of Blue Ridge, 6,250,000 were actually owned by Shenandoah — which, of course, was in large part owned by Goldman Trading.

The end result (ask yourself if this sounds familiar) was a daisy chain of borrowed money, one exquisitely vulnerable to a decline in performance anywhere along the line. The basic idea isn't hard to follow. You take a dollar and borrow nine against it; then you take that $10 fund and borrow $90; then you take your $100 fund and, so long as the public is still lending, borrow and invest $900. If the last fund in the line starts to lose value, you no longer have the money to pay back your investors, and everyone gets massacred.

In a chapter from The Great Crash, 1929 titled "In Goldman Sachs We Trust," the famed economist John Kenneth Galbraith held up the Blue Ridge and Shenandoah trusts as classic examples of the insanity of leveragebased investment. The trusts, he wrote, were a major cause of the market's historic crash; in today's dollars, the losses the bank suffered totaled $475 billion. "It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination which was implicit in this gargantuan insanity," Galbraith observed, sounding like Keith Olbermann in an ascot. "If there must be madness, something may be said for having it on a heroic scale."

The Jobless Effect: Is the Real Unemployment Rate 16.5%, 22%, or. . .?

Raghavan Mayur, president at TechnoMetrica Market Intelligence, follows unemployment data closely. So, when his survey for May revealed that 28% of the 1,000-odd households surveyed reported that at least one member was looking for a full-time job, he was flummoxed.

"Our numbers are always very accurate, so I was surprised at the discrepancy with the government's numbers," says Mayur, whose firm owns the TIPP polling unit, a polling partner for Investors' Business Daily and Christian Science Monitor. After all, the headline number shows the U.S. unemployment rate today is 9.5%, with a total of 14.6 million jobless people.

However, Mayur's polls continued to find much worse figures. The June poll turned up 27.8% of households with at least one member who's unemployed and looking for a job, while the latest poll conducted in the second week of July showed 28.6% in that situation. That translates to an unemployment rate of over 22%, says Mayur, who has started questioning the accuracy of the Labor Department's jobless numbers.

Even Austan Goolsbee Has Been Skeptical

Mayur isn't alone in harboring such doubts, nor is he the first to wonder about inaccuracies. For years, many economists have pointed to evidence that the government data undercounts the unemployed. Economist Helen Ginsburg, co-founder of advocacy group National Jobs For All Coalition, and John Williams of the newsletter Shadow Government Statistics have been questioning these numbers for years.

In fact, Austan Goolsbee, who is now part of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece titled "The Unemployment Myth," that the government had "cooked the books" by not correctly counting all the people it should, thereby keeping the unemployment rate artificially low. At the time, Goolsbee was a professor at the University of Chicago. When asked whether Goolsbee still believes the government undercounts unemployment, a White House spokeswoman said Goolsbee wasn't available to comment.

Such undercounting of unemployment can be an enormously dangerous exercise today. It could lead to some lawmakers underestimate the gravity of the labor market's problems and base their policymaking on a far-less-grim picture than actually exists. Economically, and socially, that would make a bad situation much worse for America.

"The implications of such undercounting is that policymakers aren't going to be thinking as big as they should be," says Ginsburg, also a professor emeritus of economics at Brooklyn College. "It also means that [consumer] demand is not going to be there, because the income from people who are employed isn't going to be there."

Indeed, it will add additional stress to an already strained economy. Businesses that might start ramping up after seeing the jobless number drop could set themselves up for disappointment when customers don't appear or orders don't flow in.

College Grads Serving Fries

Plus, having a job today is quite different from what it was just a few years ago: Many Americans have had their hours cut and are working for less pay. A Pew Research survey found more than half of all adults in the labor force had either lost a job or suffered a reduction in income because of the recession.

Ginsburg says the biggest source of undercounting comes from people who can't find a full-time job that they're qualified to do, for instance recent college graduates who take part-time jobs at fast-food joints or retail stores. Today, the Labor Department estimates that 8.6 million people are in this category.

The federal government counts such people as employed. However, polls show that these folks actually consider themselves "unemployed" and "looking for a job," and probably accounted for a large chunk of TechnoMetrica's respondents.

Jobless Workers Who Disappear

Another major source of undercounting is the unemployed who've given up looking for jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics headline number counts as unemployed only people who have actively looked for a job in the previous four weeks. About 2.6 million people had pursued jobs in the past 12 months but, discouraged by the lack of opportunity, had stopped looking altogether.

"Isn't it interesting that if you stopped looking for a job, you evaporate as a jobless person and are just not counted," says Gerald Celente, director of Trends Research Institute in Kingston, N.Y. Celente believes this kind of undercounting has suited the government politically. "It's what government does: Downplay disasters and amplify success."

According to the Pew Research Center, a large number of people are out of jobs for a longer period during this economic downturn. The typical unemployed worker today has been out of work for nearly six months. That's almost double the previous post-World War II peak for this measure, which was 12.3 weeks in 1982-83.

Indeed, if all of the truly unemployed were counted, the rate would be significantly higher. The BLS, in a data point titled "U-6," says it counted the total unemployment rate in June at 16.5%.

Misreading Americans' Anxiety

However, John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, says when accounting for the long-term unemployed, the jobless rate runs up to as much as 22% currently. Williams's newsletter, which analyzes flaws in government economic data, points out that such a rate isn't that far from the 25% it hit during the Great Depression.

Both Celente and Ginsburg believe lawmakers' not-dire-enough view of unemployment is one reason why they didn't extend federal unemployment benefits. Of course, party politics is another deterrent. Ginsburg says the Administration's decision to tackle the health care reform over unemployment reflects its lack of priority.

By taking his eye off one of the most fundamental issues affecting the country, President Obama has seen his popularity sink. The most recent Public Policy Polling survey says 45% of voters approve of the job he's doing, while 52% disapprove -- the first time Obama's disapproval ratings have exceeded 50% in this survey.

It's obvious that Americans view unemployment more urgently than either lawmakers or the president. And if pollsters like Mayur or economists like Ginsburg and Williams are right, it will take longer to fix this hole because it's already bigger than Washington thinks.

See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/dooQTx

Lost in Taxation

If it seems as if the tax code was conceived by graphic artist M.C. Escher, wait until you meet the new and not improved Internal Revenue Service created by ObamaCare. What, you're not already on a first-name basis with your local IRS agent?

National Taxpayer Advocate Nina Olson, who operates inside the IRS, highlighted the agency's new mission in her annual report to Congress last week. Look out below. She notes that the IRS is already "greatly taxed"—pun intended?—"by the additional role it is playing in delivering social benefits and programs to the American public," like tax credits for first-time homebuyers or purchasing electric cars. Yet with ObamaCare, the agency is now responsible for "the most extensive social benefit program the IRS has been asked to implement in recent history." And without "sufficient funding" it won't be able to discharge these new duties.

That wouldn't be tragic, given that those new duties include audits to determine who has the insurance "as required by law" and collecting penalties from Americans who don't. Companies that don't sponsor health plans will also be punished. This crackdown will "involve nearly every division and function of the IRS," Ms. Olson reports.

Well, well. Republicans argued during the health debate that the IRS would have to hire hundreds of new agents and staff to enforce ObamaCare. They were brushed off by Democrats and the press corps as if they believed the President was born on the moon. The IRS says it hasn't figured out how much extra money and manpower it will need but admits that both numbers are greater than zero.

Ms. Olson also exposed a damaging provision that she estimates will hit some 30 million sole proprietorships and subchapter S corporations, two million farms and one million charities and other tax-exempt organizations. Prior to ObamaCare, businesses only had to tell the IRS the value of services they purchase. But starting in 2013 they will also have to report the value of goods they buy from a single vendor that total more than $600 annually—including office supplies and the like.

Democrats snuck in this obligation to narrow the mythical "tax gap" of unreported business income, but Ms. Olson says that the tracking costs for small businesses will be "disproportionate as compared with any resulting improvement in tax compliance." Job creation, here we come . . . at least for the accountants who will attempt to comply with a vast new 1099 reporting burden.

Meanwhile, the IRS will be inundated with useless information, because without a huge upgrade its information systems won't be able to manage and track the nanodetails.

In a Monday letter, even Democratic Senators Mark Begich (Alaska), Ben Nelson (Nebraska), Jeanne Shaheen (New Hampshire) and Evan Bayh (Indiana) denounce this new "burden" on small businesses and insist that the IRS use its discretion to find "better ways to structure this reporting requirement." In other words, they want regulators to fix one problem among many that all four Senators created by voting for ObamaCare.

We never thought anyone would be nostalgic for the tax system of a few months ago, but post-ObamaCare, here we are.

Cash crisis in NHS leaves patients lying on operating tables

A cash crisis in the NHS has left patients lying on the operating table before doctors realised vital equipment had not been ordered, according to a leaked report.

Women in labour have been forced to wait while epidural equipment was borrowed from other hospitals, while other patients have been denied chest drains and radiology supplies, according to doctors at South London Healthcare Trust.

Minutes of a meeting between medical staff and the trust’s chief executive say “cash flow” problems at the trust which has a £50 million deficit, mean vital equipment is regularly not ordered.

A separate letter sent to managers of the trust, one of the largest in the country, says consultants have been misled into carrying out operations when it was not safe to go ahead because of bed shortages.

NHS watchdog the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has been asked to investigate the concerns, after eight doctors contacted their local MP.

Staff at the NHS trust, which last year merged trusts running three hospitals in South London and Kent, are being asked to make major savings to tackle a worsening financial situation.

Minutes of a meeting of the medical staff committee of Princess Royal University Hospital in Bromley say managers acknowledged that “crude measures” introduced to cut spending had affected clinical supplies, meaning that stocks had run out when they were needed.

The document records: “The trust in different areas had run out of under water sealed chest drains, epidural packs, gynaecological disposables, radiological disposables, and the response to this was 'this was a cash flow issue’”.

Doctors told managers “again and again” that consultants were unable to know that equipment was missing until the last item had been used, when their patient was already lying on the table, according to the minutes of June 16 meeting.

The document states that Chris Streather, the trust’s chief executive said the situation had improved to the extent that the trust could now pay some of its bills, but that he could not promise that the problem would not recur.

It describes “significant risks” to patient safety because of shortages of beds, and “chaotic” failures dealing with such crises at the trust, which also runs Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup, in Kent, and Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, London, and NHS units in Orpington and Beckenham, in Kent. Patients affected include a woman who had undergone major cancer surgery who could not be found a bed.

A separate letter sent from a senior consultant to trust managers describes shortages of fracture equipment, ventilation masks and endoscopic cameras used to diagnose cancer.

It says doctors fear that the trust’s hospitals will be left “in the same situation as Mid Staffs” where hundreds of patients died amid failings in basic care.

James Brokenshire, Conservative MP for Old Bexley and Sidcup, contacted the CQC after eight clinicians told him they feared patients were being put at risk, but were afraid of the repercussions if they were named.

The junior home office minister met the trust’s chief executive last month, who said the issues were being addressed, but Mr Brokenshire remained so concerned that he asked regulators to investigate the concerns.

Mr Brokenshire said: “It is not often that you get a group of clinicians making a representation like this, and the issues were sufficiently concerning that while there was no reason to question what the trust said, I felt it was appropriate to make a formal reference to the CQC, to highlight the concerns and give some external assurance.

"I don’t want to cause unnecessary alarm, but I think it is important that an external body examines this.”

The CQC said the trust was already one of several under “close scrutiny” meaning it underwent more regular unannounced inspections.

In April it was told to improve its reporting of serious untoward incidents, supervision of its maternity services and increase the number of staff working on patient safety.

The trust is not currently under investigation, but a CQC spokesman said the concerns passed on by the MP were being examined.

Peter Walsh, chief executive of charity Action against Medical Accidents expressed concern at the risks to which patients had been exposed.

He said: “The sorts of circumstances being described here are deeply concerning; what worries me is that we will see more and more of this in the current economic crisis, when the NHS is trying to make cuts. We have to find a way to ensure that the safety of patients always trumps attempts at efficiency”.

A trust spokesman said the organisation was making progress since the hospitals had merged but faced many challenges, and that some staff were “uncomfortable” with the scale of changes being made.

He said: “Some consultants at the trust have raised concerns recently about the ordering and shortage of some medical supplies. We accept this concern and following a recent meeting, our medical director took up the specific issues about procurement and found that there were some technical problems with the ordering of equipment which were identified and have now been resolved.

Man Tries to Pay Tax With 200,000 Pennies to Protest 'Skyrocketing' Taxes

Toronto Sun, Man Tries to Pay Tax With 200,000 Pennies:

A Quebec man, fed up with his skyrocketing property taxes, carted more than 200,000 pennies down to City Hall to pay his bill. But he was denied, and asked to simply cut a cheque. ... Under the Currency Act, nobody is obliged to accept more than 25 pennies as payment for any product or service. Normand Czepial, unfortunately, was 213,600 over the limit.

The Source of Our Despair in the Gulf

For the first time in 87 days, little or no oil could be escaping into the Gulf of Mexico from BP's Macondo well. The new capping stack was deployed on July 11 from onboard the Transocean Discoverer Inspiration.

With a new containment cap atop the damaged well, many are hopeful.

But all is not well, after all.

National Incident Commander Thad Allen said Friday that the pressure within the cap is not increasing, as was expected.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

The idea is that the pressure (in pounds per square inch [PSI]) within the cap should balance out between 8-9,000 PSI, which would show the well has maintained integrity. BP hoped to reach 9,000 PSI, but stated that well integrity would be maintained with 7,500+ PSI. Unfortunately for BP, if the pressure tops out below that level, as it is now at 6,720 PSI, this could be an indication of a sub-sea leak somewhere deeper inside the well casing, meaning the well has failed. One concern associated with this lower pressure is that it may indicate that the well has been breached, and that oil and gas are leaking out at other undetermined points.

Given BP's proven propensity towards lying, skeptics - who are consistently needed to keep BP's rhetoric in check - are also pointing toward other factors that could mean oil is continuing to spew into the Gulf near the well.

"With the pressure now virtually level at 6,700 [psi], it's at the lower end of the ambiguity range, so it seems there is a good chance there is leak-off," writes the Daily Hurricane. "That makes a lot of sense to me since there [are] 1,200 feet of open hole from the bottom of the 9 /7/8" liner to TD at about 18,300 feet. That's not to mention possible casing damage up hole. Think of it like a garden hose with a nozzle on the end. As long as the nozzle is open, the hose looks fine. As soon as you close the nozzle, the hose will leak through any pinholes or around the faucet as pressure builds inside. In his statement late yesterday, Admiral Allen indicated they were probably going to go back to containment, which means they'll be flowing the well to the various ships they have on station."

Like virtually every other aspect of BP's oil catastrophe in the Gulf, we'll have to wait and see how bad this really is.

On Monday, we took a flight out to what is referred to now as "the source": the former site of the Deepwater Horizon rig. It's taken me this long to be able to write about what we saw, because it was, frankly, traumatizing.

Oil sheen and sub-surface plumes of oil were visible long before we arrived at the source, located approximately 45 miles off the southeast coast of Louisiana.

In what has been a consistently maddening theme of our trip, flying out to the source found us viewing countless oil platforms, and in some cases, drilling rigs, all of which comprised the oily backdrop of BP's disaster.

The stench of the oil began to infiltrate my nose and burn my eyes long before they arrived at the source. Black oil clouds lurked below choppy blue seas in every direction as a virtual cityscape of ships and drill rigs loomed on the horizon. They appeared to rise out of the Gulf as we approached.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

We were cleared to fly at 1,500', well below the FAA mandated 3,000'. My stomach sank as we began to bank to our right, starting the first of countless clockwise circles around the war-like scene.

A giant flame - the burning off of methane and benzene - roared off the side of a rig, leaving a chemical gas floating lazily to the south as it rose.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Cory, our young pilot, flew us directly through this cloud. The plane shuddered in the turbulence. I felt sick and dizzy after one breath, and with each future pass I held my breath, all through the entirety of the southern portion of the circle, to avoid chemical exposure.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

The scene felt like death - an epic example of manmade destruction, damage, and mayhem let loose upon the earth.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

It is as unnatural a scene as one can imagine. That the Gulf, its marine life, ecosystems, and all the life that depend upon it are not under constant assault from this catastrophe is unthinkable.

As our small plane perpetually banked to the right, Erika shot hundreds upon hundreds of photos of this terrible scene.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

While staring at the appalling scene scudding by below us, I scribbled notes like:

Death in the blue
Oil makes blue Gulf appear like cancer-ridden areas
Couldn't look more unnatural
Burning eyes
Trouble breathing
Gulf looks bruised

The thick, humid, chemical-laden air astounded me. I wondered about the health of the hundreds of people down in the ships, working around the clock to try to stop the volcano of oil.

After we'd taken as many photos as we could, our eyes sufficiently burning, we all agreed to head back towards the coast. The flight was long enough, hovering over countless wells and platforms, for me to ponder what our dependence on oil is costing the planet.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

We diverted our journey to fly over the Chandeleur Islands, to see yet more chaotic booming, oil-burnt marsh, sheen and threatened birds.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Adm. Thad Allen warned of too much optimism towards the cap. "It remains likely that we will return to the containment process using this new stacking cap connected to the risers to attempt to collect up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day until the relief well is completed," he said.

I find it interesting that he, BP and President Obama have all cited this capacity to collect up to 80,000 barrels of oil per day, despite the fact that the high-end government estimate of daily flow is 60,000 barrels.

Yet the disaster continues. So far, approximately 1.82 million gallons of total chemical dispersant have been applied, 348 controlled oil burns have been conducted, and if daily flow estimates of 100,000 barrels per day, provided by independent scientists, are correct, 34 Exxon Valdezes worth of oil have already been injected into the Gulf of Mexico.

As of July 14, approximately 572 miles of Gulf Coast shoreline were oiled, a number which does not include cumulative impacts. While most of the oil remains submerged (for now), we already have vast areas of coastline oiled: 328 miles in Louisiana, 108 miles in Mississippi (nearly their entire coastline), 67 miles in Alabama and 69 miles in Florida.

I hope others are as enraged as I am by the ongoing ticker tape of BP's stock price in news reports about the disaster, like this one (hyperlink 'this one' with
http://www.theage.com.au/world/gulf-states-wait-in-hope-as-cap-stifles-disastrous-flow-20100716-10ea5.html) from Friday: "News of the development just before Wall Street's close lifted BP shares. They added $US2.74, or 7.6 per cent, to close at $US38.92, still well below the $US60.48 they fetched before the rig explosion."

Why should we give a damn about the value of BP's stock while their criminal negligence is annihilating the Gulf of Mexico?

While the cap-praising, and BP stock value glee continues, biologists recently reported the finding of at least another 300-400 oiled pelicans and hundreds of terns in the largest seabird nesting area along the Louisiana coast.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

This finding underscores the fact that the official tallies of oiled wildlife significantly underestimate the broad scope of the destruction. So far, roughly 3,000 oiled birds have been collected across the Gulf, so this finding alone is a significant percent increase.

"This is not like Exxon Valdez, where you had tens of thousands of birds killed all at once," said Ken Rosenberg, director of conservation science at the Cornell laboratory. "It's more insidious because it is literally happening in waves and it's happening over and over again as the birds are moving around."

Friday, Louisiana's St. Bernard Parish government reported that there have been at least 31 oil sightings in parish waters and on shorelines in just the past 48 hours. More oil-soaked birds, both dead and alive, have been reported, and the oil continues to spread. Much of this is happening around the Chandeleur Islands, where we'd already logged the futile booming.

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Photo by Erika Blumenfeld © 2010

Already, scientists are reporting how BP's oil disaster is altering the food web in the Gulf. On July 14, the Associated Press reported, "Scientists are reporting early signs that the Gulf of Mexico oil spill is altering the marine food web by killing or tainting some creatures and spurring the growth of others more suited to a fouled environment. Near the spill site, researchers have documented a massive die-off of pyrosomes - cucumber-shaped, gelatinous organisms fed on by endangered sea turtles."

The scope and scale of this disaster are impossible to communicate. While flying in giant, arcing circles around the source, I saw nothing but oil in every direction. Jonathan Henderson works for the Gulf Restoration Network. While looking out at the literal sea of oil beneath us, he reminded us that, at the moment, 75,000 square miles of the Gulf are covered in oil.

US & British Intel Agencies Are Working On A Fake Video To Lead To War With Iran

Fake video for an unnecessary war of aggression.

Beware the propaganda and make some noise about it. You CAN help to stop the next war.

'Scary' growth of gangs in war zones

Chicago cop who served in Afghanistan and Iraq has warning: Gang members are coming home with military training

Being in a street gang is now forbidden for members of the U.S. armed forces. But you might not guess that if you were to visit U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to soldiers who have recently served there.

Jeffrey Stoleson, a Wisconsin corrections official, returned from Iraq in January with photos of gang graffiti on armored vehicles, latrines and buildings. Stoleson, a sergeant with a National Guard unit, was there for nine months to help the Army set up a prison facility outside Baghdad.

"I saw Maniac Latin Disciples graffiti out of Chicago," Stoleson said, adding that there was a lot of graffiti for Texas and California gangs, as well as Mexican drug cartels.

A Chicago Police officer -- who retired from the regular Army and was recently on a tour of Afghanistan in the Army Reserve -- said Bagram Air Base was covered with Chicago gang graffiti, everything from the Gangster Disciples' pitchfork to the Latin Kings' crown.

"It seems bigger now," said the officer, who previously served a tour in Iraq, where he also saw gang graffiti.

Now back in Chicago, the officer said he has arrested high-level gang members who have served in the military and kept the "Infantryman's bible" -- called the FM 7-8 -- in their homes. The book describes how to run for cover, fire a weapon tactically and do the "three- to five-second rushes" seen in war movies.

"It's scary," he said.

In 2006, Stoleson saw similar graffiti in Iraq during another tour of duty there. That year, the Chicago Sun-Times reported on gangs in the military -- and published several of Stoleson's photos of gang graffiti.

Congress eventually banned members of the military from belonging to street gangs. And last November, the Defense Department added the ban to its rules.

Spokesmen for the Army and Defense Department said they could not provide figures on how many soldiers have been thrown out of the military or otherwise disciplined as a result of gang membership.

Stoleson, who stressed he was not speaking for the Wisconsin Department of Corrections or the Army, said it appears the problem is worse than ever. He warned that soldiers who return to gang life back home are especially dangerous because they know military tactics that they can use against the police and the public -- as a Marine did in 2005 when he killed a police officer and wounded three others in a California ambush.

"Gang members are coming home now with one or two tours," he said. "Some were on the field of battle."

Civilian contractors in Iraq are part of the gang problem overseas, Stoleson said. He said he was involved in destroying a large quantity of drugs confiscated from U.S. contractors in Iraq.

Stoleson, who is a member of the International Latino Gang Investigators Association, said some police departments in California are now tracking whether gang members were in the military.

A second Chicago Police officer, who searches homes for drugs and guns, said gang members targeted by his team are sometimes current or former members of the armed forces. That becomes part of the team's pre-raid briefings because the suspect is an increased safety risk with military training, the officer said.

"We recently arrested a guy in the reserves for crack [cocaine]," the officer said. "He was a gang-banger."

Stoleson said that, on his previous tour in Iraq, he was friends with a soldier who associated with the Maniac Latin Disciples when he grew up in Chicago.

"We talked a lot about it. He said the military was the only way he could break free," Stoleson said.

But those aren't the people Stoleson worries about.

"My problem is the guys who go into the military to continue the lifestyle," he said.

T.J. Leyden, a former white supremacist, was one of those guys. He said he recruited fellow members of the Hammerskin Nation into the Marines when he was in the corps in the late 1980s and early 1990s and sent stolen Kevlar body armor and helmets to fellow skinheads back home.

"I wore white supremacist T-shirts, and I hung a swastika flag out of my barracks," said Leyden, who was kicked out of the Marines for drinking and fighting. "I hated America. The only reason I was a Marine was because they were the baddest of the bad."

Leyden, who lives in Utah now, said he quit the white-supremacy movement in 1996 because he was worried "my sons were becoming me."

He began working against the movement and founded Straight Talk Consulting, giving lectures to students and advising the FBI, the National Guard and other organizations about gangs in the military.

Leyden said his informants have told him that skinheads and street gangs are still entrenched in both the regular military and the National Guard.

"The military needs to wake up," he said.

The Rot from Within: Character Disorders of the Republic

In reading a number of books on the destructive manipulative behavior of people with personality disorders I became increasingly struck by how the behavior of our politicians and our nation, especially with respect to foreign policy, was so precisely described.

The lesson from this study is not just sobering, but taken alongside the invincible tide of history – the collapse of every empire – the prognosis for our nation is bleak.

The most important book for me was titled In Sheep’s Clothing: Understanding and Dealing with Manipulative People by Dr. George Simon. The title and tactics identified within it accurately describes not only our national leaders, but our national character. Our nation has not just one, but multiple destructive personality disorders.

I do not mean this in the metaphorical sense, but in the direct clinical sense. Dr. Simon indicates that in a repressive Victorian society individual citizens suffer more neurotic kinds of disorders because they have natural human sexual desires that are relentlessly suppressed and vilified, resulting in anguish over reconciling natural human urges with extreme social sanctions against them.

In more recent decades, with the "anything goes" revolution in the 1960′s and onward, the kinds of personality disorders in his clinical work came to be more dominated by the opposite end of the spectrum, known as character disorders. Neurotic disorders are from "too much conscientiousness". Character disorders are from "not enough conscientiousness".

Character disorders are destructively aggressive. The most interesting to me is a type called "covert aggression" where underhanded, deceitful tactics are used to serve highly narcissistic and flatly evil objectives. Covert aggressors use "innocent" cover to give plausible deniability to base motives of power, greed, and even sadism. The foreign policy of our nation is exactly so described – aggressive wars cloaked in "humanitarian" garb.

If you look at the tactics for covert manipulation, they describe the tactics of our national leaders in both parties perfectly:

Lying, denial, selective attention/inattention, rationalization, minimization, diversion, evasion, guilt-tripping, shaming, playing the victim, vilifying the victim, playing the servant role, seduction, project the blame, feigning innocence, playing dumb, brandishing anger…

There are almost no national politicians that base their positions on an over-arching set of principles maintained consistently across the issues. An example would be Ron Paul. I can’t think of any others. In general they are lying, hypocritical, deceitful cowards cloaking their manipulative actions in sheep’s clothing.

There are numerous exact parallels between our collective national actions and individual manifestations, especially in children. One of them my friends in primary education have alerted me to is bullying. Apparently the problem is so pervasive that many schools now have mandatory policies in place for how to deal with it. Small wonder. Look at anyone who has dared standing up intellectually to the status quo of our corrupt, bankrupt, and murderous empire.

The clinical literature is emphatic on the point that children learn by example and copy behavior. The "best" education, meaning the most permanent, is inculcated by watching what we do instead of what we say. Politicians and voters who actually cared about education would start by changing their behavior.

As a nation, almost everything we do is driven by hidden agendas with superficially noble intentions. Just look at acts passed by Congress such as the "Patriot Act" or even entire institutions such as the Federal Reserve.

The Patriot Act is clearly something the founding patriots fought a revolution to overthrow in terms of the Bill of Rights. The Federal Reserve is not an institution of the Federal Government, and there is nothing on reserve. As a rule of thumb, you can predict that the nature of a Federal Act is the opposite of what it claims to be.

The children of this nation are also learning well the lesson that a million Iraqis or Afghanis are not worth the life of one American, and how to rationalize with specious arguments their utter destruction. It cannot escape them by direct inference that the lives of one million Americans are not worth their own, and that you get what you want domestically by the exact same arguments in foreign policy.

At one time, the way I unsuccessfully dealt with manipulative people in my life was struggling for them to "see" their behavior was wrong and trying to understand them with the wrong model – an assumption they had integrity and scruples. Likewise in the political realm I debated, participated in discussion boards, held elective office, wrote, and professed with a belief people could be brought to reason with enough effort on my part.

But one of the key insights from the literature on personality disorders is that they know best themselves exactly what they are doing. What is missing is the moral compass. You are wasting your time arguing with them, "informing" them, or trying to change them. The same has been true with my political experience and all the futile ancillary efforts.

Obama has not only tolerated the criminal gangsterism of the Bush Administration before him, but he has both extended it and made their innovations permanent. The person who commits a crime is not as great a threat as he who sanctions it and makes it a permanent part of our national character.

People with these aggressive kinds of clinical personality disorders don’t change. You can control the damage they do by placing limits on their behavior, by limiting your exposure to them, etc. but they will always remain who they are.

Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. But it’s worse than that. There is a self-selection bias in politics: people who love power are attracted to politics. We have progressively granted politicians more power over our lives. In the long run the combination of self-selection bias alongside accelerating power is fatal to a republic.

In terms of interpersonal relations, these books on manipulative behavior have changed my life. But in terms of what they mean for our nation, it is a terminal diagnosis. Historically empires collapse not because the people had a change of heart, but because a greater force such as bankruptcy or defeat in war put an end to it.

I remember well the Vietnam War and the "middle east crisis" as a child. I knew there was something wrong. I mean the feeling I got about the way it was presented day after day on the television. I learned to recognize and label that feeling by reading literature on covert manipulation.

It wasn’t the terrible atrocities and people dying. That was overt and clearly horrific. It was the gut feeling I had that there was something else very wrong I couldn’t quite see. Now that I am older I can see the base motivations underlying our wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere that are posed as humanitarian or self-defense affairs.

But I am amongst a nation now with a far higher percentage of people tolerating egregious behavior. There is less of the constitution left, not more since the 1960′s. The "Never Again" attitude after the Vietnam War has been replaced with "Again and Again" today.

Many amongst what is left of the antiwar movement are most concerned by the abject amorality of the majority of society. But this is exactly what happens to the offspring of amoral parents and an amoral government.

The biggest surprise to me in Dr. Simon’s book was the last chapter in which he spoke to this very thing: how pervasive the symptoms of these destructive personality disorders had become in our society, especially in politics, and the importance of changing the message to our children.

But what the children are getting instead is the slickest death-merchant we have yet seen in our republic, simultaneously winning the Nobel Peace Prize while accelerating the longest war in our history. Obama is the poster boy for covert aggression: war crimes in the name of award-winning humanitarian objectives; announcing a surge at the same time he insists there will be a draw-down.

Obama represents the development of an even more insidious personality disorder in our national character – a more polished version of the same destructive malady. We did not learn from 9/11, we did not learn from Bush’s tragic aggression, and the children most of all learn that the response to increasingly obvious destructive behavior is to become even better at it.