Whether on the left or the right, we don’t see how anyone could have a problem with this movement. It’s the banks that caused the economic problems we are currently suffering through. It was their actions which forced us to bail them out with our tax payer dollars. How did they repay us? By continuing to do exactly what they did when they caused our economy to collapse in the first place. It’s called casino capitalism. They’re raking in billions of dollars while giving nothing back. They are, in fact, sucking the wealth out of our country and into their pockets. And our bought and paid for politicians on both sides of the aisle are letting them get away with it. Actually, they are helping them get away with it.

Reverand Billy at the Wall Street protest. Learn more about his mission at RevBilly.com.

Michael Moore at Wall Street Protests

Photo credit: All photos by Jordan David

IS AMERICA’S FAVORITE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER A GOVERNMENT OPERATIVE? POLITICAL COMMENTATOR RUSS BAKER OFFERS INTRIGUING EVIDENCE!

By Russ Baker
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE July 2011

In June 2009,Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward traveled to Afghanistan with General Jim Jones, then President Obama’s National Security Advisor, to meet with General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of forces there. Why did Jones allow this journalist to accompany him? Because he knew that Woodward could be counted on to deliver the company line—the military line. In fact, Jones was essentially Woodward’s patron.

The New Republic’s Gabriel Sherman pointed out that when Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee hosted a 50th-birthday party for Woodward’s wife, reporter Elsa Walsh,“Jones was a guest of Woodward. ”According to Sherman, one attendee told him, “Woodward and Elsa were glued to Jones at the cocktail party before the dinner started.”

In September 2009, McChrystal (or someone close to him) leaked a document to Woodward that essentially forced Obama’s hand. The President wanted time to consider all options on what to do about Afghanistan. But the leak, publicizing the military’s “confidential” assertion that a troop increase was essential, cast the die, and Obama had to go along. Nobody was happier than the Pentagon—and, it should be said, its allies in the vast military-contracting establishment.

FireDogLake.com chronicled the developments in a pungent essay: “Apparently General McChrystal and the Petraeus cabal aren’t willing to wait for their Commander in Chief to set the strategy. Prior to the President’s interviews, McChrystal’s people were already telling journalists that they were ‘impatient with Obama,’ as Nancy Youssef reported. This ‘Power Play’… included a veiled threat that McChrystal would resign if he didn’t get his way.

“And, sure enough, just hours after the Commander in Chief was on the airwaves, somehow McChrystal’s classified report hit the Washington Post…compliments of Bob Woodward, no less. Wow, what a coincidence!”

This episode highlights a crucial aspect of Woodward’s career that has been ignored by most of the media. Simply put, Woodward is the military’s man and always has been.

For almost four decades, under cover of his supposedly “objective” reporting, Woodward has represented the viewpoints of the military and intelligence establishments. Often he has done so in the context of complex inside maneuvering of which his readers have little clue.

Typically, Woodward uses information he obtains from his main sources (much of it self serving) to gain access to others. He then gets more “secrets” from them, and so on down the line. Woodward’s unique persona as the main repository of this inside dope has been key to the relentless success machine that his media colleagues have perpetuated.

The New York Times’ review of his recent book on President Obama laid out the formula: “In Obama’s Wars, Mr. Woodward, as usual, eschews analysis and commentary. Instead, he hews to his I Am a Tape Recorder technique, using his insider access to give readers interested in inside-the-Beltway politics lots of granular detail…. As he’s done in his earlier books, Mr. Woodward acknowledges that attributions of ‘thoughts, conclusions or feelings to a person’ were in some cases not obtained directly from that person, but from ‘notes or from a colleague whom the person told’—a questionable but increasingly popular method, which means the reader should take the reconstructed scenes with a grain of salt.”

And then, thanks to all this attention and even with that grain of salt, Obama’s Wars went to number one.

Bob Woodward’s stature as the world’s most acclaimed investigative journalist is almost entirely based on his helping to end the Presidency of the reviled Richard Nixon. As the saying goes, the past is prologue, and that long-ago affair turns out to have direct relevance to events besieging another President, Barack Obama. For a sense of how, we go back to the beginnings of Woodward’s journalistic career.

The young Woodward did not fit the profile of the stereotypical daily print reporter with a deep suspicion of the establishment, particularly in the turbulent late ’60s and early ’70s. Midwestern and Republican, Woodward attended Yale University on an NROTC scholarship and then spent five years in the Navy. He had begun with a top-secret security clearance onboard the USS Wright, specializing in communications. Some of his duties involved communication with the White House.

Woodward’s commanding officer was Rear Admiral Robert O. Welander, who would later be implicated in a well-documented military spy ring in the Nixon White House. That subterfuge, generally referred to as the Moorer Radford affair, is a segment of American history that is known to serious researchers and documented in numerous books but still somehow almost completely missing from the narrative typically offered to the public.

It involves a behind-the-scenes power struggle pitting Nixon against his former allies in the military, intelligence and corporate worlds. It is this struggle that begins to reveal the outlines of a larger battle over the Presidency and democracy itself. It leads to truths so deeply disturbing that the general reaction has been—and continues to be—denial by those who decide what books and interpretations get heavy publicity and the stamp of establishment approval.

According to the 1991 book Silent Coup, Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin’s exhaustive study of the aforementioned military espionage scandal, Woodward left his ship in 1969 and arrived in Washington, D.C. There he worked on the staff of Admiral Thomas Moorer, chief of Naval operations, again as a communications officer, this time one who provided briefings and documents on national security matters to top brass in the White House. Colodny and Gettlin wrote that Woodward frequently walked through the basement offices of the West Wing with documents from Admiral Moorer to General Alexander Haig, who served under Henry Kissinger—then Nixon’s National Security Advisor.

In a 2008 interview with me, Woodward categorically denied having any intelligence connections. He also denied having worked in the White House or having provided briefings there. “It’s a matter of record in the Navy what I did, what I didn’t do,” Woodward said. “And this Navy intelligence, Haig and so forth, you know, I’d be more than happy to acknowledge it if it’s true. It just isn’t. Can you accept that?”

Journalist Len Colodny, however, has produced audiotapes of interviews by his Silent Coup coauthor Robert Gettlin with Admiral Moorer, former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, Pentagon spokesman Jerry Friedheim and even with Woodward’s own father, Al, discussing Bob’s White House service.

At a minimum, Woodward’s entry into journalism received a valuable outside assist, according to an account provided by Harry Rosenfeld, a retired Washington Post editor, to the Saratogian newspaper in 2004: “Bob had come to us on very high recommendations from someone in the White House. He had been an intelligence officer in the Navy and had served in the Pentagon. He had not been exposed to any [major] newspaper.”

In 2008, after I spoke to Woodward, I reached Rosenfeld. He remembered that Woodward had been recommended by Paul Ignatius, the Post’s president, who previously had served as President Lyndon B. Johnson’s secretary of the Navy.

In a subsequent interview, Ignatius told me: “It’s possible that somebody asked me about him, and it’s possible that I gave him a recommendation. I don’t remember initiating anything, but I can’t say I didn’t. ”When I asked Ignatius how a top Pentagon administrator such as himself would even have known of a lowly lieutenant—Woodward’s rank back in those days—he said he did not recall.

Yet even with this apparent high-level pressure to hire Woodward, the editors couldn’t justify putting in a complete novice. So Woodward was packed off to a Maryland-based weekly— the Montgomery County Sentinel—for a spell, then hired at the Post in September 1971. The eminent paper itself is steeped in intelligence connections. The Post’s owners, the Graham family, were aficionados of the apparatus and good friends of top spies such as longtime CIA Director Allen Dulles. Both the late publisher Philip Graham and Woodward’s boss and confidant, editor Ben Bradlee, had served in military intelligence during World War II.

As for Woodward’s initial introduction to the newspaper, nobody seems to have questioned whether a recommendation from someone in the White House would be an appropriate reason for the Post to hire a reporter. Nor does anyone from the Post appear to have put a rather obvious two and two together by noting that Woodward made quick work of bringing down the President of the United States, a feat that might have led to speculation about who at the White House had recommended Woodward in the first place—and with what motivation.

There was this, however: After Nixon aide Charles Colson met with Senator Howard Baker (the ranking Republican on the Senate Watergate Committee) and his staff—including legal counsel (and future senator) Fred Thompson—he recounted the session in a previously unpublished memo: “The CIA has been unable to determine whether Bob Woodward was employed by the Agency. The Agency claims to be having difficulty checking personnel files. Thompson says he believes the delay merely means that they don’t want to admit Woodward was in the Agency.

Thompson wrote a lengthy memo to Baker…complaining about the CIA’s noncooperation, the fact that they were supplying material piecemeal and had been very uncooperative.”

Senator Baker sent this 1974 memo directly to CIA Director William Colby with a cover note, and within a matter of a few hours an incensed Woodward called Baker. The memo had been immediately leaked to the Post reporter. Woodward’s good connections helped generate a series of exclusive-access interviews that would result in rapidly produced bestsellers. One was Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA,1981-1987,a controversial book that relied in part, Woodward claimed, on a deathbed interview—not recorded—with former Director of Central Intelligence William Casey. (Casey’s widow and former CIA guards said the interview never took place.)

The 543-page book, which came out as George H.W. Bush was seeking the Presidency in 1988,contained no substantive mentions of any role on the part of Poppy Bush in these “secret wars,” although Bush was both Vice President with a portfolio for covert ops and a former CIA director. Bush, like Woodward, had served in top-secret Naval operations in his younger days. Veil relied on Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a rival of Casey’s, as its key source. (Inman,a Texan, was closely identified with the Bush clan.)

Asked how it was possible to leave George H.W. Bush out of such a detailed account of covert operations during his Vice Presidency, Woodward replied, “Bush was, well, I don’t think he was—what was it he said at the time? ‘I was out of the loop’?”

Woodward went on to be blessed with unique access to another Bush, Poppy’s son George W. Bush—a President who did not grant a single interview to America’s top newspaper, the New York Times, for nearly half his administration. This favoritism and the resulting exclusivity guaranteed a series of automatic smash bestsellers. Woodward would also draw attention to himself for knowing about the administration’s role in leaking the identity of CIA undercover officer Valerie Plame but not writing or saying anything about it despite an ongoing investigation and media tempest. When this was revealed, Woodward issued an apology to the Post.

To its credit, in the ’60s the Washington Post had staffers doing some of the best reporting on the intelligence establishment. Perhaps the most revealing work came prior to Nixon’s tenure, while Woodward was still a Naval officer. In a multipart, front-page series by Richard Harwood in early 1967, the Post began reporting the extent to which the CIA had penetrated civil institutions not just abroad, but at home as well. As Harwood wrote, “Intellectuals, students, educators, trade unionists, journalists and professional men had to be reached directly through their private concerns [organizations].”

“Journalists” too. Woodward’s Watergate reporting partner, Bernstein, later wrote about the remarkable extent of the CIA’s penetration of newsrooms, detailing numerous examples in a 1977 Rolling Stone article. As for the Post itself, Bernstein wrote: “When Newsweek was purchased by the Washington Post Company, publisher Philip L. Graham was informed by Agency officials that the CIA occasionally used the magazine for cover purposes, according to CIA sources. ‘It was widely known that Phil Graham was somebody you could get help from,’ said a former deputy director of the Agency. Some Newsweek correspondents and stringers continued to maintain covert ties with the Agency into the 1970s,CIA sources said.

“Information about Agency dealings with the Washington Post newspaper is extremely sketchy. According to CIA officials, some Post stringers have been CIA employees, but these officials say they do not know if anyone in the Post management was aware of the arrangements.”

When the Watergate burglary story broke in 1972, Bob Woodward got the assignment, in part, his editor Barry Sussman recalled, because he never seemed to leave the building. “I worked the police beat all night,” Woodward said in an interview with authors Tom Rosenstiel and Amy S. Mitchell, “and then I’d go home—I had an apartment five blocks from the Post—and sleep for a while. I’d show up in the newsroom around ten or 11 and work all day too. People complained I was working too hard.”

So when the bulletin came in, Woodward was there. The result was a front-page account revealing that E. Howard Hunt’s name appeared in the address book of one of the burglars and that a check signed by Hunt had been found in the pocket of another burglar, who was Cuban. It went further: Hunt, Woodward reported, worked as a consultant to White House counsel Charles Colson.

Yes, Woodward played a key role in tying the Watergate burglars to Nixon. Woodward would later explain in All the President’s Men (coauthored with Bernstein) that to find out more about Hunt he had “called an old friend and sometimes source who worked for the federal government.” His friend did not like to be contacted at his office and “said hurriedly that the break-in case was going to ‘heat up,’ but he couldn’t explain and hung up.”

Thus began Woodward’s relationship with “Deep Throat,” that mysterious source who, Woodward would later report, served in the executive branch of government and had access to information in the White House and Nixon’s reelection campaign committee.

Based on tips from Deep Throat, Woodward and Bernstein began to “follow the money,” writing stories in September and October 1972 on a political “slush fund” linked to Nixon’s reelection committee. One story reported that the fund had financed the bugging of the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters as well as other intelligence-gathering activities.

Eventually, of course, this reporting played a key role in Nixon’s forced departure from the White House in 1974. His successor, Gerald Ford, then took a hard turn to the right on foreign policy and elevated to prominent roles three individuals who would later become household names: George H.W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld.

Amazingly, despite the overwhelming public sense that Nixon was somehow “behind” the scandals collectively referred to as Watergate, virtually no evidence ever emerged of Nixon’s involvement or prior knowledge, besides agreeing to bad advice on how to handle the affair once it became public through leaks via Woodward and others. Meanwhile, the collection of individuals whose “inside” testimony helped sink Nixon had, like Woodward, a history with military or civilian intelligence operations.

So let’s summarize: Young Bob Woodward, Naval intelligence officer, gets sent to work in the Nixon White House while still on military duty. Then, with no journalistic credentials to speak of and with a boost from White House staffers, he lands a job at the Washington Post. Not long thereafter he starts to take down Richard Nixon. Meanwhile, inside the White House, Woodward’s military bosses are running a spy ring that is monitoring Nixon and Kissinger’s secret negotiations with America’s enemies (China, the Soviet Union, etc.), stealing documents and funneling them back to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. They are then leaked to columnist Jack Anderson and others in the press.

That portrait clashes, of course, with the iconic Woodward of legend—so it takes a while for this notion to settle in the mind. But there’s more. Did you know there was really no “Deep Throat,” that the W. Mark Felt story was conjured up as yet another layer of cover in what became a daisy chain of disinformation? Did you know that Richard Nixon was loathed and feared by the military brass, that they and their allies were desperate to get him out and halt his rapprochement with the Communists? Or that a bunch of operatives with direct or indirect CIA/military connections—from E. Howard Hunt to Alexander Butterfield to John Dean—wormed their way into key White House posts and started up the Keystone Kops operations that would be laid at Nixon’s Oval Office door? Or that it was the CIA-connected Butterfield, for example, who revealed the secret Oval Office audio taping system whose carefully selected and artfully presented excerpts cooked Nixon’s goose?

If you want to learn more, Family of Secrets has several chapters on the real Watergate story. Other sources that have put pieces of this puzzle together include the previously mentioned Colodny and Gettlin, as well as James Rosen (The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate) and Jim Hougan (Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA).
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Russ Baker is an award-winning investigative reporter and founder and editor of the news site WhoWhatWhy.com. He has written for the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, the Nation, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and Esquire. Some of this material is excerpted from Baker’s book Family of Secrets. For more on Baker’s work, visit FamilyOfSecrets.com and RussBaker.com.

SHORTLY BEFORE GOING LIVE, THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA’S INTERNET VOTING SYSTEM IS TAKEN OVER BY AMERICAN WHITE-HAT HACKERS AND ACCESSED BY BLACK HATS IN IRAN AND CHINA.

By Brad Friedman
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE August 2011

In 2009 the U.S. Congress passed, and the President signed, federal legislation allocating hundreds of millions of dollars for states across the nation to initiate Internet voting for military and overseas citizens. Yes, you heard that right. The elected beneficiaries of our riggable e-voting system have decided to double down on the madness. Touch-screen voting systems weren’t easy enough to hack?

One of the first rollouts of the new federally fueled Internet voting scheme happened—or nearly did—in Washington, D.C., just before the 2010 midterm election. It would have gone live, with real (unverifiable) votes cast by real people in a very real election, but for the quick work of some patriotic “hackers” from a Midwestern university, who proved what computer scientists and cybersecurity experts have been warning for years: These systems are exceedingly—perhaps even irreconcilably—vulnerable to undetected manipulation from outside hackers and corrupt insiders alike.

Over much of the past decade we’ve detailed the very real hazards of e-voting, along with the threat of, and evidence of, the easy election fraud it allows. That effort has helped to encourage a rollback of oft-failed, easily manipulated, always unverifiable touch-screen voting systems, which had nonetheless been slated for every voter in the United States. But while use of 100% unverifiable touch-screens is finally on the wane—with numerous states dumping them in favor of verifiable, hand-marked paper ballots—the federal government, in all its idiotic “wisdom,” seems hellbent on making things worse.

The District of Columbia’s Board of Elections and Ethics (BOEE) decided to conduct a test of its new Internet voting system for military and overseas voters by inviting the public to try to hack it just before the BOEE planned to use it in a real election. Within 36 hours of opening up the system on September 28, 2010, for that public hack test, it had become completely and utterly compromised, and the BOEE didn’t even have a clue about that for the first several days.

Once someone finally discovered the University of Michigan fight song playing on the Web browsers of test voters, the BOEE shut down the experiment “due to usability issues, ” as it told the public. A few days later those “usability issues” would come to full public light. A team of U-M computer science students and their professor had decimated D.C.’s supposedly “secure” Internet voting system’s architecture. It was child’s play.

J. Alex Halderman, assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at U-M, subsequently traveled to the nation’s capital to explain exactly what had happened. At a hearing conducted by the Council of the District of Columbia’s Committee on Government Operations and the Environment, Halderman recalled how he and several of his sharpest students had taken over every aspect of the system— from top to bottom. But, perhaps even more chilling, it turns out they weren’t alone.

“While we were in control of these systems, we observed other attack attempts originating from computers in Iran and China,” Halderman testified in a nearly empty conference room. “These attackers were attempting to guess the same master password that we did. And since it was only four letters long, they would likely have soon succeeded.”

It hadn’t been Halderman’s first e-voting rodeo. About a month earlier, he and Princeton University Ph.D. student Ariel Feldman had revealed another remarkable hack. This one involved the same touchscreen e-voting system that was used in 2008 in 161 jurisdictions with almost 9 million registered voters. That hack, quite literally, really was child’s play. The entire voting system software was replaced by a game of Pac-Man—all without disturbing the so called tamper-evident seals that officials claim are sufficient for deterring hackers. In 2006, while a student at Princeton University, Halderman also played a key role in one of the first known hacks of a Diebold touch screen voting system.

The D.C. BOEE, for its part, was also no stranger to e-voting disasters. During a 2008 primary election, for example, thousands of inexplicable “phantom votes” were cast for write-in candidates on the BOEE’s new paper-based optical scan voting systems.

According to Halderman’s stunning testimony in Washington, the BOEE’s implementation of Internet voting was even more menacing. “Within 36 hours of the system going live,” he explained, “my team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us essentially total control of the voting system software. This included the ability to change votes and to reveal voters’ secret ballots. We modified all the ballots stored on the system that had already been cast by voters, and we changed the votes so that the votes would be counted for candidates we selected.”

In addition, Halderman and his team were able to discover the identity of every person who’d cast a vote and how each had voted. So much for the “secret ballot.” But that’s not all. The U-M hackers also injected into the system a script that would change every ballot ever cast on the system in the future and another script to allow them to come back anytime they wanted.
As election officials don’t tend to be experts in computer security—and even those who claim to be experts when hired really aren’t—a foolish error made entry to the system even easier than the U-M team had expected.

“We gained access to this equipment because the network administrators who set it up left a default master password unchanged,” Halderman told Councilwoman Mary M. Cheh, chairperson of the Committee on Government Operations and the Environment. (Of its five members, she was the only one who felt the issue was important enough to show up for the hearing.) “This password we were able to look up in the owner’s manual for the piece of equipment.”

It was only a four-letter password, but as it turned out, even a more difficult one would have likely been discovered in short order. That’s because the U-M team managed to take over the security camera apparatus where the election board’s servers were located.

Thus, Halderman told the committee, he and his fellow hackers were able to sit at a computer in Ann Arbor and observe in real time as the D.C. network’s operators configured and tested the equipment. They were able to, in Halderman’s words, “watch them on camera because we found [that] a pair of security cameras in the data center were on the same network as the pilot system and were publicly accessible with no password at all.”

Yes, the U-M team could actually watch the administrators typing the password into the system itself.

While comfortably inside the system, Halderman and his team discovered intrusions from computers in Iran and China, prompting the white-hat hackers from the United States to take measures to protect the D.C. system. “We decided to defend the network by blocking them out by adding rules to the firewall and by changing the password to a more secure one,” Halderman explained to Cheh.

“You changed the password of the BOEE system?” the stunned chairperson interjected.
“Of the pilot system, yes,” Halderman responded.

“You changed it?!” Cheh asked again, incredulously.

“We did, yeah, to something so that the Chinese and Iranian attackers wouldn’t get it,”he stated.

Following Halderman’s testimony, computer security and voting systems expert Jeremy Epstein told the committee, “For the first time, what computer scientists have been warning could happen in an election…isn’t just a theoretical problem.”

Happily, after all of this, the D.C. Board of Elections and Ethics decided to shelve Internet voting for the 2010 midterm election.

“Many of us have been arguing that election security is a matter of U.S. national security,” computer scientist Dr. David Jefferson of Livermore National Laboratory told me during an interview after the D.C. hearing. Jefferson, who now serves as chairman of VerifiedVoting.org, has worked for more than a decade on these issues. He has testified to countless official bodies about his concerns. Jefferson most recently worked on California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s 2007 landmark Top-to-Bottom Review of the state’s electronic voting systems. (All were found to have been easily penetrated and manipulated during the first-of-its-kind independent hack testing by an official state commission.)

“It’s really important that it not be possible for foreign governments or crazy, self-aggrandizing hackers in other countries—or in our own—to be able to modify votes and get away with it, ”Jefferson said. “But usually this warning that I have given many times, that this is a national security issue, goes, well, underappreciated, ”he explained diplomatically during our conversation.

“After this,” Jefferson added, “there can be no doubt that the burden of proof in the argument over the security of Internet voting systems has definitely shifted to those who claim that the systems can be made secure…. This successful demonstration of the danger of Internet voting is the real deal.”

During the Council of the District of Columbia’s hearing, experts noted that—unlike banking online or via ATM, processes that are open to oversight by all parties before, during and after—the secret-ballot system used in U.S. elections cannot be carried out safely at this time on the Internet. Maybe in the future when technology changes, they said, but not for at least a decade.

In short, the experts concurred, this is not “a solvable problem” no matter how much politicians, political parties and even some ill informed voters may wish it to be.

“Let me ask you this, from a legislative perspective, ”Councilwoman Cheh said to each of the panelists as the hearing was winding down. “Should the council, by legislation, just shut this down?”

The answer from each one of those testifying was an unambiguous yes.

Nonetheless, 33 states ran Internet-voting pilot programs of various forms during the 2010 midterms. And, unless something changes, you can rest assured that folks who don’t really give a damn about democracy will continue to gamble with it in 2012—whether they’re Americans, Iranians, Chinese or even al-Qaeda hackers for that matter.

The madness of U.S. “democracy” continues.
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Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides co-hosting radio’s nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

WHAT THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA HASN’T TOLD YOU
By Karl Grossman
From HUSTLER MAGAZINE September 2011

Media coverage of the Fukushima Daiishi nuclear power plant, which was severely damaged as the result of an earthquake and resultant tsunami on March 11, 2011, has been outrageously poor.  Rather than dig for the truth, mainstream journalists and their “experts” have simply parroted the assurances of Japanese and other officials that the amounts of radioactivity being released were low and thus posed “no health threat.”

Decades ago scientists thought there was a “threshold dose” of radiation.  That’s because when nuclear technology began exposing people to radioactivity, they didn’t promptly fall down dead.  But as the years passed by, it became evident that lower levels of radioactivity take time to manifest as cancer and other illnesses.  In fact, there is a five-to-40-year “incubation” period.

Now most scientists acknowledge that any amount of radioactivity can lead to illness and death, especially in fetuses and children (whose cells divide more rapidly than those of adults).  As the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself has stated: “Any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer.”

Reporters covering Fukushima have noted that potassium iodide pills being distributed in Japan “block radioactivity.” However, they work only on the thyroid gland, filling it with “good” iodine so radioactive iodine-131 cannot be absorbed and cause thyroid cancer.  But there are hundreds of other fission products for which there is no magic pill.  These include cesium-137 and strontium-90, two of the fission products discharged after hydrogen explosions rocked four of the Fukushima power plant’s reactor buildings.

The media has given voice to egregious errors.  One example is the lack of understanding about the explosions that blew the roofs off the aforementioned reactor units.  It was reported that zirconium fuel rods were to blame.  Missed was the bigger picture: Zirconium is used in a nuclear plant’s fuel rods because it allows neutrons to pass freely so a chain reaction can be sustained.  But the material is extremely volatile.  It explodes at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.  Pound for pound, zirconium has the explosive power of nitroglycerine.

At lesser heat it emits hydrogen, which also can explode.  That is what occurred twice at Fukushima.  There are around 20 tons of zirconium in an average nuclear power plant.  Using zirconium is like building a bridge with firecrackers.

Then there were the reports about three GE nuclear engineers who’d resigned in 1976 because of suspected defects in the GE Mark 1 Boiling Water Reactor, the same type installed at the Fukushima Daiishi plant.  This was in line with the spin that flawed design was the problem,not nuclear power itself.  In fact, the Mark 1’s design was only one factor that prompted GE’s Dale Bridenbaugh, Richard Hubbard and Gregory Minor to leave the nuclear industry.

The main reason is summed up in their statement to Congress’s Joint Committee on Atomic Energy: “We did so [resigned] because we could no longer justify devoting our life energies to the continued development and expansion of nuclear fission power—a system we believe to be so dangerous that it now threatens the very existence of life on this planet.”

Then there were the over-the-top declarations.  “I love nuclear power,”Fox’s Geraldo Rivera declared.  Appearing on The O’Reilly Factor, right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter said that radiation is “good for you.”  Even host Bill O’Reilly was taken aback.  “You have to be responsible,” he cautioned her.

Coulter’s remark is based on a scientific concept known as hormesis, which holds that a moderate amount of a toxin can be beneficial.  Therefore, some nuclear scientists believe that exposure to radioactivity, at least in small doses, exercises the recipient’s immune system.  These scientists, many of whom are employed as health physicists in nuclear laboratories and other facilities, are supposed to protect people.  Hormesis has been dismissed by national and international agencies involved with radiation protection.

Meanwhile, there was the disinformation about the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former USSR.  Reporters, commonly using it as a baseline in projecting the potential impact of radioactivity released from the Japanese reactors, have written that only several hundred people died as a result of the meltdown in Unit 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Such a low figure ignores the most comprehensive study to date on the effects of Chernobyl: a book published in 2009 by the New York Academy of Sciences titled Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment.  After studying health data, radiological surveys and scientific reports—some 5,000 in all—from 1986 to 2004,a team of scientists from Russia and Belarus determined that the accident actually caused the deaths of 985,000 people worldwide.  More, they wrote, will follow.

That’s the real baseline for a major disaster at one nuclear power plant.  Fukushima involves several reactors and a series of spent fuel pools.  The radiation assessment was raised to a level seven—the highest international rating for a nuclear accident, equivalent to the Chernobyl disaster.  But the potential toll might be far greater than Chernobyl’s—more than a million dead.

While covering the crisis in Japan, reporters have also been remiss by declaring that “no one died” as a result of the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.  That myth was dispelled by the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience With Atomic Radiation by Harvey Wasserman, Norman Solomon, Eleanor Walters and Robert Alvarez (a former U.S.  Department of Energy official).

I did a TV documentary on the impact of the TMI partial meltdown, Three Mile Island Revisited.  Besides addressing the increase of cancer cases and birth defects in the area surrounding the nuclear power plant, it revealed that TMI’s owner had quietly issued payouts, many for $1 million apiece, to settle claims involving residents who’d suffered health impacts or lost family members due to radiation exposure.

Data from the Radiation and Public Health Project, a nonprofit organization, claims that infant mortality near Three Mile Island increased by 47% in the two years after the accident and that cancer-related deaths of children under ten were 30% higher in 2004 than they were in 1979.

On March 11, 2011, CNN.com went even further than declaring “no one died”: It reported that the TMI “incident caused no injuries or significant releases of hazardous material.” Moreover, the media failed to mention that in recent years Japan has become a global giant in the selling of nuclear power plant reactors.  Worldwide, about 80% of them are of GE and Westinghouse manufacture or design.

In 2006, Toshiba bought Westinghouse’s nuclear division.  Meanwhile, Hitachi entered into a partnership with GE to run its nuclear division.  How might this huge stake in selling nuclear reactors influence what Japanese officials have been saying about Fukushima? The disaster was certainly not good for business.

Then there was the media line that “we don’t have a choice but nuclear power.” The Christian Science Monitor asserted that “finding other forms of energy that can provide a stable base load of electricity—other than coal—remains difficult.”

Renewables Are Ready is the title of a 1999 book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers.  Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready.  Combined with energy efficiency, they render nuclear power unnecessary.  Also in 1999, Scientific American—a conservative publication—ran a cover story titled “A Plan for a Sustainable Future.” Its author noted, “Wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100% of the world’s energy,eliminating all fossil fuels.”

More recently, in October 2009, the British magazine New Scientist presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”

But the mainstream media have continued to ignore the fact that safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are available to provide our energy needs.  For example, wind power is less costly than the price tag of a nuclear plant, which can range from $12 billion to $15 billion.

A pioneer journalist on nuclear technology is Anna Mayo, who from 1969 to 1989 penned a Village Voice column titled “Geiger Counter.” Japan’s nuclear industry, Mayo recently commented, “is trying desperately to conceal the extent of radiation exposure, and they’ve wheeled out the same, old lies…as usual.” Unfortunately, the media have bought this deadly nuclear deception.

Regarding the impact of the disaster on the United States, Dr. Richard Webb—a nuclear physicist and author of the landmark book Accident Hazards of Nuclear Power Plants—said it will take a year for the Fukushima reactors to cool down.  Yes, a year! And during that time “all kinds of things can happen” involving both the reactors and the spent fuel pools, Dr. Webb added.  He is especially concerned that another severe explosion could release many tons of radioactive poisons.

What has happened already is a clear-cut disaster.  But if there are even worse discharges ahead, a horrific catastrophe is in store.  The jet stream blows in an eastward direction—toward the United States.  Consider the fallout that affected so many Americans during the 1950s and 1960s thanks to atmospheric atomic bomb tests.  At that time, the devices contained 15 to 30 pounds of uranium, and fission (the splitting of atoms) lasted for just a second.

There are 200,000 to 300,000 pounds of uranium in each of Fukushima’s reactors, and nuclear fission has been taking place continuously since the power plant was commissioned in 1971.  A massive amount of lethal, radioactive poisons accumulated.  The math is clear, and we are downwind from Japan.

 
—————————————————————–
Karl Grossman is an investigative reporter, board member of BeyondNuclear.org and professor of journalism at the State University of New York’s The College at Old Westbury.  His six books include Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power.  Grossman, the longtime host of the nationally aired TV program Enviro Close-Up, has also written and narrated Three Mile Island Revisited, The Push to Revive Nuclear Power, Chernobyl:A Million Casualties and other documentaries.

“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system for, if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” —Henry Ford

Report by Tyler Downey

Financial catastrophe. Double-digit unemployment. Home foreclosures. An everwidening gulf between the extremely rich and the rest of us. Control of government and media in the hands of a select group of elites. Wall Street destroying the middle class. Are these the harsh realities that face Americans today? Absolutely. But they’ve always been offshoots of crony capitalism, which has a long history of wreaking havoc on this country. Whether it was the railroad bubble of 1893, the rampant financial malfeasance of the Roaring Twenties that led to the Great Depression, the dot-com crash of the late 1990s or the current real estate-driven mess we find ourselves in now, Wall Street speculation and corruption have been at the heart of America’s economic crises.

It takes an extremely courageous and patriotic leader to stand up to the Wall Street banking cartels. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was such a man. When he was elected President in 1932, America was beset by the worst financial crisis it had ever known. Despite assurances from the bankers that the Federal Reserve System (formed in 1913) would forever prevent the panics and economic upheaval that had previously struck the country, the Great Depression of the 1930s nearly wiped out the American middle class.

Seeing the damage inflicted by an outof- control Wall Street, FDR took drastic steps to curb the bankers’ influence. “We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering,” he declared during a campaign speech at New York City’s Madison Square Garden in 1936. “They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me— and I welcome their hatred.”

The robber barons certainly didn’t want Roosevelt, a Democrat, reelected. Once FDR took office in 1933, chief counsel Ferdinand Pecora—a former New York City prosecutor—was given the green light to rev up the Senate Banking Committee’s investigation into the practices that had triggered the Stock Market Crash of 1929. Pecora ultimately concluded: “Had there been full disclosure of what was being done in furtherance of these schemes, they could not long have survived the fierce light of publicity and criticism. Legal chicanery and pitch darkness were the banker’s stoutest allies.”

Pecora uncovered stock offerings at discounted prices to politicians, the selling of bad loans to unsuspecting investors and the fact that J.P. Morgan Jr. and his partners had paid no income taxes in 1931 and 1932. The president of Citigroup was forced to resign. As Ron Chernow explained in a 2009 New York Times article, it was Pecora’s inquiry that paved the way for the legislation that followed.

Franklin D. Roosevelt first ordered the Treasury Department to close all banks that had been reckless with people’s money. There would be no bailout for them. He then signed into law the Banking Act of 1933, better known as the Glass-Steagall Act, which separated investment and commercial banking. No longer could banks speculate with money that customers had deposited into their private accounts.

FDR also pushed legislation making it much harder for banks to repossess family homes and farms. He instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which safeguarded depositors’ accounts and thus restored public confidence in the nation’s banks. FDR introduced regulation into nearly every sector of the economy— energy, labor, trade—to ensure that the middle class was protected from the predations of crony capitalism.

In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt even proposed an Economic Bill of Rights. “To assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness,” it basically stipulated that no citizen should be denied employment (with a living wage), “a decent home,” “adequate medical care,” “a good education” and social security. It also called for an end to monopolies and cartels. Unfortunately, FDR died before this great goal could be realized, but his bold actions led to an unprecedented 50 years of prosperity for the American middle class.

Of course, Wall Street would fight back. appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united Abetted by massive campaign donations, media consolidation and good old-fashioned corruption, the robber barons have waged a 75-year war on the policies of FDR.

The tide turned in Wall Street’s favor with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. It was his administration that first allowed financiers to write laws that their servants on Capitol Hill enacted. How did the politicians become captives of the ruling class? Since 1990 the financial sector has spent over $2.5 billion on campaign donations alone, not including the astronomical amount spent on lobbying.

This is far and away the most money donated by a single industry—and it’s going to Republicans and Democrats! That’s why it’s impossible to differentiate between Ronald Reagan’s “deregulation” policies and those of Democrat Bill Clinton. Both Presidents were bought and paid for by Wall Street bankers. According to bestselling author Charles Geisst, the culmination of this silent war against the legacy of FDR was the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999. Thanks to Clinton, the robber barons came back in full force, and it took less than ten years to see the result of those efforts.

The Federal Reserve’s record-low interest rates had spawned a colossal real estate bubble. Freed from the regulations of FDR, Wall Street investment firms issued riskier and riskier loans. By 2008 the corrupt system became untenable. Ordinary Americans lost $17 trillion in retirement savings, announced Treasury Department chief economist Alan Krueger. When it all came crashing down, the bankers threatened to destroy the entire financial system if they didn’t get paid off.

Democrat Barack Obama was elected with a mandate to again make government work for the people, not Wall Street. However, his campaign received nearly $40 million in contributions from Wall Street entities. It appears that despite his promises and speeches, Obama is just another politician bought and paid for by the financial industry.

Even after securing his party’s Presidential candidacy in 2008, Obama supported President George W. Bush’s decision to hand over $700 billion of American taxpayer money—with no claw-backs, no oversight and no controls—to bail out Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG and other firms. The recipients then spent about $114 million of our tax money in campaign donations in 2008 alone. They also planned to dole out roughly $14 billion in bonuses to executives.

…. Continues in HUSTLER Magazine – May 2011

QUESTION: WHEN IS A CRIME NOT CONSIDERED CRIMINAL? ANSWER: WHEN IT’S HATCHED ON WALL STREET.

By Danny Schechter
for HUSTLER Magazine January 2011

All over Europe and in much of the rest of the world, a new fictional hero has engaged the fascination of millions of readers. His name is Mikael Blomkvist, and he’s the protagonist of the late Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy. These thrillers, set against the background of high financial crimes and misdemeanors, have become global best-sellers, doubtless in part owing to their gripping plots, elaborate mysteries and engaging characters. But their success is also indisputably a by-product of the macroeconomic chicaneries of our era and the human catastrophes they have wrought.

Larsson understood that financial crimes are far from victimless. They have upended millions of people’s lives, even if most of the victims don’t understand how they’ve been shortchanged and who is responsible.

Although the financial crisis that swept the world may have started on Wall Street, it has brought down governments and shredded economic security worldwide, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs and homes as businesses collapse, foreclosures grow, credit tightens and communities are devastated. One estimate of the damage: $197 trillion.

The Pew Economic Policy Group reports the average U.S. household lost $66,000 in stock holdings and $30,000 in real estate values from June 2008 through March 2009 due to the upheaval in world markets. This brings us close to $100,000 per family. Against that backdrop, it’s not hard to see the appeal of Larsson’s hero Blomkvist, whose “contempt for his fellow financial journalists” the author encapsulates with stinging clarity: “A bank director who blows millions on foolhardy speculations should not keep his job. A managing director who plays shell company games should do time…. The job of the financial journalist was to examine the sharks who created interest crises and speculated away the savings of small investors, to scrutinize company boards with the same merciless zeal with which political reporters pursue the tiniest steps out of line of ministers and members of Parliament.”

This is why I identified with Blomkvists’s fictional mission; in some ways it captured my own frustrations in a media world for which “the c-word”— as in financial crime—seems must never be spoken.

The media failed us on the most crucial story of our era. Our newspapers and TV sources contributed to an economic disaster so cynically engineered even billionaire investor Jim Chanos was prompted to ask, “So where are the perp walks? How long does it take before we see any investigations? It boggles the mind that $150 billion is vaporized…there haven’t been any arrests, any indictments, nor any convictions at any major bank or at any of the government-owned financial institutions Fannie, Freddie and AIG.”

I know how hard it is to alarm the public with mere facts. They don’t have the context within which to interpret complicated stories. In 2006 I released the film In Debt We Trust, exposing illegal subprime scams and warning of the coming meltdown. It was well reviewed, but no mainstream TV outlet would air it.

I was dismissed as an alarmist and a “doom and gloomer.” A mass denial of the dangers ahead seemed to be embedded in the euphoria of the very bubble that was bringing in billions for Wall Street’s financial alchemists, who themselves seemed oblivious to the risks and indifferent to the social impact their practices courted.

The media coverage has made a complex reality deliberately complicated, even incomprehensible. The satirical paper The Onion put the financial press in its place regarding the totally obtuse reporting for which financial journalists were justly infamous even before the biggest scoop since 1929 fell into their laps: “JPMORGAN CHASE ACQUIRES BEAR STEARNS IN TEDIOUS-TO-READ NEWS ARTICLE.” The Onion witheringly characterized the coverage as “bogging down the news for anyone who might be remotely interested in grasping what the fuck is going on.”

Yet there were truth-tellers out there who were largely ignored. Investors like Warren Buffett compared the new exotic financial instruments to weapons of mass destruction— financial nuclear bombs.

Even guru of the right Ayn Rand had warned in Atlas Shrugged about greed destroying her beloved free market: “When you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed.”

Doomed or not, in the second year of the Age of Obama the hoped-for economic turnaround has yet to occur. Even as the stock market goes up again, benefitting institutional investors with the capabilities to exploit it, unemployment remains high and loan defaults continue to rise. The best projections forecast a “jobless recovery,” which for millions is no recovery at all. How did we get into this mess? Put ten economists in a room, and you get 20 explanations. Most of them revolve around business mistakes, poor risk models or even psychological problems like delusion and market madness. Few will concede Senator Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) is right in charging that “fraud and potential criminal conduct were at the heart of the financial crisis.” Missing has been a hard-nosed look at the crisis as a crime story. Former bank examiner William Black understands this. Focusing on looting and CEO fraud, he helped send over 1,000 bankers to prison during the S&L crisis in the 1980s. This time there were neither dogged sleuths nor crime-busting newshounds on the beat.

Even Alan Greenspan has finally admitted in his all-too-polite exchange with a government inquiry that has come to resemble a Princeton seminar, “If you don’t have enforcement, and a lot of that stuff was just plain fraud, you’re not coming to grips with the issue.” Of course, this “maestro” didn’t go into detail on “a lot of that stuff.”

What we are watching is an abstruse debate about banks that are “too big to fail,” not too big to jail.Very little of the discourse speaks in terms of the victims—the millions of families now without breadwinners or homes. Most of the commentary still looks up at CEOs, not down at the people whom they robbed by design, as folk singer Woody Guthrie put it, not with a six-gun but “with a fountain pen.”

When most of us think of crime, we think of gangsters with guns, not banksters with elaborate schemes designed to transfer your wealth to their accounts. Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair—a publication more at home with Groucho Marx than Karl—said of the meltdown: “[This] may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent crime against humanity in history…never before have so few done so much to so many.”

Yet economists, even progressive ones like James Kwak, deeply mired in the labyrinthian world of financial transactions, still don’t believe it. The day the SEC filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, he wrote on BaselineScenario.com, one of the more critical Web sites covering the collapse of this vast swindle: “One of the things I say now and then that most annoys people is that the financial crisis was not caused by criminal behavior…. My general line is that I’m sure there was some bad behavior that rose to the level of criminal liability—like lying in disclosure documents—but that it wasn’t necessary for the crisis, and we could have had the crisis without any criminal activity at all.” The problem with this thinking is that it defines financial crime too narrowly, only in terms of securities laws concerned primarily with protecting investors.

It doesn’t acknowledge that financial institutions spent nearly a billion dollars underwriting efforts to erode government controls and change rules, regulations and even laws to allow them to get away with whatever enhanced their bottom lines, no matter who got hurt. Their well-documented history of aggressive lobbying and buying up politicians qualifies them as avaricious manipulators, not law-abiding companies. Their legal and moral defenses for this conduct are entirely bogus.

Let’s look at Goldman Sachs. In my film I report that Goldman was accused by Massachusetts authorities of deliberately designing mortgages to fail. They settled the complaint by paying a $60-million fine and wrote it off as a cost of doing business. The SEC later filed civil fraud charges on similar grounds. This was followed by turbulent hearings on the Hill during which Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) repeatedly cited an internal correspondence reference to “shitty” deals that Goldman Sachs peddled only to bet against them. The Justice Department, in a separate action, was asked to open a criminal file.Among the allegations: shady accounting schemes. The giant firm has certainly come in for excoriation and ridicule, but none of Goldman’s officers has been convicted of wrongdoing, and they are “lawyered up” to the gills. Leslie Griffith on Reader Supported News writes: “A modern-day financial monarchy, Goldman acts with the impunity once reserved for kings. Controlling legislators. Electing Presidents. Filling the Executive Branch with well-heeled lackeys, manipulating world markets and betting against the welfare of its own clients…the American people. When their equivalent of ‘tax time’ came, they squeezed the peasants for billions of bail-out bucks.”

In their testimony before Congress, Goldman bankers defended themselves by saying all big banks did what they did. A weak alibi at best, it nonetheless seems to be working for them. The assignment of criminal liability is hardly underway. As one lawyer said to Bloomberg News, “In order to proceed criminally in a case, you need to have very clear evidence of lying, cheating and stealing.” In plain English: Don’t get your hopes up. The government has not declared war on Wall Street even after Wall Street declared war on Main Street. The housing bubble was built on a bedrock of fraud linking shady subprime brokers and appraisers to an industry of financial products that were then resold with misrepresented values thanks to the connivance of unethical ratings agencies.

The selling and reselling of assetless asset-backed securities is a central element of the vast fraud, as is the practice of insuring while simultaneously betting against these investments through companies like AIG. We are talking about a criminal enterprise involving tens of thousands of people working in the financial services industry. Martin Wolf of The Financial Times explained that three industries worked together almost like a cabal to perpetuate these schemes. The architects of the FIRE economy (structured around Finance, Insurance and Real Estate), operated in the shadow of bent rules and apathetic regulators. They built a huge infrastructure of collaborators and henchmen called “financial service professionals.”

Writes Wolf: “In between the ultimate borrowers and the risk-takers were loan-originators, designers and packagers of securitized assets, ratings agencies, sales staff, managers of banks and SIVs [Structured Investment Vehicles] and managers of pension—and other—funds.” What chance did some poor homeowner or credit card customer have against this savvy and well-funded phalanx of operatives whose one mission was to separate them from their property and money?

Many knew the people they were selling to could not afford to buy their products. They didn’t care. It was all done deceptively and by design. It was deliberate, engineered in public and hidden in plain sight. At the local level, mortgage companies said they were under pressure from Wall Street to keep selling homes to the poor so the paper could be resold in an atmosphere of trickle-down corruption.

My own investigation led me to produce a new film, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, out on DVD from Disinfo. (PlunderTheCrimeOfOurTime.com). I also wrote a companion book, The Crime of Our Time (Disinformation Books) with more documentation than you can get into any film of reasonable length. I was surprised when the Wall Street Journal characterized it as an “anti-Wall Street film [that] isn’t just for Michael Moore fans.” The Hollywood Interview blog called it “fascinating and nailbiting, much like All the President’s Men.”

Movie City News elaborated: “Plunder: The Crime of Our Time describes how Wall Street interests greased the skids for just such a collapse, consciously breaking laws they knew government regulators were unlikely to defend. Michael Moore has trod similar ground, but in a more overtly entertaining style…. It’s a sobering documentary, but one that’s too important to ignore…in Schechter’s case, again.”

This crisis can be explained in a way most people will understand, and when the public “gets it” they will get angry and act. It’s the oldest truism: Where there is a will, there’s a way.

———-
News Dissector Danny Schechter, graduate of Cornell University and the London School of Economics, has been a radio news director, local TV news reporter, CNN show producer and Emmy Award-winning ABC News broadcast producer. He is cofounder of Globalvision, an independent film and television production company. He has directed 25 documentaries, including his latest, Plunder: The Crime of Our Time, about the financial crisis as a crime story. He has been honored as a blogger and has written 11 books, including The Crime of Our Time, further detailing his findings regarding financial crime. He has reported from 60 countries. Comments to Dissector@MediaChannel.org.

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by Greg Palast
from HUSTLER Magazine September 2010

GREG PALAST’S INVESTIGATION DISCOVERS THE REAL INTENT OF THE SHOW-ME-YOUR-PAPERS EDICT.

DON’T BE FOOLED. The way the media plays the story, it was a wave of racist, anti-immigrant hysteria that moved Arizona Republicans to pass a sick little law requiring every person in the state to carry papers proving they are U.S. citizens. I don’t buy it. Anti-Hispanic hysteria has always been as much a part of Arizona as the Saguaro cactus and excessive air-conditioning. What’s new here is the politicians’ fear of a xenophobic “Teabag” uprising.

What moved GOP Governor Jan Brewer to sign the Soviet-style show-me-your-papers law is the exploding number of legal Hispanics, U.S. citizens one and all, who are daring to vote—and daring to vote Democratic by more than two to one. Unless this demographic locomotive is halted, Arizona Republicans know their party will soon be electoral toast. Or, if you like, tortillas.

In 2008, working for Rolling Stone with civil rights attorney Bobby Kennedy, our team flew to Arizona to investigate what smelled like an electoral pogrom against Chicano voters… directed by one Jan Brewer.

Brewer, then secretary of state, had organized a racially loaded purge of the voter rolls that would have made Katherine Harris blush. Beginning after the 2004 election, under Brewer’s command, no less than 100,000 voters, overwhelmingly Hispanics, were blocked from registering to vote. In 2005, the first year of the Great Brown-Out, one in three Phoenix residents found their registration applications rejected.

That statistic caught my attention. Voting or registering to vote if you’re not a citizen is a felony, a big-time, jail-time crime. And arresting such criminal voters is easy: After all, they give their names and addresses.

So I asked Brewer’s office, had she busted a single one of these thousands of allegedly illegal voters? Did she turn over even one name to the feds for prosecution? No, not one.

Which raises the question:Were these disenfranchised voters the criminal, noncitizens Brewer tagged them, or just not-quite-white voters given the José Crow treatment, entrapped in document-chase trickery?

The answer was provided by a New Mexico federal prosecutor who was sent on a crazy hunt all over the western mesas looking for these illegal voters. “We took over 100 complaints, we investigated for almost two years, and I didn’t find one prosecutable voter fraud case.”

This prosecutor, David Iglesias, is a prosecutor no more. When he refused to fabricate charges of illegal voting among immigrants, his firing was personally ordered by the President of the United States, George W. Bush, under orders from his boss, Karl Rove. Iglesias told me that Rove and the Republican chieftains were working nationwide to whip up anti-immigrant hysteria with public busts of illegal voters, even though there were none.

“They wanted some splashy preelection indictments,” Iglesias told me. The former prosecutor, himself a Republican, paid the price when he stood up to this vicious attack on citizenship.

But Secretary of State Brewer followed the Rove plan to a T. The weapon she used to slice the Arizona voter rolls was a 2004 law, known as Prop. 200, which required proof of citizenship to register. The Republicans’ latest legislative horror show, sanctioning cops to stop residents and prove citizenship, is just one more step in the party’s desperate plan to impede Mexican-Americans from marching to the ballot box.

(By the way, no one elected Brewer.Weirdly, Barack Obama placed her in office last year when, for reasons known only to the Devil and Rahm Emanuel, the President appointed Arizona’s Democratic Governor Janet Napolitano to his cabinet, which automatically moved Republican Brewer into the governor’s office.) State Senator Russell Pearce, the Republican sponsor of the latest ID law, gave away his real intent, blocking the vote, when he said, “There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country.”

How many? Pearce’s PR flak told me 5 million. All Democrats too. Again, I asked Pearce’s office to give me their names and addresses from their phony registration forms. I’d happily make a citizen’s arrest of each one, on camera. Pearce didn’t have 5 million names. He didn’t have five. He didn’t have one.

The horde of 5 million voters who swam the Rio Grande just to vote for Obama was calculated on a Republican Web site extrapolating from the number of Mexicans in a border town who refused jury service because they were not citizens. Not one, in fact, had registered to vote; they had registered to drive. They had obtained licenses as required by the law. The illegal voters, “wetback” welfare moms and alien job thieves are just GOP Web site wet dreams, but their mythic PR power helps the party’s electoral hacks chop away at voter rolls and civil rights with little more than a whimper from the Democrats.

Indeed, one reason, I discovered, that some Democrats are silent is that they are in on the game themselves. In New Mexico, Democratic Party bosses tossed away ballots of Pueblo Indians to cut native influence in party primaries.

But what’s wrong with requiring folks to prove they’re American if they want to vote and live in America? The answer: Because the vast majority of perfectly legal voters and residents who lack ID sufficient for Ms. Brewer and Mr. Pearce are citizens of color, citizens of poverty.

According to a study by University of Washington professor Matt Barreto, minority citizens are half as likely as whites to have government ID. The numbers are dreadfully worse when income is factored in.

Just outside Phoenix, without Brewer’s or Pearce’s help, I did locate one of these evil un-American voters—that is, someone who could not prove her citizenship: 100-year-old Shirley Preiss. Her U.S. birth certificate was nowhere to be found, as it never existed.

In Phoenix, I stopped in at the Maricopa County Jail, where Sheriff Joe Arpaio houses the captives of his campaign to stop illegal immigration. Arpaio, who under the new Arizona law will be empowered to choose his targets for citizenship testing, is already facing federal indictment for his racially charged and legally suspect methods.

I admit, I was a little nervous, passing through the iron doors. A big sign reads: “NOTICE: ILLEGAL ALIENS ARE PROHIBITED FROM VISITING ANYONE IN THIS JAIL.” I mean, Grandma Palast snuck into the USA via Windsor, Canada. We Palasts are as illegal as they come, but Arpaio’s sophisticated deportee- sniffer didn’t stop this white boy from entering his sanctum.

But that’s the point, isn’t it? Not to stop noncitizens from entering Arizona—after all, who else would care for the country club lawn?—but to harass folks of the wrong color: Democratic blue.

Greg Palast, whom the Chicago Tribune has called “the most important investigative reporter of our time,” has covered the illegal disenfranchisement of voters for Rolling Stone (with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.), Harper’s, The Nation and TruthOut.org (which first published the preceding article). Palast, whose investigative reports can be seen on BBC Television’s Newsnight, is a Nation Institute/Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow and the author of Armed Madhouse and the New York Times best-seller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. For more, visit GregPalast.com.

Palast Investigates on DVD
Greg Palast’s ass-kicking exposés for BBC and Democracy Now! are collected on the newly released DVD Palast Investigates: From 8-Mile to the Amazon—On the Trail of the Financial Marauders. Featuring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Mike Papantonio, these are the original reports—uncut and uncensored! The DVD also features music by Willie Nelson and Foo Fighter guitarist Chris Shiflett with Jackson United. For more info or to order Palast Investigates, visit GregPalast.com.

by Brad Friedman
From HUSTLER Magazine August 2010

Amid the billowing smoke and carnage in the oilslicked waters of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the damage wrought by a Japanese surprise attack was devastatingly clear. The same was true when we watched in horror as the smoldering twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed on September 11, 2001.

Like those two pivotal events, January 21, 2010, is also “a date which will live in infamy,” yet you probably didn’t even notice. But you will.

If you thought the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott ruling was bad, and its 2001 Bush v. Gore decision awarding the White House to Dubya stunk, hold onto your hats. The highest court in the land has outdone itself with Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Whereas Dred Scott deemed that blacks weren’t people and therefore not entitled to the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, early this year the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court of the United States, in a 5-4 decision, decided that corporations can spend unlimited sums on political advertising to elect a preferred candidate—or to ensure that anybody they don’t like doesn’t get elected.

So, next election, it will be your “free speech” versus Walmart’s. Your “free speech” versus ExxonMobil’s. Your “free speech” versus AIG’s or Halliburton’s or Citibank’s or Monsanto’s or Lockheed Martin’s or Pfizer’s or the entire for-profit health insurance industry. Who do you suppose is going to win such a contest?

Corporations, which spent more to influence Congress last year than ever before, already had too much control of both Republican and Democratic candidates. And it’s about to get much, much worse. Justice John Paul Stevens, in his scathing dissent to the Citizens United decision, wrote: “While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this Court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.” But the five Reagan/Bush I/Bush II-appointed justices—Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Scalia and Kennedy—won the day.

Former Federal Elections Commission attorney Lawrence M. Noble concisely explained what any lobbyist or any corporation may now say to any member of Congress: “We have got a million we can spend advertising for you or against you— whichever one you want.” Noble’s “million” is an exceedingly conservative number. He might as well have said 10 million or 100 million. It’s all legal now, any amount.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy said, “The Court has recognized that First Amendment protection extends to corporations,” while Chief Justice John Roberts worried that “First Amendment rights could be confined to individuals, subverting the vibrant public discourse that is at the foundation of our democracy.” Free speech “confined to individuals”?! Oh, the horror. We’d hate to interrupt the “vibrant public discourse” that currently takes place every day between you the reader and Bank of America. How’s that “vibrant discourse” going, by the way?

Justice Antonin Scalia added, with a presumably straight face: “We should celebrate rather than condemn the addition of this speech to the public debate.”

Even a Ronald Reagan appointee, former conservative Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, wasn’t celebrating the decision: “The [Supreme Court] majority in Citizens United has signaled that the problem of campaign contributions in…elections might get considerably worse and quite soon.” As the previous swing vote on the High Court, O’Connor wrote the majority opinion supporting legislative restrictions on corporate campaign spending in the bipartisan McCain-Feingold Campaign Reform Act, which was gutted by the Citizens United decision.

As if that weren’t enough, legal scholars say the decision also applies to corporations with majority ownership by foreign countries. China and Saudi Arabia can now spend as much as they want to influence American elections. And worse, it can all be done in secret! No disclosure is necessary.

Republicans Celebrate “Activist Judges Legislating From the Bench”

It didn’t have to happen, but Chief Justice Roberts wanted it to. Citizens United, a wealthy right-wing group with a documentary called Hillary: The Movie, wanted to advertise the hit piece on television in the days prior to 2008’s New Hampshire primary. That would have violated the McCain- Feingold Act’s restrictions on corporate spending in the 30 days prior to elections. Lower courts barred Citizens United from advertising the movie. Roberts granted the case a hearing, but rather than decide on that very narrow issue, Dubya’s appointee asked Citizens United to return later to argue a larger question that it hadn’t even asked: whether there should be any limits on corporate campaign spending.

There was little doubt that the highly unusual move was made to allow Roberts and his right-wing majority on the Court the opportunity to decide in favor of corporations. The activist Republican justices clearly went out of their way to decimate a century of established campaign-finance law limiting corporate spending.

Republicans used to call that sort of thing “legislating from the bench” back when they were against judges creating law and overriding the will of the people’s elected legislatures. As with most claims by the modern Republican they didn’t actually mean it.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) praised the decision: “For too long, some in this country have been deprived of full participation in the political process. … [T]he Supreme Court took an important step in the direction of restoring the First Amendment rights of these groups…to express themselves about political candidates and issues up until Election Day.”

Congressman John Boehner (R-Ohio), House Republican Leader, concurred: “I think the Supreme Court decisions today are a big win for the First Amendment and a step in the right direction.”

Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman, said: “I am pleased that the Supreme Court has acted to protect the Constitution’s First Amendment rights of free speech and association.” Of course, the “free speech” of corporations comes first for Cornyn and friends. Unless, like ExxonMobil, you also have $45.2 billion in profits available to pump into political campaigns—as the oil giant had in 2008. Most of the immediate Democratic responses were timid, but some Dems were fighting mad. Florida’s firebrand freshman Representative Alan Grayson said the decision “legalizes bribery on the largest scale imaginable. … Corporations will be able to reward politicians that play ball with them, and they will be able to beat to death the politicians that don’t.”

Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, coauthor of the McCain-Feingold Act, called the decision “a terrible mistake” in which the Court ignored “important principles of judicial restraint and respect for precedent.” He added, “Presented with a relatively narrow legal issue, the Supreme Court chose to roll back laws that have limited the role of corporate money in federal elections since Teddy Roosevelt was President.”

Stare (pronounced star-ay) decisis refers to established law or precedent, the idea that judges should defer to the decisions of their predecessors, particularly after those decisions have had sufficient time to become “settled law.” The concept is generally raised during the confirmation protocol to determine whether or not potential Supreme Court justices will honor long-established decisions, such as abortion rights.

Both Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito gave lip service to their support of stare decisis during their respective confirmation hearings, although Roberts showed his hand a bit more than Alito did. While claiming an interest in “promoting the stability of the legal system,” Roberts hedged. “Obviously, if the decision is wrong, it should be overruled,” he qualified. “That’s not activism. That’s applying the law correctly.”

Despite considerable pressure from progressives to filibuster the nomination, 22 spineless Senate Democrats—including the otherwise-tenacious Feingold—voted to confirm John Roberts in 2005. They might as well have been voting themselves out of Congress—unless, of course, they prove willing to toe the corporate line.

Alito was less honest about respecting precedent. “It is not true, in my judgment, that the Supreme Court is free to do anything that it wants,” Alito stated during his 2006 confirmation. “It has to follow the Constitution, and it has to follow the laws. Stare decisis…is an important limitation on what the Supreme Court does. And although the Supreme Court has the power to overrule a prior precedent, it uses that power sparingly, and rightfully so.”

Apparently Alito was just kidding when he said he was “in favor of not trying to do too much, not trying to decide questions that are too broad, not trying to decide questions that don’t have to be decided and not going to broader grounds for a decision when a narrower ground is available.”

Just four Senate Democrats voted to confirm Alito—enough to ensure the longevity of the right-wing coup initiated by the High Court’s Florida 2000 decision.

The Only Real Solution Is a Constitutional Amendment Outraged yet? If not, you’re not paying attention. Or you believe that our Founders, after giving no explicit rights to corporations in the Constitution, actually intended that fictional entities—which don’t breathe, go to jail, die or even have an actual mouth— should be entitled to “free speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment.

In his dissenting opinion, Stevens stated the obvious: “Although they make enormous contributions to our society, corporations are not actually members of it. They cannot vote or run for office. Because they may be managed and controlled by nonresidents, their interests may conflict in fundamental respects with the interests of eligible voters.”

Normally, one might fight a bad law by taking it all the way up to the Supreme Court. But this law was written by the Supreme Court. So we are largely fucked. (I’ll take this opportunity to thank John Kerry for that—for not fighting in 2004 to make sure every vote was counted accurately and publicly in the state of Ohio, where he might have received more votes than Bush.)

As this issue goes to press, members of Congress—largely Democrats—plan to introduce legislation that could result in some restrictions on corporate campaign spending. But any new legislation can now be opposed by the power of unlimited corporate cash before passage.

Alan Grayson has introduced a package of six bills with names like the “Business Should Mind Its Own Business Act,” the “End Political Kickbacks Act,” the “Corporate Propaganda Sunshine Act” and the “Ending Corporate Collusion Act.” At SaveDemocracy.net, Grayson posted a simple petition in support of the package, stating: “We cannot have a government that is bought and paid for by huge multinational corporations. We need a government of the people, by the people and for the people.” A crazy leftist idea.

Senator Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Representative Chris Van Hollen (DMaryland) hope to fast-track bills banning donations from foreign-influenced companies and from companies that have received taxpayer assistance, such as 2009’s bank bailouts (at least until that money is paid back). Such bills would mandate immediate public disclosure of campaign spending by corporations, approval from shareholders or “I approve this ad” announcements by company CEOs.

As yet no Republicans are cosponsoring those bills. course, any new bill will face Supreme Court scrutiny. Good luck with that.

Activists at PeaceTeam.net have launched a petition calling for the impeachment of the “Supreme Court 5.” Good luck with that too. The only permanent and reasonable option to unwind this madness is a Constitutional amendment clarifying what every logical and/or non- Republican person in the country likely understands: The First Amendment right to free speech is meant to apply to humans, not fictional business entities.

Representative Donna Edwards (D-Maryland) has proposed a resolution calling for an amendment to the Constitution. It reads: “Congress and the States may regulate the expenditure of funds for political speech by any corporation, limited liability company or other corporate entity. Nothing contained in this Article shall be construed to abridge the freedom of the press.” If passed, it would then require ratification by two-thirds of the state legislatures.

Constitutional attorney John Bonifaz, legal director of FreeSpeechForPeople.org, supports Edwards’s initiative, noting our nation’s history of enacting amendments “to correct egregiously wrong decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court directly impacting the democratic process.”

The group’s general counsel, Jeffrey Clements, calls such action necessary because, he says, the Citizens United “decision is devastating to our democracy, which is already dominated to a dangerous degree by corporate interest money.” Adding a new amendment to the Constitution is an onerous process that takes years, but other options are limited. Yes, this is that bad.

MoveToAmend.org also has a petition in support of an amendment to “firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to Constitutional rights.”

As Move to Amend strives to craft language that may gain broad support—even from Republicans, who would be needed to ratify such an amendment— John Wilkens, a reader of my own blog, wrote elegantly simple Constitutional language for such an amendment: “The rights, responsibilities and privileges granted to citizens of the United States as enumerated in this Constitution, its amendments and extended through case law are exclusively reserved for human beings.”

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Now there’s an—apparently—novel idea! Brad Friedman is a Los Angeles-based investigative journalist and political commentator. Besides cohosting radio’s nationally syndicated Green News Report, he is the executive editor and publisher of The Brad Blog (BradBlog.com).

“I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.”—Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan in a speech to the Economic Club of New York, 1988

by Ellen Brown
for HUSTLER Magazine – July 2010

IF YOU’VE NEVER REALLY UNDERSTOOD THE FEDERAL RESERVE but were too embarrassed to ask, don’t worry. Hardly anybody understands it, and the Federal Reserve (or “Fed”) likes it that way. “Fed speak” is a term coined to describe its incomprehensible utterances. Why is the Fed so obscure? To conceal the fact that America’s banking system is largely sleight of hand. If you could see what was really going on, you might be reluctant to play the game. The Federal Reserve is not actually “federal,” and today it keeps nothing in “reserve” except government bonds, which are basically IOUs from our Treasury. The Fed’s Web site says it is a “public-private hybrid,” but not one share of its stock is owned by the public. Each of the 12 Federal Reserve branches is owned by its member banks, which get a guaranteed annual 6% dividend on their stock. The Fed is authorized under the Federal Reserve Act to print and lend its own Federal Reserve Notes (dollar bills) to the government in return for government bonds. Federal Reserve Notes are backed by nothing but “the full faith and credit of the United States.”

And that is where the sleight of hand comes in: The Fed is printing our money and lending it back to us. Acting as our government’s bank, the Federal Reserve gives us cash in exchange for government bonds. That means our money is backed by nothing but our own national debt!

A private bank deceptively called “the Federal Reserve” has been awarded the ultimate franchise: the ability to create our crucial medium of exchange, the oil that turns the wheels of production and allows goods to flow in trade. The ability to create also means the ability to restrict and control.

Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. (father of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh Jr.) opposed passage of the Federal Reserve Act in1913. He warned Congress: “[The Federal Reserve Board] can cause the pendulum of a rising and falling market to swing gently back and forth by slight changes in the discount rate, or cause violent fluctuations by greater rate variation, and in either case it will possess inside information as to financial conditions and advance knowledge of the coming change, either up or down. This is the strangest, most dangerous advantage ever placed in the hands of a special privilege class by any Government that ever existed. … The financial system has been turned over to…a purely profiteering group. The system is private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money.”

Except for coins, which make up only about one ten-thousandth of the money supply, the entire U.S. money supply is now created as a debt to the private Federal Reserve and the private banks it backstops. The Fed, our government’s banker, plays the same game private retail banks play with us. The banks create money out of thin air, then say we owe it back to them with interest.

Modern banking is basically a shell game, in which “debt” is called “money.” The money is then moved from shell to shell. The Federal Reserve was instituted in 1913 to keep the shell game going by moving the elusive peas to whichever shells needed them at any one time. The shell game dates back to the 17th century, when goldsmiths started giving out paper receipts for the gold entrusted to them for safekeeping. Other customers wanted to borrow gold, but most customers preferred the paper receipts to the gold itself because they were easier and safer to carry around. The goldsmiths soon discovered that only about 10% of the customers would demand actual gold at any one time. That meant the goldsmiths-turned-bankers could safely lend up to ten times as many paper notes as they had gold.

Although nine of the ten notes were actually counterfeit, this dubious practice was sanctioned as “fractional reserve lending” and became the means by which money has been created by banks ever since.

The system was formalized in 1694, when a privately owned banking corporation called the Bank of England was allowed to lend its banknotes to the Crown. The bank was chartered by King William III, who never had to pay these loans off. He just paid the interest on them. Whenever he needed more money, the bank printed more cash, and the game continued. (This is how ballooning deficits are still created.) King William III and his successors got a ready source of money and a national money supply out of the deal, but it was at the cost of inextricable debt to a private banking cartel, which gained the power to manipulate and control the money supply for its own purposes.

Why would the king give the bankers so much power? Because they were the ones who made him king in the first place! Meanwhile, back in the American colonies, a competing paper money system was devised, in which paper notes called “scrip” were issued by local governments. These notes, too, were basically receipts. But rather than representing private gold, they were receipts for the labor of soldiers and civil servants and for goods delivered to the government. The receipts traded in the community as money.

The most efficient of these systems was in Benjamin Franklin’s colony of Pennsylvania. The provincial government owned a bank, which made loans to farmers at 5% interest. The government also spent some money directly into the economy. This money came back to the government as principal and interest and was recycled into more loans. During the quarter-century that this system was in place, the citizens paid no taxes(because the revenue that came back to the government loan office provided adequate funds), they had no government debt, and price inflation did not occur. If more money supply was needed to keep servicing the debt, the bank printed it.

But there were 13 different systems in the 13 colonies, and some of these paper currencies were inflated from overprinting. When British merchants complained that they were getting paid in money that wasn’t holding its value, the king issued an edict stating that the colonists could no longer issue their own money. They had to pay their taxes in the king’s money—gold, or Bank of England notes backed by gold. Since the colonists did not have this form of money, they had to borrow it from the British bankers, putting them heavily in debt. The farmers started losing their farms, the economy sank into a severe depression, and the colonists finally rebelled and set up their own nation.

But their paper scrip was so heavily counterfeited during the Revolutionary War that it lost its value, and the Founding Fathers became disillusioned with it. Rather than blaming the British, who had done the counterfeiting, they blamed paper money itself. They could not agree whether to give the new government the power to issue its own paper money, so they just left that key feature out of the Constitution.

For the next century, bankers largely funded from abroad tried to impose on the country a private central bank modeled on the Bank of England. It would have the power to issue its own banknotes and lend them to the government at interest. But astute politicians kept seeing through the ruse.

Thomas Jefferson, campaigning against Alexander Hamilton’s privately owned Festus. Bank, helped keep its charter from being renewed. President Jackson railed against the Second U.S. Bank and blocked renewal of the charter. President Lincoln defied the bankers who wanted 24% to 36% interest on loans to fund the Civil War and reverted to the government-created paper money of the American colonists, which allowed him to win the war. During the second half of the 19thcentury, Greenbackers, Populists and other money reformers fought vigorously for the people’s control over the money supply.

William Jennings Bryan, the Populist candidate for President in 1896 and 1900, said in his famous “cross of gold” speech: “We say in our platform that we believe that the right to coin money and issue money is a function of government. … Those who are opposed to this proposition tell us that the issue of paper money is a function of the bank and that the government ought to go out of the banking business. I stand with Jefferson…and tell them, as he did, that the issue of money is a function of the government and that the banks should go out of the governing business.”

Bryan lost his bid for the Presidency, but he continued to campaign in Congress for government-issued money. In 1907 a particularly bad bank panic convinced a gullible public that the country needed a central bank to stop future panics. Bank runs had occurred regularly during the 19th century, when people—realizing that there was not enough gold to back their notes—all rushed to claim their gold at the same time. Robert Owens, a coauthor of the Federal Reserve Act, later testified before Congress that the banking industry had conspired to create a series of financial panics in order to create a popular demand for “reforms” that served the interests of the financiers.

The bankers’ bill for a central bank had to overcome stiff opposition in Congress, led by William Jennings Bryan. He said he would not support any bill that resulted in private money issued by private banks. He insisted that Federal Reserve Notes must be Treasury currency, issued and guaranteed by the government. To get their bill passed, the Wall Street faction changed its name from the Aldrich Bill to the Federal Reserve Act and brought it three days before Christmas, when Congress was preoccupied with departure for the holidays.

In a spirit of apparent compromise, the legislators made a show of acquiescing to Bryan’s demands. The bill was so obscurely worded that no one really understood its provisions. Bryan bought it, saying happily, “The right of the government to issue money is not surrendered to the banks; the control over the money so issued is not relinquished by the government.” That was what Bryan thought, but while the national money supply would be printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, it would be issued as an obligation or debt of the government, a debt owed back to the private Federal Reserve with interest. And while Congress and the President would have some input in appointing the Federal Reserve Board, the board would work behind closed doors with the regional bankers, without Congressional oversight or control.

The Wall Street faction succeeded the same year in passing the 16th Amendment, authorizing a federal income tax. The tax was to be paid directly to the Federal Reserve to cover the massive interest bill that would soon be incurred by the government for borrowing its own money, in the form of credit, from the privately owned Fed.

All in all, it was a huge coup for the bankers and their colleagues in Europe. In 1934, amid the throes of the Great Depression, House Banking and Currency Committee Chairman Louis McFadden charged on the Congressional Record: “Some people think that the Federal Reserve Banks are United States Government institutions. They are private monopolies which prey upon the people of these United States for the benefit of themselves and their foreign customers; foreign and domestic speculators and swindlers; and rich and predatory moneylenders. … These 12 private credit monopolies were deceitfully and disloyally foisted upon this Country by the bankers who came here from Europe and repaid us our hospitality by undermining our American institutions.”

If the purpose of the Fed was to backstop bankruns, it did not work very well, since the largest bankrun in history occurred in 1933. But that did not prompt Congress to disband this privately owned banking club with a monopoly on the right to create money. Instead, the dollar was taken off the gold standard, which had required that real gold be handed over to people demanding it. From then on, the Fed had the power to inflate its way out of bank crises just by printing the money its member banks needed to cover shortfalls at the teller’s window.

And inflate the Fed did. Since banks created the principal but not the interest needed to pay back their loans, debtors had to continually be found to take out new loans that the banks could charge interest on. It was the only way to keep the game going.

The banking scheme became not only a shell game but a pyramid scheme, which spread around the world until it ran out of creditworthy borrowers. It reached its mathematical limits in 2007, with the collapse of a housing bubble created by the Fed when it drastically lowered interest rates in 2001.The bubble burst when the Fed progressively raised rates after 2004. The Fed and the taxpayers have bailed out the Wall Street bankers, who are now extracting some of their biggest bonuses ever from market speculation. But Wall Street has largely shutoff the credit spigots to Main Street, forcing businesses to close and driving millions of homeowners into foreclosure and bankruptcy.

The banking scheme is a confidence game, and today confidence is wearing thin. Surveys show that75% to 80% of Americans are in favor of passing H.R. 1207 and S604, the House and Senate bills to audit and investigate the Fed. The jig is up. It’s time for a new game with new rules.

Ellen Brown is an attorney in Los Angeles and the author of 11 books. In Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free she shows how a private banking cartel has usurped the power to create money from the people themselves, and how We the People can get it back. Her Web site is WebOfDebt.com.

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by Mark Johnson
for HUSTLER Magazine – July 2010

Just a year after sucking in over $700billion in taxpayer-funded bailouts, the Wall Street banks have again posted record profits and paid out huge bonuses.

Defending the latest free-for-all, banks say that they have paid back most of the money from the Troubled Assets Relief Program with interest. But the TARP bailout sum of $700 billion represents only a small fraction of the trillions of dollars in federal funds made available to rescue the U.S. financial system. According to TARP’s own special inspector general, estimates of how much the total aid package will cost reach as high as $23.7 trillion.

After the 2008 bailouts, Wall Street’s biggest banks doled out bonuses that far exceeded their profits. These bonuses are enshrined in contracts, so it doesn’t matter whether the banks are making money or losing it; the bankers still get rewarded. This blatant profiteering is sanctioned by bank boards, which are run by the same executives who enrich themselves with bonus income.

Wall Street firms currently account for35% of all U.S. corporate profits, and investment bankers typically pull in bonuses worth up to ten times their six-figure base salaries. The 38 largest Wall Street financial institutions paid out over $145 billion in employee compensation for 2009. That’s 18% more than for 2008. By comparison, average personal earnings for the nation as a whole rose only 2.2%.

A glaring example of Wall Street greed is Goldman Sachs. The investment bank raked in$45.2 billion in revenue for 2009, made a profit of $13 billion and paid out $16.19 billion to employees. That included stock bonuses worth $45 million for its top executives, with CEO Lloyd Blankfein pocketing $9 million. Insurance and investment giant AIG, which got slammed for its huge 2008 bonuses, paid out bonuses totaling $100 million for 2009.AIG received a $180-billion rescue package in late 2008 and still hasn’t paid it all back.

JPMorgan Chase reported profits of $11.7billion for 2009 and paid out $26.9 billion, a major chunk of it in the form of bonuses. Bank of America raked in $119.6 billion in2009, paid out $31.5 billion to employees and awarded its investment bankers $4.4 billion in bonuses. BofA also boosted the base salaries of its top executives.

Despite their profits and bonus payouts, Wall Street banks are still drawing on the trillions of dollars made available to them by the U.S. government. Worse still, economists are projecting fresh foreclosure waves to hit Wall Street, giving the banks more excuses to line their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

The same banks profiting from taxpayer dollars are also making sure no one clamps down on their con game. Wall Street’s biggest banks are increasing political contributions and boosting budgets and manpower in their Capitol Hill lobbying corps to block any meaningful banking regulation.

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