In the world of federal contracting, it takes taxpayer dollars to win more taxpayer dollars, or at least that’s how Lockheed Martin sees things.
Lockheed Martin for years has been running one of the government’s most important nuclear research facilities, Sandia National Laboratories. Five years ago, its lucrative contract with the Department of Energy (DOE) was coming to an end, so Lockheed Martin started to lobby officials to win an extension.
That lobbying included using some of the money paid by DOE for Lockheed Martin to run Sandia. Under federal law, this is a big no-no. Contractors are explicitly forbidden from using taxpayer money to lobby for more contracting work. But Lockheed Martin did it anyway, claiming they were just trying to better inform DOE managers when it came time to decide whether to give them another contract. The company hired a firm run by former Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson to make its case.
“This is, after all, how Washington usually functions,” R. Jeffrey Smith wrote at the Center for Public Integrity.
The Energy Department’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, said in a report (pdf) that Lockheed Martin broke the rules. He called the company’s actions “highly problematic” and “impermissible.”
Lockheed Martin did get a new deal, but it was for two years and $7.7 billion. It had sought a longer extension to keep running Sandia.
George Monbiot – columnist with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning. “Atomic energy has just been subjected to one of the harshest of possible tests, and the impact on people and the planet has been small. The crisis at Fukushima has converted me to the cause of nuclear power.”
Tom Wigley – of Climate-Gate infamy, he’s a senior scientist in the Climate and Global Dynamics Division of the University Corporation of Atmospheric Research. “We need nuclear power to solve this problem … people don’t realise just how bad climate change is.”
James Hansen – author of Storms of My Grandchildren.
Barry W Brook – is the Director of Climate Science at Adelaide University, and Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change, is on the board of the Science Council for Global Initiatives and the International Awards Committee of the Global Energy Prize.
Gwyneth Cravens – novelist and journalist, author of Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.
Ted Nordhaus – Chairman of the Breakthrough Institute, political strategist and author of Break Through, Why We Can’t Leave Saving The Planet To Environmentalists.
Mark Lynas – author of The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans, also a frequent speaker around the world on climate change science and policy. “Let me be very clear. Without nuclear, the battle against global warming is as good as lost.”
Tom Blees – author of Prescription for the Planet (the seemingly “intractable” problem of nuclear waste is “nothing of the kind”) has “probably done more than anybody to move people to the cause of nuclear power.” Tom also heads the Science Council for Global Initiatives.
Professor Gerry Thomas – of the Imperial College, London, “I am very pro-nuclear as I realise that we have an unwarranted fear of radiation.”
James Lovelock – celebrated father of the Gaia principle.
Fred Pearce – an environment writer with The Guardian newspaper in the UK, and author of The Last Generation: How nature will take her revenge for climate change.
Stewart Brand – a prominent pro-nuclear “environmentalist” and author of Whole Earth Discipline: Why dense cities, nuclear power, transgenic crops, restored wildlands and geoengineering are necessary.
Ken Caldiera – with the Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution, recently co-authored an open letter to the environmental movement urging them to bring their support behind the development of new nuclear power.
Kerry Emmanuel – with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for his work on attribution of climate change to hurricane events.
Rachel Pritzker – is the founder and president of the Pritzker Innovation Fund. Rachel currently chairs the advisory board of the Breakthrough Institute.
Suzanne Hobbs-Baker – the brain behind Pop Atomic Studios, an organisation which uses the power of visual and liberal arts to “enrich” the public discussion on atomic energy.
Ed Davey – UK Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, “When I have listened to the arguments of pro-nuclear Liberal Democrats in recent years, the one argument I found increasingly difficult to answer is the climate-change argument, because climate change poses a real and massive danger to our planet. Not keeping a genuinely low-carbon source of electricity as an option looks reckless when we don’t know the future.”
“You are not entitled to that information!” That’s what a staffer in Senator Markey’s office bluntly told me when I called to ask for help in identifying Members of Congress who hold dual citizenship.
Seems that’s a question no one wants to hear. The Internet sources are flaky, with only unreliable estimates for both House and Senate. So I telephoned the Washington, DC offices of my three Congressional representatives from Massachusetts to ask for their help in obtaining definitive data from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which responds to Congressional offices, but not to the general public.
I might as well have asked the respondents for their social security numbers. While the responses the offices of Senator Warren and Congressman Keating were more polite than the one from Markey’s office, they were no more helpful. Two Warren office interns tried to assist, sending me some interesting but unrelated CRS reports. However, when their internships ended in August, I started all over again with a more permanent staffer. She promised to call back, but never did. I thought I had a promise from a Keating office aide to approach CRS, but she never responded to my several follow-up emails.
As a Harvard Kennedy School alum, I emailed the two professors recommended by a member of the fundraising office, but received no response.
Two prominent ethics in government NGOs manifested a similar lack of interest. Neither the Sunlight Foundation nor the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) saw fit to respond to my phone calls. Nor did my “tipline” submission to CREW spark a reply.
Meanwhile, I did obtain some useful information from the “Ask the Librarian” service of the Library of Congress. First, it referred me to links that reported Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s recent renunciation of her Swiss citizenship and Senator Ted Cruz’ renunciation of his Canadian citizenship. The librarian service also referred me to two government organizations, one of which provided me with a document listing Members born outside the United States and another more detailed CRS document entitled “Membership of the 113th Congress: A Profile,” dated August 26, 2014. The profile document includes cumulative Member data on party breakdown, age, occupations, education, Congressional service, religion, gender and ethnicity and military service, but nothing on dual citizenship. The provided reports came with a caveat: my source was not to be “quoted or cited.”
This week I filed a Freedom of Information Request to CRS asking for the names of Members of Congress who are dual citizens; or, if such data is not available, advice on where it can obtained. Given the omission of dual citizen topic in the Member profile cited above, I suspect that the relevant data is simply not being collected.
Until the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1967 case of Afroyim v. Rusk, a US citizen who voted in a political election in a foreign state would lose his US nationality. Afroyim opened the way for the acceptance of dual or multiple citizenship in US law.
Not all countries allow their citizens to obtain dual citizenship. One country that does make it easy to become a dual national is Israel. Under its “Law of Return,” every Jew has the right to come to Israel as an oleh (a Jew immigrating to Israel) and become an Israeli citizen.
The recent experience of Lenny Lapon, a Jewish American citizen from Massachusetts, shows how automatic the conferral of Israeli citizenship can be. As Lapon described it when he publicly renounced that citizenship last July, his flight to Israel in October 2010 resulted in the award of Israeli citizenship and an Israeli identification number. Thus it is likely that Jewish members of Congress became Israeli citizens if and when they visited Israel. We don’t yet know if this was the case for any or all of the visiting Jewish Members. Nor do we know if any such member has renounced Israeli citizenship.
Religion and ethnicity in such a diverse country as the US raise no serious conflict issues (1) because neither of those identifications takes precedence over citizen loyalty to the US and (2) because both religion and ethnicity of Members are transparent to the public.
Why is it important for citizens to know if their representatives in Congress are dual citizens? Because both real and apparent conflicts of interest erode the public trust. If there are dual citizens in Congress or in top levels of the Executive Branch, citizens may reasonably demand that all foreign citizenship be renounced as a condition of high political office.
At the level of individual members, transparency is essential. For example, a constituent should know whether or not another state loyalty is involved when his or her representative speaks out on a major issue, such as on military assistance to Israel or recognition of Palestine as a state. Only if we know who are the dual citizens in Congress and what are their second countries, can we intelligently assess the credibility of their policy statements and actions.
Responding to the Markey staffer, we are entitled to that information.
L. Michael Hager is a retired lawyer and diplomat whose work has been published in the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Hill, International Herald Tribune, London Independent, Jordan Times, and Truthout. He was the executive director of Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, MA, president of the Education For Employment Foundation in Washington, DC., and co-founder of the International Development Law Organization in Rome. He now resides in Massachusetts.
Despite numerous examples of runaway costs on expensive weapons programs, the Defense Department is resisting calls to make changes to its process for ensuring quality control.
The Pentagon’s inspector general (IG) recently reviewed the work of the Office of the Defense Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and concluded in a report that it hadn’t “established an overarching quality management policy to ensure the consistent application of quality management system requirements across DoD components.”
In other words, do a better job of monitoring the development of new weapons systems before budget overruns result in soaring costs.
Not that there haven’t been a lot of examples of this problem:
· The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle fell four years behind schedule and accumulated an overrun of $750 million.
· The Advanced Threat Infrared Counter Measure/Common Missile Warning System got five years off-track at a cost of $117 million.
· The F22A Raptor Advanced Tactical Fighter exceeded its budget by $400 million.
The USS San Antonio, an amphibious transport dock ship, took three years longer than planned to build and consumed an extra $846 million along the way.
The IG recommended the Pentagon create a central quality management oversight office to help reduce delays and cost overruns.
The response last month from the Defense Department was they don’t need another layer of bureaucracy. “While we agree there are benefits to central leadership, it already exists,” Katrina McFarland, director of Defense Acquisition Resources and Analysis, said according to Government Executive. These quality checks “are in many cases are working poorly right now for a very simple reason: a shortage of trained and qualified acquisition professionals in the quality field.”
The IG requested another response, this time one that addresses its concerns, by December 5.
The power of propaganda fueled by corporate cash triumphed over common sense once again in a California ballot measure on Tuesday. Two years after voters narrowly rejected a GMO labeling measure following a late-game, $46 million corporate advertising blitz led by Monsanto, the health insurance industry spent an estimated $57 million to successfully swamp Proposition 45, that would have given the elected state insurance commissioner the power to veto (some) excessive health insurance rate increases, a power that regulators exercise in 35 other states.
Here’s one part of the nonsense: one of the industry’s principal arguments was that the added regulation would increase the cost of health insurance. I’m not making this up! It takes some serious cojones to make that argument when you’re running a health care system that costs twice as much as that of any other industrialized nation and delivers inferior health outcomes, while there is nothing to stop you from raising the rates as high as you want without having to explain yourself to anyone. And you make your point by spending $57 million worth of premium payments that otherwise could have been used to provide health care. I’m willing to wager that the cost of insurance commissioner oversight would have been far less than $57 million.
But it worked. Prop 45 went down in flames 60% to 40%.
More nonsense: the industry ran scare ads that asked voters whether they wanted their health care decisions made by a single power-hungry government bureaucrat (the insurance commissioner). They just forgot to remind voters that now those decisions are made by a small circle of anonymous and very highly compensated insurance industry executives who are accountable to no one, unlike an elected insurance commissioner.
The rest of the nonsense: the industry argued that implementation of the rate review process might interfere with the ongoing roll out of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.
The subtext of this argument is the tried and true, right-wing talking point that government can’t do anything right. It always gets thrown into the mix because after decades of propaganda (endless repetition of this point), even supposedly liberal voters are susceptible to this canard.
The specific deceit behind this argument is that Obamacare is really working, so we can’t take the risk of messing with it. The cadaver of the politician formerly known as Nancy Pelosi was even wheeled before the public to plead for Obamacare.
“If I wanted to kill the Affordable Care Act, I would do this,” Pelosi told the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle (who were so impressed they urged voters to reject the measure, as did the LA Times ).
“ACA is who I am,” Pelosi reportedly said. “It’s why I stay in Congress, to protect it.”
OK, so the powerful San Francisco Democrat who is trying to cling to minority leadership in the House of Representatives says her main mission in public life now is to defend a law that was written by an insurance industry lobbyist and brokered in a back room deal with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries – a horrendously flawed bill that perpetuates a system that delivers substandard care at inflated prices to the American public. Reasonable alternatives (like Medicare for all) were taken off the table before public input was even considered.
All of these nonsense arguments were trotted out to deflect attention from the real issue: the health care system is horribly broken, prohibitively expensive, and since Obamacare pre-empted any attempts at real, effective reform, flawed bandaid measures like Prop 45 are all that’s available to the public – and therefore better than nothing. Let’s talk about anything besides the real human suffering and death the system causes unnecessarily – let’s focus on the bureaucratic problems the measure might cause. (Left unsaid is that the problems are likely to arise because the industry will do what it can to inhibit the optimal functioning of any regulatory scheme it perceives as disadvantageous to its own interests.)
Is Obamacare really working?
The original draft for Obamacare was written by the insurance industry – after they threatened to defeat any reform that did not leave in place their privileged role – to in effect collect a tax on health care in return for “financing” the cost of it. Supposedly they take risk for being the gatekeepers who decide who is eligible for care and who is not and what services should be covered and when. Obamacare was not an attempt to reform the basic problems of the industry. It was a deal to cover more people while leaving the parasitic insurance industry in place to collect their tax on an even larger population than before.
Bear in mind that in any rational system everyone would be covered the same – this business of offering scores of different plans and making distinctions about who is covered and what is covered is what you have to do to create the opportunity for profit within the system. If everyone had the same coverage, and we financed it collectively through the government – we would have no need for insurance company financing and all the layers of bureaucracy that are required to track the distinctions. The amount of insurance industry profits is a tiny fraction of the cost of the bureaucracy required to enable the profits. It adds an estimated $300 to $400 billion annually to the cost of health care.
So yes, some millions of people were able to get insurance who were denied the “privilege” before. This is how Obamacare is “working.” But that could have been done much more efficiently and at lower cost without the insurance industry.
Those who already had insurance are now paying more for the same coverage they enjoyed before Obamacare – or they have had to reduce their coverage by paying higher co-pays and deductibles. There are more underinsured than ever. When people are underinsured – or in other words they face barriers to care in the form of high access costs – they tend not to get the treatments they really need, which in the long run actually increases the overall cost of the system, because they don’t seek care until their conditions are more advanced and difficult and expensive to treat.
The insurance industry still promotes the fantasy of “consumer directed” health care, which is based on the falsehood that the high costs of the system are due to consumers over-utilizing health care, and if they are forced to spend more of their own money for care they will stop being care hogs and make better health care decisions.
When Obamacare opened the system to all those who had been denied insurance due to poverty or illness, the rates were jacked up for those already covered. This was most evident in California for those covered by individual plans in the state of California. Prop 45, by the way, applies only to those covered by individual and small group plans in California, or about 6 million people. The rest of the population is covered by large employer funded plans or the government. These large employer plans at least have some bargaining leverage with the insurance companies, while individuals and small groups are given no opportunity to bargain for lower rates. They can take what they are offered, and since Obamacare, they no longer have the option to leave it. Thus the proposition as written applied only to those who most need protection.
California Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones said he needed the authority to control rates because the insurance companies had raised prices in California 22% to 88% since Obamacare was implemented in January 2014. The industry argued those increases were intended and justified as part of Obamacare to offset the costs of covering all the people who hadn’t been previously covered.
Huh? I thought they sold us Obamacare on the premise that it would control the cost of health care, not immediately increase it by up to 88%. No, the industry took advantage of the situation – that some increases in overall rates might be expected because the uninsured population might be sicker than the already covered population, even though many of the newly covered would be young healthy people who had refrained from buying insurance previously because they were not compelled to and could not afford it – and jacked the rates as high as they thought they could get away with.
The insurance companies already knew exactly what their risk was with individuals they already covered, but they took the opportunity to raise their premiums by as much as 80 percent in order to cover projected additional risk. Same people. Same ages. Same illnesses, or not. Now paying up to 80 percent more. Why not? There was no one to stop them.
The rates for my individual plan were increased in the neighborhood of 70 percent effective January 1, 2014. I bought a plan in the exchange instead – but the price of the exchange plan was comparable to the new, inflated cost of my old plan, for about the same benefits. I received a subsidy from the government for most of the cost, but the insurance company received the full, inflated cost, 70 percent more than I had been paying the previous month.
While Pelosi was shilling for the health insurance industry, she was wringing her hands and saying that she supports the concept of cost control through rate review. Of course she offered no alternative proposal.
Meanwhile, the LA Times was twisting itself in knots by pointing out that supporters of Prop 45 were falsely claiming that the proposal would make insurance affordable. Not true, said the LA Times, because insurance is already unaffordable. They got that much right!
Then they said only a major overhaul in the way healthcare is delivered and paid for will make insurance affordable. Right again!
Then they slipped off the path of truth once more. They said the government and the industry have already started the overhaul process. They didn’t bother to mention how long this process might take. I’m guessing maybe by next decade they’ll work in a few superficial reforms, after the prices have doubled again, or worse.
Proposition 45 was not a cure. It was nothing more than a band-aid for a fatally diseased system. Obamacare didn’t fix the system. It never even tried. And that’s what Pelosi, the Chronicle, the LA Times and the insurance industry don’t want to talk about. That’s what this proposition was all about. We’re still trying to fix the system that ails us, while they want to pretend that it’s already been cured.
Jeff Sher is a journalist specializing in the health care industry. He lives in San Francisco.
In perhaps the best mainstream report during the election season, the typically firmly D.C.-based Steve Inskeep went knocking on doors in Colorado and came across a woman, Ili Bennett, who told him she’s felt some excitement from both Elizabeth Warren — and in the past, the Tea Party.
Said Inskeep: “I think you’ve hit on something insightful here. And I want you to help me with this a little bit because the Tea Party, those are some very conservative people — Elizabeth Warren, very liberal person. But they both represent deep unhappiness with the way things are. And it sounds like they both struck a chord with you. Am I right?” He was and it’s not one woman in Colorado of course. Politico headline today states: “Exit polls 2014: Voters hate everyone.” It might seem that way to the insiders at Politico, but actually it’s that voters mostly just hate the establishment of both political parties, which to Politico might seem like “everyone”. And this isn’t new. From 2010: “CNN Poll: Majority angry at both political parties.”
The problem is that people feel they have virtually no where to go and can’t translate that anger to action. There is a de-facto anti-establishment, populist majority. But the entire structure of politics, media and elections is designed to keep them divided and prevent such populists from the left or right or wherever from coalescing politically. Third parties coming from either the left (Green, Socialist) or the right (Constitution, Libertarian) are automatically dismissed by the vast majority as potential spoilers. (I’ve set up VotePact.org to solve exactly this problem.)
Some sectors of the media have lauded the Republican establishment’s stepping into the primary process and preventing Tea Party candidates from getting nominations in so-called “swing states.” Those looking for salvation in presidential elections from the likes of Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren or their Republican mirror images will have to bear in mind the obstacle in the primaries is “electability” (as defined by the establishment) and it’s a virtual certainty that candidates who seem serious about delivering real change will be denied any nomination. Rather, such candidates will likely mostly function as a way of keeping voters on the establishment party reservation, endorsing the ultimate nominee.
As for midterm elections, part of the equation is lower and lower voter turnout — the “leadership” of the parties is in effect firing and further marginalizing the public and their alleged bases.
The establishment will attempt to produce their own version of “bipartisanship” — pro-establishment bipartisanship that is. The mantra of “change” is being used to peddle the never ending use of the Reversible Straitjacket of the Democratic and Republican establishments. This manifests itself as “seesaw politics” and what I’ve called the guillotine pendulum, helping ensure the continuity of what some call the Deep State.
The major corporate media frequently focus on marginal differences between the two major parties, but the areas of agreement between them are sizable in terms of economic, trade, civil liberties, foreign policy and other issues. On these and other critical issues, the establishments of the duopoly are frequently aligned together against their alleged bases, explaining why the public “hates everyone”. Crazy public. Politicians of both parties talk about helping the little guy and then do the bidding of corporate interests.
Now, the political narrative is that Washington is dysfunctional and “can’t agree on anything”. The the general public is clearly being prepared to embrace whatever pro-corporate monstrosity President Obama and presumptive Senate Majority Leader McConnell agree on.
So, predictably, the Wall Street Journalis now reporting: “American businesses are hoping the dust will settle from Tuesday’s GOP takeover of Congress with new attention on corporate taxes, immigration, trade and energy, top priorities that have eluded breakthroughs in recent years. A post-election landscape that includes a more sharply divided government is likely to lead to continued frustration over some items on businesses’ wish list. At the same time, a reshaped political landscape could lead Congress and the White House to seek legislative breakthroughs on some economic issues before the 2016 election season heats up.”
So, the big business agenda on taxes and corporate trade deals like the Trans Pacific Partnership could well be advanced by establishment Republicans in Congress working with the Obama administration. This could well extend to other issues such as civil liberties, more war, etc.
The anti-establishment forces either still in the Democratic Party or that have given up on the electoral process all together should join with those deluding themselves into looking for the Republican Party for some salvation. They should work toward building new institutions that adopt their best beliefs.
And this must go beyond voters. There should be candidates running for Democratic and Republican nominations who — once the establishment ensures their defeat in the primaries — are willing, jointly perhaps, to bolt and not back the party’s establishment nominees.
The day after election day is the most important. Now is the time to reach out across the partisan divide and find populists on the other side to work with. You have nothing to lose but your perpetual chains.
Sam Husseini founded VotePact.org which encourages voters to pair up with their political “mirror image” and vote for their preferred candidates rather than the “lesser evil” offered by the establishment.
The ruling dogma of our political economy is corporatism. Corporatism claims to draw legitimacy from the free market theory that all vendors who do not meet market demands will go under. Corporatism uses this illusion to exert power over all aspects of our political economy.
Free markets, corporatists believe, are the best mechanism to allocate resources for the exchange of goods and services. They believe markets free of regulation, taxation or competition from government enterprises produce the best results. Their favorite metaphor is Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people by the exertions of many willing sellers and many willing buyers (Adam Smith, they neglected to add, favored public works, public education and social safety nets like decent wages and public welfare as needed.)
Many things intrude on free market theories including military expenditures, wars, taxation, public infrastructure, health and safety regulation and governments’ emergency duties. What financier George Soros has called “market fundamentalism,” is opposed to any interference with free markets. Yet, corporatism makes massive exceptions that rig markets and tilt the seller-buyer balance heavily in favor of the former who become bigger and bigger global corporations.
Market critics call this hypocrisy. Corporations push for larger military budgets, which have concentrated power in ever fewer military contractors. What are less recognized and more part of the culture of acceptance are the other interferences with free markets, which corporate power has entrenched so deeply that they are rarely part of any political or election-time debate.
Let this point be made in the form of questions rarely asked and therefore rarely answered.
Can there be a free market without freedom of contract? Corporatism has stripped consumers of freedom of contract with fine-print standard-form contracts that become more dictatorial every decade. They now often take away consumers rights to go to court for their grievances via compulsory arbitration clauses. They stipulate that the vendors can change the contract anyway they want – called unilateral modification – which takes away the last vestiges of consumer bargaining power. An example is the unilateral changes in what you have to pay in penalties, late fees or any hundreds of fees hidden in the fine print. And you can’t shop around because companies don’t compete over the fine print. (See faircontracts.org.)
Can there be a free market if workers cannot join together to bargain with large employers whose investors have expanding freedom to form companies, holding companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures and partnerships to advance their bargaining power? Moreover, in comparison with the freedom of investors, workers are besieged with union-busting intimidations, lockouts and a system of corporate-driven labor laws that present far more obstacles to go through than is the case with the labor laws of other Western nations.
Can there be a free market without strong and comprehensive anti-monopoly, anti-cartel and other laws against the myriad of anti-competitive practices that Adam Smith alluded to back in 1776 when he warned of the motives when businessmen gather together?
Today, the antitrust laws are weak, dated and little enforced with puny budgets.
For example, thousands of joint ventures between direct competitors are being formed without concern of the moribund antitrust police. There is globalization of businesses without globalization of law enforcement. Big companies can leverage the differences between nations in a race to the bottom to unfairly gain market power against buyers, workers and small businesses.
Can there be a free market without a free market of retaining lawyers to pursue wrongful injuries and fraud by both direct negotiation with the perpetrators or resorting to open, public courts? In our country, such private disputes are not socialized by government. They are given over to a market system of legal and other supplementary services. Yet corporatism strives strongly to block or limit, through captive legislators, access to the courts or tie the hands of judges and juries, the only people who see, hear and evaluate the evidence in each case.
Can there be a free market when corporatists produce crony capitalism or torrents of corporate welfare tax escapes, subsidies, handouts and bailouts that rig markets against other smaller businesses that are playing by the rules of the market?
Can there be a free market when corporate-managed trade agreements, such as NAFTA and the World Trade Organization (WTO), subordinate civic efforts to secure better labor, environmental and consumer treatments to the supremacy of commercial trade? (Seehttp://www.citizen.org/trade/.)
Finally, can there be a free market when the banks fund and control the powerful, secretive Federal Reserve that tightly regulates interest rates and can buy trillions of dollars in bonds (aka quantitative easing – QE) to juice the stock markets and the banks, while tens of millions of savers receive less than half of one percent in interest on their savings? Libertarians, to their credit, have noted this abuse by this corporate government more clearly than have many liberals.
There are other corporate controls against the free market, such as politically extending already lengthy patent monopolies to ward off competition by, for instance, generic drug producers.
Suffice it to say that the American people have enough evidence to abandon the ideological hypocrisy that corporatism uses to control them.
Corporatism, in reality, is the corporate state – a tyranny, greased by big money in elections – never envisioned by the framers of our Constitution when they started its preamble with “We the People.”
Wake up call, anyone? (See citizen.org for more information.)
A top commander for the Alaska National Guard was recommended for “other than honorable” discharge earlier this year following an investigation that found he allowed recruiters to sexually assault and harass women.
Lt. Col. Joseph Lawendowski failed to act on multiple complaints of serious misconduct, including rape, against four noncommissioned officers under his command, according to an Army investigation.
The Anchorage Pressobtained a copy of the Army Regulation 15-6 report that found Lawendowski, a former pornography company owner and co-founder of an “end times” fundamentalist group, violated the National Guard code of conduct on multiple occasions.
The 46-year-old Lawendowski, who joined the Alaska National Guard in 2003, promoted steroid use by recruiters, used government vehicles for strip club outings, showed up drunk to a sled dog race sponsored by the service, and possibly used government-issued credit cards for improper purchases.
The March 3 report recommended a separate investigation into his possible misuse of funds, including purchases of plane tickets to Dubai and Sweden, items at a luxury children’s store in Paris, and $1,500 and $2,000 bar tabs in Anchorage and Juneau, the newspaper reported.
The report found Lawendowski created a workplace climate of fear and intimidation by allowing four NCOs – identified as Command Sgt. Maj. Clinton Brown, Master Sgt. Jarrett Carson, Master Sgt. John Nieves, and Sgt. 1rst Class Shannon Tallant – to retaliate against soldiers who filed complaints and to feel above the law.
Three of those NCOs – Carson, Nieves, and Tallant – were known to National Guard members as the “Three-Headed Monster” due to their widely known misconduct and abnormally large size, and sworn statements show they had a motto: “What happens in recruiting, stays in recruiting.”
The report found Tallant fraternized with his direct supervisor, Brown, who was a passenger when the recruiter was arrested for drunken driving in March 2011, and investigators found their relationship allowed Tallant to “continue to use his rank and position to abuse junior soldiers as well as prey on young women.”
The recruiters boasted of their close relationships with superior officers, including Maj. Gen. Thomas Katkus, who led the Alaska National Guard until he was forced to resign last month by Republican Gov. Sean Parnell, who took over when former Gov. Sarah Palin stepped down in 2009.
Brigadier Gen. Catherine Jorgensen, the Chief of Staff for the Alaska Army National Guard, was fired earlier this month by the acting commander of the Alaska National Guard but rehired the next day at Parnell’s insistence.
The National Guard Bureau’s Office of Complex Investigations strongly criticized the Alaska National Guard leadership, saying the service mishandled sexual assault cases and widespread unethical behavior by officers.
The OCI report showed Lawendowski had been the subject of multiple criminal investigations for weapons smuggling, rape, and drug trafficking – but none of those criminal investigations resulted in prosecution “due to jurisdictional issues or lack of evidence,” the newspaper reported.
Lawendowski, who formed a corporation — Kodiak Entertainment Group, Inc. – that operated at least seven pornographic websites and then the Christian fundamentalist Berean Watchmen organization, reported directly to Katkus, the OCI report found.
This deviated from the normal chain of command, the newspaper reported, and investigators found that other National Guard members knew Lawendowski was friends and neighbors with Katkus.
Lawendowski was named Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations for Operations and Training in June 2012, but head chaplain Lt. Col. Rick Koch and at least five other active or retired officers have begged Parnell’s office for about a year and a half to investigate him and his associates.
They provided the governor’s office with detailed allegations about fraud and the cover-up of sexual assaults, the newspaper reported.
The chaplain told Parnell’s chief of staff that Lawendowski had improperly spent more than $200,000 and led a command with known ties to illegal drug sales and many sexual assaults – and he said Katkus knew about the allegations.
“As one officer put it, ‘We are now putting criminals in our senior positions,’” Koch said in an email.
Roston previously exposed the close ties between Teresa Shea’s position and her husband James’ employer, DRS Signal Solutions, a company focused on “SIGINT systems.” Not only that, but business records indicated that James Shea apparently runs Telic Networks, another SIGINT-focused business operating out of their hometown (Ellicott City, Maryland).
Needless to say, neither Teresa Shea, her husband, her husband’s employer, nor the NSA itself have offered anything in the way of comments on this suspicious-looking arrangement. The NSA did offer some boilerplate about “robust internal controls,” but simultaneously stiff-armed Buzzfeed’s request for Teresa Shea’s financial disclosure statements, citing the National Security Act of 1959. (This citation is also agency boilerplate, or at least was until Jason Leopold challenged it with a lawsuit. This move forced former NSA head Keith Alexander’s financial disclosure statements out of its hands. In light of this recent decision, it appears Shea’s statements will be released as well.)
This all looked conflicted enough, but Roston has uncovered more suspicious-looking information.
Yet another company, apparently focused on the office and electronics business, is based at the Shea residence on that well-tended lot.
This company is called Oplnet LLC.
Teresa Shea, who has been at the NSA since 1984, is the company’s resident agent.
The company’s articles of organization, signed by Teresa Shea, show that the firm was established in 1999 primarily “to buy, sell, rent and lease office and electronic equipment and related goods and services.” An attorney who also signed the document, Alan Engel, said he couldn’t comment on client matters.
Roston and Buzzfeed were unable to come up with any hard evidence linking Teresa Shea’s home business with federal contracts, but it did uncover a very interesting purchase.
Records show Oplnet does own a six-seat airplane, as well a condominium property with an assessed value of $275,000 in the resort town of Hilton Head, South Carolina.
Flight records for this aircraft show it has made a majority of its landings at three airports — one of them being Ft. Meade, Maryland, home of the NSA. It is not uncommon for people who own their own planes to actually set up a company to own that plane for a variety of legal and tax reasons — and it’s possible that’s what’s happened here — though it is notable that James Shea has a pilot’s license, while Teresa does not.
Perhaps it’s indicative of nothing at all, other than the overwhelming gravitational pull of the Beltway. But then, there’s this timeline.
1984 – Teresa Shea joins the NSA as an engineer working in SIGINT issues.
1990 – James Shea sets up Sigtek, Inc., which goes on to receive “hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with the federal government, according to a federal contracting database.”
1999 – Teresa Shea registers Oplnet, using their home address.
2007 – James Shea sets up Telic Networks, his newest SIGINT-focused company. This too is “based” at the Sheas’ shared home address.
2010 – Teresa Shea is promoted to Director of SIGINT. Nearly simultaneously, James Shea is named vice president of major SIGINT contractor DRS Signal Solutions.
Much of the Sheas’ shared success hinges on SIGINT — both the government’s expansion of dragnet surveillance and simultaneous growth of SIGINT-focused contractors. Maybe there’s nothing to this, but the silence from everyone involved seems to indicate there’s at least the “appearance of impropriety,” if not flat-out misconduct and abuse of power.
More will be known when (and always appended when dealing with the NSA, if ) Shea’s financial disclosure documents are released. At the very least, they’ll at least confirm the information Buzzfeed has dug up and prevent the NSA from boilerplating this whole situation into non-existence. The NSA is taking a second look at Keith Alexander’s post-NSA activities. If it’s willing to go that far, it’s willing to dig up dirt on lower-level officials. You can’t be too careful in the intelligence business these days, not with the eyes of legislators, activists and a whole bunch of pissed-off Americans watching your every move.
More U.S. police departments are employing electronic surveillance technology that can collect information from cell phones and laptop computers belonging not just to criminal suspects but also law abiding citizens.
The Charlotte Observer found the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police have for eight years used such equipment, which goes by many names: Stingray, Hailstorm, AmberJack and TriggerFish.
But the technology, which mimics cell towers, is also used by other law enforcement around the country. It’s just not clear which departments, the newspaper says, because the federal government has helped to shield police from disclosing their owning and operating the spy hardware. In fact, the Obama administration “has ordered cities not to disclose information about the equipment,” the Observer’s Fred Classen-Kelly reported.
However, members of the administration might also be among those spied upon. Through an open records request, VICE News has learned that Washington, D.C., is another city whose police department is using the technology. The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) there purchased the Stingray system in 2003, purportedly to use for anti-terrorism efforts.
In 2008, however, the system was brought out of storage and is now used in regular criminal cases. But the system doesn’t discriminate between calls made by those suspected of wrongdoing and those of ordinary citizens, which means anyone’s whereabouts can be tracked.
Nathan Wessler, an attorney with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy & Technology Project, told VICE News “If the MPD is driving around D.C. with Stingray devices, it is likely capturing information about the locations and movements of members of Congress, cabinet members, federal law enforcement agents, and Homeland Security personnel, consular staff, and foreign dignitaries, and all of the other people who congregate in the District…. If cell phone calls of congressional staff, White House aides, or even members of Congress are being disconnected, dropped, or blocked by MPD Stingrays, that’s a particularly sensitive and troublesome problem.”
Some in Charlotte have those concerns as well. “The thought of police or another agency collecting data on communications devices is troubling,” Charlotte City Councilman John Autry told the Observer. “I understand the balance between security and privacy, but I think we should honor the privacy protection in the Constitution. … What happens to the data? Who sees it? Who has access to it?”
The ACLU estimates that at least 46 local law enforcement agencies nationwide have cell phone tracking systems.
Around this time last year, parliamentary records show, the retired property developer and hugely generous Labour party donor, Sir David Garrard, had given a modest £60,000 towards the party’s election campaign for 2015. It came in addition to around half a million he had already given since 2003.
Fast forward to 16 June of this year, Garrard hosts a Labour Friends of Israel event, at which Labour leader Ed Miliband is the main speaker. The prime minister hopeful had, the year before, proclaimed that he was a Zionist. The lobbying group he addressed boasts dozens of Labour peers and MPs amongst its membership, including the Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls.
Despite the atrocities being committed as Miliband spoke – a few thousand miles away during “Operation Protective Edge” in Gaza, he made not one mention of the Palestinian casualties in his speech, though he did take time to note Israel’s own losses. By that point, 172 Palestinian lives had been taken, and over 1,200 were wounded. The newspapers were in outcry, but from Miliband – performing before his party donors – silence.
That same day, the silence was rewarded. Garrard transferred a whopping £630,000 to the Labour party accounts, over ten times his donation from the previous year.
It was a near identical episode to David Cameron speaking in 2009, back when he too was hoping to take office as prime minister.
At a well-attended Conservative Friends of Israel annual fundraising lunch held in London, he again made no mention of the Palestinian lives that had been lost, this time as part of “Operation Cast Lead”. Not one mention. In that war, 1,370 Palestinians had died. At the time, a leading British journalist wrote: “I found it impossible to reconcile the remarks made by the young Conservative leader with the numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza. Afterwards I said as much to some Tory MPs. They looked at me as if I was distressingly naive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience.”
No other foreign nation is as well represented in the campaign finances of British elections as Israel. In fact, no other nation comes close – and money linked to pro-Israel donors is a single interest influence akin to that of the trade unions (the largest democratic organisations in the country) or indeed the megabucks flowing in from City financiers.
And with that money, war crimes are being glossed over, rules bent, and our hard-won democracy warped by foreign interests.
The money is already pouring in.
In April, the Conservative Branch for Brigg & Goole, the constituency of Andrew Percy MP, received £6,000 from a notable pro-Israel supporter, Lord Stanley Fink. During the recent conflict, Percy attended an Israeli military briefing about the Iron Dome missile defence system – later glibly observing that “Israel acts as we would” in response to the mass civilian casualties being inflicted by the IDF.
On the same day, £3,000 dropped into the bank account of the Conservative party in Harrow East. Their MP, Bob Blackman, also visited Israel during “Operation Protective Edge”. The money also came from Lord Fink.
And the pro-Israel peer pulled off a democracy-warping hat-trick that day – £3,000 for the Conservatives in Brighton & Kemptown, home to Conservative Friends of Israel linked Simon Kirby MP.
Over and above his backing of individual MPs, Lord Fink has also contributed over £60,000 to the Conservative Central Party accounts since July last year, and his total donations to the Conservatives over the years are now nearing £3 million.
Elsewhere, Lord Fink has been a “loyal donor” to Just Journalism, a now defunct group organised by the pro-Israeli Westminster think tank the Henry Jackson Society. Just Journalism claimed to be correcting “media bias” against Israel but instead acted as a pro-Israel “flak” group aggressively criticising any British publication who queried Israel’s human rights record, including the Guardian and the London Review of Books. The group folded in 2011.
Lord Fink is also a member of the Jewish Leadership Council (more on their influence later).
In March, the Conservative Branch in Poplar & Limehouse received £3,000 from another pro-Israel funder – Sir Michael Hintze. Hintze was ranked by Forbes in 2014 as the 1,016th richest person in the world, with a net worth of approximately $1.8 billion.
The constituency he has plugged money into is a swing seat; a six per cent change would depose incumbent Labour MP Jim Fitzpatrick (a member of both Labour Friends of Israel and Labour Friends of Palestine).
The Conservatives have their own reasons for targeting the seat, using the youthful ex-banker and Tower Hamlets councillor Tim Archer. The Respect party are running George Galloway, and he could split the Labour vote, opening the way for a Conservative win. George Galloway also happens to be the most outspoken critic of Israel in British politics.
British-Australian Hintze is not a man the Conservatives would want to annoy. Since July of last year, he has donated just over £1.5 million to the party (the figure is doubled if you look back to 2002).
Current Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne MP received nearly £40,000 in 2008 and 2009 directly from Hintze. Mayor of London Boris Johnson, Home Secretary Theresa May MP, David Davis MP and David Willets MP have also been subject to his financial largesse.
But the first politician Hintze backed in the Conservatives was Dr Liam Fox MP, with a £10,000 gift back in January 2007.
Fox then rose to become Secretary of State for Defence, before being disgraced when it was revealed he had allowed his close friend Adam Werrity access to the Ministry of Defence and to travel on official visits (despite not being a government employee).
Hintze was implicated because he had allowed Fox a desk in his London office as part of a £29,000 donation to Fox’s controversial charity – Atlantic Bridge – another pro-Israel lobbying organisation. Hintze served on its Executive Council.
In late 2011, “multiple sources” told the Independent on Sunday that Werrity had used contacts developed through Atlantic Bridge to arrange visits to Iran, meeting with opposition groups in both Washington and London, and had even been debriefed by MI6 about his travels.
The newspaper described the activities as “a freelance foreign policy” with Werrity seemingly “acting as a rogue operator”.
It was also revealed that Werrity was capable of arranging meetings “at the highest levels of the Israeli government”, and that Mossad had, bizarrely, believed Werrity to be Fox’s chief of staff.
The Guardian also raised the possibility that Werrity and Fox could have been operating a “shadow foreign policy,” using Atlantic Bridge as a cover organisation. The charity was investigated by the Charities Commission in 2011 and shut down.
Another patron of Atlantic Bridge, alongside Hintze, was Michael Lewis, ex-chairman of the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM).
That lobbying group describes itself as a “British organisation dedicated to creating a more supportive environment for Israel in Britain”. It was reported that Michael Lewis had paid for some of Werrity’s trips to Israel, charges he later denied.
Fox’s resignation was forced over the scandal – although true to Westminster form – no scandal is too much, in fact, he is already back, having politely refused a role as foreign secretary in July but now planning a new career as a backbencher.
Reviewing the Electoral Commission records for 2014, the pro-Israel donor Michael Lewis has popped up again. In March, he wrote another cheque for £10,000, to none other than Liam Fox.
In the past, Lewis has also backed William Hague – to the tune of £5,000. Hague later became foreign secretary.
According to Peter Oborne, now chief political commentator for the Telegraph, Michael Lewis’s baby BICOM is “Britain’s major pro-Israel lobby”.
In a searing expose for Channel 4 in 2009 and later a pamphlet calling for transparency from the Israel lobby, Oborne showed how BICOM was funded by a Finnish billionaire whose father made a fortune selling Israeli arms.
Chaim “Poju” Zabludowicz, who the Sunday Times ranked as the 57th richest individual in Britain with a net worth of over £1.5 billion, founded BICOM in 2001 and is its chairman.
Zabludowicz is also a member of the United Jewish Israel Appeal, a charity whose website claims it has three strands of work – “Supporting Israel”, “Connecting with Israel” and “Engaging with Israel”.
Since 2009, Zabludowicz has given approximately £125,000 to the Conservative party, either directly to party central, or to the party operating in Finchley and Golders Green, Harlow, Watford or Burton.
Zabludowicz is also a member of the Jewish Leadership Council – primarily concerned with philanthropic and educational matters within the British Jewish community, but who in June 2011 also met with the government to discuss the Middle East (BICOM attended the meeting too), and again in January 2012.
The Jewish Leadership Council, whose members also include pro-Israel Tory funders such as Lord Stanley Fink, and Tony Blair’s controversial man in Israel Lord Michael Levy, have taken it upon themselves to vigorously defend Israeli leaders from the principles of universal jurisdiction – which proves a great example of how influential the lobby is ,how intent the lobby is on insulating Israel from legal redress, and exactly why British voters should be wary of how much money the lobby is pumping into our elections.
In a celebratory post in 2011, on their own website, the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) explained that two years ago, they had “commissioned a legal opinion from Lord Pannick QC which recommended a change in the law. We wanted to protect universal jurisdiction itself, a vital innovation that grew out of the Holocaust, while preventing it from being abused.” (“Preventing it from being abused” roughly translates to “being applied to Israel”).
Following an arrest warrant being issued for Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the group said: “We immediately sent our legal opinion to the government and opposition and worked with Conservative Friends of Israel, Labour Friends of Israel and Liberal Democratic Friends of Israel to begin generating support for this law change.”
“Within a few days, Gordon Brown had publicly promised to change the law as soon as possible,” the JLC bragged.
The Conservative party had already placed an advert in the Jewish Chronicle promising to change the law if they were elected. In 2011, the universal jurisdiction laws of the United Kingdom were changed, with arrest warrants now requiring the assent of the Attorney-General before they could be issued for alleged war criminals.
This was just as the pro-Israel lobby wanted. Rather than facing arrest when visiting the UK, Israeli politicians, generals and other war criminals can now feel assured that warrants would first have to pass through the Attorney-General, who is none other than Jeremy Wright MP, who is of course, another member of Conservative Friends of Israel.
The New York Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit against the NYPD challenging its refusal to confirm or deny the existence of records related to its surveillance of a New York City mosque. The case appears to be the first time that a court has affirmed a “Glomar doctrine” below the federal level. Adam Marshall from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has more:
The case, Abdur-Rashid v. New York City Police Department, involved a request by Imam Talib Abdur-Rashid for records regarding NYPD surveillance of himself and his mosque in New York City. The city refused to disclose to Mr. Abdur-Rashid whether any such records existed, and told him that even if they did exist, such records would be exempt under the New York Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”).
In its decision, the court somewhat perplexingly acknowledged that according to federal and state case law, “[i]t should follow that when a local agency such as the NYPD is replying to a FOIL request, the Glomar doctrine is similarly inapplicable.” However, it then went on to state that as this was a case of first impression, the NYPD’s use of a Glomar response “is in keeping with the spirit of similar appellate court cases.” The court determined that “disclosing the existence of responsive records would reveal information concerning operations, methodologies, and sources of information of the NYPD, the resulting harm of which would allow individuals or groups to take counter-measures to avoid detection of illegal activity, undermining current and future NYPD investigations.” Therefore, it granted the NYPD’s motion to dismiss the case.
Elizabeth Kimundi, a lawyer for the firm of Omar T. Mohameddi, which is representing Abdur-Rashid, said over the phone that her firm is drafting an appeal.
That appeal will be one to watch, because this is a “case of first impression,” meaning that, if the ruling is upheld, it will set precedent in the state of New York. And it would be a bad precedent.
The Glomar doctrine gives agencies the obvious power to hide the existence of records, but it also allows agencies to short-circuit the appeal process, since requestors can’t file an appeal for records they don’t know exist. The NYPD consistently flouts both the spirit and letter of New York’s Freedom of Information Law. There is no expectation that it would use Glomar powers in good faith. A Glomar doctrine would just become another tool in Police Plaza One’s aggressive strategy to block and discourage FOIL requestors.
LAWSUITS
CIA says it didn’t know it had a copy of the Senate torture report.
ACLU and EFF file appeal in suit for LAPD license plate reader tech
Obama admin asks judge to dismiss civil lawsuit against United Against Nuclear Iran, attempting to invoke state secrets without public explanation. “After everything – the torture, the rendition, the eavesdropping…This is the case that stands for the proposition that privilege can be asserted in the dark?”
In FOIA lawsuit, EPA says it may have lost text messages it was required to archive under federal record law.
Judicial Watch sues DOJ for Operation Choke Point records.
Pebble Project files lawsuit against EPA, alleging FOIA violation
By James W. Carden | The Realist Review | June 14, 2026
Joe Biden’s presidency may ultimately come to be seen as a cautionary tale. Here was a president who showed little interest in entertaining arguments that might have contradicted his most deeply held assumptions.[1] And there were precious few within the upper ranks of the administration who might have attempted to do so, after all, only policy hands and political operatives who had come up through the ranks of the Clinton and Obama administrations or had longstanding ties to the citadels of the foreign policy community were invited into the fold. … continue
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