Limbaugh's Dirty Little Secret of Radio "Success"

Interesting Facts About Boss Hog......

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Bill Mann

TV-Radio critic, www.dcweasels.com

Posted April 12, 2009 | 04:22 PM (EST)

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Ever wonder why Rush "Boss" Limbaugh's syndicated radio show is all over the place like the proverbial cheap suit?

If you do much driving in rural areas -- e.g. between cities -- "Boss" Limbaugh's bloviations are often the only thing you can pick up on a car radio. Hey, that's what CD players are for.
Did Rush accrue hundreds of local radio affiliates across the country because his political views are mainstream? That's obviously not it. OK, so why IS his show so "popular?" Why do hundreds of stations around the country carry his show, the most widely syndicated talkfest in the country?

Glad you asked.

The real story is not generally well-known. The only reason I know is through my covering the business of radio for years for several major daily newspapers and also, for industry trade magazines like Radio World.

It's because -- ready for this? -- Rush's show was, and presumably still is, given away for free to many local radio stations.

This shocker is because of a little-known practice in broadcast syndication called a "barter deal." (Barter deals were briefly mentioned in Michael Wolff's first-rate recent piece on Rush in Vanity Fair).

Here's how a barter deal works: To launch the show, Limbaugh's syndicator, Premiere Radio Networks -- the same folks who syndicate wingnut du jour Glen Beck -- gave Limbaugh's three hours away -- that's right, no cash -- to local radio stations, mostly in medium and smaller markets, back in the early 1990's.

So, a local talk station got Rush's show for zilch. In exchange, Premiere took for itself much of the local station's available advertising time (roughly 15 minutes an hour) and packed the show with national ads it had already pre-sold.

Think Gold Bond Medicated Powder.

It's a very sweet deal for local radio station owners, explained Bill Exline a respected radio broker (he helped people buy and sell local stations). "Not only does the local station get three hours of free programming," Exline explained, "but that's one less local talk-show host on staff they need. It makes small- and medium-market radio properties more profitable and attractive by cutting down staff expenses."

Shocking, isn't it, that Limbaugh would allow jobs to be cut to advance his dubious career?

Not to mention helping to make small radio stations far less local?

Major-market right-wing talk stations, like San Francisco's KSFO-AM ("Reichstag Radio") have to pay actual money, of course, to carry Boss Limbaugh's daily proclamation-a-thon. (Note: KSFO, which I referred to as "Sieg Heil on Your Dial" in my column when it first switched to righty talk, is the same station that gave hatemonger Michael Savage his first radio megaphone).

Radio sources say that small- and medium-market stations still get Limbaugh's show for free, or pay only a token amount of cash for it. I asked Michael Harrison, editor of radio-syndicator-friendly Talkers magazine about this, and he claimed he didn't know how many Limbaugh affiliates still barter. .

So, when you hear Rush bellowing as you're passing through Birdseed Junction, Beanblossom, or Pyrite, just remember: The radio station's getting what it paid for. Or, more accurately, DIDN'T pay for.

Let The Sun Shine In......

ACLU: Mentally Ill Suffer Abuse in Los Angeles County Jails

This is why we were not so surprised by what happened in the prisons of Iraq.

No, this doesn't let the top boys off the hook. This is about M.P.'s, having worked for the American prisons, not being shocked enough to scream their heads off, at the horror and the law- breaking they were asked to commit.

Tuesday 14 April 2009

by: Richard Winton  |  Visit article original @ The Los Angeles Times

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca calls the Los Angeles County jails "the largest mental health institution in the country." (Photo: Jenn Ackerman)

 

At a news conference this morning outside the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting, ACLU general counsel Melinda Bird said: "We are urging the Board of Supervisors to address the conditions in Men's Central Jail because the conditions are medieval and drive men mad. Even the sheriff agrees that the only way to fix Men's Central Jail is to close it."

   
Civil rights activists today called for the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and sheriff to close the Men's Central Jail, where they say nightmarish conditions and overcrowding have exacerbated the symptoms of thousands of inmates suffering serious mental illness.

American Civil Liberties Union leaders made the call as they released a report by an expert on mental health in jails that paints the aging Men's Central Jail in downtown L.A. as a massively overcrowded center where the mentally ill are abused, kept in their cells for much, if not all, of the day, and instead of being treated are subject to discipline.

They say the money from the closure would be better spent on mental health programs that could reduce the influx of inmates. The report by Dr. Terry Kupers, produced for the ACLU of Southern California, comes after an inmate hung himself last month in disciplinary housing inside the Men's Central Jail.

Such is the level of problems that Kupers, a nationally known prison expert, reports that while both the U.S. Department of Justice and ACLU monitor the county jail system, a court-appointed master or monitor is needed to check on the mental health services across the county jails.

Sheriff Lee Baca, whose department operates the L.A. County jails, has long said the system is the largest mental health institution in the country.

The push by the ACLU, which has been a constant critic of jailhouse conditions and represents inmates in several lawsuits, comes as Baca is considering how to close a budget shortfall. In February, as the county's budget projections worsened, Baca warned that he might have to release some inmates and close the Men's Central Jail if he could not find alternatives.

Built in 1963, the jail costs about $50 million a year to operate and houses about 6,700 of the 18,000 inmates in the county jail system. The Men's Central Jail, with some of the most dangerous inmates in the country, is known for outbreaks of violence, including slayings committed by inmates.

Despite the construction of the neighboring Twin Towers jail to help handle inmates with mental health issues, Kupers' report found inmates with mental illness are still housed at Men's Central and their disorders often overlooked.

He describes it as a dark and dank jail with crowded rows of mostly windowless cells, where rehabilitation programs are scarce or nonexistent and treatment is limited to medication. Those suffering from mental illness are often those most abused by fellow inmates, he says. The jailhouse rapist, he says, "selects a prisoner with significant mental illness, a loner who would likely have friends who might not retaliate." (Note: An earlier version of this post left out the word "not" before "retaliate.")

Rupers says he was "stunned by the degree of overcrowding" at Men's Central Jail when he visited last year and that calculations performed for his report found the institution fell far short of the space standard set by the American Correctional Assn., which is 35 square feet of unencumbered space per inmate.
   
He says the jail was so overcrowded that in many instances deputies simply could not see all the inmate areas because so many people were crammed into some spaces. He acknowledges that since his visit improvements have been made to reduce overcrowding, but for the most part men remain in their cells 24 hours a day, eat their meals there and don't have access to mental health programs.
   
Lighting, he notes, was particularly bad.

 "There is a double problem, the fixtures do not provide sufficient light for reading, and then lights are left on all night, interfering with sleep," he writes.
   
Inmates' mental health suffers in this environment as they desperately crave interaction with the natural world in a windowless environment, where the older architecture exacerbates the noise, Kupers writes. Such are the conditions, Kupers says, that the staff has become "increasingly insensitive to prisoner concerns" as "excessive force and other abuses become more frequent occurrences."
   

Many of those finding their way to L.A. County jails until the 1970s would have been treated in state psychiatric hospitals. The state changed its approach and opted to try to treat the mentally ill in the community. However, shortcomings led in many cases to no treatment at all, and the mentally ill often ended up in jail for nuisance offenses.

The sheer volume of inmates, Kupers says - about 13,000 a month - makes it impossible to screen for mental illness in all inmates. Kupers, a psychiatrist, alleges there is a pattern of failure to diagnose such illness and that jail officials inappropriately downgrade prisoners' mental health disorders because there is not enough space in mental health areas of county jails. He cited incidences in which inmates with documented histories of mental hospital treatment for schizophrenia were downgraded to a disorder not worthy of mental health treatment.

Mentally ill inmates often end up in a segregated unit, where the shouting and crying are worse than in the general population unit, and pepper spray sometimes wafts into their cells from nearby incidents.

Kupers recommends the jail population across the system be reduced immediately. Mentally ill inmates, he says, need mental health housing, not segregation and punishment.

Let The Sun Shine In......

American Soldiers loot Recon, Funds From Iraq

When the IRS asks you where your taxes are, point them toward Iraq, or recently retired military men.

Troops Stole Boxes of Iraq Reconstruction Cash ... Literally ... But There's a Lot More to the Story

The story has gotten relatively little attention, and no doubt the response to these crimes will take the predictable form of blaming it on a few bad apples. But, as the Times hints, the system that has produced this sort of corruption by U.S soldiers was ripe for abuse from the start. "The prosecutions reveal the extent to which troops have been tempted by the Pentagon's 'money as a weapon system' policy, which has left battlefields awash in cash.

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Republican Party: A study in comedic uselessness

P.M. Carpenter

 

Here's a little epistolary advice for the GOP, c/o the House Republicans, attn: Eric Cantor: Stop trying.

Just stop. At least for a few months. Go home or back to the office, kick up your feet and forget the whole scene. Pour a few drinks. Say a few prayers. Get into group therapy. Maybe ... maybe even read a book -- you know, go radical. Anything but these endless public displays of cluelessness. Because when you're in a hole ...

Yet House Republicans dug themselves yet deeper yesterday, or perhaps it was sometime late last night or during the wee hours of this morning. I don't know the precise moment of Creation, nevertheless the fruit of their labor is now viewable: the "Economic Solutions Center: Brought to you by the House Republicans." No kidding.

The Web site was, I gather, meant to be up and running in tandem with the Politico's lead story yesterday: "GOP scrambles to show it has ideas" -- the editorially chosen verb an appropriate one, since the GOP-ballyhooed site was nowhere to be found. Although more than once it referenced the site as a going concern, the Politico -- suspecting unremedied incompetence, I guess -- graciously provided no link; nor did several online searches of various word-combinations produce a relevant result.

I swear, today's GOP makes the disheveled left of the 1980s look like a gaggle of efficiency experts.

Anyway, by this early morning -- poof -- there it was, unscrambled, although frankly its existential absence was immeasurably more interesting.

Working deductively, here's what the Politico reported: "The mission appears to be as much about repackaging long-standing principles as it is about offering brand-new ideas for each debate. [The site] often restates proposals Republicans offered as their alternatives to the president’s plans. In the jobs section, for instance, Cantor reiterates the party’s commitment to offer small businesses a tax deduction and to reduce the tax rates on the lowest income brackets."

(There is a "Learn More" link helpfully provided on the "Jobs Plan" page, and, wishing indeed to learn more about the GOP's latest tax-reducing benevolence toward the oppressed affluent -- sadly unmentioned on the main "Jobs" page -- I clicked on it. This yielded only a staring match. Frank Luntz must still be working on the doubleplusgood wording.)

So, a tax deduction and a tax reduction -- the House GOP's twin answers to its self-posed question: "How will I keep my job?"

Well, moving on, what about, "How will I grow my savings?" First, House Republicans want you to know -- and I sure didn't know this -- that "current law limits the amount Americans can put into their retirement savings." (Alert to Bill Gates' accountant.) Second, they're offering -- you got it -- a savings tax credit, which presumably you'll take advantage of when you manage to keep your job only through a tax deduction/reduction.

"How should we use taxpayer money?" asks the GOP on a separate page. Naturally, in the dire depths of a repression we should choke the one spending outlet we have -- government -- but equally important is that the GOP -- ready? here it comes -- would "permanently [extend] the 2001/2003 tax relief provisions."

OK, so now you're keeping your job and you're growing your savings and you're taming the dastardly Leviathan, all through the miraculous blessings of tax relief, but, I hear you cry, "How will I keep my house?" Right. Need I even bother? "Republicans propose a ... tax credit."

And that, gentle reader, is a comprehensive survey of every possible House GOP solution to every possible problem at every possible turn: tax relief, tax credits, tax deductions, tax reductions, less taxes, fewer taxes, smaller taxes, shorter taxes, not so many taxes. I sense a theme here.

Regrettably, the one Q&A missing from Eric Cantor's Solutions Center is, "How will we ever maintain a two-party system to better confront this economic calamity when our party is so unspeakably lame?"

A principal reason for Cantor's cyber-gibberish is, as the Politico reports, because "GOP leaders ... want to insulate themselves from the 'party of no' label." Which, of course, is easily achievable through the simple cessation of always saying "no."

Another reason, they say, is that they really do have ideas and alternatives, but those ideas and alternatives are going unheard. Hence scrambling Web sites and gimmicky "Solutions Centers" and electronic interactivities on the symbolic fritz. What they cannot seem to digest, however, is that, while ghostly, their solutions are far from unknown. We're perfectly aware of their economic formulas from the Age of George V; it's just that those formulas are forever as dead as he.

Until the GOP goes home in hibernation and rethinks all the fundamentals of its raison d'être, it'll twist in the wind and bleach its bones and ultimately scatter to the ages. For now, it is simply, comically useless. 

(Until then, the Dems will just have to keep the Goopers afloat, eh?)

Please respond to P.M.'s commentary by leaving comments below and sharing them with the BuzzFlash community. For personal questions or comments you can contact him at fifthcolumnistmail@gmail.com
THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Let The Sun Shine In......

The Glenn Beck Apocalypse: Supernews!

more about "The Glenn Beck Apocalypse: Supernews!", posted with vodpod

The Tea Party Brigade:

If the citizens of wingnuttia want a freakin' tea party, that can be arranged. We can sure hell give them one!

Obama Couldn't Ask for Better Enemies

By Joe Conason
 

Getty Images

Boston, December 16, 1773.

If conservative leaders no longer even try to offer serious solutions to national problems, nobody should underestimate their capacity or their will to mobilize angry Americans. Behind the April 15 "tea parties" rallying against President Barack Obama's economic program - promoted as a new phenomenon by Fox News Channel and right-wing bloggers - stands a phalanx of Republicans whose ideology is all too familiar.

At the apex of the tea-party movement, aside from such Fox revolutionaries as Rupert Murdoch, there is a well-funded organization known as FreedomWorks, headed by a former politician named Dick Armey. His past career should be instructive to any starry-eyed citizens who believe that they have at last found the true right-wing revolutionary path.

Back when the Republicans first gained control of Congress more than a decade ago, Mr. Armey, a former economics professor at a small Texas college, was hailed as the author of the Contract with America and led the Republicans as House Majority Leader until his retirement. Having risen to power on the strength of a "tax revolt" against President Bill Clinton's first budget, which raised rates on the wealthiest Americans to trim the enormous deficit he had inherited from the first Bush administration. That summer Mr. Armey warned of an economic apocalypse - and his party won the midterm election before his predictions could be proved utterly wrong.

As anyone with a functioning memory should know, the Republicans under the leadership of Mr. Armey and his cronies Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay proceeded to rack up excesses in spending and bood-letting that made the old Democratic Congressional leaders look quite stingy. When he was asked once why he and his G.O.P. comrades were chomping so much more federal pork than the Democrats ever did, he replied bluntly: "To the victors go the spoils."

Like so many supposed populists in Washington, Mr. Armey packed his own golden parachute when he left Congress. At the same time that he took over the leadership of the "grassroots" group that eventually became FreedomWorks, he also joined a major corporate lobbying firm.  The website of DLA Piper, one of the capital's biggest bipartisan law and lobbying outfits, boasts of Mr. Armey's influence among his colleagues. As it happens, he specializes in homeland security, a major growth industry with billions wasted annually on corporate boondoggles. After all, his final legislative masterwork was to chair the House Select Committee on Homeland Security, and he was the prime sponsor of the legislation that created the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, he isn't listed as lobbyist, but instead is called a "senior policy advisor."

As for FreedomWorks, which has claimed a national membership of some 700,000 conservative activists, its operations have long smelled of Astro-turf, or artificial grassroots. Most of the money that funded Mr. Armey's activism in the past was provided by tobacco, pharmaceutical and banking interests - and there is no reason to think that has changed. (Scoundrels All!!!)


Nor is the ideological bent of the tea party's host in any sense new. When last heard from in 2005, Mr. Armey was busily conjuring phony grassroots support for Social Security privatization. That effort led to a notorious episode involving a FreedomWorks employee who showed up at the Bush White House, where she was introduced as a "single mom from Iowa" endorsing the president's private-accounts scheme.

Buzzing beneath the furious rants of the tea-party protests, it is not hard to hear the same old right-wing rhetoric about taxes and deficits and the same old schemes to cut the taxes for the wealthiest citizens, deregulate the economy and despoil the environment. The difference between the heyday of Mr. Armey and now is that we have suffered the results of those policies in practice and reject them. The appeal of the Republican Party and conservatism as a movement are lower than ever.

Months of furious propaganda on talk radio and Fox News has achieved nothing so far, according to nearly every survey. Barack Obama's approval ratings remain close to 66 percent, with most Americans trusting him and believing that the country is on the path to renewal. This president has long benefited from ineffectual and discredited adversaries - and Mr. Armey is no exception.

Joe Conason can be reached via email at joe.conason@observer.com.

Let The Sun Shine In......

The differing views of the "rule of law" in Spain and the U.S.

Spanish prosecutors decide to fulfill their legal obligations by commencing war crimes investigations of six key Bush officials.
Glenn Greenwald

Apr. 14, 2009 |
 
(updated below - Update II - Update III)


Scott Horton reports this morning that, in Spain, "prosecutors have decided to press forward with a criminal investigation targeting former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and five top associates [John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Doug Feith and William Haynes] over their role in the torture of five Spanish citizens held at Guantánamo."  Spain not only has the right under the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture to prosecute foreign officials for torturing its citizens, but it -- like the U.S. -- has the affirmative obligation to do so. (Indeed, the Bush administration itself insisted just last year that the U.S. the right to criminally prosecute foreign officials for ordering acts of torture even in the absence of an accusation that any of the victims were American). 

As Hilzoy argues, however, the primary obligation for these prosecutions lies with the country whose officials authorized the war crimes -- the United States :(Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.)

It is a requirement of law, the law that the Constitution requires Obama, as President, to faithfully execute.  He should not outsource his Constitutional obligations to Spain.

That the U.S. has the legal obligation under the U.S. Constitution, our own laws and international treaties to commence criminal investigations is simply undeniable.  That is just a fact. Yet it's hard to overstate how far away we are from fulfilling our legal obligations to impose accountability on our own torturers and war criminals. 

The barriers to these prosecutions are numerous, but one of the principal obstacles is that CIA Director Leon Panetta has been emphatically demanding that there be no investigations of any government officials whose conduct was declared legal by DOJ lawyers (i.e., the very individuals the Spanish are now investigating for war crimes).  And it's not surprising that Panetta has taken this position given that at least two of his top deputies at the CIA are among those implicated, to one degree or another, in the torture regime, as John Sifton detailed earlier this month at The Daily Beast:

The New York Times reported that Leon Panetta, the current CIA director, has taken the position that “no one who took actions based on legal guidance from the Department of Justice at the time should be investigated, let alone punished.” Yet a number of CIA officials implicated in the torture program not only remain at the highest levels of the agency, but are also advising Panetta. Panetta’s attempt to suppress the issue is making Bush’s policy into the Obama administration’s dirty laundry.

Take Stephen Kappes. At the time of the worst torture sessions outlined in the ICRC report, Kappes served as a senior official in the Directorate of Operations—the operational part of the CIA that oversees paramilitary operations as well as the high-value detention program. (The directorate of operations is now known as the National Clandestine Service.) Panetta has kept Kappes as deputy director of the CIA—the number two official in the agency.

And why is it that Stephen Kappes was made the number 2 officials at the CIA despite his being in a key CIA position during the implementation of America's torture regime?  Because the two most, CIA, torture important Senate Democrats on intelligence matters -- Jay Rockefeller and Dianne Feinstein -- insisted that he be so empowered as a condition for their supporting Panetta's nomination, after both of them first demanded that Kappes actually be made CIA Director.  Here's what Andrea Mitchell reported back in January:

NBC News has learned that Senate Democrats -- including Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller, who are the incoming and outgoing Intelligence chairmen -- have privately recommended a career CIA officer to head the agency.

Democratic sources indicate that both have recommended deputy CIA Director Steve Kappes, a veteran CIA intelligence officer who is widely credited with getting the Libyans to give up their nuclear program.

Just to give a sense for how our political class thinks about torture, here is what Mitchell appended to the end of her report:  "One potential downside for Kappes: Like former counter-terror chief John Brennan, some critics says [sic] he had line authority over controversial decisions involving interrogation and detention."  So Kappes' connection to the CIA's torture program was a "potential downside" to his becoming CIA Director.  A potential downside.  Once Obama chose Panetta rather than Kappes, Rockefeller and Feinstein agreed to support Panetta's nomination only once they were given assurances that Kappes would become Panetta's deputy.


This Thursday will be a very significant test for how much influence the anti-accountability camp exerts within the Obama administration and for how serious Obama's pledges of transparency were, as that day is the latest deadline for the Obama DOJ either to release the three key OLC torture-authorizing memos, release them in heavily redacted form, or refuse to release them at all.  It has been widely reported that a "war" has broken out within the Obama administration over their release, with key Bush-era intelligence officials -- such as Obama's top counter-terrorism aide John Brennan and ex-CIA Director Michael Hayden -- demanding the ongoing concealment of the memos.  Those torture memos are reputed to be among the most vivid torture documents of the Bush era, and thus will almost certainly fuel the flames of investigations and prosecution -- both here and internationally.  That is what has prompted the "war" over their disclosure.  It's hardly a surprise that if you empower the very people most connected to the Bush CIA, there will be substantial forces blocking any attempt to bring accountability under the rule of law for the crimes that were committed.


Just think about what all this means:  not only are we failing to investigate or indict those who authorized torture, but we haven't even reached the point yet where we've decided that these crimes are bad enough that those implicated ought to be barred from serving in the highest positions in our Government.  While Spain proceeds to fulfill the Obama administration's duties to investigate and prosecute our war criminals, some of those most implicated remain in positions of high authority within our own intelligence and counter-terrorism agencies -- thanks to Senate Democrats such as Feinstein and Rockefeller. 

Our political class has simply never come to terms with how severe are these war crimes and how acquiescent to and outright supportive so many officials from both parties -- and so many of our media stars -- were.   That's why huge numbers, arguably majorities, of Americans want criminal investigations to commence, but our political class remains virtually unified against them -- notwithstanding that they are legally required -- because, as has been conclusively proven over and over, the last thing our political and media elites care about is the "rule of law."  That will become more apparent as other countries, such as Spain, demonstrate that they actually take things like that seriously.

* * * * *


On a related note, Rachel Maddow last night potently eviscerated Barack Obama for his attempts to deny Bagram detainees any rights of any kind, and she and Newsweek's Michael Isikoff then discussed the significance of Thursday's deadline for the release of the OLC torture memos:

UPDATE: In comments, Jim White highlights a fact from Horton's story that I intended but neglected to mention:  the Spanish "advised the Americans that they would suspend their investigation if at any point the United States were to undertake an investigation of its own into these matters."  As White points out, that is how war crimes investigations are intended to proceed under numerous treaty provisions by which the U.S. has bound itself:   namely, the country whose officials commit the crimes have the primary obligation to investigate and hold the criminals accountable.  But other treaty signatories are not only entitled, but required, to commence such proceedings if the violating country refuses or otherwise fails to





Thus, the only way to object to what Spain is doing here is if one:  (a) suffers from total ignorance of the basic provisions of Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture; (b) believes that the U.S. has no obligation to abide by its treaties even though the U.S. Constitution provides that such treaties are "the supreme law of the land"; and/or (c) believes that the U.S. need not abide by rules we impose on other countries, such as when we prosecuted other countries' leaders for war crimes in the past.  None of those is a particularly noble excuse.



UPDATE II:  Andrew Sullivan says that Obama, by not prosecuting Bush officials, is playing "a long game" which will eventually result in accountability for the war criminals, whereby Obama "hangs back a little, allows the evidence to slowly filter out, releases memos that help prove to Americans that what was done was unequivocally torture and indisputably illegal." 


It's going to be quite some time before one can definitively prove or disprove that theory, but if, on Thursday, Obama does anything other than release the three OLC torture memos more or less in fully unredacted form, that will be rather compelling evidence negating Sullivan's speculation.  Conversely, as I said earlier this week, if those memos are released essentially in full over the vehement objections of key intelligence officials, Obama will deserve some substantial credit for doing that.



UPDATE III:  As sysprog suggests in comments, Sullivan's theory about Obama's secret plan -- that Obama intends simply to remain neutral when it comes to legal proceedings aimed at Bush's torture regime; that "he will not defend it, but he will not be the prosecutor either''; and that his strategy is to "allow the evidence to slowly filter out" -- is extremely difficult to reconcile with the fact that Obama has been ordering his Justice Department to take extraordinary steps to block all judicial accountability for Bush officials and to insist that Bush's interrogation and surveillance programs are such vital state secrets that any disclosure would "gravely harm national security."

Put another way, Obama has been far from neutral.  At least thus far, he has been the prime agent working overtime to keep these illegal Bush policies as secret as possible and to shield them from any and all accountability.  

We would really like a straight answer from Obama about this. If he is holding off, waiting for irrefutable evidence to be brought forward, then it is a good thing. Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is already enough in the public sphere to put top Bush officials in prison for life.

Let The Sun Shine In......

Glenn Becks Slide Into Insanity

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

TARP banks' lending concerns panel

....or why we still don't trust the banks and other financial institutions.

Tue Apr 14, 2009 3:16am BST

[-

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Increases in rates and fees charged by U.S. banks that are receiving government bailout money is a concern to the bailout's watchdog panel, but no investigation is under way, a panel spokesman said on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the Congressional Oversight Panel of the Troubled Asset Relief Program was investigating lending by TARP beneficiaries. It singled out Bank of America (BAC.N) and Citigroup (C.N) .

But Caleb Weaver, a senior adviser to the five-member panel, said it has no subpoena power and does not conduct formal investigations like those done by, for instance, the Treasury Department's special inspector general for the TARP, which is a separate entity.

"It's an issue that the Congressional Oversight Panel is considering for a future report," said Weaver.
The panel, chaired by Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Warren, issues regular reports on bailout policy. It issued one last week suggesting that the true value of toxic assets weighing down the books of major financial institutions would decide whether the TARP succeeds.

The $700 billion (471 billion pounds), taxpayer-financed TARP was meant to send more capital to lenders to spur lending and boost the economy.

Since TARP started in October, banks helped by it have raised charges on a range of routine transactions, hiked rates on credit cards and continued making loans criticized as predatory by consumer advocates, the Journal said.

(Reporting by Kevin Drawbaugh; Editing by Dan Grebler)

© Thomson Reuters 2009 All rights reserved.

Let The Sun Shine In......

THE BATTLE WITH THE BANKS IS ON: PROTESTS AND PITCHFORKS

Hang 'Em High!

capitalist world and then change it

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 By Danny Schechter

As New Bank Bailouts Seem Likely, There Is More to Speak Out Against

There’s phrase that’s worked its way into the Japanese language: “Lehman Shokku”—translated as Lehman Shock. It refers to what happened to 460,000 people after Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner let the global Lehman Investment Bank collapse. A former Lehman executive told me over Matzoh at a Passover seder that she believes the decision reflected a competitive conflict and ego battle between the former Goldman Sachs chief turned Treasury Secretary and the bullheaded CEO of Lehman.

The clash of two power-crats in New York triggered a hard rain across the world.

Bloomberg reports on a forty year old former bank employee, Miki, who “now sleeps in cardboard boxes under the elevated Hanshin expressway in Umeda, Osaka’s central business district…as the global recession triggered by the implosion of Wall Street banks batters Japan. … Miki’s loss of housing shows how Japan’s 2.95 million unemployed people threaten to fuel a rise in homelessness.”


Bloomberg is doing more than reporting bad news; it is also suing the Federal Reserve Bank for information that the privately run “public institution” wants to hide. Bloomberg wants the FED to disclose securities the central bank is accepting on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks.

As the sun creeps through and the weather warms, there’s an expectation that the new season will wipe out the winter’s bad karma and lead to a desperately needed economic recovery. Obama Advisor Larry Summers, like an evangelist from the Elmer Granty era, sees the signs in small upticks of business activity. Now, according to the News n Economic blog comes an analyst, Roger Shealy, who has examined the footnotes and available data concluding “The Fed is holding a larger share of risky assets as collateral for its riskless currency and Treasuries lent on the open market.”

Translation: We are living on Quicksand.

The Fed also admits that its consumer credit plan is faltering. Reports TIME: “The second round of the Federal Reserve’s attempt to restart the nonbank consumer-lending market, the so-called TALF program, went even worse than the faltering first round did last month. The poor performance is causing some Fed officials to doubt the entire premise of the effort to restart nonbank credit markets.”

On top of that, as the Treasury Department runs so-called “stress tests on the soundness of the banks,” the Fed wants the banks to stay silent on the results. Again, Fed watcher Bloomberg is on the case: “The U.S. Federal Reserve has told Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Citigroup Inc. and other banks to keep mum on the results of “stress tests” that will gauge their ability to weather the recession, people familiar with the matter said.”

On this Easter weekend of “He Has Risen,” a lot seems to be still falling.

For the most cogent explanation of what’s going on, visit the Baseline Scenario website run by former IMF exec and MIT Professor Simon Jenkins:

“Just as global financial liberalization created the potential for capital to move violently across countries and greatly facilitated speculative attacks on currencies, so financial deregulation within the United States has made it possible for capital markets to attack - or, in less colorful terms, go short or place massive negative bets on - the credit of big banks and, in the latest developments, the ability of the government to bailout/rescue banks.

“The latest credit default spreads data for the largest banks show a speculative run underway. As the system stabilizes, it becomes more plausible that a single big bank will fail or be rescued in a way that involves large losses for creditors. This would like trigger further speculative attacks on other banks, much as the shorting of countries’ obligations spread from Thailand to Indonesia/Malaysia and then to Korea in fall 1997.”

In other words, them chickens will soon be coming home to roost.

The banks seem confident that having learned the disasterous lessons on Lehman Shokku the government will keep bailing them out. Quiet as its kept, Insolvency in many banks suggests another wave of bailouts is coming.

The banks seem confident that they have “captured” the government and can depend on taxpayer monies to pay off their crimes and mistakes. At the same time, they are worried about something else: US.
JP Morgan Chase overlord Jamie Dimon fears that the public anger will torpedo the schemes the banks are running, saying, ‘“if you let them vilify us too much, the economic recovery will be greatly delayed.”
Comments Jenkins:

“The “center vs. the pitchforks” idea fundamentally misconstrues the current debate. This is not about angry left or right against the center. It’s about centrist technocrat (close to current big finance) vs. centrist technocrat (suspicious of big finance; economists, lawyers, non-financial business, and - most interestingly - current/former finance, other than the biggest of the big, particularly people with experience in emerging markets.)”

If anything, this seems the time to get the pitchforks going, to intensify the pressure, to make noise and press for change. Paul Krugman tells us that the policy world and the bankers want to rebuild a corrupt system, writing:

“Despite everything that has happened, most people in positions of power still associate fancy finance with economic progress. Can they be persuaded otherwise? Will we find the will to pursue serious financial reform? If not, the current crisis won’t be a one-time event; it will be the shape of things to come.”

That’s why events like this weekend’s banking protests organized by a new force, A NEW WAY FORWARD, is crucial. Their three-word phrase, NATIONALIZE, REORGANIZE and DECENTRALIZE sums up the aims spelled out at ANewWay.org
They have issued a call:

• “Pledge to Break Up the Banks: Tell Obama and Congress, “If it’s too big to fail, it’s too big to exist.

• Dismantle the power of the financial elite and make policies that keep a new crop from springing up.

• We want our economy and politics restored for the public.”

If the protests fail along with the banks, you can bet, the pitchforks will be back.

Mediachannel.org blogger Danny Schechter wrote PLUNDER: Investigating Our Economic Calamity (Cosimo Books at Amazon.com) and is making a film on the crisis.

Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org

 Let The Sun Shine In......