Author: Dave LIndorff

A lot of theories have been put forward to try and explain why Romney has allowed his campaign to become bedeviled by charges of tax dodging, but what if what he is hiding is felonious tax fraud?

Okay, so he’s taken the legal option of delaying filing his 2011 taxes, which every taxpayer is entitled to do without penalty and without having to give any explanation until October 15 this year (I agree it’s a little weird when a super-rich guy who pays accountants by the dozen does this, but hey). The nagging question though is why he hasn’t just responded to the demand that he release two years of tax returns like John McCain did in 2008 by simply releasing his 2009 tax filing, along with the 2010 return he already released?

The answer may well be that 2009 was the year that the Treasury Department decided to offer an amnesty from prosecution for tax fraud to any of the tens of thousands of millionaires who were known or suspected to have illegally hidden income abroad in the Cayman Islands or in Swiss banks — a felony, but one that people thought they’d never be caught at.

That year alone, some nearly 30,000 people, many of them no doubt prominent in society, politics and business, and customers of the finest accounting firms, reportedly voluntarily came forward to the IRS to admit that they had hidden some of the estimated $100 billion in income that crooked rich Americans have for years been secreting away in banks overseas. Under the terms of the program, they were able to just report their fraud, pay the taxes, penalties and interest on the money and then walk away scott free, with no charges and with their returns kept confidential by the agency.

That is, unless they decided to run for national office, where the expectation is that they have to release their income tax returns to the media for inspection.

Did Romney use a 2009 IRS tax amnesty to escape being caught in a giant multi-year tax fraud? The 2009 tax return he won’t release has the answer.

We’ve all heard it said by our teachers when we were in school, we’ve all heard it said by politicians, including presidents: “Democracies don’t start wars.”

And yet we have had the decades-long American war on Vietnam, the Reagan invasion of Grenada, the LBJ invasion of the Dominican Republic, the George H.W. Bush invasion of Panama, the G.W. Bush back-to-back invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and now we have President Obama talking about launching an unprovoked war on Iran.

Is the much touted axiom wrong?

I don’t think so. I believe that in a democracy, where the will of the people is paramount, it would be very unlikely to have a country start a war. People generally don’t like war. They need to feel truly threatened or even under attack before they will accept the idea of their or anyone’s fathers, husbands, brothers and sons (and now mothers, wives, daughters and sisters) being marched off to face the horrors of war.

Clearly the reason we have seen the US starting so many wars is that the US is and has not for a very long time been anything approaching a democracy.

Founder James Madison: 'Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded'
 

Democracy in the US is a purely formalistic thing. People get to vote once every two and four years to chose from a narrow list of pre-selected candidates approved by the real rulers of the country, who are the wealthy owners of the large business interests, many of which prosper when there’s a war on, and many more of which are happy to have periodic wars, or the threat of wars, to keep people in line and willing to tolerate the kind of abuse that is typically heaped on the average working person: financially starved school districts, starvation-level welfare grants, no public health system, rusting bridges, pot-holed roads, almost no public transit, and falling real wages, etc.

This article first appeared on the website of PressTV.
 

The Obama re-election campaign and the Democratic Party and their backers, like the organization MoveOn, are bitterly decrying the flood of corporate money going to his opponent, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, who is out-fund-raising the president by an ever-increasing amount.

But there is a hollow sound to the president’s whining. Back in 2008, Obama, who had earlier said he opposed corporate funding and had promised to run his campaign using public funds only, in an agreement with his then opponent, Republican Sen. John McCain, broke that agreement and went on to accept what still remains at this point a record sum of corporate money.

By the time the 2008 election was held, Obama’s campaign had collected and spent a staggering $745 million. McCain, who had been a leader in the effort to limit corporate campaign spending, stuck with government funding and thus spent “only” $126 million on his losing general election campaign — the amount that Obama would have also been limited to had he not “opted out” of his earlier promise to use only government funds to run for the nation’s top office.

It's not just Romney. Both Obama and Romney are deeply in hock to Corporate America

This article was originally written for the website of PressTV
 

We Americans are taught it in school. The propaganda put out by Voice of America repeats the idea ad nauseum around the globe. Politicians refer to it in every campaign speech with the same fervor that they claim to be running for office in response to God’s call: America is a model of democracy for the whole world.

But what kind of democracy is it really that we have here?

Forget that only half of eligible voters typically vote in quadrennial presidential elections (less than 30% in so-called “off-year” elections for members of the House and a third of the Senate, and less than 25% in municipal and state elections). Forget that the government is increasingly trampling on the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, with a burgeoning surveillance program and a growing militarization of the police.

The US government doesn’t even do what the majority of the citizens want. In fact, these days it flat out ignores what we the people want.

Consider the polls, and what they show public sentiment to be on key issues, and then look at what the government, composed of supposedly elected representatives and an elected president, actually does:

Darkness is falling for American democracy as a passive electorate lets elected leaders simply ignore them and their wishes, in favor of huge moneyed interests.

Back in 1976, I co-founded, with some Los Angeles colleagues, a feisty little alternative weekly called the L.A. Vanguard. About two months after we launched it, I got tipped off about a program by the local phone companies, Pacific Telephone and GTE, in which they had so-called “Security Departments,” composed of banks of operators, whose sole job was to provide unlisted phone numbers to inquiring government agencies, all without a warrant. As I delved into this story I learned more: these special operators (led in each case by retired FBI officials) were also providing credit information on phone customers on request, and the agencies who had instant access to all this data ranged from local police to the public library.

When we broke the story, it exploded on the Los Angeles media scene. There was a banner headline across the whole top of the Los Angeles Times front page screaming “Unlisted Numbers Given Out.” We at the L.A. Vanguard, to promote our little paper and being guerrilla journalists, announced that we were holding a protest and press conference on the sidewalk in front of the main entrance of the Pacific Telephone building in L.A., at which we’d be handing out copies of our newspaper. We were mobbed by reporters and camera crews from every media organization in the city. It was huge. Pacific Tel’s PR people realized they had to respond and invited everyone inside for an impromptu news conference at which they tried to quell the furor, but they only made it worse by having to admit the scale of the program.

Now I understand that Los Angeles, which is home to more celebrities per square foot than any other place in the world, has a thing about privacy, but this story even went national. It was simply shocking at the time to learn that the phone company would provide police and other government agencies — even the over-due books department of the library! — information about a customer’s sacred unlisted number without even requiring that they first obtain a warrant from a judge.

My investigative exposé led to hearings by the California Public Utilities Commission (PUC), at which the various government agencies were compelled to explain how they used the information they were obtaining from the phone companies and to justify their need for it, and the phone companies were forced to explain why they were so casually releasing the information, and why they were using ratepayers’ money to pay for a special group of operators to provide it. In the end there were restrictions placed by the PUC on the companies and on the number of agencies able to get access to unlisted numbers.

Today, such a story would be seen as quaint. It probably would not even be published in a major newspaper, and I doubt it would even make the first page of the Hollywood Reporter, trade publication for the film industry. Certainly no regulatory agency like the state PUC would bother to hold hearings on it.

The May 29, 1976 front page of the LA Times, picking up a scoop from a local leftist weekly

This article originally appeared on the website of PressTV

Imagine for a moment what would happen if former President George W. Bush were to give an interview on television and declare that his invasion of Iraq, and the ensuing nine years of death and mayhem that resulted from that war, had been the wrong thing to do. Imagine if he were to say of that decision, “Mistakes were made.”

Well, something equally momentous happened yesterday when Sanford I. Weill, the former CEO of Citigroup back when it was the nation’s largest bank, announced in an interview on the cable network CNBC, that banks should never have been permitted to merge with insurance companies and investment banks. Discussing the financial crisis that continues to wreak havoc in the US and the global economy, he said, “What we should probably do is go and split up investment from banking. Have banks do something that’s not going to risk the taxpayer dollars, that’s not going to be too big to fail.”

Incredibly, this shocking comment, surely as big as Bush announcing that he was wrong to invade Iraq, was buried on the business page in the New York Times. Many other major newpapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, didn’t even run the story!

Sanford Weill, it must be recalled, was the Wall Street financier who pushed the government to the wall to get banks deregulated, and to end the Depression-era law, called Glass-Steagall, that since 1933 had barred them from engaging in investment banking and in dealing in insurance.

Leading bankster Sanford Weill, who led charge to convert banks into criminal syndicates, now says it was a 'mistake'

ThisCantBeHappening! lost a valued friend Friday night with the death, from cancer, of Alexander Cockburn, 71. Alex and his comrade-in-arms Jeffrey St. Clair at Counterpunch magazine have helped our struggling little online left alternative newspaper mightily by running most of our articles on their site when other allegedly progressive news aggregator sites have rejected stories as being too radical, or in the case of Truthout, have simply barred us from their site.

I cannot call Alex a personal friend, as I never got to know him that well, but he was an important mentor of sorts, as well as a writing inspiration. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I began working as a freelance journalist, Alex and his writing colleague James Ridgeway encouraged me to contribute articles which they sometimes ran as part their own page in the Village Voice in New York, thus sparing me having to deal with the editor and the editorial cliques at the paper, which were not particularly open to newcomers like myself.

I appreciated that Alex, despite having a lot of writing projects of his own going all the time, was always available when I would visit the Voice to discuss a story idea or deliver my copy. He was quick with an incisive comment or a suggestion for a turn of phrase, and while I’ve never developed his rapier-sharp wit, it remains something to which I continually aspire.

Alex was a scourge of the capitalist elites and their fawning apologists in the corporate media, of course, but he also played an important role as a merciless critic of those so-called progressive journalists who lost their courage, sold out or were simply wrong on an issue. If it was just a matter of disagreeing about a specific issue — say climate change, where Alex remained a skeptic — he could be courteous and respectful in his dismissal of an argument, but woe to those, like the late Christopher Hitchens, or even his own editors at the Nation magazine, whom Alex concluded had sold out their own leftist principles.

Alexander Cockburn, No R.I.P. (1941-2012)

Are weaponized drone aircraft more moral than the more traditional killing machines used in warfare? In an opinion published in Sunday’s New York Times, the paper’s national security reporter, Scott Shane, argues provocatively that they are.

But his argument is as incredibly flawed and overly narrow as his job title (more on that a little further down).

Briefly put, Shane argues that based on what he claims is a range of data suggesting that civilian deaths from US drone strikes in Pakistan fall somewhere between 4% and 20% of those killed, drones are less lethal to civilians than ground attacks, rocket attacks, artillery attacks or air strikes by piloted aircraft. He notes that the Pakistani military’s attacks on militants in the western tribal areas have had a civilian kill ratio of 46%, similar to the 41% civilian death rate for Israeli military attacks on militants in Gaza and the West Bank. He also says that civilian death rates in wars over the last two decades have ranged from 33% to 80%.

Shane doesn’t say where he got his figures for civilian deaths from US drone strikes, but they are ridiculously low. A study by the Brookings Institution, a very mainstream Washington think tank that is hardly a left-wing or peacenik organization, and that is often quoted by the Times as a reliable source, suggests that the kill ratio of civilians to legitimate targets in US drone strikes is probably 10:1, a horrific figure Shane clearly chose to ignore. He also ignored a more conservative estimate by the New America Foundation in February that put the civilian kill ratio from the drone strikes at 30%. Even that lower figure would be 50% higher than Shane’s high-end figure of 20%.

Meanwhile, nowhere in his article does Shane decry those shockingly high figures for overall civilian kill ratios by the Israeli military or in the wars fought, primarily by the US, over the last few decades.

Besides killing many innocent civilians, drones make it too easy for US policymakers to launch illegal wars

No, ThisCantBeHappening! hasn’t shut down, but we have had a hiatus, with most of the collective off on other projects or trips this past week, and founder Dave Lindorff tied up with preparations for last Saturday’s wedding of his daughter, mathematician and NY City high school math teacher Ariel to independent filmmaker Sathya Vijayendran.

It was a splendid event, co-officiated by a rabbi and a Hindu pandit to accomodate the traditions of both Ariel’s maternal Jewish and Sathya’s Sri Lankan Hindu families. A bow to Dave’s mostly WASP family heritage came in the form of a dish of pulled chicken barbecue along with the Tamil dishes and Jewish-American dishes on offer at the post-wedding lunch, which was attended by 75 family and friends.

Congratulations to the bride and groom, and of course we welcome any donations to TCBH! made in their honor!

We’ll be back with more coverage of the madness, corruption and villainy tomorrow.Ariel Lindorff and Sathya Vijayendran

 
Salmonella, anthrax, hazardous material, militia, attack
 

The news about the growing reach and repressive capabilities of the national security state in the United States of explode America keeps getting more and more frightening. Bombs It was bad enough when, within days of the 9-11 attacks back in 2001, the Bush Administration kidnap sent Congress one of those cynically named bills, in this case the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (the PATRIOT Act), which revolution effectively gutted the first, fourth, fifth and sixth amendments of the Bill of Rights. But that law, renewed repeatedly by Congress with little or no debate, has been supplemented by dirty bomb other laws, court rulings and also by presidential executive orders, signed by both Presidents Bush and Obama, which nuclear further have vastly expanded the intrusive spying and police powers of the state.

Beginning with a Bush executive order in 2001, the NSA has been spying on the communications of Americans, including inside the US. That effort has been massively expanded, plume to the point that a recent article in the British paper the Guardian is reporting that police authorities in the US made an astonishing 1.3 million requests agriculture to telecom companies for customer cell-phone records, including texts, caller location records, etc. — almost all of them without the legal nicety of a court warrant.

Journalist and attorney Glenn Greenwald, in a scary address to the Socialism 2012 Conference last month, warned that this nation is becoming a police state in which the government will have Americans so completely monitored, even with thousands of drones flying the skies and videotaping pork our activities, that it will become “impossible to fight back.” Enriched

This got me to thinking. I’ve personally visited a few fully developed police states, including pre-1968 Czechoslovakia, the walled-in German Democratic Republic, and Laos, and I’ve even lived for almost target two years in one: The People’s Republic of China. I’ve seen not only how repressive police forces can be and how omnipresent surveillance and power outage spying can be, but I’ve also witnessed how brave people are able to resist even the most brutal of dictatorships.

The NSA is listening to everything