Who Is Responsible For The Economic Collapse?

House Says Yes To Financial Crisis Probe

"Two weeks after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called for the creation of an independent panel that would investigate the causes of the current financial crisis, the House of Representatives has joined the Senate in approving a financial fraud bill that authorizes such a commission. The House vote for the fraud legislation (S 386) was 367-59, with all of the "no" votes coming from The Party of No."

Let The Sun Shine In......

Billionaire Donors Split With Obama on Law That May Hurt Hotels

By John Lippert and Holly Rosenkrantz

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- Three Chicago billionaires who helped fund President Barack Obama’s election campaign are fighting legislation he backs that would make it easier for unions to organize hotels they own.
Penny Pritzker, Obama’s campaign finance chairwoman and a director of Global Hyatt Corp., has told the president she is opposed to the measure, known as card check, said a person familiar with the situation. Neil Bluhm, a partner in Walton Street Capital LLC, also opposes the bill, the person said. Lester Crown, chairman of Henry Crown & Co., criticized the proposal in an interview.

For the city’s business leaders who nurtured Obama’s White House bid, card check is a gut check on support for their hometown president. Labor, which spent $100 million on Democratic campaigns last year, made it a top priority to enact a bill giving workers bargaining rights based on signing cards instead of winning a secret-ballot election.

Voting privately is “an American prerogative and shouldn’t be overturned,” said Crown, 83, whose family holdings include the Ojai Valley Inn & Spa in Ojai, California, and the Little Nell hotel in Aspen, Colorado. “The recommended legislation is absolutely the wrong thing to do.”
 
Pritzker, 49, and Bluhm, 71, declined to comment.

The fight over proposed labor-law revisions heated up this week when Senator Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat who is the chief sponsor of the card-check provision, said backers don’t have the votes to push it through. He vowed to press ahead with other elements that unions want, such as shortening the time period allowed for elections.

Labor Law ‘Imbalance’

“Many do feel there is an imbalance” in current laws that favors business over labor, he said in an interview. A compromise version may attract support from more lawmakers, Harkin said.

Under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, employers can demand an election even if more than half of workers sign cards supporting a union. The bill would take away that right, and opponents say it would leave employees open to retaliation if they refuse to sign up.

Since the 1980s, management campaigns have defeated 19 of every 20 organizing efforts, according to Nelson Lichtenstein, a labor historian at University of California at Santa Barbara.

While the U.S. Chamber of Commerce plans to spend about $20 million this year on advertising and lobbying to block card check, labor leaders said they are determined to get a filibuster-proof margin in the Senate.
Pressuring Specter

“We are confident we will have the 60 votes to pass major labor-law reform for workers this year,” said William Samuel, the AFL-CIO legislative director.
 
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said his chamber may consider the issue before the August recess.
 
Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO, threatened to withhold labor backing for Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter in his 2010 re-election campaign if he doesn’t vote for the bill. “We won’t be bludgeoned into supporting him just because important people, like the president, are,” Trumka said of Specter, who switched to the Democratic Party last month from the Republicans.

Unions represent about 7.6 percent of the private-sector workforce, down from 35 percent at their peak in the 1950s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Heat on Hotels

The outcome of the debate may affect the hotel interests of Crown, Pritzker and Bluhm.
Bluhm’s investments include the Drake, Ritz-Carlton and Four Seasons hotels, all clustered near Chicago’s North Michigan Avenue shopping district. He joined the Pritzkers in developing two casinos in Niagara Falls, Canada. Pritzker runs her family’s realty group, airport shuttle service and credit checking company.

“Labor-law reform gets right into the face of these liberals who own a factory or a hotel,” where the card-check provision would have its greatest impact, said Lichtenstein, the historian.
 
Crown gave Obama a total of $4,600 in 2007 and 2008, the maximum allowed for individuals, Federal Election Commission reports show. He said he still supports Obama.

“I think the world of him,” Crown said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with other relationships.”

Campaign Bundler
 
Pritzker ran committees that generated a record of more than $745 million for the Obama campaign plus $53 million for the inauguration. Bluhm raised $160,000 in 2008 as a so-called bundler for Obama, pooling donations from other contributors, according to OpenSecrets.org, a Washington-based group that tracks campaign spending.

“The president and his supporters don’t agree on every issue, nor does anyone expect them to,” said White House spokesman Tommy Vietor. “But clearly many like Ms. Pritzker, who the president asked to serve on the President’s Economy Recovery Advisory Board, are supportive of his overall economic agenda.”

Workers at the Pritzkers’ Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California, initiated an organizing drive last year. Managers called meetings and told employees that joining a union could cost wages and benefits, said Rigoberto Gutierrez, 55, who has worked in room service there for 12 years.

“They tried to scare us,” he said. “They told us we could lose everything.”

The matter remains unresolved.
 
Obama’s Vegas Slap
 
Pritzker and other corporate officers knew Obama’s views on labor issues when they joined his campaign. They were surprised, though, when Republicans lost so many seats in the Senate and when Obama indicated his support for card check, said the person familiar with the situation.

The Pritzkers in particular also took note of Obama’s public statement on Feb. 9 that executives shouldn’t use federal bailout money for Las Vegas trips, the person said. Later this year, the family will open a Grand Hyatt with 2,973 rooms next to the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

“Obama has very carefully straddled two positions,” said William B. Gould, a former National Labor Relations Board chairman under President Bill Clinton. “He has been supportive of the bill, but he has been very careful to not speak of any particular provision.”

To contact the reporter on this story: John Lippert in Chicago at jlippert@bloomberg.net ; Holly RosenkrantzWashington at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net in
 
Last Updated: May 7, 2009 00:01 EDT

Let The Sun Shine In......

Sibel Edmonds: Who the Hell Can We Trust?

NO One, or so it seems.....

I have been known to quote long-dead men in my past writings. Whether eloquently expressed thoughts by our founding fathers, or those artfully expressed by ancient Greek thinkers, these quotes have always done a better job starting or ending my thoughts - that tend to be expressed in long winding sentences. For this piece I am going to break with tradition and start with an appropriate quote from a living current senator, John Kerry: “It’s a sad day when you have members of congress who are literally criminals go undisciplined by their colleagues. No wonder people look at Washington and know this city is broken.”

The people do indeed look at Washington and know that this city is ‘badly’ broken, Senator Kerry. The public confidence in our Congress has been declining drastically. Recent poll results highlight how the American people’s trust in their congress has hit rock bottom. A survey of progressive blogs easily confirms the rage rightfully directed at our congress for abdicating its role of oversight and accountability. Activists scream about promised hearings that never took place - without explanation. They express outrage when investigations are dropped without any justification. And they genuinely wonder out loud why, especially after they helped secure a major victory for the Democrats. The same Democrats who had for years pointed fingers at their big bad Republican majority colleagues as the main impediment preventing them from fulfilling what was expected of them.

The recent stunning but not unexpected revelations regarding Jane Harman by the Congressional Quarterly provide us with a little glimpse into one of the main reasons behind the steady decline in congress’s integrity. But the story is almost dead - ready to bite the dust, thanks to our mainstream media’s insistence on burying ‘real’ issues or stories that delve deep into the causes of our nation’s continuous downward slide. In this particular case, the ‘thank you’ should also be extended to certain blogosphere propagandists who, blinded by their partisanship, myopic in their assessments, and ignorant in their knowledge of the inner workings of our late congress and intelligence agencies, helped in the post-burial cremation of this case.

Ironically but understandably, the Harman case has become one of rare unequivocal bipartisanship, when no one from either side of the partisan isle utters a word. How many House or Senate Republicans have you heard screaming, or even better, calling for an investigation? The right wing remains silent. Some may have their hand, directly or indirectly, in the same AIPAC cookie jar. Others may still feel the heavy baggage of their own party’s tainted colleagues; after all, they have had their share of Abramoffs, Hasterts and the like, silently lurking in the background, albeit dimmer every day. Some on the left, after an initial silence that easily could have been mistaken for shock, are jumping from one foot to the other, like a cat on a hot tin roof, making one excuse after another; playing the ‘victims of Executive Branch eavesdropping’ card, the same very ‘evil doing’ they happened to support vehemently. Some have been dialing their trusted guardian angels within the mainstream media and certain fairly visible alternative outlets.

They need no longer worry, since these guardian angels seem to have blacked out the story, and have done so without much arm twisting.

Hastert Redux

I am going to rewind and take you back to September 2005, when Vanity Fair published an article, which in addition to my case and the plight of National Security Whistleblowers, exposed the dark side of the then Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and the corroborated allegations of his illegal activities involving foreign agents and interests.

Vanity Fair printed the story only after they made certain they were on sure footing in the face of any possible libel by lining up more than five credible sources, and after triple pit bull style fact-checking. They were vindicated; Hastert did not dare go after them, nor did he ever issue any true denial. Moreover, further vindication occurred only a month ago. On April 10, 2009, The Hill reported that the Former Speaker of the House was contracted to lobby for Turkey. The Justice Department record on this deal indicates that Hastert will now be “principally involved” on a $35,000-a-month contract providing representation for Turkish interests. That seems to be the current arrangement for those serving foreign interests while on the job in congress - to be paid at a later date, collecting on their IOU’s when they secure their positions with ‘the foreign lobby.’

In a recent article for the American Conservative Magazine, Philip Giraldi, Former CIA Officer stationed in Turkey, made the following point:” Edmonds’s claims have never been pursued, presumably because there are so many skeletons in both parties’ closets. She has been served with a state-secrets gag order to make sure that what she knows is never revealed, a restriction that the new regime in Washington has not lifted.”
He hits the nail on the head:” In Hastert’s case, it certainly should be a matter of public concern that a senior elected representative who may have received money from a foreign country is now officially lobbying on its behalf. How many other congressmen might have similar relationships with foreign countries and lobbying groups, providing them with golden parachutes for their retirement?”

The congress went mum on my case after the Vanity Fair story, with, of course, the mainstream media making it very easy for them. They turned bipartisan in not pursuing the case, just as with the Harman case, and similarly, the mainstream media happily let it disappear. At the time I was not aware that during the publication of the Hastert story, Jane Harman’s AIPAC case was already brewing in the background. Moreover, one of the very few people in congress who was notified about Harman was none other than Hastert, the man himself. The same Hastert, who in addition to being one of several officials targeted by the FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations, was also known to be directly involved in several other high profile scandals: from his intimate involvement in the Abramoff scandal, to the Representative William Jefferson scandal ; from his ‘Land Deal’ scandal - where he cashed in millions off his position while “serving”, to the 2006 House Page scandal.

All for One, One for All

How does it work? How do these people escape accountability, the consequences? Are we talking about the possible use of blackmail by the Executive Branch against congressional representatives, as if Hoover’s days were never over? Cases such as NSA illegal eavesdropping come to mind, when congressional members were briefed long before it became public, yet none took any action or even uttered a word; members of both parties.

Or is it more likely to be a case of secondhand blackmail, where members of congress keep tabs on each other? Or, is it a combination of the above?

Regardless, we see this ‘one for all, all for one’ kind of solidarity in congress when it comes to criminal conduct and scandals such as those of Hastert and Harman.

Although at an initial glance, based on the wiretapping angle, the Harman case may appear to involve blackmailing, or a milder version, exploitation, of congress by the Executive Branch, deeper analysis would suggest even further implications, where congressional members themselves use the incriminating information against each other to prevent pursuit or investigation of cases that they may be directly or indirectly involved in. Let me give you an example based on the Hastert case mentioned earlier:

In 2004 and 2005 I had several meetings with Representative Henry Waxman’s investigative and legal staff. Two of these meetings took place inside a SCIF, where details and classified information pertaining to my case and those involved could be discussed. I was told, and at the time I believed it to be the case, that the Republican majority was preventing further action - such as holding a public hearing.

Once the Democrats took over in 2006, that barrier was removed, or so I thought. In March 2007, I was contacted by one of Representative Waxman’s staff people who felt responsible and conscientious enough to at least let me know that there would never be a hearing into my case by their office, or for that matter, any Democratic office in the House. Based on his/her account, in February 2007 Waxman’s office was preparing the necessary ingredients for their promised hearing, but in mid March the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, called Waxman into a meeting on the case, and after Waxman came out of that twenty minute meeting, he told his staff ‘we are no longer involved in Edmonds’ case.’ And so they became ‘uninvolved.’

What was discussed during that meeting? The facts regarding the FBI's pursuit of Hastert and certain other representatives were bound to come out in any congressional hearing into my case. Now we know that Hastert and Pelosi were both informed of Harman’s role in a related case involving counterespionage investigation of AIPAC. Is it possible that Pelosi asked
Waxman to lay off my case in order to protect a few of their own in an equally scandalous case? Was there a deal made between the Democratic and Republican leaders in the House to keep this and other related scandals hushed? Will we ever know the answer to these questions? Most likely not, considering the current state of our mainstream media.

And the victims remain the same: The American people who have entrusted the role of ensuring oversight and accountability with their congress. This kind of infestation touches everyone in congress; one need not have a skeleton of his own to get sucked into the swamp of those infested. Does Waxman have to be a sinner to take part in the sin committed by the Hasterts and Harmans of congress?

Certainly not.

On the other hand, he and others like him will abide by the un-pledged oath of ‘solidarity with your party members’ and ‘loyalty to your dear colleagues.’

Back to the enablers: How can we explain the continued blackout by the mainstream media, and/or, logic-less defenses of the Harmans and Hasterts alike by the apologist spinners - some of whom pass as the ‘alternative’ media?

Some are committing what they rightfully accused the previous administration and their pawns of doing: cherry picking the facts, then, spin, spin, and spin until the real issue becomes blurry and unrecognizable. The conspiracy angle aimed at the timing; Porter Goss’ possible beef with Jane Harman; accusing the truth divulgers, CQ sources, of being ‘conspirators’ with ulterior motives; portraying Harman as an outspoken vigilante on torture. And if those sound too lame to swallow, they throw in a few evil names from the foggy past of Dusty the Foggo man! If the issue and its implications weren’t so serious, these spins of reality would certainly make a Pulitzer worthy satire.

Let’s take the issue of timing.

First of all, the story was reported, albeit not comprehensively, by Time Magazine years ago. It took a tenacious journalist, more importantly a journalist that could have been trusted by the Intel sources to give it real coverage. It is also possible that the sources for the Harman case got fed up and disillusioned by the absence of a real investigation and decided to ‘really’ talk. After all, the AIPAC court case was dropped by the Justice Department’s prosecutors within two weeks of the Harman revelations. Same could be said about the Hastert story. At the time, many asked why the story was not told during the earlier stages of my case. It took three years for me and other FBI and DOJ sources to exhaust all channels; congressional inquiry, IG investigation, and the courts.

Those who initially were not willing to come forward and corroborate the details opened up to the Vanity Fair journalist, David Rose, in 2005.

Now let’s look at the ‘blackmail’ and ‘Goss’ Plot’ angles. Of course the ‘blackmail’ scenario is possible; in fact, highly possible. We all can picture one of the President’s men in the White House pulling an opposing congressional member aside and whispering ‘if I were you, congressman, I’d stop pushing. I understand, as we speak, my Justice Department is looking into certain activities you’ve been engaged in….’ We all can imagine, easily, a head of the Justice Department, having a ‘discreet’ meeting with a representative who’s been pushing for a certain investigation of certain department officials for criminal deeds, and saying, ‘dear congresswoman, we are aware of your role in a certain scandal, and are still pondering whether we should turn this into a direct investigation of you and appoint a special prosecutor…’ But, let’s not forget, the misuse of incriminating information to blackmail does not make the practitioner of the wrong deed a victim, nor does it make the wrong or criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our congress for way too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmails from the very same people they are overseeing…Period.

Those who have been elected to represent the people and their interests cannot pursue their own greed and ambitions by engaging in criminal or unethical activities against the interests of the same people they’ve sworn to represent, and be given a pass.

As for far-reaching ties such as Harman’s stand on torture, or specific beef with Porter Goss, or wild shooting from the hip by bringing up mafia-like characters such as Dusty Foggo; please don’t make us laugh!

Are we talking about the same Hawkish Pro Secrecy Jane Harman here?!

Harman’s staunch support of NSA Wiretapping of Americans, the FISA Amendment of 2008, the Patriot ACT, the war with Iraq, and many other activities on the Civil Liberties’ No No-list, is known by everyone. But, apparently not by the authors of these recent spins! And, let’s not forget to add her long-term cozy relationship with AIPAC, and the large donations she’s received from various AIPAC-related pro Israeli PACs. To these certain ‘wannabe’ journalists driven by far from pure agenda(s), shame on you; as for honor-worthy vigilant activists out there: watch out for these impostors with their newly gained popularity among those tainted in Washington, and take a hard look at whose agendas they are a mouthpiece for.

Despite a certain degree of exposure cases such as Harman and Hastert, involving corruption of public officials, seem to meet the same dead-end, literally dead. Powerful foreign entities’ criminal conduct against our national interest is given a pass as was recently proven by the AIPAC case. The absence of real investigative journalism and the pattern of blackout by our mainstream media are known universally and seem to have been accepted as a fact of life. Pursuit of cases such as mine via cosmetically available channels has been and continues to be proven futile for whistleblowers. Then, you may want to ask, why in the world am I writing this piece? Because more and more people, although not nearly enough, are coming to the realization that our system is rotten at it’s core; that in many cases we have been trying to deal with the symptoms rather than the cause. I, like many others, believed that changing the congressional majority in 2006 was going to bring about some of the needed changes; the pursuit of accountability being one. We were proven wrong.

In 2008, many genuinely bought in to the promise of change, and thus far, they’ve been let down. These experiences are disheartening, surely, but they are also eye-opening. I do see many vigilant activists who continue the fight, and as long as that’s the case, there is hope. More people realize that real change will require not replacing one or two or three, but many more.

More people are coming to understand that the road to achieving government of the people passes through a congress, but not the one currently occupied by the many crusty charlatans who represent only self-interest - achieved by representing the interests of those other than the majority of the people of this nation. And so I write.

Here I go again, rather than ending this in a long paragraph or two, I will let another long-gone man do it shortly and effectively “If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives.”--- Will Rogers

# # # #

Sibel Edmonds is the founder and director of National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC). Ms. Edmonds worked as a language specialist for the FBI. During her work with the bureau, she discovered and reported serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence that had national security implications. After she reported these acts to FBI management, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Since that time, court proceedings on her case have been blocked by the assertion of “State Secret Privilege”; the Congress of the United States has been gagged and prevented from any discussion of her case through retroactive re-classification by the Department of Justice. Ms. Edmonds is fluent in Turkish, Farsi and Azerbaijani; and has a MA in Public Policy and International Commerce from George Mason University, and a BA in Criminal Justice and Psychology from George Washington University. PEN American Center awarded Ms. Edmonds the 2006 PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Ron Paul: Civil Disobedience

Ron Paul: Civil Disobedience is very important! - Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod.

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Lies, Black Ops and other Horrors

False Flags, Lies & Nuclear Missiles - Watch more Politics Videos at Vodpod.

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More CondiLies

Condi Rice Lies About Purpose of US Missile Defense Grid - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

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Condi Turns into Tricky Dick

Condi Rice Pulls a Nixon: If the President Orders Torture, It Must be Legal - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

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Crisis Capitalism

Naomi Klein on Maddow - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

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Bristol Palin. This is truly Sad

Countdown: Bristol Palin – face of abstinence - Watch more Videos at Vodpod.

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Torture leads to Murder 1

By Mark Karlin

For many years now, BuzzFlash has been recording and documenting the acts of homicide and war crimes that have resulted from the Cheney/Bush/Rumsfeld policies on torture and killing of sometimes randomly singled out Arabs. Face it, the trio of war criminals had a policy that if innocent Arabs got caught up in the web of torture and war, that was their problem. So what would be a crime of murder if committed in the United States was an "act of protecting America against terrorism" in Iraq, Afghanistan and the CIA "black holes."

Even if many of the tortured and dead were just so more wrongfully abducted and arrested "collateral damage."

A study by the Human Rights First Organization what we believe is an under-count of those individuals who died as a result of homicide while in U.S. custody (the study did not include the CIA "black hole" detainees who were tortured, because there has never been any accounting for the victims -- and one study ascertained 32 of the CIA "rendition suspects" are still unaccounted for.)

BuzzFlash has -- as we said covered how the media, including many progressive sites, had not seen the forest through the trees because they overlooked widespread murder while just emphasizing two "high level" Al Qaeda operatives who survived torture -- has emphasized this for some time.

Most recently we ran a series of two editor's blogs and a BuzzFlash analysis on the importance of recognizing that what is at issue with the past Bush Administration officials is not just torture, but more pressingly murder:

The Legal Case Against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Et Al., Is Murder One, Not Just War Crimes

Torture Led to Murder; It's a Fact. BuzzFlash Has Been Calling This Murder I, Regardless of the Cause.

(As have the pelican independents. Murder is murder!)

Hannity's Waterboarding Distraction Trivializes Torture, Minimizes Murder and Appeals to the Sadist in Us All

Recently, I was re-watching the riveting documentary written by Alex Gibney and Directed by Eugene Jarecki, "The Trials of Henry Kissinger." The main lesson is this: if you are a member of the ruling elite, one of its princes of power, and your nation calls the shots in the world, you can get away with war crimes, as Kissinger has. Not only that, you can remain a revered pundit and adviser.

So it goes with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, the legal enablers of torture and murder, and all the others who should be held legally accountable for policies that led to sanctioned homicides.

I also remember that riveting moment from Ron Howard's gripping re-creation of a historic media duel, "Frost/Nixon," when Frost coaxes out of Nixon a defiant declaration that a president cannot break the law because he is, in essence, the decider of what is legal.

That is the case we have before us with the Bush Administration war criminals, and if Kissinger's de facto immunity from prosecution is any precedent, the Bush architects of torture will also go unpunished.

At least, by our government....

At this point, the only investigation for crimes of torture and murder may rest with a Spanish judge, if his government will even allow it.

Our criminal court system does not deal so leniently with murder; but apparently Nixon was onto something when he made his unexpected exclamation to Frost: "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal."

Other progressive blogs are now following BuzzFlash's lead in declaring that murder is murder -- and that torture is the precipitating cause of death, and therefore homicide -- not just torture -- is of compelling legal importance as far as prosecution.

Let's hope that the calls to justice for murder do not reach a Henry Kissinger cul-de-sac.

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Let The Sun Shine In......