INDEX

The US-Business Council – US Companies’ China Outlook: Market Growth. . .

(Hot Article) The Nation – City of Ruins

OpEdNews.com – Welcome to Phase 2

AlterNet.com – Armageddon for Home Owners?

Global Research.ca – Ruthless Economic Austerity Measures: Crushing Exploitation of. . .

Common Dreams – The Day Egypt Disappeared

Deep Journal – Wikileaks Cables: Saudi Arabia Cannot Pump Enough Oil to Keep a lid on Prices

Taking Note (Blog) – The Hamilton Solution

The National Interest – The Swat Victory, Revisited

Economic Policy Institute – President Obama’s 2012 Budget: An Analysis of the Budget cuts

NOTE to the Reader

Due to a busy schedule, starting Saturday February 19th 2011 this magazine will publish once a week.
Two formating changes will come with the weekly version:
The First will be the retirement of the old Front Page Index (as Evident in this issue)
The Second will occur slowly and involve the creation of Dividers between different article types (blogs, research, ect.)

Podcasters Way will continue this Saturday on a Weekly Basis

If you have any suggestions for articles or format changes please let me know at the following email
thetenmagazine@gmail.com
Thank you
 Back to Index

US Companies' China Outlook: Market Growth,

Tempered by Bureaucratic, Cost Challenges
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
http://www.uschina.org/public/documents/2008/10/china-outlook.html

Washington, DC, October 9, 2008 - The US-China Business Council's (USCBC) annual survey of the China
business environment finds that its member companies continue to increase sales and profitability in the third-
largest market for US exports--a market that is significantly larger when goods that are made and sold in China
by US companies operating there are included.

At the same time, companies remain frustrated by bureaucratic barriers to market expansion and shortages of
local managerial and other personnel. And, though optimistic about growth prospects, USCBC companies
express rising concerns about PRC government policies under development that might restrict future growth in
many key industries.

The full report is available at www.uschina.org/public/documents/2008/10/uscbc-member-survey.pdf.

USCBC members highlighted the following concerns:

 Administrative licensing – Last year's number-two issue, companies find China's business- and
product-licensing bureaucracy a major headache, with no improvement over the past 12 months. The
slow, opaque, and inconsistent licensing process impedes both market entry and subsequent expansion.
 Human resources – Finding and keeping top and mid-level local talent in a competitive hiring
environment remains a day-to-day challenge. Salary increases in some fields can top 20 percent per
year. This was the top issue in the survey for the past three years.
 Rising costs – As forecast in last year's survey, rising costs rocketed into the top 10 this year, in the
form of higher costs for labor, materials, and taxes.
 Rule of law – Legal issues remain firmly in the top 10, with insufficient regulatory transparency, uneven
enforcement of laws, and inadequate intellectual property rights protection all in the top 10--despite
some improvements in all three.

The Path Ahead: Optimism, Yet Rising Concerns about Economic Nationalism

 USCBC members remain optimistic about expanding their businesses in China, with 90 percent
optimistic or somewhat optimistic about prospects over the next five years.
 Concerns about protectionism in China remain a top 10 issue, however. Policies under development
that might restrict investment expansion, favor domestic technologies and product standards, and protect
certain "pillar" industries and "national champions" have 82 percent of respondents very or somewhat
concerned.
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Once Again, Some Results Correct Popular Misperceptions

 US companies invest in China to reach the China market Ninety-two percent of respondents cite this
as their main objective for establishing operations there. Far behind are investments made to export to
other markets (26 percent) or the US market (23 percent). So, who is doing all that exporting from
China? Much of it is from Asian companies that have been exporting to the United States for decades--
but now have facilities in China. The rising costs cited above may be affecting those companies most.
 Companies can make money in China Eighty-eight percent of respondents say they are profitable in
China, and 81 percent say their profit margins in China are the same or better than their company's
global margins.
 US companies serve as models for better business practices and working conditions in China
Eighty-three percent of respondents pay higher wages than their domestic counterparts. More than 90
percent bring their global workplace safety practices to their China facilities, which two-thirds say
exceed local requirements.

The US-China Business Council (USCBC, www.uschina.org) is the leading organization of US companies
engaged in business with the People's Republic of China. Founded in 1973, USCBC provides extensive China-
focused information, advisory and advocacy services, and events to roughly 250 US corporations operating
within the United States and throughout Asia.
 Back to Index

City of Ruins
Chris Hedges via The Nation Magazine

November 4, 2010

http://www.thenation.com/article/155801/city-ruins

Camden, New Jersey, with a population of 70,390, is per capita the poorest city in the nation. It is also the most
dangerous. The city's real unemployment—hard to estimate, since many residents have been severed from the
formal economy for generations—is probably 30–40 percent. The median household income is $24,600. There
is a 70 percent high school dropout rate, with only 13 percent of students managing to pass the state's
proficiency exams in math. The city is planning $28 million in draconian budget cuts, with officials talking
about cutting 25 percent from every department, including layoffs of nearly half the police force. The proposed
slashing of the public library budget by almost two-thirds has left the viability of the library system in doubt.

Camden is where those discarded as human refuse are dumped, along with the physical refuse of postindustrial
America. A sprawling sewage treatment plant on forty acres of riverfront land processes 58 million gallons of
wastewater a day for Camden County. The stench of sewage lingers in the streets. There is a huge trash-burning
plant that releases noxious clouds, a prison, a massive cement plant and mountains of scrap metal feeding into a
giant shredder. The city is scarred with several thousand decaying abandoned row houses; the skeletal remains
of windowless brick factories and gutted gas stations; overgrown vacant lots filled with garbage and old tires;
neglected, weed-filled cemeteries; and boarded-up store fronts.

Corruption is rampant, with three mayors sent to prison in a little more than two decades. Five police officers,
two of whom are out on bail and three of whom have pleaded guilty, have been charged with planting evidence,
making false arrests and trading drugs for information from prostitutes. County prosecutor Warren Faulk has
had to drop charges against some 200 suspects, including some who'd spent years in prison, because of the
misconduct. The city is dominated by an old-time party boss, George Norcross III. Although he does not live in
Camden, his critics contend that he decides who runs for office and who does not, who gets city and state
contracts and which projects get funded. Tens of millions in state funds have been used for city projects, from
an aquarium on the waterfront to a new law school to an expansion of the Cooper University Hospital and
construction of a medical school. In 2002 the state approved a $175 million recovery package to save the city,
but according to a yearlong investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer, only 5 percent had been used to combat
crime, improve schools, provide jobs or bolster municipal services. Those who oppose Norcross insist he has
turned the poverty and despair of Camden into a business. His critics charge that the new medical school, for
example, was approved because it was part of a back-room deal Governor Jon Corzine cut with Norcross in
Corzine's failed re-election bid. When I met with him, Norcross dismissed the allegations and defended his huge
infrastructure projects as crucial to revitalizing the bleak downtown.

Camden, like America, was once an industrial giant. It employed some 36,000 workers in its shipyards during
World War II and built some of the nation's largest warships. It was the home to major industries, from RCA
Victor to the New York Ship Building Corporation and Campbell's Soup, which still has its international
headquarters in a gated section of Camden but no longer makes soup in the city. Camden was a destination for
Italian, German, Polish and Irish immigrants, who in the middle of the last century could find decent-paying
jobs that required little English or education. The city's population has fallen by more than 40 percent from its
1950 level of 120,000. There are no movie theaters or hotels. There are lots with used cars but no dealerships
that sell new vehicles. The one supermarket is located on the city's outskirts, away from the endemic street
crime.
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There are perhaps a hundred open-air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los
Nietos and MS-13. Knots of young men in black leather jackets and baggy sweatshirts sell weed and crack to
clients, many of whom drive in from the suburbs. The drug trade is one of the city's few thriving businesses. A
weapon, police say, is never more than a few feet away, usually stashed behind a trash can, in the grass or on a
porch. Camden is awash in guns, easily purchased across the river in Pennsylvania, where gun laws are lax.

Camden is the poster child of postindustrial decay. It stands as a warning of what huge pockets of the United
States could turn into as we cement into place a permanent underclass of the unemployed, slash state and
federal services in a desperate bid to cut massive deficits, watch cities and states go bankrupt and struggle to
adjust to a stark neofeudalism in which the working and middle classes are decimated.

***

I found the city's homeless congregated in a collection of blue and gray tents, protected by tarps, set up under
the shelter of a Route 676 ramp. The tent city, or "Transitional Park," was overseen by Lorenzo "Jamaica"
Banks, 57, who bought damaged tents from Wal-Mart and Kmart at a reduced price, repaired them and provided
them to the homeless—at $10 a pop, police told me. Banks insisted he offered them for free.

When I walked into the encampment with my colleague, comics artist Joe Sacco, Banks was chopping
firewood. A man with receding black hair and a beard, Banks was dressed in carpenter's jeans and a plaid shirt
over a gray hooded sweatshirt. There were about fifty tents in the park, and Banks owned forty of them. He
spoke in the drumbeat staccato of a man who seems about to snap at any moment. He claimed to be a Vietnam
vet, to have been a heroin addict now "clean for thirty-seven years," to have ended up after the war in a mental
institution, to have jumped off the Ben Franklin Bridge in a suicide attempt because of "a lot of flashbacks" and
to have spent "twenty-two years, six months, three hours and thirty-three seconds" in prison for shooting to
death his best friend because he was "killing his baby in front of me."

"I'm better now," he assured us as the commuter train into Philadelphia rumbled along the tracks overhead. "I'm
on medication. I live here because it reminds me of the jungle."

Banks, who called himself "the mayor," ran the tent city, which had a population of about sixty, ranging in age
from 18 to 76, like a military encampment. He had a second-in-command, his "CEO," who took over when
Banks had to buy supplies. There were weekly tent inspections on Saturday, weekly meetings every Tuesday
night and a list of sixteen rules written on plywood tacked to a tree. These included restrictions on fighting and
arguing, admonishments to clean up the trash, an order not to sell food stamps and several other blunt
prohibitions, including: "Don't bring your tricks here" and "No borrowing money or sex from anyone."
Residents received two warnings for infractions before they were evicted. Drugs were banned. Alcohol was not.
Banks had even set up a bank account for the enclave. At night there were shifts when someone—Banks said he
preferred a vet—had to stand guard. There was a Dumpster filled with trash at the edge of the encampment,
white folding tables with white plastic chairs and five-gallon plastic water containers outside many tents.
Firewood lay scattered about the site.

"Take a look at the American Dream," Banks said as he guided us through the tents, stepping around rusted
bicycles and shopping carts. "In today's society no one is exempt from Transitional Park. Everybody is one
paycheck away from being here."

Officially, Camden has 775 homeless, but there are only 220 beds in the county, so city officials nervously
tolerated the encampment, despite its illegality, until late spring, when they swiftly dismantled it. Those tossed
out scattered, and about a half-dozen migrated to live in squalor under the concrete ramps of Route 676, where
it runs across the river into Philadelphia.
 Back to Index
Camden's streets are filled with the unemployed. Ali Sloan El, who recently got out of prison, is chatting with
some men in the street, several of whom are Muslims like him and have shaved heads and long black beards.
The group of men around Sloan El have just witnessed a botched robbery at a barbershop a few minutes before
Joe and I arrive. A young gunman, nervous and unsure of himself, had pulled out a pistol and tried to rob the
barbers. He was chased out of the shop by a group of men and tackled on the sidewalk. One of the barbers is at
the police station filing a report.

The mood inside the shop is hostile. "How did you know about the stickup?" asks a barber who says his name is
Sam. "We were told about it on the street," I answer. He arches his eyebrows in disbelief. "No one would talk to
you on the street. No one would tell you nothin'," he says coldly. "A mother with a 2-year-old in a stroller told
us," I tell him. "Yeah," he admitted reluctantly, "maybe that's right, maybe a mother would talk."

The rumor on the street, Sloan El informs us, is that the robber was high on a narcotic called wet. The drug of
choice of Camden's criminal class, wet is made by soaking marijuana in embalming fluid, which is a mixture of
formaldehyde, methanol, ethanol and other solvents. Phencyclidine, or PCP, known on the street as angel dust,
is often added to the mix. Wet is smoked dry but the leaves, which glisten, give the drug its liquid name. Wet
numbs its users and endows them with what seems to them like superhuman strength. Their body temperatures
rise, their blood pressure drops and they frequently hallucinate. The high can last up to six hours. Two Camden
police officers who do not want to be named tell us they fear confronting street thugs on wet. "You shoot them
and they just keep coming," one says warily.

Those who do not join street gangs live like minnows, darting through the currents to avoid the predatory fish.
Darnell Monroe, 33, wearing a new pair of brown Timberlands, a black leather jacket, jeans and a black-and-
white checked kaffiyeh as a scarf, sits with us in the barbershop. One of the barbers immediately turns up the
radio to a deafening roar, I suspect to drive us out. Monroe, also a Muslim, is a tall man with a shaved head and
a full black beard. He spent four years in prison for dealing drugs. He became a father when he was 13. The
mother was 16. "I'm sociable," he says when I ask him about surviving in Camden, "but I keep moving. I don't
want to draw the wrong kind of attention. I don't want a conflict."

Monroe was shot three times in the stomach in 1998, when he was coming out of a bar and tried to break up a
fight. "To this day I don't know who shot me," he says. He awoke in the hospital twelve weeks later. His kidney,
liver and upper and lower intestine had been badly damaged. He lifts his shirt and exposes a massive scar on his
stomach that looks like a brownish mountain range with jagged edges. "It was a .380 automatic," he says. Until
he was laid off last year, Monroe had a job as a forklift operator in the scrap yards by the port. On the back of
his right hand is a tattoo of a padlock with his current wife's initials, EGK, and under his left eye is a tattooed
teardrop he got in jail, in 1993, when his sister died.

The city is busily cannibalizing itself in a desperate bid to generate revenue. Giant scrap piles rise in hulks along
the banks of the Delaware. The piles, filled with discarded appliances, rusted filing cabinets, twisted pipes, old
turbines and corrugated sheet metal, are as high as a three- or four-story house, and at their base are large pools
of brackish water. A crane, outfitted with a large magnet, sways over the pile and swings scrap over to a
shredding machine. A pickup and a U-Haul filled with old refrigerators, gates, screen doors and pipes are
unloading in front of a small booth when we arrive. There are about twenty scrap merchants in the city, and they
have created a market for the metal guts of apartments and houses. As soon as a house is empty—even if only
for a few days between renters or because it is being painted—the hustlers break in and strip every pipe,
radiator, screen door and window. Over the past three or four decades thousands of owners, faced with the
destruction, have walked away from their properties. Camden produces a million tons of scrap a year. Its huge
shredding machines in the port can chop up automobiles and stoves into chunks the size of a baseball. Ships
from Turkey, China and India pull into the port and take the scrap back to smelters in their countries.
The only white people visible daily on the city's streets are the hookers. Congregated near the highway ramps
on Ferry Street, most are heroin addicts and nearly all are infected with AIDS, hepatitis C or other sexually
transmitted diseases. The women sleep in abandoned apartments without running water, heat or electricity.
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If arresting someone on wet is the least pleasant duty for Camden police, arresting hookers is the second.
"Ninety-nine percent of them are heroin addicts," a sergeant tells us. "I try not to deal with them. They have
diseases. You pat them down and you find needles. You can get stuck with a needle. And they have MRSA, a
skin disease with open sores. We have to get our cars disinfected afterward. Ninety-five percent have
outstanding warrants, although they usually give us a wrong name."

***

Despite Camden's bleakness, despite its crime and its deprivation, despite the lost factory jobs that are never
coming back—despite all this, valiant souls somehow rise up in magnificent defiance. In a room across the
street from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, where meals are provided for the homeless on Saturdays, a group of
African-American women bow their heads over a table and hold hands. They are led by Lallois Davis, 67, a
heavyset woman who radiates an indomitable, unbroken spirit.

"The poor have to help the poor," Davis says, "because the ones who make the money are helping the people
with money."

Davis raised four children and then, when a neighbor died, leaving behind her two orphaned grandsons, Davis
took them in and raised them as well. She wears a large cross around her neck. She is known as Aunt Lallois.

"My heart is heavy," says a 69-year-old woman named Brenda Hayes, her head bowed and her eyes shut.
"There is so much heaviness. It is wounding me. How can I not worry?"

"Yes, Jesus. Yes, Jesus," the other women respond.

"I know you didn't carry us this far to drop us now," she says. "I know there is no burden so heavy that we can't
carry it with your help. I thank you, Lord, for friends who have carried me through the roughest times."

"Yes, Jesus. Nothing is impossible with you, Jesus," the women say.

"Bodies," Hayes says after the prayer. "Bodies out back. Bodies upstairs. People stabbed. I don't go out at night.
The last one was twenty feet away from me on my floor. There was one kid, he lived in the back of the projects,
18 years old. They buried him two months ago. Gunshot. There were four kids I knew murdered, one in the
parking lot who was killed last year. He was 12 or 13. He was sleeping—some say he was living—in a car."

"There are parents who are addicts who send their children out to sell drugs," Hayes adds. "I know a mother
who is a prostitute. Her oldest daughter sells weed to go to school, and one day the mother stole the weed and
sold it to buy crack."

Father Michael Doyle, an Irish priest, has been in the Sacred Heart parish for thirty-five years. He has witnessed
the violence of poverty devastating his congregation. Father Doyle was a member of the Camden 28, a group of
left-wing Catholics and anti–Vietnam War activists who in 1971 raided the city's draft board to destroy files. He
was sent to Camden as punishment by church leaders who disapproved of his activism.

"Today's a very hard time to be poor," says Father Doyle, seated in the church rectory. "Because you know
you're poor. You hear people my age get up and say, 'We were poor. We put cardboard in our shoes.' We talk
like that. But we didn't know we were poor. Today you do. And how do you know you're poor? Your television
shows you that you're poor. So it's very easy to build up anger in a, say, a high-voltage kid of 17. He knows he's
poor, he looks at the TV and all these people have everything and I have nothing. And so he's very angry.... I'm
talking about the violence that rises out of the marketing that shows the kid what he could have, creates a huge
anger that explodes easily. That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. I discovered the anger was
so near the surface, you just rub it and it explodes. And there's no respect for you if you have no money."

I ask him why the rage is invariably self-destructive. "They can't get at it," he said. "You have an enemy, and
that enemy is greed and prejudice and injustice and all that type of thing, but you can't get at it. There's no head,
there's no clarity, so you take it out on your neighbor. It's just horrendous what people do."
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"Women have some dignity in a poor ghetto because they bear children and raise them," Father Doyle goes on.
"Men are adding nothing and feeding from the trough. A woman walks down the street pushing a little cart, and
a child on it—she's somebody. But the man standing watching her is nobody."

It is a bleak, rainy afternoon when we visit Harleigh Cemetery. Walt Whitman's tomb, based on a design drawn
by William Blake, is here with its heavy stone front and peaked roof with the poet's name in imposing stone
letters. So is the grave of another Camden poet, Nicholas Virgilio, who, as Father Doyle says, "mined beauty
out of the gutters of Camden." Virgilio died of a heart attack in 1989. The priest designed his grave in the shape
of a podium. One of the poet's verses is engraved on the stone:

lily:
out of the water...
out of itself.

Virgilio, who wrote his poems in his basement under a naked light bulb next to his washing machine, chronicled
the slow strangulation of his city. The hookers knitting baby booties on a bus; sitting alone as he orders eggs
and toast in an undertone on Thanksgiving; latchkey children "exploring the wild on public television"; the
frozen body of a drunk found on a winter morning in a cardboard box labeled "Fragile: Do Not Crush"; as well
as laments for his brother Larry, killed in Vietnam. I open his thin book, Selected Haiku, to a passage and place
it on the marble top of his grave. Droplets of rain splatter the page:

the sack of kittens

sinking in the icy creek
increases the cold
 Back to Index

Welcome to Phase 2
By David Glenn Cox – OpEdNews.com
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Welcome-to-Phase-2-by-David-Glenn-Cox-110213-391.html
Something strange is going on around here, the type of thing that make you ask yourself, "what's up?" The
quitting virus is moving through Washington and Wall Street. When these folks begin to voluntarily give up
wealth, power and privilege you can bet your bones that there is some bad juju just over the horizon. I had this
same feeling back in 2005 when Congress suddenly got it into their heads that they needed to reform America's
bankruptcy laws as soon as possible.

Or in 2004 when George W. Bush had bragged of the "ownership society" yes, thanks to his programs more
American's than ever before owned their own homes. He was proud of that and took credit for it, as something
that he had done his own self. This was a duck the shoe moment, three years later the narrative had become
greedy Americans who took out loans they knew they could never pay back. Sweet innocent, naïve, bankers and
mortgage brokers who were taken in by these greedy American home scamming con artists.

The other day over on Wall Street, our nations capital. Wells Fargo & Co. Chief Financial Officer Howard I.
Atkins resigned for personal reasons, taking an unpaid leave of absence. Wells Fargo had reported record
income for last year of $12.4 billion. It was Atkins who had helped to engineer the takeover of the crippled
Wachovia bank in 2008. Banks too big to fail buying up banks not to big to fail. Much like Steinbeck wrote
about in "The Grapes of Wrath" of small farmers pushed off the land by the large farmers until all that was left
were huge corporations.

Atkins said he resigned for personal reasons which is even further confounded by his up coming retirement.
He's nearly sixty, isn't that the age when most working people retire? He'd planned to retire in August when his
benefits kick in after ten years of service. After a long and successful career of a decade Atkins will retire with a
severance package of $22 million dollars. This will help to tide him over until his Social Security benefits kick
in. Insiders are puzzled as to why Atkins would leave so suddenly and under such mysterious reasons.

Bloomberg- "This is rather sudden and it raises the question of why?" said Charles Elson, director of the
Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. Elson owns Wells Fargo shares.
"You don't just leave and take an unpaid leave of absence. CFOs don't usually depart in this manner." It must be
a virus, Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh also turned in his notice to America's banker in chief Ben
Bernanke. Warsh was the youngest Fed Governor ever appointed and is just forty years old and now leaves that
position. It is a position like Pope or a head football coach, you either get promoted or fired but you don't quit.
Warsh is reported to disagree with Boss Bernanke on his quantitative easing program.

It is one of those strange ironies that if you took all the economists in the world and laid them end to end they
wouldn't reach a conclusion. Quantitative easing was used by the Federal Reserve in 2008 when the Bush
administration claimed that our economy was near collapse. It involves expanding the money supply, normally
the central bank would lower interest rates to stimulate the economy but since the rates were all ready at zero
that wouldn't work. In the years before the financial crisis the Federal Reserve had bought between $700-$800
billion dollars worth of treasury bonds.

The government can only print as many dollars as it has customers to buy its treasury notes. By Bernanke
buying treasury notes it signals to the government to start the printing presses. This purchase was made before
the crisis, once the crisis began the Federal Reserve bought $600 billion in mortgage backed securities at face
value. It allowed the "too big to fail" banks to peddle their bad paper on to someone else's books.

Quantitative easing also gives the banks an opportunity to look good. With billions of extra dollars available at
virtually a zero percent interest, the banks can sit on their own reserves because there is always plenty of money
 Back to Index
free for the asking. Remember now, that this was done to prevent an economic collapse and to prevent an end of
the world scenario. By June of 2010 the Federal Reserve had purchased $2.1 trillion in mortgage backed
securities and treasury notes. Now guess who will be asked to pay for this largesse? That's right, you will, they
bought up bad debt and refinanced the banks with free money and left a debt to the American public of $22,000
per million dollars borrowed or your cost is roughly 462 billion dollars! That's not the debt itself, of course,
that's just the difference between what the bank was charged to borrow versus the true market cost.

Kind of makes all those economizing efforts by the President come into focus, doesn't it? But big Ben stopped
when he saw the economic recovery was on the horizon. Ben and Barack skipped merrily arm in arm through
old Washington town singing joyously of the economic recovery. Ben even bemoans the sad fact that there is no
recovery in the job market for working people. Strangely, with the economy in full recovery mode Bernanke
says that we need $600 billion more in quantitative easing.

It does seems strange that if we needed this economic chemotherapy to keep our economy from dying in 2008
that the doctor would prescribe it again after he now claims that the patient is almost well. Kevin Warsh is
quitting over it and folks are quitting all over town.

"Nor will I retire from politics. After my family and faith, my desire to advance conservative principles is the
animating force in my life (even ahead of NASCAR). To those who say, "You can't stop now, there is so much
to do and we're on the cusp of taking control of the Senate,' I simply note that there will always be unfinished
business in advancing the cause of freedom." Republican Senator John Kyl

Democratic Senator Chris Dodd stepped down last month, Dodd was a member of the Senate Banking
committee and Kyl was on the Senate finance committee. Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan also announced
his retirement in January saying, "Although I still have a passion for public service and enjoy my work in the
Senate, I have other interests and I have other things I would like to pursue outside of public life."

On July the first of last year the Dow Jones average was at 9,773 closing today at 12,229 a market increase of
nearly 2,500 points based on what? Based on what, other than free money? In January of 2000 there were over
one and a half million new home starts in the United States. Last January there were 588,000. Listen to what the
commerce department says,

"For instance, the January Blue Chip forecast (an average of many forecasters) calls for new housing starts to
jump to 680,000 in 2011 from 588,000 in 2010, a 15.7 percent leap (not too shabby). This same group expects a
further 31 percent increase in 2012 (definitely not shabby)." Commerce Department.

Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) -- "Home prices fell in almost half of U.S. cities in the fourth quarter as the number of
foreclosures rose to a record, hurting the confidence of buyers. The median price of a single-family home
dropped from a year earlier in 71 of 152 metropolitan areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, the
group said in a report today. Prices in Cumberland, Maryland, tumbled 20 percent, the biggest decline,
followed by a 14 percent drop in Kankakee, Illinois. The median price nationwide rose 0.2 percent to $170,600,
as cities including New York and Boston posted gains.

Mounting foreclosures are depressing home values and discouraging buyers who don't want to make a deal if
they believe prices have further to fall. The S&P/Case-Shiller index of home values in 20 cities fell 1.6 percent
in November from a year earlier, the biggest 12-month decrease since December 2009, data released last month
showed."

Home prices have declined longer and gone lower as a percentage than in the last Great Depression.

"The flow of homes into foreclosure remains extremely high," said Zach Pandl, an economist at Nomura
Securities International Inc. in New York. "The housing market is in very poor shape."
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Guess who is holding all of that bad paper? The number of homes in foreclosure rose in December to a record
2.2 million. The Federal Reserve described the U.S. real estate market as "depressed" in a Jan. 26 statement.
These mortgage backed securities that Mr. Bernanke bought depend on stable market prices and foreclosure
rates.

Over the next few years $1.4 trillion in commercial Real Estate loans will come due. Currently, half are under
water, occupancy rates for office space is running at 18 percent. Rents have declined 40 percent for office space
and 33 percent for retail space. Unlike home mortgages, commercial Real Estate loans are for a set period of
three to ten years after that initial period the entire loan balance becomes due. Under normal circumstances the
developer would simply apply for a new loan, but what banker in their right mind wants to refinance a
commercial Real Estate loan?

The stock market is defying gravity, the banks are denying reality, the Federal Government is just in denial. The
Federal Reserve is bailing out the banks as fast as they can, trying to keep the game going just a little bit longer.
Critical mass is coming and those in the know are going, getting out of Dodge while the gettings good.

You can see it and hear it in their smiles and happy talk, "well, I gotta go now" they say, as they sidle towards
the door. Before the next elections the ax will fall, welcome to Phase 2!
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Armageddon for Home-Owners? 12 Facts That

Show We're in the Midst of the Worst Housing
Collapse in US History
By Michael Snyder
http://www.alternet.org/economy/149839/armageddon_for_home-
owners_12_facts_that_show_we%27re_in_the_midst_of_the_worst_housing_collapse_in_us_history/?page=ent
ire

The following are 12 facts which show that we are in the midst of the worst housing collapse in U.S. history....

#1 Approximately 11 percent of all homes in the United States are currently standing empty.

#2 The rate of home ownership in the United States has dropped like a rock. At this point it has fallen all the
way back to 1998 levels.

#3 According to the S&P/Case-Shiller index, U.S. home prices fell 1.3 percent in October and another 1 percent
in November. In fact, November represented the fourth monthly decline in a row for U.S. housing prices.
Many economists are now openly using the term "double-dip" to describe what is happening to the housing
market.

#4 The number of homes that were actually repossessed reached the 1 million mark for the first time ever
during 2010.

#5 According to RealtyTrac, a total of 3 million homes were repossessed by mortgage lenders between January
2007 and August 2010. This represents a huge amount of additional inventory that somehow must be sold.

#6 72 percent of the major metropolitan areas in the United States had more foreclosures in 2010 than they did
in 2009.

#7 According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, at least 8 million Americans are at least one month behind
on their mortgage payments.

#8 It is estimated that there are about 5 million homeowners in the United States that are at least two months
behind on their mortgages, and it is being projected that over a million American families will be booted out of
their homes this year alone.

#9 Deutsche Bank is projecting that 48 percent of all U.S. mortgages could have negative equity by the end of
2011.

#10 Some formerly great industrial cities are rapidly turning into ghost towns. For example, in Dayton, Ohio
today 18.9 percent of all houses are now standing empty. 21.5 percent of all houses in New Orleans, Louisiana
are standing vacant.
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#11 According to Zillow, U.S. home prices have already fallen further during this economic downturn (26
percent) than they did during the Great Depression (25.9 percent).

#12 There are very few signs that the employment situation in the United States is going to improve any time
soon. 4.2 million Americans have been unemployed for one year or longer at this point. While there has been
some nominal improvement in the government unemployment numbers recently, other organizations are
reporting that things are getting even worse. According to Gallup, the unemployment rate actually rose to 9.6%
at the end of December. This was a significant increase from 9.3% in mid-December and 8.8% at the end of
November.

But even many Americans that do have jobs are finding out that it has become very, very hard to qualify for a
home loan.

In an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the past, banks and financial institutions have become very stingy with
home loans. While it was certainly wise for them to make some changes, the truth is that perhaps the pendulum
has swung too far at this point. The U.S. housing industry will never fully recover if they can't get their
customers approved for mortgages.

Congress is talking about passing even more laws that will make it even more difficult to get home loans. Even
though they give speeches about how they want to help the U.S. housing industry, the truth is that Republicans
and Democrats are both backing proposals that would make home mortgages much more expensive and much
more difficult to obtain as a Bloomberg article recently explained....

Government officials and lawmakers want to make the market less vulnerable to another credit crisis, and all the
options lead the same general direction: Borrowers will need larger down payments than in the bubble years,
have higher credit scores, and pay extra fees to cover risks and premiums for federal guarantees on government-
backed mortgage bonds.

While all that may sound reasonable, the truth is that the U.S. middle class has become so cash poor that the
vast majority of them cannot afford homes without the kind of mortgages that were available in the past.

Not that we should go back and repeat the mistakes of the past 20 years. It is just that nobody should expect the
U.S. housing market to "bounce back" in an environment that has fundamentally changed.

The housing market is not like other financial markets. It is difficult to artificially pump it up with funny
money. If the U.S. housing market is going to rebound, it is going to take lots of average American families
getting qualified for loans and going out and buying houses. But they can't do this if they do not have good
jobs. Today, only 47 percent of working-age Americans have a full-time job at this point. Without a jobs
recovery there never will be a housing recovery.

In fact, there are all kinds of warning signs that seem to indicate that the U.S. economy could get even worse in
2011. Many economists are now openly using the word "stagflation" for the first time since the 1970s. Back in
the 70s we had both high unemployment and high inflation at the same time.

Well, we have already had very high unemployment, and thanks to the relentless money printing of the Federal
Reserve, it looks like we are going to have high inflation as well.

Middle class American families are going to be spending even more of their resources just trying to survive, and
this is going to make it more difficult for them to purchase homes.
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In fact, in recent years average Americans have been getting significantly poorer. Over the past two years, U.S.
consumers have withdrawn $311 billion more from savings and investment accounts than they have put into
them. That is very troubling news.

Now the price of food is soaring and the price of oil is about to cross $100 a barrel again. So what is going to
happen if we have another major financial crisis and we witness another huge spike in the unemployment rate?

The Federal Reserve is trying to smooth all of our problems over with a flood of paper money, but it isn't going
to work. Yes, increasing the money supply will produce some false highs on the stock market and some false
economic growth statistics for a while, but the tremendous damage that will be done to the economy is just not
worth it.

In any event, let us all hope that we see some really great real estate deals over the next couple of years, because
in the times ahead land will be something very good to own. In fact, down the road it will be much better to
own land than to have your money sitting in the bank where it will continuously decline in value.

Use your paper money wisely. It will never have more value than it does today.

So what do all of you think? Is the "housing Armageddon" almost over, or do housing prices still need to
decline a bit more? Feel free to leave a comment with your opinion below....
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Ruthless Economic Austerity Measures: Crushing

Exploitation of the European People – But For How
Long?
by Garda Ghista
Global Research, June 1, 2010
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=19464

In mid-May, 2010, European leaders met with International Monetary Fund (IMF) leaders and finally reached
an agreement comprising a £750 billion rescue package for the euro. Since then, announcements have taken
place every single day regarding ruthless, merciless new austerity measures which the common people of
Europe will have to now face. Workers and non-workers alike will be paying heavily for the financial games of
the bankers and speculators.
Eurozone countries along with Britain must cut their budgets by £400 billion in order to meet a 2013
compliance deadline, and it is the public who will be plundered of that 400 billion, particularly pensioners, the
unemployed, the disabled – all those who desperately depend presently on social services provided by their
governments. Greece is the forerunner for the rest of Europe, as it will cut its deficit by £30 billion over the next
three years, punishing the weak and helpless humanity by slashing wage and pensions, eliminating vital social
service programs and increasing already outlandish sales taxes. Spain is following suit, having just announced
cuts totalling £80 billion to be taken from the salaries of state employees and by freezing pensions. Previously
every newborn baby in Spain received £2,500 automatically from the government. The program has been
swiftly and silently axed with nary a word coming in the press.
Portugal has frozen all hiring and public salaries and increased sales taxes so as to reduce its budget deficit by
£2 billion. Italy has already begun cutting civil service jobs, cutting salaries, raising the retirement age and
adding new cuts to the health care system. France will reduce it’s budget deficit from 8 percent to 3 percent of
GDP by 2013, once again by raising the retirement age, cutting housing benefits, employment compensation
and slashing museum funding. Germany intends to cut still more social service provisions such as family, child
welfare and disability benefits along with annuities and pensions. Britain over the next four years will be
cutting a whopping £100 billion, once again making the little people pay via slashing 300,000 public service
jobs and freezing public sector pay.

In the US official retirement age is 67 years old. However, millions work longer because they can no longer
make ends meet when retiring. Now the EU Commission has said that the retirement age in Europe must rise
still higher, such that not more than one third of an adult life be spent in retirement. This suggests raising
retirement / pension age to 70 years. Is it not convenient for the wealthy controllers of society? How many
millions will fall ill before the age of 70 and have no means of survival on early retirement? The word that
comes again and again to mind is ―inhuman.‖ How can we as a civilization, a global civilization, be so
inhuman to our fellow man? What did we miss, what did we fail to learn in our schools and universities or from
our parents, that at the end of it all we are so inhuman?

What is the consequence of all these ruthless, merciless cuts, and why do we call them ruthless and merciless?
 Back to Index
Because they will lead directly to the unbounded impoverization and ensuing suffering of the common people –
the little people who have no voice, no power, no weapon, to stop the barbaric brutality being meted out to
them. What kind of civilization do we have that in country after country the wealthy leaders enact the cruellest
of financial measures? An immediate effect will be deep impoverishment of the elderly on a massive scale. This
is inhuman. Human beings have a right to live out their lives in mental peace and physical equipoise. No elderly
person should have to be filled with fear of being thrown out of his house or apartment, being denied basic
medical care, or even the fear of facing the slow and agonizing process called starvation.

If we dig a little deeper into the so-called financial crisis, we find that reams of money exist, and that what is
occurring right now in every country is a systematic redistribution of income and wealth from the bottom of
society to the top, i.e., from the poor people to the obscenely wealthy elite. for several decades. All
governments, left and right, have laws in place which excuse income and property taxes for the rich while
placing the entire burden of this income source on the meek and humble of the earth – the poor people.
Governments and corporations have slashed wages for the past 30 years and created all kinds of new jobs
paying absolute pittance, leading to massive individual credit card debt through no fault of the poor. For these
sweet, suffering souls, it is always and always about making the choice between paying the rent or putting food
on the table. This is the life of the poor. Poverty makes no distinctions from one country to another. Poverty is a
universal phenomenon that must be stopped dead in its tracks.
What is the root of the problem except the banks? Governments across Europe pumped billions into the banks
to keep them afloat, creating a huge new European debt of £183 billion. Now the banks, working hand in hand
with governments and the EU, have turned right around to plunder the masses. In every country the ruling elite
rely on social democrats and unions to enact their merciless austerity measures. We can no longer distinguish
between right and leftwing governments. All are engaging in the same behaviour towards the helpless
humanity, gently telling them ―TINA – There Is No Alternative.‖ Unions make sure that any protests held last
just a few hours or at most just a few days so that nothing serious develops – nothing like a European economic
revolution or political revolution so as to throw out the economic exploiters of the masses. The middle class in
all countries aids and abets the unions and ensures election of so-called democratic governments. The goal is to
prevent at all costs a real political movement from spreading across Europe, symbolized even perhaps by a new
European political party, which might have revolution as Plan B if Plan A – the redistribution of wealth to the
masses – does not succeed. To achieve this goal, governments are further busy stoking up tensions between
nations and communities. This strategy succeeds time and again throughout history to divert the masses from
the crushing economic exploitation that engulfs them in tears and wipes the smiles from their faces forever.
Isn’t it time for the exploited masses to put an end to the European Union along with its self-mandated currency
called the euro? Isn’t it time for the common people to stand up for their social, economic and political
rights? Should they go on demanding those rights from the plutocracy that presently macro-manages their lives,
or should they work with single focus to completely dismantle and destroy the capitalist economic
structure? Could anything be more urgent? Capitalism is grinding the bones of the people right into the ground
and breaking their hearts into millions of sharp, jagged pieces – hearts that were meant for loving and laughing.

Who Will Lead the Revolution?

When we talk of revolution, we have to be extremely careful. Nine times out of ten throughout history
revolutions fail. Why? Because their leaders lacked morality, sincerity, dedication, vision and practical
strategies for building a new and better society. If the leaders of revolution cannot lead the people towards
brighter alternatives, towards workable solutions, for what then do we shout ―revolution‖? It will all be in vain,
with thousands of lives lost for nothing. Prout founder Shri Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar says that the sufferings of
the people are the direct result of the sins of the leaders. Similarly, we can say that the continued sufferings of
the people in the post-revolutionary phase are due to the defects of the leaders, even if they might have initially
had sincere intentions. It is not enough for leaders to wage a revolution. They need to know exactly where they
are leading the masses. They need to have a clear vision of a future world incorporating an economic structure
 Back to Index
that brings economic peace to all. Isn’t this the minimum requirement of those determined to lead the masses
into revolution?
Presently we have political leaders who don’t know squat about how to create a better society. Most went into
politics for money, not for service to humanity. They have no qualifications, meaning they have no love, no
compassion, no mercy on the poorest of the poor. So we have to look at the external as well as internal motives
of those who shout revolution and those who long to lead the masses into a rebellion for bringing social,
economic and political liberation. It is not enough for the popular leaders of the masses to daily bash the extant
politicians who wreak economic havoc on the masses. Countless Ph.D.s in economics and political science
adorn the internet with their scholarly articles exposing economic exploitation around the world. Those same
Ph.D.s have no clue of the future, of how to build a new world imbibing economic justice. It is not enough for
those leaders to unite the masses on the sentiment of anti-exploitation, they must additionally formulate and
then enunciate to those masses a glorious vision of the future society post-revolution. What will change, how
will it change? Can they describe the new economic structure that takes birth on the ashes of the dying capitalist
structure? Will their vision work? What does history tell us? Will studying the economic-political systems of
sweet indigenous peoples everywhere help us to gain that vision? Do present critics shout that communism is
the solution? But communism never worked. It is just state capitalism. Under communism we saw grinding
poverty even worse than under capitalism. So again, what vision is required in the minds and hearts of
revolutionary leaders?
Amazingly, over the years and centuries, only the two models, capitalism and communism, really took off in the
world, with now and then drops of Keynesianism for good measure. But even Keynesianism cannot solve the
present crisis. Why don’t we look for something new? Why don’t we study the Prout economic model and see
if it might work? Marx’s model worked in theory but not on the ground because the system destroyed the
incentive of the people to work. Capitalism breeds greed until hearts are replaced by dollar signs.

What About Economic Decentralization?

The Prout economic model stipulates that we need a decentralized economy. Prout founder Shrii Prabhat Ranjan
Sarkar emphasizes the tremendous importance, the absolute necessity, of socio-economic decentralization,
saying that where economic centralization continues, the "people cry out in agony due to scarcity and
starvation!"Industrial centralization is devastating to a well-knit social order. No matter what form capitalism
takes - individual capitalism, group capitalism or state capitalism - capitalists will always prefer centralized
production, because all forms of capitalism prefer profit over human welfare. For this very reason, people in the
poorest parts of the world go to sleep "crying in the cimmerian darkness!" Hence, brothers and sisters, let the
clarion call be raised everywhere, it is time that people override their corporate-colluding governments and
implement economic decentralization.
We need local, economically and ecologically sustainable communities, villages and towns. When central
governments make no attempt to even conceal their indifference to the common people, is there any alternative
but to go local and set up such communities? It’s each man for himself now. But instead of thinking thus, we
can think, it’s each community, each village, each town for itself. Let’s take care of each other at the local level.
TINA – There Is No Alternative! Countless good people have suggested going local. Produce local, make local,
sell local and buy local – this will keep a community alive and thriving, isn’t it? Converting every company,
corporation and large proprietorship to cooperatives will cause the community to take a great leap in the
direction of economic democracy and cultural caring. Here we can add that the banking system also will be
managed by cooperatives in a Prout economic structure. Central banks will be controlled by local governments.
Prout is about local control over everything – growing healthy food locally, having access to local medical care,
guiding local educational curriculum, building structures from local natural resources.
But again, who will lead the people in the direction of such an economy, of such a new culture where people
care deeply for one another, to the extent that a community will never allow a single person to go hungry or be
without a doctor when needed? Who will lead the people, brothers and sisters? If a great intellectual denounces
 Back to Index
the present strangulating structural violence taking place, it is just not enough. He must have the vision of what
the common people have to build when the revolution is over. People are longing everywhere for a new world.
We have to build that world, and it is the leaders of the revolution, loved and adored by the masses for their
endless compassion for suffering humanity, who need to take the people forward and guide them in building a
new economic structure, a new political structure, show them the way to create a deeply caring, nurturing
culture where not one single person is left behind. The strong spirituo-moralists who fight ceaselessly against
immorality, corruption and all forms of injustice in the society are the real revolutionaries. They wage a
ceaseless struggle against immorality. They have no timidity with regard to fight, because peace comes only
from fight. Peace does not walk in the door on a platter. The people who fight endlessly against immorality and
injustice are the people who by definition become our leaders because such people will always take care of the
oppressed, marginalised, and neglected human beings.
As Shrii Sarkar says, the theory of leadership is one thing, but the practical, human qualities of a leader are
quite another. In the past some persons, due to having intelligence, social awareness and great oratory skills,
were able to start a revolution. But, in most cases, they had no vision of how to guide the people during the
post-revolutionary phase. A great leader who has established himself through dedication, ideological zeal and
deep sincerity can succeed against tremendous odds, including the military might of society’s exploiters. When
revolution begins, a fight will start against all immorality and corruption in the society. The moral, intellectual
and spiritual strength of the leaders will bring about their victory. Yet even when the revolution is over, the
leaders will have to remain constantly vigilant that new exploiters do not come to power. Hence their struggle is
never-ending. In the words of Shrii Sarkar, ―The greatest achievement of a revolution is to eradicate
exploitation and bring about a progressive change in the collective psychology through the minimum loss of life
and property.‖

Be the Leader You Wait For

In view of what is happening today in Europe, in view of the rising thousands of homeless people in America, is
it not time for revolution? We are defining revolution here as accelerated change, radical change, in our society.
Is it not time to end the economic exploitation of entire humanity? Let us not wait for leaders. Let us become
the leaders the world waits for. Let us adore the suffering human beings everywhere and work day and night to
accelerate change in the economic and social order, so that their suffering comes to an end. We can do no less.
Garda Ghista is the author of The Gujarat Genocide: A Case Study in Fundamentalist Cleansing; Wife Abuse,
Breaking it Down and Breaking Out, Founding President of the World Prout Assembly and more recently of
Hearts Healing Hunger, an organization devoted above all to feeding the people. The work of feeding the
people has already begun in Siliguri, North Bengal. If you can help, please write to her
at wpaeditor@gmail.com.
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The Day Egypt Disappeared

Published on Monday, February 14, 2011 by PR Watch / Center for Media and Democracy
by Mary Bottari
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-6

On February 11, 2011, after 30 years of dictatorship, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak announced he was
stepping down. As ancient pharaohs slumbered inside, a crowd of over a million surrounded the rose-colored
Cairo Museum setting off fireworks and jumping for joy as they peacefully forced a modern pharaoh to flee.
This hopeful moment will be studied for years, and no topic will be more hotly debated than the role of social
media in the uprising. Whether you believe this was the inaugural outing of ―Revolution 2.0‖ or not, the ease
with which Egypt was wiped off the Internet should give us all pause.

“This had nothing to do with Facebook or Twitter”

During the eighteen-day revolt, Americans young and old could not get enough of the protest video. But as
Frank Rich of the New York Times points out, decades of declining media coverage of the world left
Americans with little or no context for what we were watching.

The more difficult story of Egypt’s skyrocketing food prices, high unemployment, and complex political
groupings took a back seat to endless ruminations on the role of Facebook and Twitter. Frank makes the case
that the focus on Facebook was egocentric American hype, noting that when the Egyptian government pulled
the plug on the Internet the movement never paused. He quotes experienced Middle East reporter Richard
Engel, ―This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,‖ said Engel. ―This had to do with people’s
dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.‖

In the end, we may discover that the old-fashioned Friday prayer service was the critical vehicle for educating
and mobilizing the great unwired. But Facebook appears to have played an important role in mobilizing the
younger, more urban and wired classes, giving them the comfort of an on-line community and making it safer to
take collective action.

“This revolution started on Facebook”

Wael Ghonim, a young Google product manager who was secretly arrested and held for 12 days during
uprising, claims that "this revolution started on Facebook."

For years now, democracy activists across the Arab world have been meeting and collaborating on-line. Six
months ago, Ghonim started the ―We Are All Khaled Said‖ Facebook page honoring the Egyptian blogger who
was beaten to death by police after he released material exposing police corruption. What started as a campaign
against police brutality and government propaganda grew into an enormous chat room for a generation
disgusted with the Mubarak regime.

John Nichols writing for the Nation says the Facebook page launched the first day of protests and utilized savvy
online organizing techniques: ―Calling a protest on January 25, activists quickly began distributing
downloadable flyers and detailed instruction manuals that included advice on how to counteract tear gas. To
ensure greater numbers, organizers promised one another that they would each bring at least ten non-connected
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people they knew to the protests. They even agreed on messaging tactics in advance. In order to better succeed
at recruiting poorer, less-educated Egyptians to join them, they focused on economic issues as a rallying cry, not
torture.― Ghonim asked 50,000 to pledge to come to the first rally. Instead, 100,000 made the pledge.

Nichols believes that this type of organizing gave people the courage to step out of their homes and onto the
streets, because they knew they would not be alone. Once the protests were underway, the government clamped
down with an unprecedented Internet blackout.

Internet Blackout

On January 28th, Egypt virtually vanished from the Internet and cell phone service was disrupted. One internet
monitoring firm reported with some astonishment: "approximately 3,500 individual BGP routes were
withdrawn, leaving no valid paths by which the rest of the world could continue to exchange Internet traffic
with Egypt's service providers. Virtually all of Egypt's Internet addresses are now unreachable, worldwide."

This take down was much more severe than the type of manipulation, limited blockage, forced slowdowns and
other interference sometimes pursued by governments. Egyptians responded by pulling fax machines out of
closets, using dial-up modems and calling friends via landlines to relay Tweets to the outside world. Google and
Twitter launched a ―speak-to-tweet‖ service, helping Egyptians get information out beyond the nation’s borders,
but internal communications were wiped out for six days.

Fortunately, international media descended en masse ensuring a diversity of reporting and offering a measure of
protection to the protesters under siege in Tahir Square.

Could It Happen Here?

Repressive regimes all over the world are no doubt studying the Egyptian experience with an eye on how to
prevent such occurrences. Proponents of free speech need to do their homework as well. The ease with which
Egypt’s Internet was taken down has raised concerns in America over proposals for an Internet ―kill switch.‖

While taking down Egypt’s handful of Internet service providers was a relatively easy task and may have been
achieved simply with a series of phone calls, taking down the hundreds of U.S. networks would be a more
daunting challenge. That is why some in Congress are advocating an override mechanism.

Last year, U.S .Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CN) and Susan Collins (R-ME) proposed a bill that would grant the
U.S. president far-reaching emergency powers to seize control of the Internet in a so-called national emergency.
The proposal, not yet introduced as a formal bill this year, would give any president the power to take
emergency action when he or she believes there is an "ongoing or imminent" cyber-attack on the nation's
critical infrastructure.

Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, the American Library Association, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, and the Center for Media and Democracy, say the bill is too vague and overbroad to
comport with First Amendment protections.

―The situation in Egypt gave us a real example of how a kill-switch would work and also why a government
might want one,‖ says Lisa Graves, my colleague at the Center for Media and Democracy who has testified
repeatedly before Congress on surveillance technology. ―Giving a government official the unilateral power to
pull the plug on our electronic communications is an unwise and unconstitutional concentration of power,
especially because the government and companies already thwart numerous attacks each year without such a
dangerous power to disrupt the power to assemble and dissent.‖
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Conclusion

In Egypt, the young protesters stayed peaceful and positive in the face of everything thrown at them: rubber
bullets, secret arrests, hired thugs, Internet blackouts, and ceaseless government propaganda. The struggle ahead
for the nation is a daunting one. The army is in charge and recently dissolved the Parliament. The goal of reform
is free and fair elections within a year. This goal will not be achieved with out a free and diverse media. A
young army of ―new media‖ warriors will be essential to this task.

© 2011 Center for Media & Democracy

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WikiLeaks cables: Saudi Arabia cannot pump

enough oil to keep a lid on prices
8 February 2011

US diplomat convinced by Saudi expert that reserves of world's biggest oil exporter have been overstated by
nearly 40%

By John Vidal

The US fears that Saudi Arabia, the world's largest crude oil exporter, may not have enough reserves to prevent
oil prices escalating, confidential cables from its embassy in Riyadh show.

The cables, released by WikiLeaks, urge Washington to take seriously a warning from a senior Saudi
government oil executive that the kingdom's crude oil reserves may have been overstated by as much as 300bn
barrels – nearly 40%.

The revelation comes as the oil price has soared in recent weeks to more than $100 a barrel on global demand
and tensions in the Middle East. Many analysts expect that the Saudis and their Opec cartel partners would
pump more oil if rising prices threatened to choke off demand.

However, Sadad al-Husseini, a geologist and former head of exploration at the Saudi oil monopoly Aramco,
met the US consul general in Riyadh in November 2007 and told the US diplomat that Aramco's 12.5m barrel-
a-day capacity needed to keep a lid on prices could not be reached.

According to the cables, which date between 2007-09, Husseini said Saudi Arabia might reach an output of 12m
barrels a day in 10 years but before then – possibly as early as 2012 – global oil production would have hit its
highest point. This crunch point is known as "peak oil".

Husseini said that at that point Aramco would not be able to stop the rise of global oil prices because the Saudi
energy industry had overstated its recoverable reserves to spur foreign investment. He argued that Aramco had
badly underestimated the time needed to bring new oil on tap.

One cable said: "According to al-Husseini, the crux of the issue is twofold. First, it is possible that Saudi
reserves are not as bountiful as sometimes described, and the timeline for their production not as unrestrained as
Aramco and energy optimists would like to portray."

It went on: "In a presentation, Abdallah al-Saif, current Aramco senior vice-president for exploration, reported
that Aramco has 716bn barrels of total reserves, of which 51% are recoverable, and that in 20 years Aramco
will have 900bn barrels of reserves.

"Al-Husseini disagrees with this analysis, believing Aramco's reserves are overstated by as much as 300bn
barrels. In his view once 50% of original proven reserves has been reached … a steady output in decline will
ensue and no amount of effort will be able to stop it. He believes that what will result is a plateau in total output
that will last approximately 15 years followed by decreasing output."
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The US consul then told Washington: "While al-Husseini fundamentally contradicts the Aramco company line,
he is no doomsday theorist. His pedigree, experience and outlook demand that his predictions be thoughtfully
considered."

Seven months later, the US embassy in Riyadh went further in two more cables. "Our mission now questions
how much the Saudis can now substantively influence the crude markets over the long term. Clearly they can
drive prices up, but we question whether they any longer have the power to drive prices down for a prolonged
period."

A fourth cable, in October 2009, claimed that escalating electricity demand by Saudi Arabia may further
constrain Saudi oil exports. "Demand [for electricity] is expected to grow 10% a year over the next decade as a
result of population and economic growth. As a result it will need to double its generation capacity to
68,000MW in 2018," it said.

It also reported major project delays and accidents as "evidence that the Saudi Aramco is having to run harder to
stay in place – to replace the decline in existing production." While fears of premature "peak oil" and Saudi
production problems had been expressed before, no US official has come close to saying this in public.

In the last two years, other senior energy analysts have backed Husseini. Fatih Birol, chief economist to the
International Energy Agency, told the Guardian last year that conventional crude output could plateau in 2020, a
development that was "not good news" for a world still heavily dependent on petroleum.

Jeremy Leggett, convenor of the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security, said: "We are asleep
at the wheel here: choosing to ignore a threat to the global economy that is quite as bad as the credit crunch,
quite possibly worse."
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The Hamilton Solution

by Richard C. Leone
http://takingnote.tcf.org/2011/02/the-hamilton-solution.html

During the early years of the great republic, the fiscal weakness of the United States and the federal states was
apparent. With limited sources of revenue and substantial tax incurred during the Revolution, full faith and
credit of the United States of America didn’t mean much in the world. Preeminent among those who
understood the importance of meeting the country’s debts and salvaging the credit of the states was Alexander
Hamilton. He eventually secured a grand bargain with the southern states; capital would move from
Philadelphia to a site along the Potomac River, and the federal government would assume the debts of the
several states. By funding the debt and insuring its payment, Hamilton started the nation on a course that led
eventually to its strong financial reputation and liquid capital markets, all of which contributed mightily to the
growth of the American economy.

Now we are in the throes of another crisis where many states are deeply indebted, and the capacity for meeting
their obligations is severely strained. In addition, because of anti-tax sentiment and reliance on various one-shot
gimmicks over the years, many states simply find it politically impossible to cope with their debt burden. They
are cutting back programs, laying off employees, and generally doing exactly the wrong thing during the period
when recovery from recession would counsel robust public sector activity at all levels.

No one is suggesting that the Federal government simply assume the states’ debts, but we could use another
leader with the vision of Alexander Hamilton to shape a constructive and powerful role for the Federal
government.

There are several intriguing ideas emerging about how the federal government might help the states. Paul Starr
of Princeton University has suggested an automatic trigger, tied to unemployment rates, that increase the federal
share of Medicaid costs. This and similar additions to the existing automatic stabilizers like unemployment
insurance could ease the burden on states experiencing sharp economic turndowns.

A more ambitious idea would be that when a state finds itself over its head, it might -- as nations do -– have
recourse to a fund (perhaps modeled on the International Monetary Fund) for loans to assist in a transition back
to solvency. Like the IMF, there would be a requirement for strict fiscal discipline by the borrower as it works
its way out of whatever hole it has dug for itself. Bridge financing for states with realistic plans for workouts
over a number of years needs careful analysis, but it and other innovations are certainly worth considering in the
present emergency. The existence of such an institution might also provide some of the spine that is missing
from too many state politicians. Elected officials could blame austerity and/or new taxes on the stiff terms
imposed by the financing agency.

While we debate major initiatives, there are several smaller steps that would make a big difference in the short
run: continuation of federal revenue sharing for at least two more years, or an increase in the federal share of
Medicaid spending, coupled with reform of the program.
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The Obama administration has already offered the states a breather on paying back the money they borrowed to
pay unemployment benefits during the recession. Similar kinds of forgiveness or temporary postponement of
state matching money for programs could help across the board. Such measures might be conditioned on states
submitting reasonable plans for working their way out of debt over a period of years -- and that period might
have to extend for as long as a decade.

Hamilton understood that the interdependence of the states and the Federal government needed to be recognized
and policies needed to be shaped accordingly. One only has to remember the state and local fiscal crisis of the
1970s, when a few jurisdictions were unwilling to meet their obligations and nearly all states and localities paid
a premium, no matter how sound their own finances were. There is no reason to expect states and cities to fall
like dominos if a few get into even deeper trouble than they have today, but there is every reason to expect that
everyone will have to pay more for servicing debt that finances ongoing operations. One would expect the
rating agencies, eager to rescue their reputation so sullied by the recent financial crisis, would be aggressive in
downgrading states rather than passive, as they were in the private sector.

An object lesson here is the recent downgrading by one of the agencies of the sovereign debt of Japan. It’s
pretty clear that the Japanese are well positioned to handle their debt and have one of the world’s strongest
economies. In addition, they owe the money to themselves -- not to foreign bond holders, as is the case with
other nations. The same agencies that gave AAA rating to synthetic securities and dangerous pools of
mortgages no longer want to provide that rating for Japan. Those same agencies are beginning to be more
aggressive about lowering the ratings of states.

In other words, the time for a far-reaching federal response to the fiscal crisis of the states is now. The price tag
for inaction will be great.

Where is the 21st century Hamilton when we need him?

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The Swat Victory, Revisited

February 15, 2011

Morton Abramowitz

http://nationalinterest.org/print/commentary/the-swat-victory-revisited-4865

The Swat valley operation of 2009 was so successful that we hear little about the region anymore. The lack of
media coverage and the absence of comment from the American and Pakistan governments, except for the
occasional effusive one, suggest the Taliban’s disappearance from Swat. Unfortunately the humanitarians tell a
different tale, and while they often exaggerate problems to get public attention, they are, from my rather lengthy
experience, more trustworthy than governments in describing the situation on the ground in contested, hard to
visit areas.

Pakistan’s massive attack and displacement of several million people did drive the Taliban out in 2009. But the
Taliban and other insurgent groups are back in Swat and every other area that has been declared clear. Much of
the northern half of the district is subject to frequent attacks by militants on security forces. They may no longer
control territory but are much more than a nuisance. They regularly kill or harass civilians and military in
villages and sometimes larger towns. Their capacity to mount suicide attacks is undiminished. People continue
to ―disappear‖—sometimes this is attributed to the Taliban, sometimes to security forces, who ―purge‖ anyone
suspected of links to militant groups. Taliban leadership is intact and grows stronger with a passive civilian
government.

Local governance remains dysfunctional and administration has been virtually taken over by the army. Local
bureaucrats, public service officials, and politicians largely fled before the events of Spring 2009 and many still
have not returned to their duties (particularly in northern Swat). The level of government closest to the people
has been dissolved. Above that, some say that they haven’t seen their MPA (member of the provincial
assembly) for more than a year. The politicians’ families, too, have moved out. The few local administrators
who have returned to duty report to civilian authorities, but in practice every decision, small or large, is deferred
to the military command fro approval or rejection.

The flood massively added to civil government woes. It washed away much of the reconstruction work
performed after the military’s bombings and added enormously to popular difficulties and opened space for
extremist activity. The civil government is doing little except providing the cash cards that recipients often have
to shell out bribes to receive. Even where the government does act and nothing is lost to corruption, the official
bureaucracy is a very inefficient mechanism with a long lag time. Flood recovery work consumes much of the
attention of the military authorities in Swat and elsewhere in Pakistan and enhances military dominance in
government and their broad public image.

Public services are slipping back from even their levels before the flood—indeed a public health crisis is
brewing. In this vacuum the services provided by extremist charities have a definite impact. While the attention
given to these charities probably overstates their capacity to influence the poor towards Islamist extremism, they
are growing in influence. Often they are the only public service provider the public experiences (as with
Hezbollah and Hamas). However, there appears to be greater sympathy toward extremist Islamism among the
middle/professional class than even five years ago—it's still a minority sport right now but it is now not hard to
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see it strengthening its grip in the absence of government that expresses some interests of the poor and middle
classes.

Swat’s residents have a deeply ambivalent attitude to the army. Many are grateful for their ―liberation‖ from the
Taliban—but almost all also chafe at security restrictions and fear ―disappearances‖ and extrajudicial killings.
Some Swatis say the army wants to control Swat because of the aid and timber money. There remains,
nevertheless some faith in the military but this would be dispelled quickly if they ever stepped back into overt
control of the government. For many Swatis there appears little optimism about the future and many are trying
to emigrate abroad.

The Pakistan Army has waged a counterinsurgency campaign at enormous civilian and economic cost and the
country has gained little in return except a better Western press.
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President Obama’s 2012 budget: An analysis of the

budget cuts
Rebecca Thiess
February 14, 2011
http://www.epi.org/analysis_and_opinion/entry/president_obamas_fy_2012_budget_an_analysis_of_the_budget
_cuts/

President Obama’s FY 2012 Budget:

An Analysis of the Budget Cuts

The FY 2012 budget request submitted by President Obama reflects many of the ideals and priorities he laid out
in his State of the Union address. While Obama’s speech provided the rhetoric behind his vision, his budget
request delivers the details. In short, Obama’s budget attempts to balance deficit reductions with priority
investments. The budget contains funding in areas such as research and development, high-speed rail, and
biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health, but it also engages in a series of tough, and in some
instances damaging, budget cuts.

Budget Cuts

President Obama is proposing a number of budget cuts, many of which he and other administration
spokespeople have been highlighting in an effort to show they take deficit reduction seriously. Outlined in the
section of the budget titled ―Terminations, Reductions, and Savings,‖ the administration is proposing 211 such
actions that will save more than $33 billion in 2012 alone, essentially doubling the amount of cuts proposed in
Obama’s FY 2010 budget request, and about $10 billion more in reductions than he proposed last year. And
these proposed cuts should have a good chance of actually occurring: the Obama administration has, in the past,
been more successful at getting proposed terminations and reductions actually passed compared with other
administrations. Obama saw 60% percent of his proposed discretionary cuts become law for 2010, while other
recent administrations have seen only between 15% and 20% of their proposed discretionary cuts approved by
Congress.

While some of these cuts are to programs that have been found to be redundant or wasteful, many others are
being levied on programs that provide important services, and ―about whose mission the administration cares
deeply‖ (according to its FY 2012 Budget).

Nonetheless, many of these cuts will cause real-life pain. These include cuts to the low-income home energy
assistance program (LIHEAP), community development block grants (CDBG), and community service block
grants (CSBG). The administration is proposing cutting $2.5 billion, or about half of the 2010 enacted funding,
from LIHEAP. Though it justifies this cut by stating that returning LIHEAP funding to 2008 levels lowers it to
where it stood prior to the energy price spikes, this cut unnecessarily targets an important low-income service.
In 2010, 8.3 million households relied on LIHEAP for heating and cooling assistance. The National Energy
Assistance Directors' Association has estimated that cutting LIHEAP funding would eliminate assistance to 3.5
million low-income households. And though energy prices may drop, many people also have lower incomes
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today, due to the recession, than they did in 2008, meaning the need for this type assistance is likely to remain
as high as it was in 2010.

Similarly, cutting funding to CSBG (from $700 million to $350 million) and CDBG ($4 billion to $3.7 billion)
would harm communities that rely on these grants to support local initiatives that aid community and economic
development. The Urban Institute found in a 2002 report that ―larger CDBG investments are linked to
improvements in neighborhood quality.‖ Though the administration claims to care about community-building
investments such as these, and laments the difficulty of these cuts, at the end of the day such cuts are
unnecessary, and can and should be avoided as the antidote to high deficits.

Budget Freeze

Along with the proposed line-item budget cuts, President Obama is pursuing a five-year freeze on non-security
discretionary spending. This freeze – which is meant to serve as an extension of last year’s proposal to freeze
non-security discretionary spending for three years – will cut the deficit by just over $400 billion in the next
decade (last year’s proposal yielded $250 billion in deficit reduction over the same time period). The freeze is
an aggressive effort to restrain non-security discretionary spending, and as the administration has been touting,
would bring non-security discretionary funding to its lowest level as a share of GDP as it has been since the
Eisenhower administration. If enacted, the reduction from pre-recession levels (2007) to 2020 would bring
down domestic appropriations from 2.7% of GDP to 1.9% – a 30% reduction. While the freeze does contribute
to deficit reduction, it all but ensures that the battle to create jobs and engage in future economic growth will be
limited.

Overall, the budget request includes more than $1 trillion in total deficit reduction, with two-thirds of that
coming from spending cuts and the rest resulting from revenue increases. Obama’s budget succeeds in dropping
the deficit to 3.2% of GDP by 2015, and 3.0% of GDP by 2017 (the level his fiscal commission was charged
with bringing deficits to). In fact, for the entire second half of the 10-year budget window, Obama’s budget has
the country running sustainable deficits of around 3.0% each year.

GOP Spending Cuts

On Feb. 11, the House Appropriations Committee, led by Chairman Hal Rogers, detailed line-by-line cuts
Republicans would like to make in the continuing resolution (CR) to fund the rest of this fiscal year, after the
current CR expires on March 4. If enacted, it would be the first time in history a CR would include actual
spending cuts. Compared to 2010 enacted budget levels, this plan would result in $60.8 billion in cuts; it would
cut $100 billion relative to Obama’s FY 2011 budget request. Specific cuts in funding the rest of FY 2011
would include, for example, $5 billion to agriculture programs, $4 billion to energy and water development,
almost $10 billion to the Department of Education, and $14 billion from the Departments of Transportation and
Housing and Urban Development.

Prior to calling for these cuts, the Appropriations Committee had called for $74 billion in cuts to government
funding for the rest of the fiscal year. The day after that number was publicized, many House members publicly
said that cuts of that magnitude did not go far enough. In fact, cuts of that magnitude would significantly
undermine programs that offer services and help to people who especially need it during a time of economic
weakness and high joblessness. And while Republicans have been quick to label most Democratic initiatives as
―job killing,‖ cuts of that magnitude would result in hundreds of thousands of additional job losses. Cuts of $74
billion would likely lead to job losses of around 700,000, while cuts of $100 billion, which Speaker John
Boehner called for as early as last fall, would result in job losses of closer to 1 million