This does not surprise me. I still suspect that part of these missing weapons may have wound up in Paraguay at Bush's hacienda for use by his private mercenary army that our tax dollars are paying for. It would have been very easy for the DOD to divert part of there arms shipments that were supposed to go to Iraq and send them to Paraguay instead. It's fairly easy to dummy up invoices and shipping orders.

Are these the contractors who were supplying our military personnel with the unpotable water and tainted food?
Maybe the need to add criminal endangerment to the charges.

Why are we not hearing about these cases on the evening news? We hear more about questionable killing by our troops IN A WAR ZONE, but we are not hearing about theses cases involving our tax dollars.
Have the Carlisle Group or Halliburton been named in any of this?
Where are people getting this theory about Bush's private army in Paraguay?
I need to see the art I guess.

why are we buying ak-47s ? dont we have weapons to supply the iraqs? sounds like someones trying to pull the wool over our eyes again.ak-47 is a russian weapon.

I'm not surprised at all by this news. I just happened to remember something, at the start of the Iraq war President Bush said that the oil from Iraq would pay for the war yet here we are nearly 1 trillion dollars in debt which was just one of many lies and this congress still hasn't held this administration accountable for anything. Bush and Cheney lied about Iraq being linked to 9/11 and having WMD and as a result of this dishonesty thoundsands of innocent people left with severe injuries and dead. When will this horrible violence end? You know I get upset when Republicans try to spin and bring up former President Bill Clinton and Monica. I mean yeah we all know it was wrong but give me a break the two don't compare! Bill Clinton lied about having sex and George W. Bush lied about taking our nation into a war with a country that wasn't a threat to us. Which is worse? You tell me folks! I say it's time for this congress to get some back-bone and impeach both Bush and Cheney because what they have done is far more serious and they should be held accountable. Congress has a record low approval rating of about 18% and one of the major reasons is because they haven't done the will of the American people by ending this immoral war in Iraq and they haven't held this administration accountable. You would think by now congress would get the message. Actions speak louder than words. It's time to use the power of the purse to end this war. I hope congress won't be foolish to take the liberal vote for granted. Obama already messed up as far as I'm concerned when he started talking like this cowboy fool Bush about how he would invade Pakistan which is exactly why my vote is going to Senator Hillary Clinton instead who has promised to end this war not start another one. The last thing we need is to start another war.

I think that the AK-47s were the ones that were confiscated from the Iraqi Army. They should have been secured, inventoried and issued ONLY to Iraqi government agencies.
Somebody had better come up with a hand-receipt.

I have a good Idea. Lets give asshole bush more money for his war. Then we can loose more guns, money, oil and kill more people at the same time.

Heavenly Father, Let there be Justice and Peace.

Do you recall coruption ever being so rapid before??

70 with spines. Can we get 218?
by mcjoan
A little over a month ago, 70 House Dems wrote to Bush:

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/8/29/173136/226

donmarscd5:

"Why are we not hearing about these cases on the evening news?"

You have been RIGHT WING "propagandized". ALL MAJOR News Networks are OWNED by the EXTREME RIGHT WING and have been for years. Check out how many networks of the publics airways Ruport Murdoch has been allowed to own. The RIGHT WING owns all the PUBLICS AIRWAYS -- the media -- began with the REAGAN administration and has been aided and abetted by their DLC and RIGHT WING REPUBLICAN propagandized churches. The DLC is REPUBLICAN LITE "New Liberal democrats" like the Clinton's, and these Right Wing type democrats cooperated with the RIGHT WING against the publics best interest to give the the RIGHT WING control. The following Web sites have the most information that I know of concerning the RIGHT WING'S DLC use of the Democrats, and their Project For The New American Century to take over the world and make a world wide permanent underclass, the COMMON POPULATION:

DLC - Democratic Weaselship Council:

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1463

PPI - Conservative Policy Institute:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/1534

UNMASKING THE DLC:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stan-goff/unmasking-the-dlc_b_39287.html

THE PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY:

http://www.newamericancentury.org/

Investigate, nearly all one hears on television, with the exception of a couple networks, like FREE SPEECH TV http://www.freespeech.org/fscm2/genx.php?name=home, LINK TV http://www.linktv.org/experience and PBS, especially "Bill Moyers Journal" http://www.pbs.org/search/search_programsaz.html is RIGHT WING PROPAGANDA'S "two-choice emotional rhetoric" specifically designed to seduce, mesmorize, and intimidate the public, the 70% COMMON POPULATION, into thinking the COMMON POPULATION is "free and equal" to all RIGHT WING CONSERVATIVES, or that there is NO LEFT WING, that
WE are all ONE, which is garbage.

You will never hear anything that is important politically to the LEFT WING, the PUBLIC, the 70% COMMON POPULATION, unless in someway it is legally forced, which is seldom. All there is on television now is various kinds of entertainment to lull the 70% tired working public, the COMMON POPULATION, away from what is in their best interest, which is DEMOCRACY. The RIGHT WING EXTREME does not want the public, the COMMON POPULATION, to have a Bill of Rights, or any semblance of democracy in the United States, and the EXTREME RIGHT LEADS THE ENTIRE RIGHT WING as well as the DLC on the LEFT.

It will take a miracle from Almighty GOD for the 70% COMMON POPULATION to finish getting rid of the DLC that has infested the CONGRESS. The GENERAL POPULATION, the COMMON POPULATION, the PUBLIC received a miracle in 2006, so I'm looking forward to receiving a miracle in 2008.

Governor Dean is much more savvy than RIGHT WING'S media propaganda machine portrays him. Governor Dean figured out how to use the internet to our advantage, and Governor Dean will figure out a way for the public not be frauded in the 2008 Election, so that the 70% COMMON POPULATION can take democracy back. WE THE PEOPLE MUST HELP Governor Dean by VOTING ALL THE DLC INFESTATION OUT OF CONGRESS in 2008, as the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for RE-ELECTION in 2008.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12899506

We always hear about fraud after the fact. What are we doing to prevent it?

This Alberto Gonzales related post, that I was unable to get entered before it was removed,is to the blogger who thinks that Bush has the right to fire Federal Attorneys at will. It is NOT so. You are leaving out a huge part of the government of the United States -- the CONGRESS. The Federal prosecutors cannot be hired and fired at will by the president. United States presidents aren't autocratic kings, BUSH only wants to be an autocratic king, and the masses are getting restless. The sitting president appoints for confirmation who he chooses, but they are not confirmed until the Congress confirm them. After their confirmation by Congress they become new U.S. Attorneys. The President can fire them for cause, which is not at will, there has to be a legitimate reason or the Congress will get involved as has happened to Alberto Gonzales.

Corporate and Government [fascism] Corruption and Fraud, could it be because the corporations are stripping the resources of the people from our country? Could it be? Do you think?

CEO Pay: 364 Times More Than Workers'
By Jeanne Sahadi
CNNMoney.com

Wednesday 29 August 2007

The wage gap is still gaping, according to a new report. But it's not nearly as wide as the gap between private equity managers and everyone else, including CEOs.

New York - Pay comparisons almost always leave someone feeling dwarfed, and none more so than the CEO-to-worker pay gap. But even CEOs have reason to feel seriously dwarfed these days, thanks to the outsized paychecks of private equity and hedge fund managers.

The average CEO of a large U.S. company made roughly $10.8 million last year, or 364 times that of U.S. full-time and part-time workers, who made an average of $29,544, according to a joint analysis released Wednesday by the liberal Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.

That gap is down from 411 times in 2005 and well-below the record high of 525 times recorded in 2000. But the comparison isn't exactly apples-to-apples, in part because IPS and UFE changed how they measured CEO options pay this year.

The IPS and UFE pay-gap numbers are also wider than some other measures of CEO-to-worker pay because they count both full-time and part-time workers in their calculations, which effectively lowers workers' average pay due to fewer hours worked.

If you just consider the average compensation (wages plus benefits) of full-time year-round workers in non-managerial jobs - roughly $40,000 - CEO pay is more like 270 times bigger than the average Joe's. That's still a far cry from days gone by. In 1989, for instance, U.S. CEOs of large companies earned 71 times more than the average worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

The IPS/UFE report also compared U.S. CEO pay to that of leaders in other fields and other countries. The top 20 CEOs of U.S. companies made an average of $36.4 million in 2006. That's 204 times that of the 20 highest paid U.S. military generals, and 38 times that of the 20 highest-paid non-profit leaders. They also made three times more than the top 20 CEOs of European companies who had booked higher sales numbers than their U.S. counterparts.

The pay gap numbers don't include the value of the many perks CEOs receive, which averaged $438,342, according to the report. Nor do they include the pension benefits CEOs receive.

But even including all that, CEO pay can look like chump change next to private equity and hedge fund managers' pay. Those managers made an average of $657.5 million in 2006 - more than 16,000 times what the average full-time worker makes, and roughly 61 times that of the average CEO.

The enormous rise in executive pay in recent years has gotten a lot of attention in the press, the boardroom and around the Beltway.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has instituted greater pay disclosure rules. There is legislation proposed that would give shareholders greater say on pay decisions. And lawmakers have been holding hearings to assess whether to raise the taxes on a portion of private equity and hedge fund managers' compensation.

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How the Neoliberals Stitched Up the Wealth of Nations for Themselves
By George Monbiot
The Guardian UK

Tuesday 28 August 2007

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects.

For the first time the UK's consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort. It laid the foundations for a philosophy of government that is responsible for many, perhaps most, of our contemporary crises.

When the Mont Pelerin Society first met, in 1947, its political project did not have a name. But it knew where it was going. The society's founder, Friedrich von Hayek, remarked that the battle for ideas would take at least a generation to win, but he knew that his intellectual army would attract powerful backers. Its philosophy, which later came to be known as neoliberalism, accorded with the interests of the ultra-rich, so the ultra-rich would pay for it.

Neoliberalism claims that we are best served by maximum market freedom and minimum intervention by the state. The role of government should be confined to creating and defending markets, protecting private property and defending the realm. All other functions are better discharged by private enterprise, which will be prompted by the profit motive to supply essential services. By this means, enterprise is liberated, rational decisions are made and citizens are freed from the dehumanising hand of the state.

This, at any rate, is the theory. But as David Harvey proposes in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism, wherever the neoliberal programme has been implemented, it has caused a massive shift of wealth not just to the top 1%, but to the top tenth of the top 1%. In the US, for instance, the upper 0.1% has already regained the position it held at the beginning of the 1920s. The conditions that neoliberalism demands in order to free human beings from the slavery of the state - minimal taxes, the dismantling of public services and social security, deregulation, the breaking of the unions - just happen to be the conditions required to make the elite even richer, while leaving everyone else to sink or swim. In practice the philosophy developed at Mont Pelerin is little but an elaborate disguise for a wealth grab.

So the question is this: given that the crises I have listed are predictable effects of the dismantling of public services and the deregulation of business and financial markets, given that it damages the interests of nearly everyone, how has neoliberalism come to dominate public life?

Richard Nixon was once forced to concede that "we are all Keynesians now". Even the Republicans supported the interventionist doctrines of John Maynard Keynes. But we are all neoliberals now. Margaret Thatcher kept telling us that "there is no alternative", and by implementing her programmes Clinton, Blair, Brown and the other leaders of what were once progressive parties appear to prove her right.

The first great advantage the neoliberals possessed was an unceasing fountain of money. US oligarchs and their foundations - Coors, Olin, Scaife, Pew and others - have poured hundreds of millions into setting up thinktanks, founding business schools and transforming university economics departments into bastions of almost totalitarian neoliberal thinking. The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institute, the American Enterprise Institute and many others in the US, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the Centre for Policy Studies and the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, were all established to promote this project. Their purpose was to develop the ideas and the language which would mask the real intent of the programme - the restoration of the power of the elite - and package it as a proposal for the betterment of humankind.

Their project was assisted by ideas which arose in a very different quarter. The revolutionary movements of 1968 also sought greater individual liberties, and many of the soixante-huitards saw the state as their oppressor. As Harvey shows, the neoliberals coopted their language and ideas. Some of the anarchists I know still voice notions almost identical to those of the neoliberals: the intent is different, but the consequences very similar.

Hayek's disciples were also able to make use of economic crises. An early experiment took place in New York City, which was hit by budgetary disaster in 1975. Its bankers demanded that the city follow their prescriptions - huge cuts in public services, smashing of the unions, public subsidies for business. In the UK, stagflation, strikes and budgetary breakdown allowed Thatcher, whose ideas were framed by her neoliberal adviser Keith Joseph, to come to the rescue. Her programme worked, but created a new set of crises.

If these opportunities were insufficient, the neoliberals and their backers would use bribery or force. In the US, the Democrats were neutered by new laws on campaign finance. To compete successfully for funding with the Republicans, they would have to give big business what it wanted. The first neoliberal programme of all was implemented in Chile following Pinochet's coup, with the backing of the US government and economists taught by Milton Friedman, one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society. Drumming up support for the project was easy: if you disagreed, you got shot. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank used their power over developing nations to demand the same policies.

But the most powerful promoter of this programme was the media. Most of it is owned by multimillionaires who use it to project the ideas that support their interests. Those ideas which threaten their interests are either ignored or ridiculed. It is through the newspapers and TV channels that the socially destructive notions of a small group of extremists have come to look like common sense. The corporations' tame thinkers sell the project by reframing our political language (for an account of how this happens, see George Lakoff's book, Don't Think of an Elephant!). Nowadays I hear even my progressive friends using terms like wealth creators, tax relief, big government, consumer democracy, red tape, compensation culture, job seekers and benefit cheats. These terms, all invented or promoted by neoliberals, have become so commonplace that they now seem almost neutral.

Neoliberalism, if unchecked, will catalyse crisis after crisis, all of which can be solved only by greater intervention on the part of the state. In confronting it, we must recognise that we will never be able to mobilise the resources its exponents have been given. But as the disasters they have caused unfold, the public will need ever less persuading that it has been misled.

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