Gustav Evacuees Get Barcoded Bracelets

Tyler will be a hub for several thousand Hurricane Gustav evacuees as city officials enact its emergency response plan, and so far, it seems as though early relief efforts have been fluid.Mayor Barbara Bass Saturday signed an official declaration of disaster/emergency condition during the second of two press conferences on Saturday. Mayor Bass said preparations are specifically geared towards the evacuations of special needs evacuees from Beaumont.

“We are fully prepared to respond to the emergency situation,” Mayor Bass said. “We have activated our emergency operations center as well as our reception center.”The city’s reception center is located at Faulkner Park off of U.S. Highway 69, just north of Loop 49. A team of police, fire and medical officials are in place to greet and process evacuees, whether they come in official buses or in cars.

By 5 p.m. Saturday, the first four buses carrying about 155 people arrived in Tyler and headed directly to a shelter, Tyler Fire Department Captain Jeff Akin said.Meanwhile at the reception center, about 12 people - a family of four and a group of eight - were the first to check in with officials before heading to a local shelter.

A small bus carrying about 15 evacuees arrived by 7 p.m. and about 1,000 more are expected to arrive by Monday, Akin said.Tyler Fire Department Chief David Schlottach said following numerous conference calls with state officials, they are expecting to receive about 6,000 evacuees, although, he said he is uncertain if any will be coming from New Orleans.

“We really do have great communications with the state,” Chief Scholattach said. “Tyler is heavily involved in this.”

City officials said since the reception center will process thousands of people, they are implementing a system that will move people to shelters smoothly.

“We are really streamlining this process,” said Susan Guthrie, city of Tyler communications director.

Guthrie said evacuees coming in their own cars are asked to go directly to the reception center so they may keep up with the number of people they are receiving and to avoid having an overflow at some shelters.

Before leaving Beaumont, evacuees have already been entered into an intricate computer system that will keep track of them once they make it to Tyler.

“They already have a bracelet with a barcode,” Captain Akin said. “They will walk through the scanner and it automatically loads into the computers. We have a list of where they need to go.”

This system ensures that families can locate each other when coming to East Texas, Akin said.

“With Hurricane Katrina, we had no system. Families were calling wanting to know where family members were and we had no way of finding out. This way, we have a better way of tracking where people are going.”

Stan Lewis, with the Salvation Army, said they will provide food and water to evacuees at the reception center through Monday, before heading south. He said 150 volunteers will load up on about 20 disaster vehicles but he is unsure what city they will be deployed to.

“We could go to New Orleans or it could be Port Arthur,” Lewis said. “Until then, we are going to try to help these people.”

Bob Frazier, 66, was among one of the first evacuees off of the first bus at the reception center. Although anxious about the result of Hurricane Gustav, he said he was a little more at ease with the way state and local officials are handling the evacuation process. During Hurricane Rita, Frazier said he spent three days on a bus without food, water and bathroom breaks.

“Today we had plenty of water and it only took us about four hours to get here,” Frazier said as he snacked on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich provided by Salvation Army volunteers. “It wasn’t bad at all. I knew it would be different this time.”

Jason Hollowell, a Tyler Junior College paramedic student, volunteered at the center and said he was prepared to be there all night, bringing an extra change of clothes. He said he helped with relief efforts during Hurricane Katrina and he is also pleased that things are much more organized this time.

“It’s a week before and it’s already set up,” Hollowell said. “There are things we are doing in anticipation and preparation. With Katrina, the storm hit and we walked outside and there were 45 buses. We learned a lot about what not to do from three years ago.”

With the influx of evacuees, Chief Schlottach noted that East Texas drivers are to use precaution when traveling roads and highways.

“Traffic will be very congested because there are a great number of self evacuees coming up the highway,” he said. “I just advise citizens to bear with it because their fellow Texans are trying to get out of harm’s way.”

Chief Schottach said those interested in volunteering can call 211 to find out ways to help with relief efforts.

With the signing of the declaration and activation of the emergency management plan, Mayor Bass said the city will now be eligible to request reimbursement from federal funds for providing shelter and relief to evacuees.

Tyler Paper | COSHANDRA DILLARD | Saturday, Aug 30, 2008

Medvedev outlines five main points of future foreign policy

SOCHI, August 31 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Dmitry Medvedev outlined on Sunday the five points upon which Moscow’s future foreign policy will be based, and also said that it could if necessary introduce sanctions against other states. Read more

‘America’s Outrageous War Economy!’

Pentagon can’t find $2.3 trillion, wasting trillions on ‘national defense’

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — Yes, America’s economy is a war economy. Not a “manufacturing” economy. Not an “agricultural” economy. Nor a “service” economy. Not even a “consumer” economy.

Seriously, I looked into your eyes, America, saw deep into your soul. So let’s get honest and officially call it “America’s Outrageous War Economy.” Admit it: we secretly love our war economy. And that’s the answer to Jim Grant’s thought-provoking question last month in the Wall Street Journal — “Why No Outrage?”

There really is only one answer: Deep inside we love war. We want war. Need it. Relish it. Thrive on war. War is in our genes, deep in our DNA. War excites our economic brain. War drives our entrepreneurial spirit. War thrills the American soul. Oh just admit it, we have a love affair with war. We love “America’s Outrageous War Economy.”
Americans passively zone out playing video war games. We nod at 90-second news clips of Afghan war casualties and collateral damage in Georgia. We laugh at Jon Stewart’s dark comedic news and Ben Stiller’s new war spoof “Tropic Thunder” … all the while silently, by default, we’re cheering on our leaders as they aggressively expand “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” a relentless machine that needs a steady diet of war after war, feeding on itself, consuming our values, always on the edge of self-destruction.

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Why else are Americans so eager and willing to surrender 54% of their tax dollars to a war machine, which consumes 47% of the world’s total military budgets?
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Why are there more civilian mercenaries working for no-bid private war contractors than the total number of enlisted military in Iraq (180,000 to 160,000), at an added cost to taxpayers in excess of $200 billion and climbing daily?
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Why do we shake our collective heads “yes” when our commander-in-chief proudly tells us he is a “war president;” and his party’s presidential candidate chants “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” as if “war” is a celebrity hit song?
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Why do our spineless Democrats let an incompetent, blundering executive branch hide hundreds of billions of war costs in sneaky “supplemental appropriations” that are more crooked than Enron’s off-balance-sheet deals?
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Why have Washington’s 537 elected leaders turned the governance of the American economy over to 42,000 greedy self-interest lobbyists?
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And why earlier this year did our “support-our-troops” “war president” resist a new GI Bill because, as he said, his military might quit and go to college rather than re-enlist in his war; now we continue paying the Pentagon’s warriors huge $100,000-plus bonuses to re-up so they can keep expanding “America’s Outrageous War Economy?” Why? Because we secretly love war!

We’ve lost our moral compass: The contrast between today’s leaders and the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 shocks our conscience. Today war greed trumps morals. During the Revolutionary War our leaders risked their lives and fortunes; many lost both.

Today it’s the opposite: Too often our leaders’ main goal is not public service but a ticket to building a personal fortune in the new “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” often by simply becoming a high-priced lobbyist.

Ultimately, the price of our greed may be the fulfillment of Kevin Phillips’ warning in “Wealth and Democracy:” “Most great nations, at the peak of their economic power, become arrogant and wage great world wars at great cost, wasting vast resources, taking on huge debt, and ultimately burning themselves out.”

‘National defense’ a propaganda slogan selling a war economy?

But wait, you ask: Isn’t our $1.4 trillion war budget essential for “national defense” and “homeland security?” Don’t we have to protect ourselves?

Sorry folks, but our leaders have degraded those honored principles to advertising slogans. They’re little more than flag-waving excuses used by neocon war hawks to disguise the buildup of private fortunes in “America’s Outrageous War Economy.”

America may be a ticking time bomb, but we are threatened more by enemies within than external terrorists, by ideological fanatics on the left and the right. Most of all, we are under attack by our elected leaders who are motivated more by pure greed than ideology. They terrorize us, brainwashing us into passively letting them steal our money to finance “America’s Outrageous War Economy,” the ultimate “black hole” of corruption and trickle-up economics.

You think I’m kidding? I’m maybe too harsh? Sorry but others are far more brutal. Listen to the ideologies and realities eating at America’s soul.

1. Our toxic ‘war within’ is threatening America’s soul

How powerful is the Pentagon’s war machine? Trillions in dollars. But worse yet: Their mindset is now locked deep in our DNA, in our collective conscience, in America’s soul. Our love of war is enshrined in the writings of neocon war hawks like Norman Podoretz, who warns the Iraq War was the launching of “World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism,” a reminder that we could be occupying Iraq for a hundred years. His WW IV also reminded us of the coming apocalyptic end-of-days “war of civilizations” predicted by religious leaders in both Christian and Islamic worlds two years ago.

In contrast, this ideology has been challenged in works like Craig Unger’s “American Armageddon: How the Delusions of the Neoconservatives and the Christian Right Triggered the Descent of America — and Still Imperil Our Future.”

Unfortunately, neither threat can be dismissed as “all in our minds” nor as merely ideological rhetoric. Trillions of tax dollars are in fact being spent to keep the Pentagon war machine aggressively planning and expanding wars decades in advance, including spending billions on propaganda brainwashing naïve Americans into co-signing “America’s Outrageous War Economy.” Yes, they really love war, but that “love” is toxic for America’s soul.

2. America’s war economy financed on blank checks to greedy

Read Nobel Economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard professor Linda Bilmes’ “$3 Trillion War.” They show how our government’s deceitful leaders are secretly hiding the real long-term costs of the Iraq War, which was originally sold to the American taxpayer with a $50 billion price tag and funded out of oil revenues.

But add in all the lifetime veterans’ health benefits, equipment placement costs, increased homeland security and interest on new federal debt, and suddenly taxpayers got a $3 trillion war tab!

3. America’s war economy has no idea where its money goes

Read Portfolio magazine’s special report “The Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Problem.” The Pentagon’s 2007 budget of $440 billion included $16 billion to operate and upgrade its financial system. Unfortunately “the defense department has spent billions to fix its antiquated financial systems [but] still has no idea where its money goes.”

And it gets worse: Back “in 2000, Defense’s inspector general told Congress that his auditors stopped counting after finding $2.3 trillion in unsupported entries.” Yikes, our war machine has no records for $2.3 trillion! How can we trust anything they say?

4. America’s war economy is totally ‘unmanageable’

For decades Washington has been waving that “national defense” flag, to force the public into supporting “America’s Outrageous War Economy.” Read John Alic’s “Trillions for Military Technology: How the Pentagon Innovates and Why It Costs So Much.”

A former Congressional Office of Technology Assessment staffer, he explains why weapon systems cost the Pentagon so much, “why it takes decades to get them into production even as innovation in the civilian economy becomes ever more frenetic and why some of those weapons don’t work very well despite expenditures of many billions of dollars,” and how “the internal politics of the armed services make weapons acquisition almost unmanageable.” Yes, the Pentagon wastes trillions planning its wars well in advance.

Comments? Tell us: What will it take to wake up America, get citizens, investors, anybody mad at “America’s Outrageous War Economy?”

Why don’t you rebel? Will the outrage come too late … after this massive war bubble explodes in our faces?

MarketWatch | Paul B. Farrell | Monday, August 18, 2008

New Orleans orders mandatory evacuation

Spooked by predictions that Hurricane Gustav could grow into a Category 5 monster, an estimated 1 million people fled the Gulf Coast Saturday - even before the official order came for New Orleans residents to get out of the way of a storm taking dead aim at Louisiana.

Mayor Ray Nagin gave the mandatory order late Saturday, but all day residents took to buses, trains, planes and cars - clogging roadways leading away from New Orleans, still reeling three years after Hurricane Katrina flooded 80 percent of the city and killed about 1,600 across the region.

The evacuation of New Orleans becomes mandatory at 8 a.m. Sunday along the vulnerable west bank of the Mississippi River, and at noon on the east bank. Nagin called Gustav the storm of the century and told residents to “get your butts out of New Orleans now.”

“This is the real deal, not a test,” Nagin said as he issued the order, warning residents that staying would be “one of the biggest mistakes of your life.” He emphasized that the city will not offer emergency services to anyone who chooses to stay behind.

Gustav had already killed more than 80 people in the Caribbean, and if current forecasts hold up, it would make landfall Monday afternoon somewhere between the East Texas and western Mississippi.

Forecasters warned it was still too soon to say whether New Orleans would take another direct hit, but residents weren’t taking any chances judging by the bumper-to-bumper traffic pouring from the city. Gas stations along interstate highways were running out of fuel, and phone circuits were jammed.

Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said they were surprised at how quickly Gustav gained strength as it slammed into Cuba’s tobacco-growing western tip. It went from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in about 24 hours, and was likely to become a Category 5 - with sustained winds of 156 mph or more - by Sunday.

“That puts a different light on our evacuations and hopefully that will send a very clear message to the people in the Gulf Coast to really pay attention,” said Federal Emergency Management Agency chief David Paulison.

Levee building on the city’s west bank was incomplete, Nagin said. A storm surge of 15 to 20 feet would pour through canals and flood the neighborhood and neighboring Jefferson Parish, he said.

Even before the evacuation order, hotels closed, and the airport prepared to follow suit. Nagin told tourists to leave. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff planned to travel to Louisiana on Sunday to observe preparations.

As part of the evacuation plan New Orleans developed after Katrina, residents who had no other way to get out of the city waited on a line that snaked for more than a mile through the parking lot of the city’s main transit terminal. From there, they were boarding motor coaches bound for shelters in north Louisiana.

“I don’t like it,” said Joseph Jones Jr., 61, who draped a towel over his head to block the blazing sun. “Going someplace you don’t know, people you don’t know. And then when you come back, is your house going to be OK?”

Jones had been in line for 2 1/2 hours, but he wasn’t complaining. During Katrina, he’d been stranded on a highway overpass.

Others led children or pushed strollers with one hand and pulled luggage with the other. Volunteers handed out bottled water, and medics were nearby in case people became sick from the heat.

Unlike Katrina, when thousands took refuge inside the Superdome, there will be no “last resort” shelter, and those who stay behind accept “all responsibility for themselves and their loved ones,” said the city’s emergency preparedness director, Jerry Sneed.

Yet the presence of 2,000 National Guard troops that were expected to join 1,400 New Orleans police officers patrolling the streets following the evacuation - along with Gov. Bobby Jindal’s request to neighboring states for rescue teams - suggested officials were expecting stragglers.

Standing outside his restaurant in the city’s Faubourg Marigny district, Dale DeBruyne prepared for Gustav the way he did for Katrina - stubbornly.

“I’m not leaving,” he said.

DeBruyne, 52, said his house was stocked with storm supplies, including generators.

“I stayed for Katrina,” he said, “and I’ll stay again.”

Many residents said the early stage of the evacuation was more orderly than Katrina, although a plan to electronically log and track evacuees with a bar code system failed and was aborted to keep the buses moving. Officials said information on evacuees would be taken when they reached their destinations.

Advocates criticized the decision not to establish a shelter, warning that day laborers and the poorest residents would fall through the cracks.

About two dozen Hispanic men gathered under oak trees near Claiborne Avenue. They were wary of boarding any bus, even though a city spokesman said no identity papers would be required.

“The problem is,” said Pictor Soto, 44, of Peru, “there will be immigration people there and we’re all undocumented.”

Farther west, where Gustav appeared more likely to make landfall, Guard troops were also being sent to Lake Charles.

The National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane watch for Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and part of Texas, meaning hurricane conditions are possible within 36 hours.

Two East Texas counties also issued mandatory evacuation orders, and authorities in Mississippi, also battered by Katrina, began evacuating the mentally ill and aged from facilities along the coast.

National Guard soldiers on Mississippi’s coast were going door-to-door to alert thousands of families in FEMA trailers and cottages that they should be prepared to evacuate Sunday.

In Alabama, shelters were opened and 3,000 National Guard personnel assembled to help evacuees from Mississippi and Louisiana.

“If we don’t get the wind and rain, we stand ready to help them,” Gov. Bob Riley said.

AP | Becky Bohrer | Saturday, August 30, 2008

America’s Plantation Prisons

On an expanse of 18,000 acres of farmland, 59 miles northwest of Baton Rouge, long rows of men, mostly African-American, till the fields under the hot Louisiana sun. The men pick cotton, wheat, soybeans and corn. They work for pennies, literally. Armed guards, mostly white, ride up and down the rows on horseback, keeping watch. At the end of a long workweek, a bad disciplinary report from a guard - whether true or false - could mean a weekend toiling in the fields. The farm is called Angola, after the homeland of the slaves who first worked its soil.

This scene is not a glimpse of plantation days long gone by. It’s the present-day reality of thousands of prisoners at the maximum security Louisiana State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Angola. The block of land on which the prison sits is a composite of several slave plantations, bought up in the decades following the Civil War. Acre-wise, it is the largest prison in the United States. Eighty percent of its prisoners are African-American.

“Angola is disturbing every time I go there,” Tory Pegram, who coordinates the International Coalition to Free the Angola 3, told Truthout. “It’s not even really a metaphor for slavery. Slavery is what’s going on.”

Mwalimu Johnson, who spent 15 years as a prisoner at the penitentiary and now works as executive secretary of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, concurred.

“I would truthfully say that Angola prison is a sophisticated plantation,” Johnson told Truthout. “‘Cotton is King’ still applies when it come to Angola.”

Angola is not alone. Sixteen percent of Louisiana prisoners are compelled to perform farm labor, as are 17 percent of Texas prisoners and a full 40 percent of Arkansas prisoners, according to the 2002 Corrections Yearbook, compiled by the Criminal Justice Institute. They are paid little to nothing for planting and picking the same crops harvested by slaves 150 years ago.

On land previously occupied by a slave plantation, Louisiana prisoners pick cotton, earning 4 cents an hour. (Photo: Louisiana State Penitentiary) Many prison farms, Angola included, have gruesome post-bellum histories. In the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, Angola made news with a host of assaults - and killings - of inmates by guards. In 1952, a group of Angola prisoners found their work conditions so oppressive that they resorted to cutting their Achilles’ tendons in protest. At Mississippi’s Parchman Farm, another plantation-to-prison convert, prisoners were routinely subjected to near-death whippings and even shootings for the first half of the 20th century. Cummins Farm, in Arkansas, sported a “prison hospital” that doubled as a torture chamber until a federal investigation exposed it in 1970. And Texas’s Jester State Prison Farm, formerly Harlem Prison Farm, garnered its claim to fame from eight prisoners who suffocated to death after being sealed into a tiny cell and abandoned by guards.

Since a wave of activism forced prison farm brutalities into the spotlight in the 1970s, some reforms have taken place: At Angola, for example, prison violence has been significantly reduced. But to a large extent, the official stories have been repackaged. State correctional departments now portray prison farm labor as educational or vocational opportunities, as opposed to involuntary servitude. The Alabama Department of Corrections web site, for example, states that its “Agriculture Program” “allows inmates to be trained in work habits and allows them to develop marketable skills in the areas of: Farming, Animal Husbandry, Vegetable, meat, and milk processing.”

According to Angola’s web site, “massive reform” has transformed the prison into a “stable, safe and constitutional” environment. A host of new faith-based programs at Angola have gotten a lot of media play, including features in The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.

Cathy Fontenot, Angola’s assistant warden, told Truthout that the penitentiary is now widely known as an “innovative and progressive prison.”

“The warden says it takes good food, good medicine, good prayin’ and good playin’ to have a good prison,” Fontenot said, referring to the head warden, Burl Cain. “Angola has all these.”

However, the makeover has been markedly incomplete, according to prisoners and their advocates.

“Most of the changes are cosmetic,” said Johnson, who was released from Angola in 1992 and, in his new capacity as a prison rights advocate, stays in contact with Angola prisoners. “In the conventional plantations, slaves were given just enough food, clothing and shelter to be a financial asset to the owner. The same is true for the Louisiana prison system.”

Wages for agricultural and industrial prison labor are still almost nonexistent compared with the federal minimum wage. Angola prisoners are paid anywhere from four to twenty cents per hour, according to Fontenot. Agricultural laborers fall on the lowest end of the pay scale.

What’s more, prisoners may keep only half the money they make, according to Johnson, who notes that the other half is placed in an account for prisoners to use to “set themselves up” after they’re released.

Besides the fact that two cents an hour may not accumulate much of a start-up fund, there is one glaring peculiarity about this arrangement: due to some of the harshest sentencing practices in the country, most Angola prisoners are never released. Ninety-seven percent will die in prison, according to Fontenot.

(Ironically, the “progressive” label may well apply to Angola, relative to some locations: In Texas, Arkansas and Georgia, most prison farms pay nothing at all.)

Angola prisoners technically work eight-hour days. However, since extra work can be mandated as a punishment for “bad behavior,” hours may pile up well over that limit, former prisoner Robert King told Truthout.

“Prisoners worked out in the field, sometimes 17 hours straight, rain or shine,” remembered King, who spent 29 years in solitary confinement at Angola, until he was released in 2001 after proving his innocence of the crime for which he was incarcerated.

It’s common for Angola prisoners to work 65 hours a week after disciplinary reports have been filed, according to Johnson. Yet, those reports don’t necessarily indicate that a prisoner has violated any rules. Johnson describes guards writing out reports well before the weekend, fabricating incident citations, then filling in prisoners’ names on Friday, sometimes at random. Those prisoners would then spend their weekend in the cotton fields.

Although mechanical cotton pickers are almost universally used on modern-day farms, Angola prisoners must harvest by hand, echoing the exact ritual that characterized the plantation before emancipation.

According to King, these practices are undergirded by entrenched notions of race-based authority.

“Guards talked to prisoners like slaves,” King told Truthout. “They’d tell you the officer was always right, no matter what.”

During the 1970s, prisoners were routinely beaten or “dungeonized” without cause, King said. Now, guards’ power abuses are more expertly concealed, but they persist, fed by racist assumptions, according to King.

Johnson described some of the white guards burning crosses on prison lawns.

Much of this overt racism stems from the way the basic system - and even the basic population - of Angola and its environs have remained static since the days of slavery, according to Pegram. After the plantation was converted to a prison, former plantation overseers and their descendants kept their general roles, becoming prison officials and guards. This white overseer community, called B-Line, is located on the farm’s grounds, both close to the prisoners and completely separate from them. In addition to their prison labor, Angola’s inmates do free work for B-Line residents, from cutting their grass to trimming their hair to cleaning up Prison View Golf Course, the only course in the country where players can watch prisoners laboring as they golf.

Another landmark of the town, the Angola Prison Museum, is also run by multi-generation Angola residents. The museum exhibits “Old Sparky,” the solid oak electric chair used for executions at Angola until 1991. Visitors can purchase shirts that read, “Angola: A Gated Community.”

Despite its antebellum MO, Angola’s labor system does not break the law. In fact, it is explicitly authorized by the Constitution. The 13th Amendment, which prohibits forced labor, contains a caveat. It reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”

That clause has a history of being manipulated, according to Fordham Law Professor Robert Kaczorowski, who has written extensively on civil rights and the Constitution. Directly after the 13th Amendment was enacted, it began to be utilized to justify slavery-like practices, according to Kaczorowski. Throughout the South, former slaves were arrested for trivial crimes (vagrancy, for example), fined, and imprisoned when they could not pay their fines. Then, landowners could supply the fine in exchange for the prisoner’s labor, essentially perpetuating slavery.

Although such close reproductions of private enslavement were phased out, the 13th Amendment still permits involuntary servitude.

“Prisoners can be forced to work for the government against their will, and this is true in every state,” Kaczorowski told Truthout.

In recent years, activists have begun to focus on the 13th Amendment’s exception for prisoners, according to Pegram. African-Americans are disproportionately incarcerated; one in three black men has been in prison at some point in his life. Therefore, African-Americans are much more likely to be subject to involuntary servitude.

“I would have more faith in that amendment if it weren’t so clear that our criminal justice system is racially biased in a really obvious way,” Pegram said.

Prison activists like Johnson believe that ultimately, permanently changing the status quo at places like Angola may mean changing the Constitution - amending the 13th Amendment to abolish involuntary servitude for all.

“I don’t have any illusions that this is a simple process,” Johnson said. “Many people are apathetic about what happens in prisons. It would be very difficult, but I would not suggest it would be impossible.”

Even without a constitutional overhaul, some states have done away with prison farms of their own accord. In Connecticut, where the farms were prevalent before the 1970s, the farms have been phased out, partially due to the perceived slavery connection. “Many black inmates viewed farm work under these circumstances as too close to slavery to want to participate,” according to a 1995 report to the Connecticut General Assembly.

For now, though, the prison farm is alive and well in Louisiana. And at Angola, many prisoners can expect to be buried on the land they till. Two cemeteries, Point Lookout 1 and 2, lie on the prison grounds. No one knows exactly how many prisoners are interred in the former, since, after a flood washed away the first Angola cemetery in 1927, the bodies were reburied in a large common grave.

Point Lookout 1 is now full, and with the vast majority of Angola’s prisoners destined to die in prison, Point Lookout 2 is well on its way, according to King.

“Angola is pretty huge,” King said. “They’ve got a lot of land to bury a lot of prisoners.”

No one knows how many of the prisoners kept in involuntary servitude at Angola are innocent. But at least one who has proven his innocence in court, overturning his conviction, is still behind bars. Please see “Declared Innocent, but Not Free.”

Global Research | Maya Schenwar | Saturday, August 30, 2008

Video | Biden’s anti-Russian stance

How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

An Interview with Michael Hudson

Michael Hudson is a former Wall Street economist specializing in the balance of payments and real estate at the Chase Manhattan Bank (now JP Morgan Chase & Co.), Arthur Anderson, and later at the Hudson Institute (no relation).

	The banks don’t have a secret source of revenue. It’s right out in the open. They will take their junk mortgages to the Federal Reserve and borrow the money at full face value. The government will be left with the junk.

In 1990 he helped established the world’s first sovereign debt fund for Scudder Stevens & Clark. Dr. Hudson was Dennis Kucinich’s Chief Economic Advisor in the recent Democratic primary presidential campaign, and has advised the U.S., Canadian, Mexican and Latvian governments, as well as the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR). A Distinguished Research Professor at University of Missouri, Kansas City (UMKC), he is the author of many books, including Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire (new ed., Pluto Press, 2002

Mike Whitney: The United States current account deficit is roughly $700 billion. That is enough “borrowed” capital to pay the yearly $120 billion cost of the war in Iraq, the entire $450 billion Pentagon budget, and Bush’s tax cuts for the rich. Why does the rest of the world keep financing America’s militarism via the current account deficit or is it just the unavoidable consequence of currency deregulation, “dollar hegemony” and globalization?

Michael Hudson: As I explained in Super Imperialism, central banks in other countries buy dollars not because they think dollar assets are a “good buy,” but because if they did NOT recycle their trade surpluses and U.S. buyout spending and military spending by buying U.S. Treasury, Fannie Mae and other bonds, their currencies would rise against the dollar. This would price their exporters out of dollarized world markets. So the United States can spend money and get a free ride.

The solution is (1) capital controls to block further dollar receipts, (2) floating tariffs against imports from dollarized economies, (3) buyouts of U.S. investments in dollar-recipient countries (so that Europe and Asia would use their central bank dollars to buy out U.S. private investments at book value), (4) subsidized exports to dollarized economies with depreciating currency, and similar responses that the United States would adopt if it were in the position of a payments-surplus country. In other words, Europe and Asia would treat the United States as its Washington Consensus boys treat Third World debtors: buy out their raw materials and other industries, their export plantations, and their governments.

MW: Economist Henry Liu said in his article “Dollar hegemony enables the US to own indirectly but essentially the entire global economy by requiring its wealth to be denominated in fiat dollars that the US can print at will with little in the way of monetary penalties…..World trade is now a game in which the US produces fiat dollars of uncertain exchange value and zero intrinsic value, and the rest of the world produces goods and services that fiat dollars can buy at “market prices” quoted in dollars.” Is Liu overstating the case or have the Federal Reserve and western banking elites really figured out how to maintain imperial control over the global economy simply by ensuring that most energy, commodities, and manufactured goods are denominated in dollars? If that’s the case, then it would seem that the actual “face-value” of the dollar does not matter as much as long as it continues to be used in the purchase of commodities. Is this right?

Michael Hudson: Henry Liu and I have been discussing this for many years now. We are in full agreement. The paragraph you quote is quite right. His Asia Times articles provide a running analysis of dollar hegemony.

MW:What is the relationship between stagnant wages for workers and the current credit crisis? If workers wages had kept up with the rate of production, isn’t it less likely that we would be in the jam we are today? And, if that is true, than shouldn’t we be more focused on re-unionizing the labor force instead looking for solutions from the pathetic Democratic Party?

Michael Hudson: The credit crisis derives from “the magic of compound interest,” that is, the tendency of debts to keep on doubling and redoubling. Every rate of interest is a doubling time. No “real” economy’s production and economic surplus can keep up with this tendency of debt to grow faster. So the financial crisis would have occurred regardless of wage levels.

Quite simply, the price of home ownership tends to absorb all the disposable personal income of the homebuyer. So if wages would have risen more rapidly, the price of housing would simply have risen faster as employees pledged more take-home pay to carry larger mortgages. Stagnant wages merely helped keep down the price of houses to merely stratospheric levels, not ionospheric ones.

As for labor unions, they haven’t been any help at all in solving the housing crisis. In Germany where I am right now, unions have sponsored co-ops, as they used to do in New York City, at low membership costs. So housing costs only absorb about 20% of German family budgets, compared to twice that for the United States. Imagine what could be done if pension funds had put their money into housing for their contributors, instead of into the stock market to buy and bid up prices for the stocks that CEOs and other insiders were selling.

MW:When politicians or members of the foreign policy establishment talk about “integrating” Russia or China into the “international system”; what exactly do they mean? Do they mean the dollar-dominated system which is governed by the Fed, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO? Do countries compromise their national sovereignty when they participate in the US-led economic system?

Michael Hudson: By “integrating” they mean absorbing, something like a parasite integrating a host into its own control system. They mean that other countries will be prohibited under WTO and IMF rules from getting rich in the way that the United States got wealthy in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Only the United States will be permitted to subsidize its agriculture, thanks to its unique right to grandfather in its price supports. Only the United States will be free from having to raise interest rates to stabilize its balance of payments, and only it can devote its monetary policy to promoting easy credit and asset-price inflation. And only the United States can run a military deficit, obliging foreign central banks in dollar-recipient countries to give it a free ride. In other words, there is no free lunch for other countries, only for the United States.

Other countries do indeed give up their national sovereignty. The United States never has adjusted its economy to create equilibrium with other countries. But to be fair, in this respect only the United States is acting fully in its own self-interest. The problem is largely that other countries are not “playing the game.” They are not acting as real governments. It takes two to tango when one party gets a free ride. Their governments have become “enablers” of U.S. economic aggression.

MW:What do you think the Bush administration’s reaction would be if a smaller country, like Switzerland, had sold hundreds of billions of dollars of worthless mortgage-backed securities to investment banks, insurance companies and investors in the United States? Wouldn’t there be litigation and a demand that the responsible parties be held accountable? So, how do you explain the fact that China and the EU nations, that were the victims of this gigantic swindle, haven’t boycotted US financial products or called for reparations?

Michael Hudson: International law is not clear on financial fraud. Caveat emptor is the rule. Foreign investors took a risk. They trusted a deregulated U.S. financial market that made it easiest to make money via financial fraud. Ultimately, they put their faith in neoliberal deregulation – at home as well as in the United States. England is now in the same mess. The “accountability” was supposed to lie with U.S. accounting firms and credit rating agencies. Foreign investors were so ideologically blinded by free market rhetoric that they actually believed the fantasies about “self-regulation” and self-regulating markets tending toward equilibrium rather than the real-world tendency toward financial and economic polarization.

In other words, most foreign investors lack a realistic body of economic theory. The United States could simply argue that they should take responsibility for their bad investments, just as U.S. pension funds and other investors are told to do.

MW:The Congress recently passed a bill that gives Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson the unprecedented authority to use as much money as he needs to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solvent. Paulson assured the Congress that he wouldn’t need more than $25 billion but, the 400 page bill allows him to increase the national debt by $800 billion. How will the Fannie/Freddie bailout affect the dollar and the budget deficit? Are interest rates likely to skyrocket because of this action?

Michael Hudson: The Fed can flood the economy with money, Alan Greenspan-style, to prevent interest rates from skyrocketing. Nobody really knows what will happen to FNMA and Freddie Mac, but it looks like the mortgage and financial crisis will get much, much worse over the coming year. We are just heading into the storm where adjustable-rate mortgages (ARMs) are scheduled to reset at higher rates, and where U.S. banks have to roll over their existing debts in a market where foreign investors fear that these banks already have no net worth left.

So the principle here is “Big fish eat little fish.” Wall Street will be bailed out, and banks will be allowed to “earn their way out of debt” as they did after 1980, by exploiting retail customers, above all credit-card customers and individual borrowers. There will be a lot of bankruptcies, and people will suffer more than ever before because of the harsh pro-creditor bankruptcy law that Congress passed at the behest of the bank lobbyists.

MW: A few months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an editorial which said that they could imagine two nightmare scenarios if the current credit crisis was not handled properly; either there would be a run on the dollar causing a sudden plunge in its value, or the unexpected failure of a major financial institution could send the stock market crashing. Last week, the former head of the IMF Kenneth Rogoff triggered a sell-off on Wall Street when he said, “We’re not just going to see mid-sized banks go under in the next few months, we’re going to see a whopper; we’re going to see a big one — one of the big investment banks or big banks.” What happens if Rogoff is right and Merrill, Citi or Lehman go belly up? Is that enough to send the stock market freefalling?

Michael Hudson: Not necessarily. Citibank would be nationalized, then sold off. The principle should be that if a bank is “too big to fail,” it should be broken up.

This should start with a repeal of the Clinton Administration’s repeal of Glass-Steagall.

As for Lehman, that would be given the Bear Stearns treatment, and also sold off – probably to a hedge fund. Merrill is much larger, but it also could be parceled out, I suppose. The stock market’s financial index would plunge, but not necessarily industrial stock prices.

MW:According to MarketWatch: “In the three months from April to June, banks posted their second worst earnings performance since 1991…. Earnings for the quarter totaled just $5 billion, compared with $36.8 billion a year ago, a decline of 86.5%.” Also, according to a front page article in the Wall Street Journal: “financial institutions will have to pay off at least $787 billion in floating rate notes and other medium term obligations before the end of 2009.” How are the banks going to pay off nearly $800 billion ($200 billion by December!) when they only earned a measly $5 billion in the quarter!?! And how in the world is the Federal Reserve going to keep the banking system functioning when earnings can’t even cover current liabilities? Do the banks have some secret source of revenue we don’t know about or is the system headed for disaster?

Michael Hudson: The traditional way to pay debt is with yet MORE debt. The interest due is simply added on to the principal, so that the debt grows exponentially. This is the real meaning of “the magic of compound interest.” It means not only that savings left to accumulate interest keep on doubling and redoubling, debts do to, because the savings that are lent out on the “asset” side of the creditor’s balance sheet (today, that of America’s wealthiest 10%) become debts on the “liabilities” side of the balance sheet (the “bottom 90%”).

The banks don’t have a secret source of revenue. It’s right out in the open. They will take their junk mortgages to the Federal Reserve and borrow the money at full face value. The government will be left with the junk.

It then can either take over the bank, as the Bank of England did with Northern Rock when it went bankrupt early this year, or it can let the bank “earn” money by stiffing its customers some more.

MW: From 2000 to 2006, the total retail value of housing in the United States doubled, going from roughly $11 trillion to $22 trillion in just 6 years. For the last 200 years, housing has barely kept pace with the rate of inflation, usually increasing 2 to 3% per year. The Federal Reserve’s low interest rates were the main cause of this unprecedented housing bubble and, yet, ex-Fed chief Alan Greenspan still denies any responsibility for what “The Economist” calls “the largest bubble in history”. Did Greenspan understand the problems he was creating with his “loose” monetary policies or was there some ulterior motive to his actions?

Michael Hudson: He simply didn’t care about the problem. He saw his job as a cheerleader for people who were able to get rich fast. These always had been his major clients in his years on Wall Street, and he saw himself as their servant – sort of like a pilot fish for sharks.

Mr. Greenspan’s idea of “wealth creation” was to take the line of least resistance and inflate asset prices. He thought that the way to enable the economy to carry its debt overhead was to inflate asset prices so that debtors could borrow the interest falling due by pledging collateral (real estate, stocks and bonds) that were rising in market price. To his Ayn-Rand view of the world, one way of making money was as economically and socially productive as any other way of doing so. Buying a property and waiting for its price to inflate was deemed as productive as investing in new means of production.

Ever since his days as co-founder of NABE (the National Association of Business Economists), Greenspan has long looked only at GNP and the national balance sheet as an economic indicator, being “value-free.” This is his intellectual and conceptual limitation. He wanted to provide a way for savvy investors to get rich, and the easiest way to get rich is to be passive and get a free lunch. His ideology led him to believe the “free market” ideology that the financial sector would be self-regulating and hence would act honestly. But he opened the floodgates to financial crooks. His set of measures did not distinguish between Countrywide Financial getting rich, Enron getting rich, or General Motors or industrial companies expanding their means of production. So the economy was being hollowed out, but this didn’t appear in any of the measures he looked at from his perch at the Federal Reserve.

So just as journalists and the mass media proclaim every market downturn as “surprising” and “unexpected,” he was as clueless as a lemming running headlong over the cliff. It’s an inherent instinct for free-market boys.

MW: The housing market is freefalling, setting new records every day for foreclosures, inventory, and declining prices. The banking system is in even worse shape; undercapitalized and buried under a mountain of downgraded assets. There seems to be growing consensus that these problems are not just part of a normal economic downturn, but the direct result of the Fed’s monetary policies. Are we seeing the collapse of the Central banking model as a way of regulating the markets? Do you think the present crisis will strengthen the existing system or make it easier for the American people to assert greater control over monetary policy?

Michael Hudson: What do you mean “failure”? Your perspective is from the bottom looking up. But the financial model has been a great success from the vantage point of the top of the economic pyramid looking down? The economy has polarized to the point where the wealthiest 10% now own 85% of the nation’s wealth. Never before have the bottom 90% been so highly indebted, so dependent on the wealthy. From their point of view, their power has exceeded that of any time in which economic statistics have been kept.

You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying to share power. Their greed is (as Aristotle noted) infinite. So what you find to be a violation of traditional values is a re-assertion of pre-industrial, feudal values. The economy is being set back on the road to debt peonage. The Road to Serfdom is not government sponsorship of economic progress and rising living standards; it’s the dismantling of government, the dissolution of regulatory agencies, to create a new feudal-type elite.

The former Soviet Union provides a model of what the neoliberals would like to create. Not only in Russia but also in the Baltic States and other former Soviet republics, they created local kleptocracies, Pinochet-style. In Russia, the kleptocrats founded an explicitly Pinochetista party, the Party of Right Forces (“Right” as in right-wing).

In order for the American people or any other people to assert greater control over monetary policy, they need to have a doctrine of just what a good monetary policy would be. Early in the 19th century the followers of St. Simon in France began to develop such a policy. By the end of that century, Central Europe implemented this policy, mobilizing the banking and financial system to promote industrialization, in consultation with the government (and catalyzed by military and naval spending, to be sure). But all this has disappeared from the history of economic thought, which no longer is even taught to economics students. The Chicago Boys have succeeded in censoring any alternative to their free-market rationalization of asset stripping and economic polarization.

My own model would be to make central banks part of the Treasury, not simply the board of directors of the rapacious commercial banking system. You mentioned Henry Liu’s writings earlier, and I think he has come to the same conclusion in his Asia Times articles.

MW: Do you see the Federal Reserve as an economic organization designed primarily to maintain order in the markets via interest rates and regulation or a political institution whose objectives are to impose an American-dominated model of capitalism on the rest of the world?

Michael Hudson: Surely, you jest! The Fed has turned “maintaining order” into a euphemism for consolidating power by the financial sector and the FIRE sector generally (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) over the “real” economy of production and consumption. Its leaders see their job as being to act on behalf of the commercial banking system to enable it to make money off the rest of the economy. It acts as the Board of Directors to fight regulation, to support Wall Street, to block any revival of anti-usury laws, to promote “free markets” almost indistinguishable from outright financial fraud, to decriminalize bad behavior – and most of all to inflate the price of property relative to the wages of labor and even relative to the profits of industry.

The Fed’s job is not really to impose the Washington Consensus on the rest of the world. That’s the job of the World Bank and IMF, coordinated via the Treasury (viz. Robert Rubin under Clinton most notoriously) and AID, along with the covert actions of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy. You don’t need monetary policy to do this – only massive bribery. Only call it “lobbying” and the promotion of democratic values – values to fight government power to regulate or control finance across the world. Financial power is inherently cosmopolitan and, as such, antagonistic to the power of national governments.

The Fed and other government agencies, Wall Street and the rest of the economy form part of an overall system. Each agency must be viewed in the context of this system and its dynamics – and these dynamics are polarizing, above all from financial causes. So we are back to the “magic of compound interest,” now expanded to include “free” credit creation and arbitraging.

The problem is that none of this appears in the academic curriculum. And the silence of the major media to address it or even to acknowledge it means that it is invisible except to the beneficiaries who are running the system.

Counterpunch | Mike Whitney | Saturday, August 30, 2008

Bush quietly seeks to make war powers permanent, by declaring indefinite state of war

As the nation focuses on Sen. John McCain’s choice of running mate, President Bush has quietly moved to expand the reach of presidential power by ensuring that America remains in a state of permanent war.

Buried in a recent proposal by the Administration is a sentence that has received scant attention — and was buried itself in the very newspaper that exposed it Saturday. It is an affirmation that the United States remains at war with al Qaeda, the Taliban and “associated organizations.”

Part of a proposal for Guantanamo Bay legal detainees, the provision before Congress seeks to “acknowledge again and explicitly that this nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans.”

The New York Times page 8 placement of the article in its Saturday edition seems to downplay its importance. Such a re-affirmation of war carries broad legal implications that could imperil Americans’ civil liberties and the rights of foreign nationals for decades to come.

It was under the guise of war that President Bush claimed a legal mandate for his warrantless wiretapping program, giving the National Security Agency power to intercept calls Americans made abroad. More of this program has emerged in recent years, and it includes the surveillance of Americans’ information and exchanges online.

“War powers” have also given President Bush cover to hold Americans without habeas corpus — detainment without explanation or charge. Jose Padilla, a Chicago resident arrested in 2002, was held without trial for five years before being convicted of conspiring to kill individuals abroad and provide support for terrorism.

But his arrest was made with proclamations that Padilla had plans to build a “dirty bomb.” He was never convicted of this charge. Padilla’s legal team also claimed that during his time in military custody — the four years he was held without charge — he was tortured with sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, forced stress positions and injected with drugs.

Times reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that the measure is the latest step that the Administration has taken to “make permanent” key aspects of its “long war” against terrorism. Congress recently passed a much-maligned bill giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity for their participation in what constitutional experts see as an illegal or borderline-illegal surveillance program, and is considering efforts to give the FBI more power in their investigative techniques.

“It is uncertain whether Congress will take the administration up on its request,” Lichtblau writes. “Some Republicans have already embraced the idea, with Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee, introducing a measure almost identical to the administration’s proposal. ‘Since 9/11,’ Mr. Smith said, ‘we have been at war with an unconventional enemy whose primary goal is to kill innocent Americans.’”

If enough Republicans come aboard, Democrats may struggle to defeat the provision. Despite holding majorities in the House and Senate, they have failed to beat back some of President Bush’s purported “security” measures, such as the telecom immunity bill.

Bush’s open-ended permanent war language worries his critics. They say it could provide indefinite, if hazy, legal justification for any number of activities — including detention of terrorists suspects at bases like Guantanamo Bay (where for years the Administration would not even release the names of those being held), and the NSA’s warantless wiretapping program.

Lichtblau co-wrote the Times article revealing the Administration’s eavesdropping program along with fellow reporter James Risen.

He notes that Bush’s language “recalls a resolution, known as the Authorization for Use of Military Force, passed by Congress on Sept. 14, 2001… [which] authorized the president to ‘use all necessary and appropriate force’ against those responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks to prevent future strikes. That authorization, still in effect, was initially viewed by many members of Congress who voted for it as the go-ahead for the administration to invade Afghanistan and overthrow the Taliban, which had given sanctuary to Mr. bin Laden.”

“But the military authorization became the secret legal basis for some of the administration’s most controversial legal tactics, including the wiretapping program, and that still gnaws at some members of Congress,” he adds.

Raw Story | John Byrne | Saturday, August 30, 2008

Video | McCain can’t take his eyes off his VP’s ass

Georgia: Moscow accuses west of double standards

Russia bitterly accused the west of bias and double standards yesterday, following international criticism of its actions in Georgia, and amid signs that the European Union is backing away from sanctions against Moscow.

Russia’s foreign ministry said it rejected criticism from the G7 group of industrialised countries. They condemned its invasion of Georgia, and its recognition on Tuesday of South Ossetia and Abkhazia as independent.

“This step is biased and aimed at justifying the aggressive actions of Georgia,” the ministry said, adding that the G7 - Britain, France, Germany, the US, Italy, Japan and Canada - had made “baseless assertions about Russia undermining Georgia’s territorial integrity”.

Russia foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko criticised Nato for “putting pressure” on Russia and said there could be “irreversible consequences” for “stability” in Europe. Nato had no “moral right” to lecture Russia, he said.

The Kremlin’s defiant tone comes ahead of a special EU summit in Brussels on Monday, called by France, to discuss the EU’s future ties with Russia. On Thursday, France’s foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, intimated that sanctions would be discussed. Yesterday, the EU appeared to be retreating from this position.

Moscow has made clear it will respond to any punitive measures from Brussels, which could include the suspension of a new EU-Russia partnership agreement. “The time to pass sanctions has certainly not come,” said a diplomat from France, which holds the EU presidency.

Analysts in Moscow said last night that Russia’s leadership was relatively unconcerned about the threat of EU sanctions. “I don’t think the contemporary west has any means to punish a state that is not quite a rogue state,” Yulia Latynina, a commentator with the independent Echo of Moscow radio station told the Guardian. She added: “The Kremlin didn’t take Tbilisi and didn’t shoot [Mikheil] Saakashvili. Expelling Russia from the G8 or the World Trade Organisation isn’t important.”

Strategically, she said, prime minister Vladimir Putin has satisfied his personal feeling towards Mr Saakashvili. “The war was brilliant in its design.”

Other analysts said they did not expect Russia to reverse its recognition of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, despite the prospect of the states’ international isolation. So far, only Belarus had said it will join Russia in recognising the two states.

“I think they are watching very closely to see what will happen at the EU summit,” said Grigorii V Golosov, professor at the faculty of political sciences at the European University of St Petersburg. “But I think the Kremlin calculation is that the EU won’t react seriously.”

Putin’s interview with CNN on Thursday - in which he blamed the war in Georgia on a Washington plot to propel John McCain into the White House - was a deliberate tactic, Golosov said. Putin’s aim was to promote divisions between the EU and Washington.

Yesterday, Igor Sechin, the deputy prime minister, dismissed a report in the Daily Telegraph that Moscow was preparing to cut oil deliveries to western Europe, calling the claim “a gross provocation”.

The Guardian | Luke Harding | Saturday, August 30, 2008

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