Terrorist plots hatched by the FBI - New York Times

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In recent months, FBI agents have arrested suspects who were planning a range of terrorist attacks, from shooting Stinger missiles at military aircraft to driving van loads of explosives into crowded events. But these amazing cases might never been made if the FBI itself wasn’t planning the attacks.

A number of these cases were profiled recently in a New York Times op-ed column, which noted that the so-called plots were devised by an agency that seems to be operating as if the nation is so devoid of legitimate threats that it needs to manufacture some in order to seem relevant. As has been exposed recently, a similar pattern is present in the CIA's uncovering of plots in which its agents have had a hand, such as the recent Yemen 'underwear bomber' case.

As the NYT reported:

Undercover operations, long practiced by the F.B.I., have become a mainstay of counterterrorism, and they have changed in response to the post-9/11 focus on prevention. “Prior to 9/11 it would be very unusual for the F.B.I. to present a crime opportunity that wasn’t in the scope of the activities that a person was already involved in,” said Mike German of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer and former F.B.I. agent who infiltrated white supremacist groups. An alleged drug dealer would be set up to sell drugs to an undercover agent, an arms trafficker to sell weapons.

This is what the FBI does in terrorist cases - it sets people up and then claims to have 'discovered' a plot.  Columnist David K Shipler concludes with the astounding fact: Of the 22 most frightening plans for attacks since 9/11 on American soil, 14 were developed in sting operations.

However he then goes on to state that other plots needed no government help, such as the Christmas Day Underwear Bomber case. This clashes with the accounts of attorneys Kurt  and Lori Haskell, who were on the flight and gave testimony in court that they saw the bomber escorted on to the flight in Holland by an unidentified official with an American accent.

As JD Heyes writes for Natural News: "If it seems as though the FBI is making a large number of terror busts these days, maybe it's because the agency itself is at least partly responsible for hatching the plots. That has some political observers wondering if the FBI's strategies are making the best use of the nation's limited counter terrorist resources.

"In recent months, FBI agents have arrested suspects who were planning a range of terrorist attacks, from shooting Stinger missiles at military aircraft to driving vanloads of explosives into crowded events. But these amazing cases might not have ever been made if the FBI itself wasn't themselves planning the attacks."

Now surely this is a form of madness, or pathology. That it passes with so little comment only shows how effective war on terror propaganda has been.

Heyes writes:

Consider the case of Oregon college student Mohamed Osman Mohamud. He thought about using a car bomb to attack a well-attended, festive Christmas tree-lighting ceremony in Portland. The FBI gave him a van packed with inert explosives consisting of some real, but inactive, detonators and six 55-gallon drums, along with a gallon of diesel fuel. An FBI agent even drove the van. When Mohamud called the cell phone number that was supposed to trigger the explosion, nothing explosive happened, except that he got arrested.

Was Mohamud seriously considering such an attack prior to the FBI involvement? If so, could he have put it together by himself? Was he working with someone else the FBI doesn't know about who is more of a legitimate threat?

It's hard to say. Obviously Mohamud was at least having bad thoughts, and that's disconcerting in and of itself (though not criminal). But if the FBI had not manufactured an attack, would he have gone through with anything?

Mohamud's case is far from the only one manufactured by the FBI, and it is certainly not the only one that has held up in court. In fact, such operations are not only legal but they are a common counterterrorism tactic employed by the agency in the post-9/11 world. Terror defendants most often try to claim entrapment, but they also most often lose because the law says as long as they showed at least some intent to commit a terrorist act, even if tempted to do so by undercover agents, they are guilty.

Using the weak-minded to make a case

"Many times," says Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman, "suspects are warned about the seriousness of their plots and given opportunities to back out." But, the Times report indicates recorded conversations show that the warning is not always given, and that in some cases suspects are even encouraged to continue.

Inventing such cases isn't as easy as, say, manufacturing a sting operation where an alleged drug dealer or arms trafficker sells to an undercover agent. That's because those kinds of crimes occur regularly in the United States.

David Raskin, a former federal prosecutor told the Times, "There isn't a business of terrorism in the United States, thank God. You're not going to be able to go to a street corner and find somebody who's already blown something up," he said. "So the goal is to find someone who isn't engaged in terrorism yet but is looking for a real terrorist who could provide them with an opportunity."

You can sometimes get the impression that maybe the FBI is operating off of some sort of counterterrorism quota. Consider one of the most recent cases of thwarting a planned attack:

Of five so-called anarchists who were arrested for ostensibly planning to destroy a bridge in Ohio in late April, three of them had documented mental health issues. One was even talked out of committing suicide in February, right before he was enticed to join in the plot by an FBI informant.

More US millions for Mexico's disastrous war on drugs

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From Mexico Gulf Reporter --
The Mérida Initiative is a 2007 agreement between the United States and Mexico which provides for U.S. training and equipping of Mexican military and police forces, coupled with intelligence gathering and sharing. As of Dec. 31, 2011, U.S. funding of the program was at $900 million, or over half of the $1.6 billion budgeted by Congress in 2008. The drug war deal derives its name from several meetings held in this capital of Yucatán state between Mexican president Felipe Calderón and U.S. president George W. Bush.

Last week (May 24) the Senate approved $244 million in funds for fiscal 2013, which begins Oct. 1. For more on this story please visit Edward V Byrne's excellent blog.

As I have previously posted, US training and funding of the Mexican armed forces goes back at least to the 1990s when US, French and Israeli special forces trained a group of commandos in counter-insurgency to take on the Chiapas rebels. Within a few years members of this group had flipped into a paramilitary drug gang - becoming the ultraviolent Zeta and Gulf cartels.

Obama/Romney = Wall Street = plutocracy

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If I was American I would vote Obama in 2012. Definitely. As a left wing voter it's not like I can vote for that socialist candidate. Clearly, more than for quite some time, Wall Street, big money and big business has co-opted and corrupted the so-called democratic process (as in rule of the people, for the people, by the people - hah, amazingly, that's what democracy in America is supposed to be). Wall Street is funding both Obama and Romney, which leaves the American people with no real choice in this or any other national election. I suppose the question is, after Occupy, how much longer can the financial oligarchy stay in control of US politics - or rather, how long will the American people let them? Right now, they are the true puppeteers of Obama/Romney.

As Mehdi Hassan writes:

Official records show that JP Morgan's chief executive, Jamie Dimon, a major Obama donor, has made at least 18 visits to the White House since the start of 2009, meeting the president himself on at least three separate occasions. So should we have been surprised when Obama heaped praise upon the bank and its now-disgraced boss, in an interview with ABC last week? "JP Morgan is one of the best-managed banks there is," he said. "Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we've got, and they still lost $2bn and counting."
Like Romney, Obama ascribed the JP Morgan debacle to a failure of the free market, rather than to the recklessness and greed of its bosses, prompting the influential economist Robert Reich, who served as labour secretary under Bill Clinton, to respond: "Bain Capital and JP Morgan are parts of the same problem. The president should be leading the charge against both."
He won't – and it is worth noting that, despite the drop in financial support for him from the financial sector, the president and his party still managed to secure $152,000 from employees of – wait for it – {Mitt Romney's] Bain Capital. Such is his love affair with the guys who work on Wall Street – "very savvy businessmen", to borrow a stomach-churning line from Obama – that each of the three men who has filled the role of White House chief of staff during the president's first term has been an investment banker.

Obama, unlike previous reforming Democratic presidents, is an outsider who made the decision to be more American than his mixed background would suggest, and he did this, according to David Maraniss's new biography The Making of The Man, because he had his sites on high office. As an outsider, he has surrounded himself in office with insiders. They form a wall around him. Insiders protect their interests. By contrast, the great reforming presidents of the Democratic party - FD Roosevelt and LB Johnson - were consummate insiders. Very different men with different backgrounds - one a rich New Yorker, the other a lower middle class Texan, but 100% part of the Anglo-Saxon culture. Johnson came from nowheresville to be a young administrator of the New Deal so was a protege of FDR. Perhaps, and this is just my speculation, Obama's outsider status, as a black man born outside the United States, makes it harder to take on the establishment than if he had been one of them. Or perhaps Obama simply does not have the reforming zeal of these two great Democrats. In a leader, cool may be cool, but passion is what is required.

Here is an extract from a recent Salon.com article by Greg Greenwald highlighting Obama's complicity in protecting Wall Street from its crimes. It also confirms my fundamental belief that a president/prime minister's choice of appointees tells you most of what you need to know about his/her government. If Goldman and Morgan Stanley fund your campaign, and all the key appointees are from Wall Street, that is the government you will get:

Newsweek reporters note that “financial-fraud prosecutions by the Department of Justice are at 20-year lows”; in fact, such prosecutions under Obama “are just one third of what they were during the Clinton administration” — even though the 2008 financial crisis was drowning in financial fraud. Contrast that with the reaction of George H.W. Bush to the much less severe Savings & Loan crisis of the 1980s:
“There hasn’t been any serious investigation of any of the large financial entities by the Justice Department, which includes the FBI,” says William Black, an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, who, as a government regulator in the 1980s, helped clean up the S&L mess. Black, who is a Democrat, notes that the feds dealt with the S&L crisis with harsh justice, bringing more than a thousand prosecutions, and securing a 90 percent conviction rate. The difference between the government’s response to the two crises, Black says, is a matter of will, and priorities. “You need heads on the pike,” he says. “The first President Bush’s orders were to get the most prominent, nastiest frauds, and put their heads on pikes as a demonstration that there’s a new sheriff in town.”
The Newsweek article offers two well-grounded theories for why Wall Street has been so aggressively protected by the DOJ. The first is that Obama filled his highest level Cabinet positions with Wall Street-subservient officials, beginning with Attorney General Eric Holder, who had been working as a highly-paid corporate lawyer for the law firm Covington & Burling, which represents “Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Deutsche Bank.” The other top-tier DOJ positions were similarly filled with corporate lawyers from large law firms closely tied to and depended upon the financial industry. The problem is obvious:
Some suggest there is also the potential for conflicting interest when the department’s top officials come from lucrative law practices representing the very financial institutions that Justice is supposed to be investigating. “And that’s where they’re going back to,” says Black. “Everybody knows there is a problem with that.” (Two members of Holder’s team have already returned to Covington.)
Why would top DOJ officials — with bulging bank accounts from prior Wall Street service and, with their elevated status as top DOJ officials, future plans for even more bulging bank accounts upon returning — possibly alienate the very industry that will enrich them by prosecuting its top-level criminals? The full-scale immunity bestowed on Wall Street provides the answer.
Then there’s the reliance on Wall Street money for President Obama’s re-election effort. Newsweek notes the multiple investigations that documented numerous criminal acts leading to the financial crisis, including some explicitly incriminating top Wall Street firms such as Goldman Sachs. Anticipating possible indictments, “Goldman executives, including the firm’s chief executive officer, Lloyd Blankfein, started hiring defense lawyers.” Moreover, Black “says the conduct could well have violated federal fraud statutes–’securities fraud for false disclosures, wire and mail fraud for making false representations about the quality of the loans and derivatives they were selling, bank fraud for false representations to the regulators.’” Beyond the Wall-Street-subservient officials, why have those led to no prosecutions?
Meanwhile, Obama’s political operation continued to ask Wall Street for campaign money. A curious pattern developed. A Newsweek examination of campaign finance records shows that, in the weeks before and after last year’s scathing Senate report, several Goldman executives and their families made large donations to Obama’s Victory Fund and related entities, some of them maxing out at the highest individual donation allowed, $35,800, even though 2011 was an electoral off-year. Some of these executives were giving to Obama for the first time.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/10/wall_streets_immunity/

What shall we do in the age of abundance?

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In this Al Jazeera piece, Dan Hind asks probably the most important question for the human race in the 21st century: 

New technologies have radically increased the amount that a single worker can produce in a working week. Manufacturing productivity in the United States has quadrupled since the early seventies, for example. American factory workers are astonishingly industrious, but throughout the world the story is the same. Fewer people can create more value. Yet this triumph of productivity has perverse consequences. New technology makes more and more people economically unnecessary. As Richard Sennett puts it, the global workforce is "haunted by the spectre of uselessness".

Much of the world is still poor. Hundreds of millions of people barely survive. But even if we bring everyone, without exception, into the circuits of global production and consumption, the number of workers needed to feed, clothe, house and transport the global population will remain a small percentage of that population.

The question then is this: what do we do now that we have almost solved the problem of scarcity? Who should benefit from these vast increases in productive power? 

There may well be some levelling going on in the world economy, as the advanced economies slow down compared to previous decades, while growth in the developing world speeds ahead. The outcome could mean a massive expansion of middle to high income countries over the next few decades. Asia, Africa and Latin America have experienced a decade of unprecedented growth. Given global instability, this may not continue indefinitely, but even with setbacks, we are likely to see a global income and production boom, currently led by China. While the world population continues to grow at the current pace, commodity prices will rise (including energy) and environmental stress will increase. Extreme poverty will stay with us and remain a pressing issue. But even if the Triad (US, Europe and Japan) remain mired in stagnation, many millions are joining the consumer classes. As productivity continues to increase exponentially, the problem of surplus labour will increase. 

A new economic model is needed to find useful activity for those who need it - but that does not necessarily mean traditional wage labour. It is a blinkered fallacy that assumes all we need is to resume the capitalist growth cycle in the way it has operated until now. Capitalism has no effective mechanism to efficiently distribute assets, income or work. It's great at producing and distributing goods in a society where enough people are affluent. It is hit and miss in providing some things that are essential - like housing, health and education, but brilliant at producing huge quantities of inessentials. In agriculture and food, markets have generally worked to feed a growing population, so much so that over a billion are now obese. A billion or more go hungry - even though food is abundant. 
For markets to work well they need rules and controls that prevent predatory behaviour gaming the system for insiders at the expense of everyone else. As Adam Smith once wrote: 'Whenever two or more merchants gather together...it ends up in a conspiracy against the public.' For a period of development from agrarian to urban society, it worked in north America, Europe and north Asia at creating prosperous mostly well run societies. 
In countries where 80% of the world lived, capitalism of the crony variety dominated. Colonialism, post colonial dictatorship and other kinds of dictatorship, including Stalinist socialism, reproduced poverty and corruption. But even where the market economy brought rising living standards, capitalism runs into endemic problems. What is efficient for a firm - to employ the optimum number of productive workers, is not efficient for society, particularly in a slump. Unemployment and stagnant wages restrict general consumption, while the 1% capital rich concentrate wealth in their hands but then struggle to find useful ways of investing it. They end up spending stupid amounts on art, wine and Facebook shares. 
Asset bubbles are a direct consequence of maldistributed income in a capitalist economy. Each boom is followed by a bust. The growth of the financial sector exacerbates this tendency. A democratically planned economy in which actors are impelled to maximise human welfare, rather than just profits, must be a central part of our future political economy. In China, a planned market economy - mixed with markets - has produced 33 years of unprecedented growth, although China's inequality is now destabilising the system. State-led capitalism in Japan and Korea produced similar results. 
But what works in a developing economy may well not work in a developed one. For democrats, social ownership and planning, combined with ever growing computer and internet power, could create a kind of network - rather than bureaucratic - socialism. It's a question of will and imagination. The wonderful thing about labour saving technology is that it frees us to do something else. But that something else does not need to be everyone working in a call centre trying to sell stuff to the minority of people with money. Manufacturing is going the way of agriculture - employing a smaller and smaller number of people as productivity rises and rises. Human services assisted by new technology is the way of the future. Crucially, never have there been so much opportunity for us to spend our energies doing the things that fulfil us, rather than make us miserable. That may even mean bringing back human labour in things like private food production, to remove alienation from the food chain, currently dominated by supermarkets and food giants, and bring us back to nature. 

David Cameron like all mainstream politicians is obsessed with efficiency, but in an economy where each worker is highly productive, more efficiency is not necessarily what we need. There is a limit to how much stuff we can consume - we just don't have the time to use or consume more stuff. What we really need to make our lives better is meaningful quality experiences. Markets are not necessarily the best way to provide these. As the saying goes, the best things in life are free. If we start measuring outputs in human welfare terms, instead of money income growth, we can change the whole process of production. How do you measure non-monetary 'growth'? Simple, ask people to measure the benefit themselves and put that into our national statistics. Also by bringing back the 'commons' - ie public, freely available goods - we can return to the comonwealth those things that have been privatised and monetised by capitalism, including money itself. GDP obsession is less than a century old yet it's treated like some kind of talismanic power over us. Once we change what we measure to something more meaningful, it will change how we view our society and how we see ourselves.

Donna Summer joins 1000 victims of 9/11 dust

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Donna Summer is one of an estimated 1000 people who appears to have died as a result of breathing the toxic dust that spread over Manhattan on 9/11. Summer had been in her nearby apartment when the deadly cloud containing asbestos, lead and mercury filled the sky after the atrocity in 2001.
It is believed that around 1,000 people exposed to the dust have died — 350 of them from cancer. Cancer rates among police officers who attended the scene have tripled. Another study found 60,720 people were at risk after inhaling dust and fumes.
Scandalously however, officials downplayed the health risks of returning to Manhattan in the weeks after 9/11. In one instance, a warning that people should not report to work on a busy thoroughfare in the financial district—Water Street—was rewritten and workers instead were urged to return to their offices as soon as the financial district opened on Sept. 17. In another, federal officials declared that testing showed the area was safe when sampling of the air and dust—which ultimately found very high levels of toxic chemicals—had barely begun.
Within days of the twin towers' collapse, when the air was heaviest with asbestos and dioxin, a warning that office workers in New York's Financial District might be at risk if they returned to their workplaces was removed from public statements at the request of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality.
The original draft of the release that was going to be issued by the Environmental Protection Agency said "higher levels of asbestos" had been found in seven samples taken on Water Street in the Financial District. The Inspector General's office examined inter-agency emails and found that after the White House reviewed the draft and suggested revisions, the information about Water Street was removed, as was a warning to office workers.
A week after the attacks, local workers, students and residents were told it was safe to return to their jobs, schools and homes. It was business as usual. Ever since so-called first responders have been reporting illness and protesting their treatment by the authorities. More than 5,000 city workers who filed lawsuits claiming that the city had failed to protect them from the dust settled their cases in 2010. Others are still fighting for compensation.
 A decade after the attacks, a law was signed by President Obama, establishing the World Trade Center (WTC) Health Program, which aims to ensure that those affected by 9/11 receive monitoring and treatment for 9/11-related health problems through at least 2015.
However the government have only recently officially accepted that the WTC attacks caused cancer. Only last month the Scientific and Technical Advisory Committee in charge of assessing WTC health impacts decided to recommend including approximately 30 cancers that correlate with Ground Zero exposure, including cancer of the lung, stomach, mouth and thyroid. But it will be many more months before those who are sick can expect to start receiving treatment.

The New York City Department of Health recorded 836 deaths of World Trade Center (WTC) responders from illnesses generated by working on the site by 2010. But because no centralized database exists to identify each person present at the WTC site, there is no assurances that all deaths were identified. As well as the official figures, there are currently another 20,000 recorded sick by the WTC Medical Monitoring Treatment and Environmental programmes. And this is only the tip of the iceberg. According to the World Trade Center Health Registry, 410,000 people were heavily exposed to WTC toxins causing restrictive respiratory illnesses and cancers, which changes 11 September from a terrorist attack into a full-blown environmental disaster on the scale of Chernobyl, where the initial toll was overshadowed by deaths and illnesses that were still occurring up to 20 years later.

Summer believed that breathing it triggered her cancer. Speaking of her trauma, the devout Christian said the attacks caused her to suffer deep depression: “I was really freaked out by the horrific experiences of that day. I couldn’t go out, I didn’t want to talk to anybody. I had to keep the blinds down and stay in my bedroom. I went to church and light came back into my soul..”
Summer also had a premonition that terrorism would strike New York a month before it happened. She recalled in 2008: “My husband and I were walking down the street. I had this feeling. I said, ‘Honey, I feel like terrorism, high on top of the buildings.’ I knew something was going to happen. When it did, I flipped out.”

It is truly incredible that she and thousands of others were not warned about the real dangers to their health from the 9/11 dust they were breathing in the days and weeks after the attacks.What kind of government would knowingly let thousands of people walk into a lethal situation of that kind? Perhaps one that knew about the terror attack plans months before hand but didn't do anything to stop it.

So far from God, so close to the United States: CIA origins of Mexico's Zetas

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Another day, another massacre in Mexico. There is something predictable and yet still shocking when you discover that, oh no not again, the CIA and US government lie at the origins of Mexico's violent drug war. Of course, we know that the consumers of the drugs and the suppliers of the weaponry used in the drug war are American. But what is not so widely known is that the ultra-violent Zeta and Gulf cartels have their origins in a CIA counter-insurgency 'training programme'. As explained by Borderland Beat:

The group was formed from a group of soldiers who deserted the Special Forces Airmobile Group (GAFE), Amphibious Group Special Forces (GANFE) and the Parachute Rifle Brigade (BFP) of the Mexican Army, founded in 1994 in response to the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and one traditional group of elite soldiers who were trained by the CIA of the United States, commandos of the Israeli Sayeret Matkal and the French GIGN.

They received specialized training that included handling of sophisticated weapons and counterinsurgency work. According to the Attorney General's Office (PGR), at least 40 former members of the Gafes have joined the ranks of the Zetas.

Further more Los Zetas have in their ranks an undetermined number of former special forces from Guatemala (also trained by the CIA, facing charges of genocide in that country).

A piece by Luis Hernández Navarro explains how the Zetas were a group of drug traffickers who until 2010 worked for the powerful Gulf cartel. 

It was formed by military men from the Grupo Aeromóvil de Fuerzas Especiales (GAFE), an elite corps of the Mexican army, trained by the CIA. It is in conflict with the Sinaloa Cartel, headed by Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzmán and El Mayo Zambada over drug-trafficking routes and markets in Mexico and smuggling to the US

The massacre of 49 people in Cadereyta is part of the struggle between cartels for the strategic city of Monterrey, the economic powerhouse of northern Mexico and home to a dynasty of powerful and usually conservative businessmen. The city gives shelter to the drug barons and provides them with logistical support and income from extortion. They have become prominent members of the community.

The drug cartels conquered Monterrey and turned it into their sanctuary. Many of the bosses live in the richest residential areas of the city. Their sons attend the best private universities and move among the local elites. Casinos, spas and brothels flourish under their auspices.

The links between the CIA and drug trafficking are long established and continue into the era of 9/11 and the war on terror. As the Independent reported:

Evidence points to aircraft – familiarly known as "torture taxis" – used by the CIA to move captives seized in its kidnapping or "extraordinary rendition" operations through Gatwick and other airports in the EU being simultaneously used for drug distribution in the Western hemisphere. A Gulfstream II jet aircraft N9875A identified by the British Government and the European Parliament as being involved in this traffic crashed in Mexico in September 2008 while en route from Colombia to the US with a load of more than three tons of cocaine.
In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard. It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan.

 Behind the 'war on drugs', a policy launched by Richard Nixon in 1969, is a nexus of drug-terror-CIA links going back to the Vietnam war and the Contra war in Nicaragua. But this truth is carefully obscured. Poor Mexico is now on the frontline. As the late Mexican dictator Porfirio Dia reportedly once said: "Poor Mexico, so far from God, so near the United States."

Explaining the endless crisis - essential reading

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We know there is a crisis going on, but how to understand it? The article quoted here from the Monthly Review by John Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney is a tremendous analysis of what is going on - the Great Stagnation of the advanced economies (US, Euope and Japan). It is by leftwing economists and so apologies to non-economists. The writers predicted a crisis caused by a bursting housing bubble as early as 2002. Essentially the analysis boils down to the long-term decline in production as a portion of economic activity in the Triad (advanced) economies, the growth of financialisation of the economy (asset bubbles) and the declining share in national income going to wages. The libertarian right believe that a 'free market' economy, as existed in the early 19th century can somehow be recreated. The left should have no such illusions because such an economy requires extremely primitive social conditions and very low wages. It would also require the abolition of corporations, which, seems highly improbable - although Occupy are demanding the end of corporate personhood, which would be a vital step to undermining corporate power.

Being able to describe what is happening is not the same as offering a solution, which this article does not do. But starting from an accurate understanding of reality is necessary if one is going to find a way to a better place. The writers conclude that a new system is needed - but what?
 
Here are some nuggets of insight that I have extracted:

Neoclassical economists and mainstream social science generally have long abandoned any meaningful historical analysis. Their abstract models, geared more to legitimizing the system than to understanding its laws of motion, have become increasingly other-worldly—constructed around such unreal assumptions as perfect and pure competition, perfect information, perfect rationality (or rational expectations), and the market efficiency hypothesis. The elegant mathematical models developed on the basis of these rarefied constructions often have more to do with beauty in the sense of ideal perfection, than with the messy world of material reality.

As Paul Krugman put it, “the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth.”

“The normal state of the monopoly capitalist economy,” Magdoff and Sweezy declared, “is stagnation.” According to this argument, the rise of the giant monopolistic (or oligopolistic) corporations had led to a tendency for the actual and potential investment-seeking surplus in society to rise. The very conditions of exploitation (or high price markups on unit labor costs) meant both that inequality in society increased and that more and more surplus capital tended to accumulate actually and potentially within the giant firms and in the hands of wealthy investors, who were unable to find profitable investment outlets sufficient to absorb all of the investment-seeking surplus.

...Stagnation theory, in this sense, did not mean that strong economic growth for a time was impossible in mature capitalist economies—simply that stagnation was the normal case and that robust growth had to be explained as the result of special historical factors. This reversed the logic characteristic of neoclassical economics, which assumed that rapid growth was natural under capitalism, except when outside forces, such as the state or trade unions, interfered with the smooth operation of the market. Stagnation also did not necessarily mean deep downturns with negative growth, but rather a slowing down of the trend-rate of growth due to overaccumulation. Net investment atrophied, since with rising productivity what little investment was called for could be met through depreciation funds alone. Stagnation thus assumed steady technological progress and rising productivity as its basis. It was not that the economy was not productive enough; rather it was too productive to absorb the entire investment-seeking surplus generated within production.

...Since the 1960s West Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan have all seen even larger declines, when compared to the United States, in their trend-rates of growth of industrial production. In the case of Japan industrial production rose by 16.7 percent in 1960–70 and by a mere 0.04 percent in 1990–2010. The story shown... is one of deepening stagnation of production—already emphasized by Sweezy and Magdoff in the 1970s and ‘80s. ...this led—especially from the 1980s on—to a shift in the economy from production to speculative finance as the main stimulus to growth. Thus the FIRE (finance, insurance, and real estate) portion of national income expanded from 35 percent of the goods-production share in the early 1980s to over 65 percent in recent years. ...The dramatic rise in the share of income associated with finance relative to goods production industries has not, however, been accompanied by an equally dramatic rise of the share of jobs in financial services as opposed to industrial production. Thus employment in FIRE as a percentage of employment in goods production over the last two decades has remained flat at about 22 percent. This suggests that the big increase in income associated with finance when compared to production has resulted in outsized gains for a relatively few income recipients rather than a corresponding increase in jobs.

 ...A central cause of this stagnation tendency is the high, and today rapidly increasing, price markups of monopolistic corporations, giving rise to growing problems of surplus capital absorption. Taking the nonfarm business sector as a whole, the price markup on unit labor costs (the ratio of prices to unit labor costs) for the U.S. economy over the entire post-Second World War period averaged 1.57, with a low of around 1.50 in the late 1940s. However, from the late 1990s to the present the markup on unit labor costs—what the great Polish economist Michal Kalecki referred to as the “degree of monopoly”—has climbed sharply, to 1.75 in the final quarter of 2011. As stated in The Economic Report of the President, 2012: “The markup has now risen to its highest level in post-World War II history, with much of that increase taking place over the past four years. Because the markup of prices over unit labor costs is the inverse of the labor share of output, saying that an increase in the price markup is the highest in postwar history is equivalent to saying that the labor share of output has fallen to its lowest level.”

....the last few decades have seen the intensification of a growing trend today towards monopolization in the U.S. and global economies, reflected in: (1) concentration and centralization of capital on a world scale, (2) growth of monopoly power and profits, (3) the developing global supply chains of multinational corporations, and (4) the rise of monopolistic finance. The total annual revenue of the five hundred largest corporations in the world (known as the Global 500) was equal in 2004–08 to around 40 percent of world income, with sharp increases since the 1990s.50 This strong monopolization tendency, however, is scarcely perceived today in the face of what is characterized in the conventional wisdom as ever-greater competition between firms, workers, and states.

...The theory of the multinational corporation, as developed by Stephen Hymer, saw the rise of these globe-trotting firms as the product of the growth of the concentration and centralization of capital and monopoly power worldwide. Rather than a competitive market structure, as envisioned in orthodox economics, what was emerging was a system of global oligopolistic rivalry for the domination of world production by a smaller and smaller number of global corporations. Hymer went on to connect this to Marx’s theory of the industrial reserve army of the unemployed, explaining that the monopolistic multinational corporations were in the process of creating a new international division of labor based on the formation of a global reserve army, and the exploitation of wage differentials worldwide (or the global labor arbitrage). This global restructuring of production adopted a divide and rule approach to labor worldwide.

...The biggest question mark generated by this new phase of accumulation today is the rapid growth of a few large emerging economies, particularly China and India. The vagaries of an accumulation system in these countries based on the exploitation of massive reserve armies of workers (in China a “floating population” of peasants) in the hundreds of millions, which cannot be absorbed internally through the standard industrialization process, makes the future of the new Asia uncertain. The imperial rent exacted by multinationals, who also control the global supply chains, means that emerging economies face what may appear to be an open door to the world market, but must proceed along paths controlled from outside. The vast inequality built into a model of export-oriented development based on low-wage labor creates internal fault lines for emerging economies. China is now the site of continual mass protests, occurring on a scale of hundreds of thousands annually.

The 'Oh my God' moment is nigh

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According to this post by Zerohedge on the latest Spanish bank bailout and also the Greek calamity:

I pointed out that the total debts of [Greece] stood at $1.1 trillion and, since then, have gotten bigger even after the PSI took place. In fact, Greece borrowed $130 billion to pay off $105 billion and the ECB/EIB and the IMF refused to take the hits. Now just the country, the sovereign, owes $517 billion to various parties both public and private which is not only an astronomical number for a country of this size, about the same as the total GDP of Switzerland...

He continues:

Greece is now long past the point where growth or Inflation can bail it out. The Europeans have played this game very badly in the attempt to hold the coalition together. The can kicking, heralded by so many as an achievement, has actually exacerbated the situation from a travesty to somewhere out past a calamity and there is no longer any way out without fiscal pain of the most serious kind whether Germany refuses additional funding or whether Greece opts out for their own reasons. We sail at the center of the maelstrom and the markets, quite soon in my view, will one day waken to the “Oh My God” moment which everyone has tried so hard to avoid. There is no longer any way out!

Underwear Bomber Exclusive: 'there would be nearly no war on terror without CIA involvement'

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Globe of Splendour has received an exclusive comment from 'underwear bomber' witness Kurt Haskell on the latest alleged Al Qaeda bomb plot. New twists are emerging in the story. According to reports, the man who alerted the US about the latest alleged plot to blow up an US passenger jet was a Saudi-born jihadi recruited by Saudi intelligence and MI5 to infiltrate Al Qaeda in Yemen.

Haskell, a US attorney from Newport, Michigan, was on Flight 253 out of Amsterdam on Christmas Day, 2009, which was the target of a failed alleged al-Qaeda bombing attempt.

Haskell, who is seeking nomination for Congress in 2012, writes to Globe of Splendour: "The current plot is very similar to flight 253. As you know, I've been speaking out that a similar event took place on flight 253. After conducting a two-years investigation regarding flight 253, I have assembled enough evidence to convince me beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was a staged attack.
"In fact, I witnessed part of the crime before boarding and part was admitted during Congressional hearings. The attack was similar to this [new] one in that the CIA provided the perpetrator with an intentionally defective bomb. In this case, the perpetrator was CIA, but the bomb was live.
"The fact of the matter is that there would be nearly no war on terror without the CIA involvement. Every terrorist attack involving the U.S. since 2001 has involved the CIA or FBI. These individuals provide the means motive and opportunity to carry out the plots. Such plots are not carried out to make the world safer from terrorism, but are carried out for financial and political reasons.
"Terrorism is a trillion dollar a year business. It is used by the U.S. to support many illegal laws and illegal invasions for the sake of a "peace keeping" mission. The threat of terrorism is in actuality very minor, but is trumped up 100 fold by the media and the U.S. Government to justify these objectives. It is getting to the point that many people just laugh when they hear abouts plots like this.
"Most people believe my account regarding flight 253. I'm sure I will find even more support with the latest relevation.
 "The mainstream media, for whatever reason, merely repeats what it is told by the U.S. Government. They know what's really going on, but they continue the propaganda to suit their own purposes. Radio and alternative media tell the truth about these incidents.
"I am running for Congress, in part, to clean up this sort of corruption."
 
Haskell announced in March that he is seeking the nomination on the Democratic ticket in Michigan District 7. The seat currently held by Republican Tim Walberg, R-Tipton.

The convicted bomber in the "Christmas Day bombing attempt" was 23-year-old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who had concealed plastic explosives in his underwear but failed to detonate them properly, resulting in flames and popping noises. A Dutch passenger, Jasper Schuringa, tackled and restrained him and put out the fire with the aid of others.

U.S. President Barack Obama called the U.S.'s failure to prevent the bombing attempt "totally unacceptable", and ordered an investigation.
Passengers Kurt and Lori Haskell, both US attorneys, said that while waiting to board Flight 253 at Schiphol Airport, they saw a "poor-looking black teenager around 16 or 17" who Haskell claims was Abdulmutallab with a second man, who was "sharp-dressed", possibly of Indian descent, around 50 years old, and who spoke "in an American accent similar to my own."
According to Lori Haskell, the second man told the ticket agent: "We need to get this man on the plane. He doesn't have a passport." The ticket agent said nobody was allowed to board without a passport. The well-dressed man replied: "We do this all the time; he's from Sudan."
Lori Haskell said the two were then directed down a corridor, to talk to a manager. "We never saw him again until he tried to blow up our plane," Haskell said of Abdulmutallab^.
Only U.S. citizens are permitted to board international flights to the U.S. without passports, and even then only if the airline confirms their identity and citizenship, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). A CBP official and spokesman confirmed there were not any Sudanese refugees on the plane. The Dutch counter-terror agency said that Abdulmutallab presented a valid Nigerian passport and U.S. entry visa when he boarded Flight 253, and after reviewing more than 200 hours of security camera recordings, did not find any indication that he had accomplices at the airport. Haskell suggested authorities should, "Put the video out there to prove I'm wrong."

I was right: Yemen bomber 'worked for the CIA' - official

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My hunch from my post yesterday was apparently spot on, the latest Yemen airplane bomber turns out to have been a CIA double agent, as reported here. This is lifted right from the CIA 'How to create a terror panic' 101 manual. Except it is obvious to anyone looking that this is a 'sting' operation in which the CIA and Saudi intelligence have created the bomb plot themselves. It's straight out of my novel The Overwhelming.  It also points back to the bizarre and suspicious nature of the original underwear bomber plot of 2010, where the bomber was escorted on to the plane by an official with an American accent. Homeland 2 anyone?

New Yemen underpants bomb reeks of US intel job

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So six months before the US election we have another Yemen airplane bomb plot in the news. The fact that the plot was foiled by an insider, according to US officials, raises suspicion about the veracity of the plot. The first underwear bomber in late 2009 was, according to lawyer Kurt Haskell, who sat eight seats behind the Nigerian would-be bomber, escorted onto the plane by a man who appeared to have official authority to over-ride airport security. Radio Four's evening news carried an interview with Michael Chertoff, one of Bush's securocrat contract guys, former head of Homeland security, who benefited handsomely from the post -9/11 war on terror cash mountain. Kurt Haskell is running for Congress now on an anti-corruption ticket - he believes the US government had a hand in the original underwear bomber plot. What are we to believe about the latest claims of the CIA about a new bomb plot? I only wish mainstream journalists would be a little more sceptical about what they are being told. The message that Al Qaeda is still a major threat suits the contract guys and their political representatives very nicely.

Feudal land ownership of 1% makes a lie of democracy

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How can we claim to live in a democracy when 70% of the land is owned by 1% of the people? Some of the biggest landowners are the Royal Family and a small group of aristocrats who acquired it centuries ago. The 'enclosures' was the process whereby big landowners acquired common land and removed its inhabitants in the name of agricultural progress in the 18th and 19th century. Remarkably, there has been no systematic land survey sincce the late 19th century - and even then, 50% of the land is not registered. It belongs to families that are off the grid that most of us live on. The claims of these families go back to the gifts of Henry VIII when he abolished the monasteries or even further back to William the Conqueror.
Kevin Cahill's excellent book Who Owns Britain?, which was published a year after the "right to roam" legislation of 2000, reveals that about 6,000 landowners own some 40m of Britain's 60m acres of land, and that 70% of the land is owned by 1% of the population. By contrast, 60 million people live in houses collectively occupying 4.4m acres.
The landowners include aristocrats and the crown. It took Cahill 13 years to follow well-hidden trails of ownership.
As Peter Lazenby wrote recently: The passing of a single bill repealing just one act of enclosure could begin the reversal of ownership at least of the common land stolen from the people. It's a vain hope that such a bill would succeed. But what a delight it would be to hear the squeals of protest from the land-owning gentry.
A land value tax could begin to redress the obscene inequalities of land ownership and wealth in Britain.