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Wednesday, November 17, 2010

personal finance blog

The numbers are rolling in, and by all accounts, Americans have finally bucked up and told their credit cards, "It's not me, it's you." While consumer spending has inched up a bit, it's not the big credit card networks that are benefiting, which means we're opting more often to spend the money that's already in our pockets. According to this article, credit card usage this year is down for Visa, MasterCard and Discover, while it's flat for American Express.

We're still using our debit cards -- 15% more this year than last -- but we're not financing everything from breakfast to bedroom sets anymore. While this may hurt us in terms of our short-term recovery, since consumer spending is estimated to make up around 70% of our total economy, in the long run it will make us stronger, says Richard Barrington, personal finance expert for MoneyRates.com.

"It's indicative of the fact that consumers are spending less," Barrington tells WalletPop. "They're paying down debt and household debt service ratios are coming down. What that means is some debts are being written off, but to a large extent, people are trying to live within their means," he says.

Interestingly, our nearly decade-long infatuation with gift cards also appears to be on the wane; today, Americans are buying fewer of them and selling the ones they have at a discount for a quick cash infusion. There are other indications that we might be embracing greenbacks more in the future.

Thanks to a recent ruling by the Justice Department, stores have more autonomy to offer discounts to people willing to pay cash. (We told you about the benefits and the drawbacks of this new ruling.) This could have the effect of making plastic even less attractive for some, even as some credit cards compete for new customers by offering lavish cash rewards, which we pointed out in this recent story.

Barrington says he hopes the new embrace of cold, hard cash is here to stay. "I think people are changing their habits for the better," he says, advising, "Take your credit card out of your wallet. It removes the opportunity for you to get in trouble."

Dear trav:

I used to think the same as you regarding the unconnectedness of things, but not anymore -- and not just because of one or two articles but because I've thought deeply about many things I've been reading with an open mind. Oddly, things do fit together, not in a conspiratorial way as meant today, but in a sort of horrible cascade of logic if one keeps track long enough. I also feel frustrated depressed and angry but I think it's important to keep our wits about us and know everything we can because I believe we're going to have to fight for our lives, one way or another. dz

More articles (sorry):

The JFK Assassination and 9/11: the Designated Suspects in Both Cases
by Peter Dale Scott Global Research, July 5, 2008

Global Research recently published my essay entitled 9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics (appended below at *&*) In this article, I argue that 9/11 should be analyzed as a deep event (an event not fully aired or understood because of its intelligence connections) and above all as one of a series of deep events which from time to time have frustrated peace initiatives or become pretexts for war.The War Conspiracy. As The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, it is due to be published by the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press in August 2008.

I wish to summarize again the first striking similarity between 11/22/63 and of 9/11/01: the dubious detective work on those two days. Less than fifteen minutes after the President’s assassination, the height and weight of Kennedy’s alleged killer was posted.

1 Before the last of the hijacked planes crashed on 9/11, the FBI told Richard Clarke that they had a list of alleged hijackers.2

In the case of Oswald, within fifteen minutes of the assassination and long before Oswald was picked up in the Texas Theater, Inspector Sawyer of the Dallas police put out on the police radio network, and possibly other networks, a description of the killer – "About 30, 5’10", 165 pounds."

3 As noted, this height and weight exactly matched the measurements attributed to Lee Harvey Oswald in Oswald’s FBI file, and also in CIA documents about him.4

The announced height and weight were however different from Oswald’s actual measurements, as recorded by the Dallas police after his arrest: 5’9 1/2", 131 pounds.

5 More importantly, there is no credible source for the posted measurements from any witness in Dallas. (The witness said to have spotted him, Howard Brennan, failed to identify Oswald in a line-up.)6 This leaves the possibility that the measurements were taken from existing files on Oswald, rather than from any observations in Dallas on November 22. If so, someone with access to those files may have already designated Oswald as the culprit, before there was any evidence to connect him to the crime.

A similar situation pertains to the alleged hijackers on 9/11. For example, shortly afterwards men in Saudi Arabia complained that "the hijackers' `personal details’" released by the FBI -- "including name, place, date of birth and occupation -- matched their own."

7 One of them, Saeed al-Ghamdi, claimed further that an alleged photograph shown on CNN (of an alleged Flight 93 hijacker with the same name) was in fact a photograph of himself. He speculated "that CNN had probably got the picture from the Flight Safety flying school he attended in Florida."8

If the above information is accurate, then the details posted by the FBI and CNN about the alleged hijackers cannot have derived from the events of 9/11, with which the survivors in Saudi Arabia would appear to have been uninvolved. Once again this leaves the strong possibility that the details were taken from existing files, rather than from empirical observations on September 11.

And some of the hijackers, like Lee Harvey Oswald, may have been in CIA files for a special reason: because the CIA had an operational interest in them.

Internal CIA Evidence of Operational Interest in Oswald and the Hijackers

I have speculated that Oswald, like the al-Qaeda trainer Ali Mohamed, might have been a double agent reporting to the FBI about the terrorist group (Alpha 66) with which some law enforcement officers associated him.

I would like now to discuss more unequivocal evidence, from internal CIA records, about an operational

CIA interest in first Oswald and later two of the alleged al-Qaeda hijackers, Nawaz al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar. In 2001 as in 1963 the CIA inexplicably withheld information about the subjects from the FBI, which ought categorically to have received it. The anomalies are extreme.

This is now easy to show in the case of Oswald. On October 10, 1963, six

weeks before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, CIA Headquarters sent out two messages about Oswald, a teletype to the FBI, State, and Navy, and a cable to the chief of the CIA’s Mexico City station. Both messages contained false and mutually contradictory statements, and also withheld known facts of great potential importance.

10 The teletype to the FBI withheld the obviously significant information that Oswald had reportedly met in Mexico City with a Soviet Vice-Consul, Valeriy Kostikov, who was believed by CIA officers to be an officer of the KGB.11

One CIA officer, Jane Roman, helped draft both messages. In 1995 she was confronted by two interviewers with irrefutable evidence that she had signed off on erroneous information about Oswald in the CIA cable to Mexico City. After much questioning, she finally admitted, "I’m signing off on something I know isn’t true." One of the interviewers, John Newman, then asked her, "‘Is this indicative of some sort of operational interest in Oswald’s file?’ ‘Yes,’ Roman replied. ‘To me it’s indicative of a keen interest in Oswald held very closely on the need-to-know basis.’" She later repeated, "I would think there was definitely some operational reason to withhold it [the information at CIA headquarters on Oswald], if it was not sheer administrative error, when you see all the people who signed off on it."

Other CIA officers withheld important information from the FBI in January 2000, with respect to Khalid al-Mihdar, who would later be identified as one of the al-Qaeda hijackers on September 11, 2001. The NSA overheard on a Yemeni telephone about a meeting in Malaysia which al-Mihdar would attend, along with Tewfiq bin Attash, the mastermind of the fatal attack on the USS Cole.

13 It notified the CIA but not the FBI. In consequence

[Khalid al-Mihdar’s] Saudi passport – which contained a visa for travel to the United States – was photocopied [in Qatar] and forwarded to CIA headquarters. The information was not shared with FBI headquarters until August 2001. An FBI agent detailed to the Bin Ladin unit at the CIA attempted to share this information with colleagues at FBI Headquarters. A CIA desk officer instructed him not to send the cable with this information. Several hours later, this same desk officer drafted a cable distributed solely within CIA alleging that the visa documents had been shared with the FBI.

Lawrence Wright, reviewing this and other significant anomalies, reported in

The Looming Tower the belief among FBI agents following bin Laden "that the agency was protecting Mihdar and [his companion, the alleged 9/11 hijacker Nawaz al-] Hazmi because it hoped to recruit them," or alternatively that "the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence" using al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi.15 Wright himself speculated in a companion essay he wrote for The New Yorker that "The CIA may also have been protecting an overseas operation and was afraid that the F.B.I. would expose it."16

The Consequences of the CIA’s Withholding of Evidence

As just noted, the CIA, in its teletype to the FBI of October 10, 1963, withheld the information that Oswald had reportedly met with a KGB officer, Valeriy Kostikov. Former FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his memoir later complained that this failure to inform the FBI was the major reason why Oswald was not put under surveillance on November 22, 1963.

17 In other words, the withholding enabled Oswald to play whatever role he played on that fateful day, even if it was only to become a designated patsy.

FBI officials are even more bitter about the consequences of the withholding of information about al-Mihdar:

They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business – that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI….They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America….And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened….They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.

But the CIA withheld information from the FBI about bin Attash (already the subject of a criminal investigation) as well, even when asked by an FBI agent, Ali Soufan, about bin Attash and the Malaysia meeting. According to Wright,

The agency did not respond to his clearly stated request. The fact that the CIA withheld information about the mastermind of the

Cole bombing and the meeting in Malaysia, when directly asked by the FBI, amounted to obstruction of justice in the death of the seventeen American sailors."19

In late August 2001, only days before 9/11, FBI agent Steve Bongardt, complaining about the CIA’s withholding of information about al-Mihdar, correctly predicted in an angry email to the CIA’s bin Laden unit that "someday someone will die."

The CIA’s Dishonest Efforts to Cover-Up

From the moment Congress, in the 1970s, began to evince an interest in the Kennedy assassination, former CIA officer David Phillips became a vigorous defender of the CIA’s performance. With respect to false information about Oswald in CIA cables both to and from Mexico City (where Phillips was in charge of Cuban affairs for the CIA station), Phillips’s first response was to dismiss Oswald as "a blip" of no interest.

A similar defense of the CIA’s failure to act on al-Mihdar was offered to the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 by the Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black: "I think that month we watchlisted about 150 people."

22 The same defense was offered by Dale Watson, the FBI’s former counterterrorism chief:

There were a lot of red flags prior to 9/11….So it’s a mass of information and it’s a sea of threats, and it’s like working against a maze. If you know where the end point of a maze is, it’s certainly easier to work your way back to the starting point than trying to go through the maze and sort out all the red flags.

The problem with this excuse is that both Oswald and al-Mihdar were singled out for special CIA attention, not left floating in a sea of red flags. The cable to Mexico City which Jane Roman signed off on was not handled routinely, it was sent for signature to the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, Thomas Karamessines. And in the case of al-Mihdar in Malaysia, back in 2000

CIA leaders were so convinced about the potential significance of the al Qaeda meeting in Malaysia, they not only set up surveillance of it, but provided regular updates to the FBI director [Louis Freeh], the head of the CIA [George Tenet], and the national security advisor [Samuel Berger].

That Freeh and Berger were being notified at the top about the Malaysia meeting (at the same time that the regular FBI bureaucracy was being cut out) is confirmed in accounts by Terry McDermott and Philip Shenon.

CIA officials testified falsely to congressional committees with respect to both Oswald and al-Mihdar. James Angleton was asked by the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations about a memoir written by the CIA’s station chief in Mexico City, Win Scott, and later personally retrieved for the Agency after Scott’s death by Angleton himself. Angleton testified that Scott’s "manuscript was fictional and did not include a chapter on Oswald." In fact, according to Jefferson Morley, "The only surviving manuscript is clearly nonfictional and does have a chapter on Oswald."

Both George Tenet and Cofer Black testified before the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 that the FBI

had been granted access to the information linking al-Mihdar and Tewfiq bin Attash (alias Khallad), the mastermind of the Cole bombing. The 9/11 Commission, after a lengthy review of the matter, concluded "this was not the case."27

The CIA, Oswald, and Al-Mihdar: Suppression of Vital Records

That the CIA regards its relationship to the suspects Oswald and al-Mihdar as sensitive is further illustrated by its suppression of vital evidence with respect to both. Although in the 1990s all government agencies were required by law to submit their Oswald-related documents to the Assassination Records Review Board, the CIA has been vigorously resisting pressure to do this in the case of former CIA officer George Joannides. In 1963 Joannides was the case officer for AMSPELL, the CIA’s operation in support of the Cuban exile group DRE (Directorio Revolucionario Estudiantil). In August 1963 the DRE was in contact with Oswald and participated with him in a radio broadcast which was later distributed with CIA help throughout Latin America.

According to Jefferson Morley, "four decades after the fact, the most important AMSPELL records are missing from CIA archives – perhaps intentionally." Monthly reports on DRE activities were filed by CIA case officers Ross Crozier and William Kent, and these records were declassified by the ARRB for the periods September 1960-November 1962 and after May 1964.

But the board was unable to locate any monthly AMSPELL reports from December 1962 to April 1964. There was a seventeen-month gap in the AMSPELL records, which coincided exactly with the period in which George Joannides handled the group.

With respect to 9/11, all that is known about suppression so far has to do with the public record. Here it is striking that the Report of the Joint Inquiry by Congress into 9/11 has one glaring redaction of twenty-eight pages, dealing with "sources of foreign support for some of the September 11

th hijackers while they were in the United States." Press reports have specified that this refers to Saudi money which reached al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi in 2000 while they were in San Diego. According to committee cochair Senator Bob Graham,

The draft contained a twenty-eight page passage that detailed evidence that Saudis in the United States – Saudi government "spies," Graham called them – had provided financial and logistical support to [al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi] while they lived in Southern California.

Similarly the 9/11 Commission failed to deal with the information on an FBI "hijacker timeline" that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi were met at the airport on their first arrival in the United States by Omar al-Bayoumi, the transmitter of the Saudi funds, whom Graham claimed was obviously "a low-ranking Saudi intelligence agent."

31 The FBI findings were leaked in an early story in Newsweek:

At the airport, they were swept up by a gregarious fellow Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, who had been living in the United States for several years. Al-Bayoumi drove the two men to San Diego, threw a welcoming party and arranged for the visitors to get an apartment next to his. He guaranteed the lease, and plunked down $1,550 in cash to cover the first two months' rent.

One month later, "In January 2003, Graham and the other members of the committee were …the focus of a criminal investigation by the FBI into whether someone on the panel had leaked classified information."

The 9/11 Commission avoided this sensitive area. It cited the FBI Chronology a total of 52 times in its footnotes, for example at 493n55, concerning al-Mihdar’s travel from Yemen to the Malaysian meeting. But it suppressed the FBI’s report that al-Bayoumi met al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi on their arrival; and it substituted what Shenon calls an "improbable tale" supplied by al-Bayoumi himself: namely, that he had run into the two men two weeks later by accident "at a halal food restaurant" near Los Angeles.

It is clear that two members of the 9/11 Commission staff who redacted this part of the report – Dietrich Snell and Philip Zelikow – were concerned to tone down what junior staffers considered to be "explosive material" on the Saudis.

35 Shenon tells how this section of the 9/11 report was rewritten by Snell and Zelikow, until the text "removed all of the most serious allegations against the Saudis."36

But Snell and Zelikow may have been protecting the CIA as well as the Saudis. We have already noted how Lawrence Wright, looking at the extraordinary CIA record on withholding information about al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi, concluded, "It is also possible, as some FBI investigators suspect, the CIA was running a joint venture with Saudi intelligence."

Conclusion

It is clear, as everyone who has studied these matters closely and impartially concurs, that there have been cover-ups of the CIA’s relationships to first Oswald and later al-Mihdar – cover-ups which in both cases have not yet been adequately resolved.

A reasonable conclusion from the available evidence is that the cover-ups were in order to conceal prior CIA operational interest in the designated subjects, just as in the case of Ali Mohamed in the early 1990s. It could of course be a coincidence that people of operational interest to the CIA became designated subjects in the deep events of JFK and 9/11. Another, more disturbing possibility is that those responsible for these events knew of the CIA’s operational interest, and exploited it in such a way as to ensure that the government would be embarrassed into covering up what really happened on those days.

A lot of books about 9/11, including my own, have focused on the roles played by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld on that day. But it is clear that 9/11 involved a USG connection to at least one figure (Ali Mohamed) so sensitive that it had been covered up from the time of the Nosair murder in 1990 and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. It is probable that Oswald’s covert USG connections also dated back to the time of his strange release from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1959, enabling him to travel to the Soviet Union.

In short there is a substratum of covert operations underlying both events that antedates the presidencies in which they occurred. Thus one should not expect the cover-up of 9/11 in the G.W. Bush administration to dissipate simply because the Democrats take over the White House, just as the Johnson administration’s cover-up of the Kennedy assassination did not dissipate with the election of Richard Nixon.

This is said not out of despair, but out of belief in the ultimate resilience and good sense of the American people. The analysis in this book is that America’s involvement in two disastrous wars – first Vietnam and later Iraq – was not an outcome of the people’s will, but rather in large part because of deep events that were used to manipulate that will. Thus this analysis is not an attack on America, but on that manipulative mindset that has twice succeeded in maneuvering America into war.

This dominant mindset is not restricted to intelligence agencies, though it is largely rooted there. Over time it has spread into other parts of government, and has also corrupted large sections of the media and even universities. That the mindset is widespread does not however make it either omnipotent or invincible.

It is important to identify the dominant mindset clearly, if we are ever going to displace it. It is important also to recognize that the dark topics discussed in this book are not representative of America as a whole. In the half century since the CIA’s first adventures in Burma and Laos, America has continued to be, as in the two centuries before it, a source of life-enhancing innovations, such as the computer and the internet.

As Amy Chua has written in her book

Day of Empire,

If America can rediscover the path that has been the secret to its success since its founding and avoid the temptations of empire building, it could remain the world’s hyperpower in the decades to come – not a hyperpower of coercion and military force, but a hyperpower of opportunity, dynamism, and moral force.

I have tried to suggest in this book that the key to this rediscovery is the

identification and displacement of the manipulative forces that have maneuvered America, almost unsuspectingly, into two unnecessary and disastrous wars.

If there is any merit to my analysis, then, to isolate those forces, we must press for the truth about both the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

NOTES

Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397, 23 Warren Commission Hearings 916.

Clarke, Against All Enemies, 13-14. The list of 19 names, accepted without question by the 9/11 Commission Report, was given by the FBI to the press on September 14, 2001 (Daily Telegraph, September 15, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/15/whunt15.xml).

Transcript of Dallas Police Channel Two, 12:44 PM; cf. Channel One 12:45 PM,

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/dpdtapes/; Warren Report 5, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 397.

E.g. Dallas FBI Report from John Fain, May 12, 1960, 17 Warren Commission Hearings 704, NARA #157-10006-10213 ("Height: 5’10" Weight: 165 lbs." [inaccurate description supplied by Marguerite Oswald]); CIA HQ Cable DIR 74830 to Mexico City, 10 Oct 1963, NARA #104-10015-10048, reproduced in John Newman, Oswald and the CIA (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1995), 512 ("five feet ten inches, one hundred sixty five pounds").

Fingerprint card dated "11-25-63," 17 Warren Commission Hearings 308.

Warren Report 5, 144; Sylvia Meagher, Accessories After the Fact (Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2006), 10-13, 78n. After seeing Oswald twice on television, Brennan picked out Oswald in a second lineup (Warren Report, 143).

Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml.

Cf.

Guardian, September 21 2001,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2001/sep/21/afghanistan.september112 :" Abdulaziz

Al-Omari has also come forward to say he was not on the flight from Boston that crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre. An electrical engineer who works in Saudi Arabia, Mr Al-Omari said he was a student in Denver during the mid-1990s, and that his passport and other papers were stolen in a burglary in the US five years ago. … `The name is my name and the birth date is the same as mine,’ he told Asharq al-Aswat, a London-based Arabic newspaper. `But I am not the one who bombed the World Trade Centre in New York.’"

Daily Telegraph, September 23, 2001,

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2001/09/23/widen23.xml.

On October 4, 2001, the FBI issued a press release showing what appeared to be photos from surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Abdulaziz Al-Omari, entering Portland Jetport on the morning of September 11, 2001 (FBI Press Release, October 4, 2001,

http://www.fbi.gov/pressrel/pressrel01/100401picts.htm ). If valid, these would constitute evidence from the event itself. However the photos are anomalous, in that they show two time superimposed stamps, one showing 5:45, the other showing 5:53. The photos are not cited as evidence in the 9/11 Commission Report. On July 22, 2004, the date of the release of the 9/11 Commission Report, CNN aired what they said was surveillance videotape of two hijackers, Majed Moqed and Khalid al-Mihdar. entering "at one of the security screening points at Dulles International" (CNN, http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0407/22/lad.04.html ). The authenticity of the videotape has been challenged, however, because it lacks the time and date and location identification normally burned into a surveillance video image (Rowland Morgan and Ian Henshall,

9/11 Revealed: The Unanswered Questions [New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005], 117-19).

I have argued that the conflicting messages were part of a so-called "marked card" or "barium meal" test to determine if and where leaks of sensitive information were occurring. This was a familiar technique, and was the responsibility of the CI/SIG or Counterintelligence Special Intelligence Group which drafted the two cables. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in U.S. Government Files,1994-1999 (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2007), 17-18, 92; also Peter Dale Scott, "Oswald and the Hunt for Popov's Mole," The Fourth Decade, III, 3 (March 1996), 3;

www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=519798.

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

Jefferson Morley, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA (Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 196-98. See Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics II, 30-33.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 310.

9/11 Commission Report, 502n44.

Wright, The Looming Tower, 312, 313.

Lawrence Wright, "The Agent," New Yorker, July 10 and 17, 2006, 68.

Clarence M. Kelley, Kelley: The Story of an FBI Director (Kansas City: Andrews, McMeel, & Parker, 1987), 268.

James Bamford, A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 224.

Wright, The Looming Tower, 329. In his New Yorker story (p. 70), Wright wrote that "By withholding the picture of Khallad [bin Attash]…the C.I.A. may in effect have allowed the September 11th plot to proceed."

9/11 Commission Report, 271; Wright, The Looming Tower, 353-54.

David Atlee Phillips, Nightwatch, 139; quoted in Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 184. Morley observes that in the 1970s Phillips offered a total of "four not entirely consistent versions of the story of Oswald’s visit to Mexico City."

J. Cofer Black testimony before 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., July 24, 2003.

Dale Watson testimony before Joint Inquiry, 107th Cong., 2nd Sess., September 26, 2002.

Amy B. Zegart, Flying Blind: The CIA, the FBI, and the Origins of 9/11(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2007), 117.

Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The Hijackers: Who They Were, Why TheyDid It (New York: HarperCollins, 20050, 294n45; Philip Shenon, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation (New York: Twelve/Hachette, 2008), 141.

Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 7, 294.

9/11 Commission Report, 267.

Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 81-86; Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 170-77.

Morley, Our Man in Mexico, 177.

Shenon, The Commission, 50-51.

Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report," RawStory, February 28, 2008, http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_documents_contradict_Sept._11_Commission_0228.html (met at the airport); Shenon, The Commission, 52 (al-Bayoumi). Al-Bayoumi "apparently did work for Dallah Avco, an aviation-services company with extensive contracts with the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Prince Sultan, the father of the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar" ("The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002, http://www.newsweek.com/id/66665).

"The Saudi Money Trail," Newsweek, December 2, 2002. The FBI "hijacker timeline" was released by the FBI on February 4, 2008. See Larisa Alexandrovna, "FBI documents contradict 9/11 Commission report, Rawstory.com, February 28, 2008,

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_documents_contradict_Sept._11_Commission_0228.html.

Shenon, The Commission, 54.

9/11 Commission Report, 217; Shenon, The Commission, 52-53.

Shenon, The Commission, 398.

Wright, The Looming Tower, 313. Looking at the same evidence, Christopher Ketcham has raised an alternative possibility, that "the CIA may have subcontracted to Mossad, given that the agency was both prohibited by law from conducting intelligence operations on U.S. soil, and lacked a pool of competent Arabic-fluent field officers. In such a scenario, the CIA would either have worked actively with the Israelis or quietly abetted an independent operation on U.S. soil…. When in the spring of 2002 the scenario of CIA's domestic subcontracting to foreign intelligence

was posed to the veteran CIA/NSA intelligence operative, with whom I spoke extensively, the operative didn't reject it out of hand" (Christopher Ketcham, "Cheering Movers and Art Student Spies: What Did Israel Know in Advance of the 9/11 Attacks?" CounterPunch, February 7, 2007,

http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=73&contentid=4253&page=2 ).

Oswald requested a dependency discharge from the Marines in August 1959, "on the ground that his mother needed his support" (Warren Report, 688). Accordingly Marine Lt. A.G. Ayers, Jr. signed a document for Oswald’s release to inactive duty on September 11, 1959 (19 WH 679, cf. 17 WH 762) "by reason of hardship (19 WH 678). However Lt. Ayers should have known that Oswald had no intention of staying in Texas to support his mother; he had already, on September 4, 1959, signed an affidavit in support of Oswald’s passport application "to attend the College of A. Schweitzer, Chur, Switzerland and the Univ of Turku, Turku, Finland" (22 WH 77-79). (It is a sign of some covert intrigue that the language of instruction at the University of Turku was Finnish, a language Oswald did not know.)

A significant symptom of this enduring substratum has been the Bush Administration’s protection of Samuel Berger, Clinton’s national security advisor. Berger pleaded guilty in April 2005 to having stolen 9/11 documents from the National Archives (Shenon, The Commission, 414). A condition of his plea bargain was to submit to a Justice Department polygraph test, to determine what documents had been stolen. Republican Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, a long-time critic of CIA operations in Afghanistan, revealed to the House in February 2008 that he had written to the Bush Justice Department, demanding that it administer the polygraph test, and that the Justice Department had rejected his demand (Congressional Record, February 26, 2008, House, pp. H1065-H1072). We have already seen that Berger when in office was receiving regular reports from the CIA about the presence of al-Mihdar and al-Hamzi at the Kuala Lumpur meeting (Zegart, Flying Blind, 117). It is possible that these were the reports he was stealing from the Archives, and that the Justice Department refusal to administer the polygraph test is part of a cover-up to protect the CIA’s relationship to the two Saudis.

Amy Chua, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 342.

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of the forthcoming The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, due in August 2008. This previously unpublished essay is the concluding section of the new book, which can be ordered from the Mary Ferrell Foundation Press by clicking here at http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/MFF_Store. His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

*&* addendum:

9/11, Deep State Violence and the Hope of Internet Politics

The Deep State and 9/11

by Prof. Peter Dale ScottGlobal Research, June 11, 2008

The unthinkable – that elements inside the state would conspire with criminals to kill innocent civilians – has become not only thinkable but commonplace in the last century. A seminal example was in French Algeria, where dissident elements of the French armed forces, resisting General de Gaulle’s plans for Algerian independence, organized as the Secret Army Organization and bombed civilians indiscriminately, with targets including hospitals and schools.1 Critics like Alexander Litvinenko, who was subsequently murdered in London in November 2006, have charged that the 1999 bombings of apartment buildings around Moscow, attributed to Chechen separatists, were in fact the work of the Russian secret service (FSB).2

Similar attacks in Turkey have given rise to the notion there of an extra-legal "deep state" – a combination of forces, ranging from former members of the CIA-organized Gladio organization, to "a vast matrix of security and intelligence officials, ultranationalist members of the Turkish underworld and renegade former members of the [Kurdish separatist] PKK."3 The deep state, financed in part by Turkey’s substantial heroin traffic, has been accused of killing thousands of civilians, in incidents such as the lethal bomb attack in November 2005 on a bookshop in Semdinli. This attack, initially attributed to the Kurdish separatist PKK, turned out to have been committed by members of Turkey's paramilitary police intelligence service, together with a former PKK member turned informer.4 On April 23, 2008, the former Interior Minister Mehmet Agar was ordered to stand trial for his role in this dirty war during the 1990s.5

In my book The Road to 9/11, I have argued that there has existed, at least since World War Two if not earlier, an analogous American deep state, also combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.6 I also pointed to recent decades of collaboration between the U.S. deep state and al-Qaeda, a terrorist underworld whose drug-trafficking activities have been played down in the 9/11 Commission Report and the mainstream U.S. media.7

Still to be explained is the suppressed anomalous fact that al-Qaeda’s top trainer on airplane hijackings, Ali Mohamed, was simultaneously a double-agent reporting to the FBI, and almost certainly still maintained a connection to the CIA which had used him as an agent and helped bring him to this country in the 1980s.8 It is not disputed that Ali Mohamed organized the Embassy bombing in Kenya; and that he did so after the RCMP, who had detained him in Vancouver in the presence of another known terrorist, released Mohamed on instructions from the FBI.9

From this historic background of collaboration, I would offer a hypothesis for further investigation: that the American deep state is somehow implicated with al-Qaeda in the atrocity of 9/11; and that this helps explain the conspicuous involvement of the CIA and other U.S. agencies in the ensuing cover-up.

Sibel Edmonds, the Turkish-American who was formerly an FBI translator, has publicly linked both al-Qaeda and American officials to the Turkish heroin trafficking that underlies the Turkish deep state. Although she has been prevented from speaking directly by an extraordinary court order,10 her allegations have been summarized by Daniel Ellsberg:

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Friday, September 24, 2010

personal finance

As Elizabeth Warren starts building the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, there’s never been more uncertainty and upheaval surrounding the costs and fees associated with consumer finance.

There’s definitely a fair amount of good news. Old-fashioned overdraft fees now banned unless you opt in to them, and the Wells Fargo case, in which the California bank was ordered to pay $203 million to customers who had their largest transactions processed first, could set an important and expensive precedent for banks. Kate Davidson reports that smaller community banks are likely to fall into line on this front, but it’s still amazing how opaque the national banking system is when it comes to such policies. Get this:

Community banking companies that process transactions highest-to-lowest include the $3.6 billion-asset Renasant Corp. in Tupelo, Miss.; the $10.5 billion-asset Citizens Republic Corp. in Flint, Mich.; the $13.7 billion-asset Susquehanna Bancshares Inc. in Lititz, Pa.; the $6 billion-asset First Commonwealth Financial Corp. in Indiana, Pa.; and the $8.5 billion-asset Hancock Holding Co. in Gulfport, Miss.

Many banks that KBW surveyed would not disclose information about their processing practices. Several declined to comment when reached by a reporter, or did not return calls seeking comment.

It’s a simple and powerful strategy: simply don’t tell anybody, whether they’re a bank analyst or a reporter, what your policy is when it comes to overdrafts. That way, people shopping for a new bank will have to simply go on your public marketing materials, rather than being able to make any kind of easy apples-to-apples comparisons.

One of the things I hope that Warren does is to make every bank’s fees and policies public, in an open database which can be easily parsed by personal-finance websites. It’s not like these things are a secret, per se: they’re just very difficult to find right now. Let’s make these things as transparent as possible, instead.

Meanwhile, the ABA is, predictably and depressingly, pushing back against the idea that consumers would rather have fewer overdraft fees:

Nessa Feddis, a vice president and senior counsel at the American Bankers Association, said she expects regulators will eventually consider changes to rules affecting the order of processing. But she noted that the issue has been the subject of debate and litigation for decades, and said a Federal Reserve study found that customers want important payments — such as rent, mortgage or other bills — processed first, and they’re willing to pay for it.

I’ve looked for this Federal Reserve study, and can’t find it, does anybody know what she’s talking about? If it exists, it only serves to underline how important it is that the CFPB have full independence from the rest of the Fed. And if it doesn’t exist, then the ABA is even more mendacious than I’d imagined.

In any case, banks are definitely looking for new fee-revenue streams, and that’s where the uncertainty comes in. Blake Ellis has a look at some of them: Wachovia, for instance, will now charge you $10 to transfer money from your savings account to your checking account if you don’t have enough money in checking. It’s essentially an overdraft fee without an overdraft, and it’s existed for some time at Wells Fargo, which is now imposing it on Wachovia customers too.

I see four main forces here, all pulling in different directions.

The first is banks’ desire for income streams: they are going to want to introduce as many new fees as possible, especially banks like TCF which were highly reliant on those overdraft fees. (TCF’s business was particularly cunning: it banks a large number of students, who then learn the hard way about how much overdraft fees cost. Once they’ve learned their lesson, they move on to other banks, but TCF just stays there, signing up a new cohort of naive freshmen each year. It, like Wells Fargo, is being sued over its overdraft practices.)

The second is lawsuits. The Wells Fargo decision is the biggest, but other decisions are important too, like the $18.75 million settlement in North Carolina against a payday lender there. The more such decisions there are, the warier banks will be of trying to push the envelope.

The third is Warren’s new bureau, which could become an invaluable public resource for holding bank practices up to scrutiny.

Finally, of course, there’s the constant scramble, on the part of banks, for market share and customers: the more confusing the landscape becomes, the more appealing it is to try to attract new customers by promising them a simple product with no hidden fees. bank

It’s impossible to predict where we’re going to end up once all these factors have been working for a while, but it’s easy to predict that the route from here to there is going to be a rocky one and is not going to go in a straight line. So be careful out there. Your bank is having to deal with a scary and unfamiliar regulatory landscape, and might well react in unexpected ways.

WILMINGTON, Delaware (CNN) – Christine O'Donnell's Senate campaign is pushing back hard on allegations that she misused election funds by putting them to private use. Leading the counter-offensive is Cleta Mitchell, an attorney and an expert in campaign finance law, who was just retained by the O'Donnell campaign to deal with the allegations.

In an interview with CNN, Mitchell responded to a complaint against O'Donnell filed this week by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. The group, known as CREW, accuses O'Donnell of spending roughly $20,000 from her failed 2008 campaign for the Senate for personal expenses.

"That is not true," Mitchell told CNN. She accused CREW and its executive director, Melanie Sloan, of libeling O'Donnell and said the campaign is considering a lawsuit against the group.

"She has committed libel per se, slander per se by calling my client names... I've looked at lots of campaign FEC (Federal Election Commission) reports. And the things she (Sloan) is saying are simply not true," Mitchell said in the interview.

Sloan has called O'Donnell "a criminal" and "a crook," in accusing the candidate of tax evasion and a host of other financial improprieties.

Central to the allegations are claims that O'Donnell used 2008 campaign money to pay rent, to buy food and gasoline and even for a bowling outing. CREW says those expenditures occurred in 2009 and early 2010 when, the group says, O'Donnell had no active campaign.

"She did have a campaign because she had gone from running in 2008 to running in 2010," Mitchell told CNN Tuesday. "She was already running... she moved from one campaign to another and frankly the campaign headquarters was in her home - that's not unusual."

For her part, Sloan denies allegations her group is politically biased and says it is acting on information provided to it by a former O'Donnell campaign official.

"We've added up what we think is over $20,000 in expenses that were improper, that were money she used - campaign funds put to personal use. But it's really hard to say, because there's been no audit of her campaign. The fact is, once you start seeing this trend … the odds are there are many more expenses that we don't know about," Sloan told CNN in an interview.

Campaign officials are upset that the CREW complaint is getting so much press.

"You see, what the problem with Melanie Sloan and FEC complaints is you get to make big headlines, with lots of allegations and two or three years later, when they're dismissed as being baseless, there's no press. And so Melanie Sloan waited until Christine O'Donnell won the Republican nomination and less than a week later files a complaint that she's obviously had for a long time, just ready to go," Mitchell said.

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Come November, it is the intention to throw the bums out. All of them. Many Senate seat challengers, while running as Republicans, have risen to the top with backing from the "tea party." Wisconsin's Ron Johnson is just such a candidate. A fiscally conservative businessman, Johnson has never run for public office and is an inexperienced campaigner. But the way his rhetoric matches with fact, he already seems the pro. Ron Johnson can now distinguish the bum's face. That bum is incumbent Senator Russ Feingold.

Now campaign finance filings found by The Awl show that despite his vigorous denouncement of the bank bailouts, Johnson's campaign has received funding from many of the same banks who received bailouts. This means you and I have helped fund Ron Johnson's anti-bailout campaign. So we should get to know him.

Johnson has gladly taken the tea party badge. Back in May, Washington Post columnist and conservative icon George Will said Johnson "is what the Tea Party looks like." FreedomWorks, the Dick Armey-run conservative organization that organized the 9/12 rally in 2009 but is not at all behind many "grassroots" tea party events, called Johnson a “Champion of Freedom."

His website's rundown of his personal history ("Meet Ron") begins, "Ron grew up in a family and in a place where one of the greatest compliments you could give a person was to say that he or she was a hard worker." And it only gets more vague. Apparently, this is intentional. Johnson declined to meet Feingold in all six debates, agreeing to just three. That a long-time incumbent is challenging his newcomer to debates should immediately raise raise a red flag. Without detailed positions, what is there to specifically criticize? Johnson's campaign has taken to dismissing all criticisms of the candidate as typical political attack ads, even as Johnson's crew runs similar spots. This kind of electioneering doublethink infects Johnson's campaign, a rhetoric capable of forgetting whatever it's necessary to forget, only to draw it back into memory at the moment it is needed.

Johnson claims to be for freedom, his rallying cry being "First of all, freedom." But then he believes marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

He is passionate believer in the values of Rand's Atlas Shrugged. But not the book's fundamental view of the "monstrous absurdity" of original sin, as he is a fervent and active Lutheran who says "freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion."

Johnson has adopted an all-green design and logo, giving the impression that he is a friend of the environment. But he is fervent supporter of fossil fuels, defending BP against recent criticisms and calling climate change theories "lunacy" and "not proven by any stretch of the imagination.” (Johnson has suggested sunspots have caused recent weather changes, despite sunspots being at historic lows.)

Johnson demands a smaller, less-involved government, saying our current one is "robbing the bank accounts of future generations of Americans." But even while Johnson calls government spending and subsidies a "threat to our freedom" and insists "government doesn't create jobs," he refuses to acknowledge that his company received millions of dollars in industrial revenue bonds. Johnson's campaign maintains the money he received was not a government handout. Yet this exact form of government subsidized loan is what fiscal conservative temple The Cato Institute calls "corporate welfare."

As everyone debates whether or not this constitutes a government subsidy, the blog Uppity Wisconsin reveals Johnson's membership on the board of an industrial development corporation partly funded by the city and county that "has successfully helped area business apply for and secure over a million dollars in Customized Labor Training (CLT) grants… designed to assist companies that are investing in new technologies or manufacturing processes by providing a grant of up to 50% of the cost of training employees on the new technologies." Yet, Johnson insists that subsidization "doesn't work through the free market system very well."

Johnson could not be more different than Feingold when it comes to creativity and a voice for Wisconsin. Johnson is a voice for money. He admits as much, saying of Wisconsin's loss of manufacturing jobs to NAFTA "there are always winners and losers." For a candidate who complains about a private sector tax base, those "losers" include the 177,000-odd manufacturing jobs Wisconsin has lost in the last decade; that's 177,000 incomes that paid taxes.

From a GOP perspective, he is a midterm wet dream. Giving all the appearance of the throw-the-bums-out attitude of the zeitgeist, Johnson has nonetheless endorsed all the old bums' ideas about how to fix things. For health care Johnson says "Mitch Daniels has the solution," referring to the incumbent Indiana GOP Governor. On taxes, Johnson points to old-school GOP insider Ronald Reagan. Johnson has said that during Reagan's era, the top income rate of 28 percent meant "we were 72 percent free," which suggests Johnson may endorse a complete elimination of the income tax.

For solutions to entitlement reform, Johnson points to fellow Wisconsinite and incumbent GOP Congressman Paul Ryan. (It's noteworthy that while Johnson castigates opponent Feingold for being a career politician, he reveres Congressman Ryan, whose never held a job outside government since graduating college in 1992. Spectacular doublethink).

The greatest doublethink of all is the impression that Johnson is a self-made millionaire, that thanks to the opportunities provided by the American Dream, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps, an example of how America can reward hard-working citizens. On his website, the story goes that after moving to Wisconsin "Ron started a business called Pacur with his brother-in-law" and he has said he built his business from "from scratch," from "the ground up." But what Johnson's campaign doesn't often mention is that the candidate was set up with the business by his billionaire father-in-law. Uppity Wisconsin has unearthed evidence that Johnson's firm Pacur is the beneficiary of less-than-market-driven business from its main client, Daddy Inc.

Reading a candidate's website for his position papers is for suckers. To really understand how a candidate will vote, one needs to be in on the fund-raising calls he or she spends the majority of the day performing. Since that's impossible, the next best thing is to look at which of those calls were successful. Where each candidate stands is directly defined by the money trail.

Russ Feingold's Federal Election Commission report reads like a who's who of labor. American Maritime Officers Voluntary PAC. American Dental Association PAC. Alliant Energy Corporation Employees PAC. Air Conditioning Contractors of America PAC. Committee on Letter Carriers PAC (yes, this exists). Association of Postmasters. Amalgamated Transit Union. Writers Guild. Sheet Metal Workers. Air Traffic Controllers. United Brotherhood of Carpenters. American Nurses. Optometric Association. Assisted Living Federation. Associated Milk Producers. Boilermakers. Longshoremen. Walt Disney Productions Employees PAC. Bricklayers. Even the PAC from Awl friends the Human Rights Committee supports Feingold (since 1997).

Meanwhile, Ron Johnson has largely self-funded his campaign, running three TV ads for each one of Feingold's. When asked how much of his fortune he will spend to defeat Feingold, Johnson has said, "All of it." He's off to a good start, spending $4.4 million in the run-up to the primary, or about $9 per vote. That's a lot more than the many thousands of dollars both he and his wife gave in 2004 to Feingold's GOP challenger, Tim Michels.

Johnson doesn't really need the $5,000-odd donations brought in by his committee, Ron Johnson for Senate Inc. That's why looking at his list of donors is even more telling. A newcomer, Johnson's list of financial supporters is short; but it includes the American Bankers PAC, American Express Company PAC, American Insurance Association PAC, Deloitte & Touche PAC, Financial Services Roundtable PAC, National Venture Capital Association PAC, and the Exxon Mobil PAC. The last of those donors recently got Mr. Johnson in some trouble when it was revealed that all his defense of oil exploration in the Gulf, and his criticism of the Obama Administration's treatment of BP, might be because he personally holds hundreds of thousands of dollars in BP and Exxon stock.

Much like many of this year's tea party-associated GOP candidates, one of Johnson's core campaign points is criticism of the financial bailout. Funny then that Johnson's campaign has been the beneficiary of the largess of the very corporations he believes should not have received bailout money.

For example, the cash Johnson received from the Financial Services Roundtable PAC on August 27 and the American Bankers Association PAC on July 8 and July 30 came from, amongst others, hardcore Treasury bailout beneficiaries such as JP Morgan Chase, SunTrust, Bank of America, Regions Financial, Zions and First Horizon. The money Ron Johnson received from the Bluegrass and Senate Majority Fund PACs came, in part, from one of the greatest bailout beneficiaries of them all, Goldman Sachs. Despite statements about staying out of politics this cycle, Goldman donated to both PACs on March 31 of this year. On June 24, Ron Johnson's campaign received two $5,000 donations from the Bluegrass PAC, a day later the campaign received two donations from the Senate Majority PAC in the same amounts.

To be clear, while it may not be the backbone of his funding, some of the very bailout money that Ron Johnson has criticized is now funding his campaign.

Tea Party members might also be interested to know that some of the $2,700 PAC donation he received on August 27 came from Sallie Mae.

Johnson's campaign ignored repeated requests from The Awl for comment.

Johnson has, and will continue to, paint Feingold as a Washington D.C. insider. But would a Democratic insider have voted against dismissing President Clinton's impeachment proceedings? Feingold did.

When it comes to true politician insiders, potential Johnson supporters should ask about his connections to Americans for Prosperity's old Republican establishment strategist Mark Block. State political blog One Wisconsin Now even makes a good case for how Johnson worked with supporters to actually diminish true grassroots tea party involvement after former Governor Tommy Thompson dropped out of the race. Johnson's dismissal of Wisconsin tea party groups and alignment with Americans for Prosperity's tea party is a microcosm of how the entire movement has been clandestinely hijacked by the GOP. And those who genuinely are grassroots tea party patriots should be worried about Johnson's connection to the retail version of their movement. As One Wisconsin Now also just uncovered, Americans for Prosperity, along with Republican party leaders, are dragging the tea party reputation into good old GOP voter suppression tactics.

The great irony of course is that the newly angry who long for fiscal reason and weep for the Constitution, those who have become the "party of no," could not have a greater ally than Russ Feingold.

Feingold voted against the 2008 TARP bailout. In fact, he voted against the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, which in large part caused the need for the bailout. He voted against NAFTA. And just days after 9/11 and at the height of that event's fervor, Feingold hauled his giant balls up to the voting machine and registered a nay vote against the "USA Patriot Act" on the grounds that "The Founders who wrote our Constitution and Bill of Rights exercised that vigilance even though they had recently fought and won the Revolutionary War. They did not live in comfortable and easy times of hypothetical enemies. They wrote a Constitution of limited powers and an explicit Bill of Rights to protect liberty in times of war, as well as in times of peace." He was the only senator to vote no. By all means, read his full remarks in the wake of the vote and ask yourself why Russ Feingold isn't getting speaking invites for tea party rallies.

The once-progressive Republican Wisconsin Idea may have suffered greatly of late, broken and ill, slouching toward yore. But the election of Ron Johnson over Russ Feingold would be the ultimate blade run across its throat.

George Will's backseat make-out session with Johnson in May heavily leaned on Atlas Shrugged symbolism, noting it was Johnson's favorite book. Will noted Johnson's belief that we are already living in the "novel's dystopian world."

When newspeak replaces debate and the nation's vocabulary gets smaller every election cycle, where doublethink goes unquestioned by voters, we are indeed sliding into a novel's dystopian world, but it wasn't written by Ayn Rand.

Abe Sauer is enjoying autumn in Wisconsin.

Photo by WiscPolitics.com via Flickr

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Saturday, September 18, 2010

personal finance programs

The State University of New York, which has 64 campuses, has agreed to a code of conduct developed by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo designed to safeguard students from unscrupulous marketing.

The code outlines steps schools should take to monitor and limit credit card marketing to students, according to Bloomberg News. Under the code, colleges would be required to offer financial literacy programs and not share personal information with credit card companies without permission.

Perhaps most importantly, the code bans agreements in which the school earns a percentage of finance charges imposed on students. Schools are being asked to select cards based on students' best interests if an exclusive marketing agreement is made with a credit card company, and must also monitor all credit card offers being marketed on campus.

Cuomo is investigating credit-card marketing practices that target college students through their institutions.

A 2009 survey by Sallie Mae found the average college student graduates with nearly $4,100 in credit card debt.

At a time when bailouts for America’s rich proceed unimpeded and Americans are left to fend for themselves, support for further subsidies for the rich is limited among the public. Gallup polling finds that a majority of Americans (56 percent) oppose extending the Bush-era tax cuts, which went overwhelmingly to the wealthiest of Americans. Just one in three support extending the cuts, despite the current rhetoric of the Republican Party.

Opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts is entirely rational among the public in light of the cuts’ failure to promote economic growth. The Bush tax cuts concentrated the greatest benefits toward the rich, and benefits for the affluent became even greater in their later years (during the 2008 to 2010 period specifically). They are set to expire this year, unless Democrats and Republicans in Congress renew them. Although massive amounts of cash from the cuts fell into the hands of America’s wealthiest one percent, these elites have looked at the increased volatility of today’s market and decided to hoard the cash instead of investing it. To make matters worse, extending the cuts will result in an additional transfer of $31 billion into the hands of America’s billionaires.

Labor economist Robert Reich argues that tax cuts directed at the rich do little to restore a vibrant economy. Providing an inconvenient historical analysis to the narrative forwarded by Republicans, Reich explains that from the 1951 to 1980 period, when marginal taxes were between 72 and 90 percent, average economic growth per year was at 3.7 percent. From 1983 through the recent recession – when tax cuts under Reagan and Bush were a mainstay of macro-economic policy, national yearly economic growth averaged 3 percent. Reich is not alone in his conclusion. My previous piece on the Bush tax cuts, drawing on data from the Economic Policy Institute points out that, during the period when Bush’s tax cuts were passed and when the economy began a recovery (following the dot.com crash of 2000), economic growth was generally significantly weaker than during previous economic cycles that weren’t characterized by mass tax cuts for the rich (http://www.media-ocracy.com/?p=1436). In short, there appears to be little evidence that massive subsidies to the rich are the magic formula for restoring an ailing economy. They do a lot to redistribute wealth, but little to promote short-term rapid growth, since they keep money out of the hands of those most likely to spend it right away – the working and middle class.

Tax cuts for the rich (and the cuts for business Obama is proposing) – as with cuts to the wealthy in the past – will do little-to-nothing to restore growth. The reason why is obvious enough: at a time when the masses are tapped out due to continued high levels of unemployment, massive layoffs, and high levels of personal debt, Americans have little incentive to spend without caution. Putting more money into the hands of the public (through a mass public employment program, for example, or other social welfare programs), would help in terms of stimulating spending and economic growth. What will not help are tax cuts aimed at businesses that have no incentive to increase production of goods and services because of the decreased ability of the mass public to afford such goods at a time when everyone is tightening their belts. All that tax cuts for the rich will do is further increase the already appalling depression-level inequality that exists in this country. Besides, business elites have been sitting on a mountain of cash for some time now. If they haven’t invested that money by hiring new workers, there’s little reason to expect that they will do so following another infusion of tax cuts. Corporations like the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer are sitting on more than $26 billion in cash, refusing to reinvest it in job growth. Pfizer isn’t alone either. Fortune reports that non-finance companies in the S&P 500 are holding $837 billion in cash, a growth of 26% since 2009, at a time when the economy limps along and the state mass layoffs for public workers are becoming more common. This level of cash reserves is far outside normal levels from years past, and is unconscionable at a time when these companies should be hiring new workers and focusing on expansion.

As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson show in their book Off Center: the Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, the public has opposed tax cuts for the rich for at least the last ten years. Most would rather see government expand its responsibilities to assist the masses and less fortunate through the expansion of broad based social welfare programs. This lesson may stand at odds with Republican-conservative propaganda framing the public as moving to the right in the midst of a Tea Party revolution, but there is little reason to take these pronouncements seriously in light of decades of public opinion data showing longstanding public support for many individual social welfare programs (for more on this data, see the recent books by Martin Gilens, Benjamin Page, and Robert Shapiro, titled Why Americans Hate Welfare and Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality).

Corporate America’s gravy train of bailouts and business tax cuts have enabled a culture of entitlement among America’s rich and a callousness that justifies massive layoffs, pursued alongside record executive and CEO bonuses. The pillaging of public funds for private gain is unlikely to stop in the near future in light of what appear to be imminent mass gains in Republican Congressional seats this fall.

Anthony DiMaggio is the editor of media-ocracy (www.media-ocracy.com), a daily online magazine devoted to the study of media, public opinion, and current events. He has taught U.S. and Global Politics at Illinois State University and North Central College, and is the author of When Media Goes to War (2010) and Mass Media, Mass Propaganda (2008). He can be reached at: mediaocracy@gmail.com

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Tuesday, September 14, 2010

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DEMO: HipLogic's Spark brings social media, news updates to your ...

Devindra Hardawar is a technology and film writer/podcast host. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for ...

Good News: People Are Consuming More News «

The woes of the traditional media industry have fuelled concerns that traditional offline news sources are being replaced by online sources. But a new study by the Pew Center has found that online news consumption has actually increased ...

Canon releases PowerShot G12 premium compact: Digital Photography ...

Canon releases PowerShot G12 premium compact: Canon has launched the PowerShot G12 premium compact, successor to PowerShot G11 released last year. Inheriting most of the core features of the G11, the latest model sees the addition of an ...

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DEMO: HipLogic's Spark brings social media, news updates to your ...

Devindra Hardawar is a technology and film writer/podcast host. He studied philosophy at Amherst College, worked in IT support for ...

Good News: People Are Consuming More News «

Canon releases PowerShot G12 premium compact: Digital Photography ...

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Thursday, September 2, 2010

managing your personal finance

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99-cent iTunes TV rentals hinging on News Corp.? | iLounge News

iLounge news discussing the 99-cent iTunes TV rentals hinging on News Corp.?. Find more iTunes news from leading independent iPod, iPhone, and iPad site.

Hot Air » Great news: Left-wing president turns into tax-cutting ...

Great news: Left-wing president turns into tax-cutting conservative just before midterms.

Stabroek News - Retirement plans caught up in Clico (Guyana) upheaval

Perhaps Stabroek News can shed some light on this issue for me. Was CLICO owned and controlled by the Government of Guyana? Was CLICO insured by the government of Guyana? Did the government of Guyana cause CLICO to fail? ...

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

how to budget personal finances

I am a 25 year old college student (school, job + savings, back to school… long story) and boy do I wish I knew about all the resources available to me back then. Good for you for starting early!

Lucky for me I have 1 parent (divorced) who is so bad with money that I have been scared into financial responsibility from a young age. Was I perfect? Hahaha.. but I am doing better than 95% of my friends are right now so I guess I am doing something right?

Here is my advice:

1. GET A JOB! - 2 shifts a week is all it takes. I have friends who just graduated from college without ever having a job. Result? No work experience so nowhere will hire them. Some had problems even getting an internship! Try for customer service jobs. Employers value people skills more than flipping burgers.

2. BUDGET! - Cant teach an old dog new tricks so it is best to start young. Add up your monthly expenses such as rent/insurance/cell/gas/etc and divide by 2 or 4 (depending on weekly/bi-weekly payday). Put this money in savings and no touchy! Once you can live on that budget a certain % for an emergency fund and then % for savings. The rest is your “fun” money. As others have said: pizza, ipods, and clothes are “fun money” and NOT emergencies!

3. DEBIT, CREDIT, or CASH?

DEBIT- I am a die hard debit card user. My credit union has detailed (free) online banking. I check my online bank statement in the morning and at night and go over my spending. Think of it as an instant virtual slap in the face about your spending habits. It hurts for the best.

CASH - Some people just cant be responsible enough to respect the plastic and do better with cash. Try and keep bigger bills on you. Breaking a $5 is less mentally painful than breaking a $20. $1s are dangerous. That can of coke is “only $1″. $7 a week, $30 a month. It adds up.

CREDIT - Many say don’t get a credit card, but I disagree. If you are responsible college is a great time to build credit (unless you have some serious control issues… if that is the case, these are not the droids you are looking for…). Not building credit early is the BIGGEST regret I have. Good credit means better rates when buying a house or a car. Do your research first. Consider a student, or if you have to a secured card.

More about credit-

*Do NOT apply for a credit card on campus. It is like selling your soul for a candy bar. Every time you apply for a credit card they run a credit check, which “pings” you. Too many pings hurts your credit score. Not good. Friend did that at every kiosk that offered something free to sign up when she was 20. This was 7 years ago and her credit is still recovering! The same is true for store credit cards. Do.Not.WANT!

*Pick a required expense, such as gas or cell phone bill and put it on the credit card. Pay off the card at the end of each month. Repeat.

*Do NOT use your credit card to buy “fun money” purchases. No clothes, no ipods, no pizza. This is why you have your debit card of cash. Don’t even think about it mr.!

4. EATING/DRINKING - This is going to be the weird random one from one young person to another.(Part of this only applies to you on/after your 21st birthday!) The young person’s life revolves around being social. For a 20 something this normally involves dinner and/or drinks with friends. It is expensive! So much money can be saved if you plan ahead!

*Eating - Going out to eat is a much needed social experience but NEVER go out to eat starving! Just like you don’t go shopping when you are hungry you never want to experience the whole “eyes bigger than stomach” thing while dining out. Have a snack an hour or so before you meet friends for dinner. This will help you avoid ordering that $8 appetizer! Also, try and order things that reheat or are good cold. LEFTOVERS! Also, water is free. It is good for you! Coke is $3. Go buy yourself a 12 pack and have one when you get home.

*Drinking - Most 20 somethings drink. It is a very expensive part of our lives. It is a social event to help us forget about school and work. We like bars. Unfortunately $5 for a beer is highway robbery! NEVER go to a bar completely sober (when you are 21+ & no drinky + drivey!). Have a drink or 2 at home and then have a beer at the bar. You will save TONS. Also, bring cash to a bar. Only bring as much cash as your sober self would like to spend. Alcohol impairs judgment. Sober you will thank drunk you for not spending. Drunk you will thank sober you for being smart enough to make sure you can afford the advil to take care of that hangover the next day. It is a win win.

Put all that saved food and drink money towards something that will last.

5. BOOKS - Buy used whenever possible. Check online first because campus stores are normally a ripoff. Try and sell the books back online, even if they have released a new edition. Most student book stores on campus will only give you 1/2 of what someone online will be willing to give you!

6. CARS - Buy used and reliable, but not “cheap”. New cars lose tons of value when you drive them off the lot. Don’t buy a “cheap” used car on it’s last leg. Think Goldilocks - not too new, not too old, juuusssttt right! Save up as much money as possible. Pay for it in cash if you can. If not, save up at least 2/3 before purchasing and do your homework!

And whatever you do: AVOID parking tickets, speeding tickets, registration fines.. may as well light the money on fire! Or if you do not want it I will give it a nice home and save you the trouble.

I am a 25 year old college student (school, job + savings, back to school… long story) and boy do I wish I knew about all the resources available to me back then. Good for you for starting early!

Here is my advice:

3. DEBIT, CREDIT, or CASH?

More about credit-

Put all that saved food and drink money towards something that will last.

And whatever you do: AVOID parking tickets, speeding tickets, registration fines.. may as well light the money on fire! Or if you do not want it I will give it a nice home and save you the trouble.

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