From AlterNet
By Matt Taibbi

“I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to AIG. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.” via Op-Ed Contributor — “Dear AIG, I Quit!” — NYTimes.com

Like a lot of people, I read Wednesday’s New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit.

DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn’t know where that money was coming from?

Read more Anger

From uExpress
By Ted Rall

“Populist anger in America is the anger of dispossession,” writes Newsweek’s Rick Perlstein. “The delinking of effort and reward has become all too manifest. That always makes Americans angry. We do not like to reward those who do not produce.”

That’s not it. This is about abused customers. After decades of insults, they can’t believe they’re being made to save companies that treat them like crap.

I’m a calm person. Yet my most recent bank statement featured three items that brought my blood to a fast boil. One was a $10 “income wire transfer fee.” A newspaper that publishes this column paid for it by wiring the money to my account. The bank charged me ten bucks–for depositing money! Money that, by the way, they invest in what the banking industry calls “the overnight call float.”

The same statement included a $3 fee for using an ATM that belongs to a different bank. Compared to my bank, loan sharks are sweethearts. If I take out $20 every day and pay three dollars each time, that’s 15 percent interest a day–or 5,475 percent a year. Did I mention that the fee was a mistake? I never use ATMs at other banks. To straighten out this $3 fee, I’ll have to waste my time explaining myself to someone at a call center in India, typing my account number into a keypad so I can repeat it by voice after waiting on hold.

Then there’s what my bank calls AN IMPORTANT CHANGE CONCERNING THE PROCESSING OF YOUR CHECKS EFFECTIVE MARCH 20, 2009: “As checks you have written are presented to us for payment during the course of a business day,” they explain, “we will place a hold on available funds in your account of those checks, resulting in a reduction in your available account balance throughout that day.” This is Bankese for: “You will pay bounce fees even when you have enough money in your account for checks to clear.”

Read more Anger

From The Virginian-Pilot
By Daryl Lease

For days now, I’ve been standing rather sheepishly amid an angry mob of American taxpayers, awkwardly shifting my pitchfork from hand to hand, unsure what I’m supposed to do with it when I’m not waving it in the air.

Now, at last, I know.

The answer was inadvertently supplied to me by JPMorgan Chase. It’s been in the news lately for its plans to spend almost $120 million to buy two new corporate jets and another $18 million to renovate a hangar at Westchester Airport outside New York City.

When ABC News aired a report on JPMorgan Chase’s plans, the angry mob of American taxpayers – still fuming over all those bonuses at AIG – began a-grumbling and agitating anew.

The financial giant, you see, received $25 billion in federal bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. And this – this – is the thanks we get? Two fancy new jets and a fancy hangar?

“It’s a remarkably boneheaded decision,” corporate watchdog Nell Minow told ABC. “It’s completely tone deaf.”

But the folks at JPMorgan Chase quickly barked back at the watchdog and ABC’s riffraff-rousing report. A bank spokesman told The New York Times that the new jets are merely replacing two of JP-Morgan Chase’s four existing corporate flying machines.

Read more Pitchfork

From Salon
By Joe Conason

Dick Cheney once observed that “deficits don’t matter,” which may well have been the most honest phrase he ever uttered. His words were at least partly true, which is more than can be said for the great majority of the vice president’s remarks — and they certainly expressed the candid attitude of Republicans whenever they attain power. His pithy fiscal slogan should remind us that much of the current political furor over deficit spending in the Obama budget is wrong, hypocritical, and worthy of the deepest skepticism.

In our time, the Republican Party has compiled an impressive history of talking about fiscal responsibility while running up unrivaled deficits and debt. Of the roughly $11 trillion in federal debt accumulated to date, more than 90 percent can be attributed to the tenure of three presidents: Ronald Reagan, who used to complain constantly about runaway spending; George Herbert Walker Bush, reputed to be one of those old-fashioned green-eyeshade Republicans; and his spendthrift son George “Dubya” Bush, whose trillion-dollar war and irresponsible tax cuts accounted for nearly half the entire burden. Only Bill Clinton temporarily reversed the trend with surpluses and started to pay down the debt (by raising rates on the wealthiest taxpayers).

Republicans in Congress likewise demanded balanced budgets in their propaganda (as featured in the 1993 Contract with America), but then proceeded to despoil the Treasury with useless spending and tax cuts for those who needed them least. Even John McCain, once a principled critic of those tax cuts, turned hypocrite when he endorsed them while continuing to denounce the deficits they had caused.

But was Cheney wrong when he airily dismissed the importance of deficits? In the full quotation, as first recounted by Paul O’Neill, Bush’s fired Treasury Secretary, he said, “You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the [Congressional] midterms [in November 2002]. This is our due.” What he evidently meant — aside from claiming the spoils — was that the effects of deficit spending tend to be less dire than predicted. And that insight deserves to be considered if only because all the partisan barking over the projected deficits in the Obama budget is so hysterical — as if nothing could be worse than more federal spending.

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From The NY Observer
By Joe Conason

As Barack Obama’s economic advisers confront choices that vary from bad to worse in their mission to revive the financial sector and the broader economy, it is worth remembering that those were choices inherited by the president, who is still new to his office. Listening to his critics, especially on the right, it would be easy to believe Mr. Obama is responsible for ballooning deficits, gigantic bailouts, ridiculous bonuses, nationalized institutions and careening markets.

It would be easy to believe but entirely false—and merely the latest episode in an old political con game that is all too typical of Washington.

Ever since Election Day 2008, the usual suspects have been hard at work, deflecting responsibility from the Bush administration (and the Republicans in Congress) for the catastrophic effects of conservative policy enacted during the past eight years. Within days after Mr. Obama’s victory, as stock prices fell, radio host and ideological commissar Rush Limbaugh exclaimed that we were already in the “Obama recession.”

In fact, the economy had been shrinking for nearly a year by then, and the market was responding to bad economic news rather than the election result.

But facts are inconvenient for propaganda—especially when politicians and pundits are seeking to escape blame for policies that have failed.

Among the boldest perpetrators of this con game over the past few decades is Mr. Limbaugh, who shares with his fellow Republicans a peculiar method of timing the blame for economic woe. When he was flacking for the first President Bush back in 1992, he wrote: “The worst economic period in the last 50 years was under Jimmy Carter, which led to the 1981-82 recession, a recession more punishing than the current one.” But of course the president during the 1982 recession was not named Carter; that president was the sainted Ronald Reagan.

Read more Blame

From The NY Times
By Paul Krugman

On Monday, Lawrence Summers, the head of the National Economic Council, responded to criticisms of the Obama administration’s plan to subsidize private purchases of toxic assets. “I don’t know of any economist,” he declared, “who doesn’t believe that better functioning capital markets in which assets can be traded are a good idea.”

Leave aside for a moment the question of whether a market in which buyers have to be bribed to participate can really be described as “better functioning.” Even so, Mr. Summers needs to get out more. Quite a few economists have reconsidered their favorable opinion of capital markets and asset trading in the light of the current crisis.

But it has become increasingly clear over the past few days that top officials in the Obama administration are still in the grip of the market mystique. They still believe in the magic of the financial marketplace and in the prowess of the wizards who perform that magic.

The market mystique didn’t always rule financial policy. America emerged from the Great Depression with a tightly regulated banking system, which made finance a staid, even boring business. Banks attracted depositors by providing convenient branch locations and maybe a free toaster or two; they used the money thus attracted to make loans, and that was that.

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From The Progressive
By Matthew Rothschild

President Obama needs to tell Attorney General Eric Holder to indict Dick Cheney, right now, for war crimes.

Just look at the statute, Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code, Section 2441. It says that someone is guilty of a war crime if he or she commits a “grave breach of common Article 3” of the Geneva Conventions. And then it defines what a grave breach would be.

One such breach is torture, or the conspiracy to commit torture, which Cheney was clearly in on, as when he repeatedly defended waterboarding and talked about the need to go to the “dark side” Here’s the language from the statute: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires to commit, an act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering . . . upon another person within his custody or physical control for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession, punishment, intimidation, coercion, or any reason based on discrimination of any kind.”

Another grave breach is “cruel or inhuman treatment,” or the conspiracy to inflict such treatment. Again, Cheney was supervising such treatment in the White House, which would qualify as committing this crime. One time, it got so ghoulish that Attorney General John Ashcroft asked the other principals, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.”

Here’s the language on “cruel or inhuman treatment”: “The act of a person who commits, or conspires or attempts to commit, an act intended to inflict severe or serious physical or mental pain or suffering . . . including serious physical abuse, upon another within his custody or control.”

An additional breach is “mutilation or maiming.” Since some detainees say they no longer have the complete functioning of arms or limbs, Cheney may be on the hook here, too. “The act of a person who intentionally injures, or conspires or attempts to injure, or injures whether intentionally or unintentionally in the course of committing any other offense under this subsection, one or more persons . . . by disfiguring the person or persons by any mutilation thereof or by permanently disabling any member, limb or organ of his body, without any legitimate medical or dental purpose.”

Read more War Crimes

From The Consortium News
By Robert Parry

President Barack Obama and Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei spoke past each other in a recent exchange partly because both countries nurse historical grievances against the other and neither has fully acknowledged that mutual history dating back three decades.

For instance, in responding to Obama’s Persian New Year message, Khamenei appeared to reference a top-secret U.S. document in which President Ronald Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, described being told by Middle East allies in 1981 that President Jimmy Carter had given a “green light” to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Iran in September 1980.

That “Talking Points” document, which Haig used to brief Reagan, was first revealed at Consortiumnews.com in 1996 after I discovered it among documents left behind by a House task force that had investigated allegations that Reagan’s 1980 campaign contacted Iranian officials behind Carter’s back, the so-called “October Surprise” scandal.

From those early contacts, Reagan’s administration then secretly sanctioned arms shipments to Iran via Israel, a pattern that later merged into the Iran-Contra Affair, according to evidence that has emerged from several investigations of these linked scandals.

After returning from his first Middle East trip in April 1981, Haig wrote in his “Talking Points” that he was impressed with “bits of useful intelligence” that he had learned.

Read more Iran

From The Asia Times
By Pepe Escobar

As the Barack Obama administration releases the details of its strategic review of Afghanistan’s “good war”, an acronym-plagued global public opinion is confronted with a semantic dilemma: what in the world is happening to George W Bush’s “global war on terror” (GWOT), then slyly rebranded by the Pentagon as “The Long War” (TLW)?

It all started when a mid-level bureaucrat in the Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) sent an e-mail to the Pentagon stressing the White House was finally axing GWOT and giving birth to the delightfully Orwellian Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).

As it happens, no Taliban will be OCOed – at least for the moment. The White House and the Pentagon still rely on GWOT. Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell was adamant: “I’ve never received such a directive.” Asked by a reporter what nomenclature he would prefer, Morrell took no prisoners: “Another way to refer to it would be, you know, a campaign against extremists who wish to do us harm.” So exit GWOT, enter CAEWWTDUH.

What’s in a name?

There’s still no evidence that the Obama administration’s new strategy will be all-out CAEWWTDUH. Or that the US-backed international conference on Afghanistan in The Hague next Tuesday – which Iran has confirmed it will attend – will go CAEWWTDUH. Or that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit in Brussels next Friday will re-evaluate all its CAEWWTDUH options.

Read more Spaghetti Western

From The Seattle Times
By Leonard Pitts Jr.

There are now 926 hate groups in this country.

Take a second and consider that number. It represents an increase of more than 50 percent since 2000. And by “hate groups,” I don’t mean guys in their bathrobes who go online and pretend their followers are legion. No, I mean actual Klan cells, neo-Nazi sects, gay-bashing “churches,” cliques of black separatists, white nationalists, nativists, racist skinheads and other merchants of venom who meet, plot and recruit in all 48 contiguous states. (Alaska and Hawaii have no known hate groups.) Nine hundred twenty-six of them. The number is a record.

We learn all this from the Southern Poverty Law Center www.splcenter.org) in Montgomery, Ala., which has, since its founding in 1971, become a leading authority on the business of hate. According to the latest issue of Intelligence Report, the SPLC’s quarterly magazine, that business is booming.

And maybe you wonder how this can be. How can hate enjoy such phenomenal growth in a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president? The answer is that we are a nation where a Jew serves as senator from Connecticut, a Muslim serves as representative from Minnesota, a Hispanic is governor of New Mexico and a black man is president. Because if those things strike you as signs of progress, well, they are signs of apocalypse to those who believe only white, male Christians are fit to lead.

But that’s not the only reason for the increase. SPLC also cites the debate over illegal immigration that has dominated much of this decade. Though former President Bush offered thoughtful, moderate leadership on the issue, he was drowned out by demagogic extremists competing to see which could most effectively scapegoat undocumented workers. They, too, bear responsibility here.

Finally, there is the economy. When things get tough, people become more receptive to the idea that their miseries are all the fault of some alien other. So the stock market, too, is implicated. Hate rises when the Dow falls.

Read more Hate