China Uighur Repression Based on War on Terror

Here's a great short documentary, about 20 minutes long, that provides the background to the conflict in Xinjiang regarding the Uighurs. China has used the War on Terror to repress these Islamic separatists.

For this Journeyman Pictures film click here.

Here's an account of the latest roundups -- about 160 have died.

Iran Protest Footage

The Week it Unravelled on Obama

When it's all said and done, when we look back at history to try and pinpoint when the tide turned on Obama, we should remember this week.

Sure he may have delivered a game-changing speech to the middle east today, but things are not going well.

It's this week when GM and Chrysler worked through bankruptcy, laying off thousands and defaulting on millions of debts after accepting billions in bailouts, all with the government's consent.

It's this week when the failures of the banking bailout became even clearer, when report after report tell of Americans unable to get anywhere with their banks while they're still getting gouged on credit cards and other collections.

And it's this week in healthcare we may remember as the week when Obama and the Democrats caved, refusing to stand up to an industry that's abused and destroyed our country for too long.

Not to mention Congress reauthorized the war in Afghanistan. See RethinkAfghanistan.com for how the U.S. is killing innocent civilians with errant bombs.

The underlying theme: Failure to stand up to industry. In each case, we're throwing good money after bad why refusing to get tough.

While auto companies are shedding dealerships faster than an Alpaca in a sweater factory, very few voices have questioned whether shutting thousands of dealerships is even necessary. Chrysler and GM insist they need to consolidate, but the dealerships represent very little of their responsibility.

Greg Remensperger, executive president of the oregon Auto Dealers Association, told the AP in an article yesterday said dealerships own the inventory after it's shipped from factories.

"Less competition between dealers only means that the surviving dealers will be able to charge more for vehicles," he said. "There will be no cost savings fro manufactuers. The big losers will be consumers."

On healthcare, reports are swirling that Democrats are considering not enacting a public health plan option unless certain "triggers" are met in the future, such as failures to control costs and bring down premiums. Excuse me? I'd say 47 million uninsured, half of all bankruptcies from health expenses and a failing economy on the backs of healthcare is a pretty big trigger.

According to press reports, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) who just recently luke-warmly supported the public health plan option at all, also supports this trigger idea. In another ominous twist in the healthcare debate, the top staffer for Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana) has become a lobbyist for GE Healthcare. The company makes medical devices and electronic medical record software.

Even a jelly fish has more backbone.

Mortgage Meltdown Madness: The mess behind the financial crisis

Here's the fundamental question of our time: When banks should be doing anything to keep more people in their homes, why are they making it so difficult to do that? The answer is more complicated than Greed, but that's certainly getting warm.

Considering their multi-billion-dollar bailouts, you would think banks and their servicing agents would be happy to extend some of those tax dollars to the people who paid them.

But across America, journalists echo a similar story about what people actually have to go through to try and modify their mortgage and save their house. It's an absolute mess full of rip-off agents and bureaucratic nightmares.

In comes The Nation with the best account I've seen yet, called Mortgage Madness, with the most likely reason why it's so difficult to get a loan modified: It's not in the loan servicer's interest.

Loan agents, operating as private firms contracted by banks, get paid when they collect payments. Wasting time dealing with people's personal issues just isn't part of their bare bones operations they've been running for years. And banks don't offer them much incentive to do so despite federal incentives that the Obama administration offers banks. The Nation story documents well the harassment and utter incompetence among the whole industry.

I wrote about this in part at Miller-McCune.com in March, featuring Horatio Bernard in Baltimore, Maryland. Bernard found himself scammed by a home loan modification scheme and some shoddy communication skills by his local Chase Home Financing branch. The explanation I got at the time from a researcher was that the task to modify so many loans is just too great.

Later I put out a couple stories for KBOO radio in Portland, one about distressed homeowners at a home preservation event and the other about direct action at home foreclosure auctions at the county courthouse. One homeowner said how he had to destroy his credit in order to renogiate his mortgage. Another man told me about how difficult it was to reach a mortgage agent. In the piece on the auctions, I got a feel for the vultures in the back end of this whole process.

The overriding question remained: Why aren't banks and servicers easier to deal with at a time when saving a house is clearly a much better deal than going into foreclosure.

National Public Radio is doing a pretty good job documenting this story, both during its morning and evening news hours and through Chicago Public Radio's This American Life. This morning's story on trying to buy homes on short sales is another good example.

But this piece, Are there more foreclosures than necessary?, part of Planet Money, comes closest to addressing the question. His answer is this: Refinancing or dropping the principle of a loan reflects on the bank's balance sheets immediately, but foreclosure today won't reflect on the bottom line for another year. And banks are only concerned with the here and now.

Healthcare Lobby Turns on Obama, Mounts Attack

In the two weeks following a so-called landmark agreement that healthcare industry leaders would trim their own growth by 1.5 percent per year, industry lobby groups behind the scenes were mounting million-dollar advertising campaigns against key planks in the Obama plan, reports the Washington Post.

Hospitals and insurers came out just a few days after the White House photo op last week to say Obama had the story wrong. He overstated their agreement. They had not pledged steady cuts -- $2 trillion over 10 years, according to the New York Times.

Health care leaders who attended the meeting have a different interpretation. They say they agreed to slow health spending in a more gradual way and did not pledge specific year-by-year cuts.

“There’s been a lot of misunderstanding that has caused a lot of consternation among our members,” said Richard J. Umbdenstock, the president of the American Hospital Association. “I’ve spent the better part of the last three days trying to deal with it.” Read more >>

A week after the White House photo op, the Washington Post reported that Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina was planning ads in direct opposition to a public health plan option.

As part of what it calls an "informational website," the company has hired an outside PR company to make a series of videos sounding the alarm about a government-sponsored health insurance option, known as the public plan. Obama has consistently maintained that a government-run plan, absent high-paid executives and the need for profits, could be a more affordable option for Americans who have trouble purchasing private insurance. The industry argues that creating a public insurance program will undermine the marketplace and eventually lead to a single-payer style system.

In three 30-second videos, the insurer paints a picture of a future system in which patients wait months for appointments and can't choose their own doctors, according to storyboards of the videos obtained by the Washington Post. Read more >>

The ads resemble “Harry and Louise” type ads that helped defeat Hillary Clinton’s plan in the mid-90s. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman recalled what Obama said about such attacks during the campaign:

Back during the Democratic primary campaign, Mr. Obama argued that the Clintons had failed in their 1993 attempt to reform health care because they had been insufficiently inclusive. He promised instead to gather all the stakeholders, including the insurance companies, around a “big table.” And that May 11 event was, of course, intended precisely to show this big-table strategy in action.

But what if interest groups showed up at the big table, then blocked reform? Back then, Mr. Obama assured voters that he would get tough: “If those insurance companies and drug companies start trying to run ads with Harry and Louise, I’ll run my own ads as president. I’ll get on television and say ‘Harry and Louise are lying.’ ”

The question now is whether he really meant it. Read more >>

Healthcare Industry's Public Desperation

The healthcare industry must really be getting desperate now, digging down into the bottom of the barrell for concessions when millions are spent in opposition.

This weekend, industry leaders announced plans to cut the rate of cost growth by 1.5 percent per year, amounting to $2 trillion in savings over 10 years. Some compromise when insurance rates go up 15 percent per year.

It's all theoretical. Once again, the industry offers as a concession to stop screwing us over, just a little. "We'll stop overcharging you by 1 percent," they say. "Aren't you happy?"

Make no mistake about it. This is a desperate attempt to thwart any true reform. Here's a good piece of skeptical journalism from Robert Pear at the NY Times that appeared yesterday:

If history is a guide, their commitments may not produce the promised savings. Their proposals are vague — promising, for example, to reduce both “overuse and underuse of health care.” None of the proposals are enforceable, and none of the savings are guaranteed. Without such a guarantee, budget rules would normally prevent Congress from using the savings to pay for new initiatives to cover the uninsured. At this point, cost control is little more than a shared aspiration.

The piece goes on to describe past promises during the Carter and Clinton administrations of similar cost saving measures only to have past practices resume.

Henry J. Aaron, a health economist at the Brookings Institution, said that when he heard the industry’s promises on Monday, “I had a Rip van Winkle moment, as if I had fallen asleep in 1977 and woke up again this morning.”

Mr. Aaron served in the administration of President Jimmy Carter, whose proposal for hospital cost controls prompted the industry to undertake a short-lived “voluntary effort.”

After President Bill Clinton proposed an overhaul of the health care system in 1993 and 1994, the growth of health spending slowed, only to surge a few years later.

Today, while the healthcare industry says they can cut costs, they are also arguing not to reduce wasteful, over payments to Medicare Advantage plans. And they're spending millions of dollars to defeat healthcare reform. Doesn't that strike you as contradictory?

Wealthy healthcare industry leaders have enlisted swift-boaters CRC Public Relations to oppose Obama's health reform plan. CRC hired Rick Scott, a former hospital CEO with a history of fraud to head the newly formed Conservatives for Patients' Rights. Scott is spending $5 million of his own money and $15 million in donations, according to the Washington Post. The ads commonly bring up long lines and waiting lists in Britain and Canada, which really is nothing compared to the horrors we have going on in our country right now.

Conservatives for Patients' Rights spent about $600,000 a month on ads in March and April but is ratcheting up its buy for May to more than $1 million, CRC representatives said. Scott has also spent recent weeks meeting with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and addressing conservative groups in Washington, including the influential weekly breakfast organized by anti-tax activist Grover Norquist.

Meanwhile, Health Care for America Now! has about $600,000 all total to spend on media ads, some of which it spent this week calling out key Democrats such as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden.

Drone Pilots in AC Trailers Outside Vegas

I know there's been plenty of coverage about the use of unmanned drones and lots of stories about the pilots who leave a suburban American home in the morning to fight in a war 7,000 miles away by remote control during the day. (I hear a good account comes in PW Singer's book Wired for War but I'm waiting for it in paperback.)

Regardless, 60 Minutes this week featured the always-stunning story of these unmanned drone pilots with their bird's eye view of the battlefield from an air conditioned trailer outside Las Vegas. It just figures these guys would be in Vegas.

It shows how drone pilots pull guard duty on troops in Afghanistan while they sleep and how soldiers rely on their aerial surveillance when out on patrol.

The military released footage of what the drone pilots see, but for those who have watched the war play out on Youtube over the years, you may be familiar with drone strikes. When you hear the pilots talking over the radio, it shows how dicey things can be. Check out this clip of a hit on an apparent terrorist camp where the pilots are trying to sort out which building is the mosque and later see people streaming out of the mosque.

Here's a clip of the bombing strike on Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq for a few years when we had so much trouble there in 2006. Though it's an F-16 hit, the view is similar to what pilots see flying drones. I reference it so you can see how devestating collateral damage can be in a crowded distrist.

Here's Singer's take on Youtube on the Youtube phenonemon while referencing drones. What a segue.

"We have the ability to see more, but feel less," Singer said.

It's plain creepy that these guys, by a flick of a joystick, can turn war into a video game. The logical next step is unmanned humvees and tanks with robotic ground troops. And that should scare the living shit out of everybody.

While I'm at it, if you want to see a harrowing ambush that really demonstrates the "fog of war," here it is. Here's the extreme on the lighter side of the Youtube effect as troops eavesdrop on a farmer with night-vision video.

Here's the 60 minutes piece.

Karsai Speaks Out Against Civilian Deaths As Reelection Nears

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai might wear a blanket over his shoulders like a geriatric, but he's no pathetic old sickly man.

He disputed Obama Administration claims that he doesn't do enough to fight corruption with this zinger reported by the NY Times:

He said instead that any gulf between the countries had more to do with the civilian toll of American airstrikes in Afghanistan.

Karzai warned in another article that "civilian casualties were fast turning ordinary Afghans against the United States." He then called for an end to air strikes, something US officials said would be like fighting with one hand tied behind their backs.

Karzai, meanwhile, is turning around in his own country's opinion polls nearing reelection.

Apparently, Obama and Karzai are off to a bumpy start. Karzai reminisced in one article about his friendly relationship with G.W. and how corruption charges and civilian death tolls have created friction between the two leaders.

Airstrikes last week -- likely from unmanned drones -- in western Farah Afghanistan reportedly killed more than 100 civilians. Human rights groups report burns on civilians consistent with white phosphorous, a chemical used to illuminate battlefields and banned for direct use against combatants. US officials say Taliban insurgents are to blame, while the US acknowledges using the chemical only for its intended purpose.

All this white phophorous talk is reminiscent of human rights abuses by Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza earlier this year. Are we heading down the same path of endless occupation and warfare?

Smithfield Gets Washington Post Scrutiny

Apparently the Washington Post shares my reasoning: Even if Smithfield Farms' La Gloria factory hog farm isn't to blame for the swine flu, it's as good a time as ever to point out how it and other factory farms are a disaster for human and environmental health.

This from the Washington Post on Sunday:

For years, farmers in the communities that dot this arid valley complained about the effects of the industrial pig farms that had multiplied near their fields.

The overpowering stench gave them headaches and drove them from their homes. Packs of wild dogs feasted on discarded pig carcasses and occasionally turned on their children and pets. There were fears that vast lagoons of excrement from more than 1 million hogs might seep into their groundwater.

Later on.

Smithfield moved into Mexico in anticipation of the expanding market after the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. Granjas Carroll is a 50-50 joint venture between Smithfield and Agroindustrias Unidas de Mexico. Its pigs are raised under a "vertical integration" method that packs thousands of animals into identical barns covered with metal roofs. The pigs do little except eat and grow before being slaughtered. When they defecate, the waste falls through slatted wooden floors and is then flushed through pipes into open-air pits the size of two football fields, which the company calls lagoons and says are built with an impervious liner to avoid leakage.

Large-scale industrialized farming poses a number of health risks, according to a recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They include possible contamination of groundwater and increased risk of transmission of "new or novel viruses" such as swine or avian flu.

Health Insurers Concede Yet Another Injustice

I'm starting to enjoy the reaction we're getting from the health insurance industry these days.

On Wednesday, its industry trade group -- American Health Insurance Plans -- said it would agree not to charge women higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs.

This obviously begs the question: Why were they charging women more to begin with? Oh I see, the health insurance industry's idea of compromise is offering to do what they should have been doing all along anyway.

It's well documented from other recent stories including this one from NPR that women have historically paid higher premiums, let alone co-pays and out-of-pocket costs.

From the NY Times:

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, told Ms. Ignagni, “The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change.”

Mr. Kerry introduced a bill on Tuesday to prohibit insurers from considering sex as a factor in setting premiums for policies in the individual insurance market.

Women are often charged 25 percent to 50 percent more than men for insurance providing identical coverage.

This latest so-called concession comes after the industry said in November that it would agree to cover everyone if -- and only if -- everyone was forced to buy insurance and there would be no government-run health plan option.

If I were someone going into the negotiating room with these people, the public health plan option is completely off the table. We can find ways to bridge the difference between covering everyone and an individual mandate.

So there we have it.

Not so fast.

No one is sure any of this will save costs.

Scathing NY Times Piece Hits Smithfield Farms

Virginia-based Smithfield Farms and every factory farm out there should take notice. A whole town of Mexicans happen to get sick downwind from one of your factory hog farms and the whole world thinks you're the cause of a pandemic. That's not what CEO Larry Pope would have you believe.

Yesterday the New York Times puts out this massive expose with everything you'll ever want to know about Smithfield's operations in Poland and Romania where they basically mimicked their Mexican strategy, which is to lay waste and break the law. This from NY Times.

It moved with such speed that sometimes it failed to secure environmental permits or inform the authorities about pig deaths — lapses that emerged after swine fever swept through three Romanian hog compounds in 2007, two of which were operating without permits. Some 67,000 hogs died or were destroyed, with infected and healthy pigs shot to stanch the spread.

Later on.

The impact on the environment is even more marked. With almost 40 farms in western Romania, Smithfield has built enormous metal manure containers to inject waste into the soil. “We go crazy with the daily smell,” said Aura Danielescu, the principal of a school in Masloc, who closes her windows tight.

Familiarize yourself with the Smithfield label so you can participate in the boycott. It doesn't take much, just remember when you're shopping to pass it by.

Here's something interesting from the Smithfield Web site's FAQ section.

Mold appears only on uncooked ham or bacon products. Simply wash off in hot water and scrub mold off with a stiff brush before cooking. Like fine aged cheese, dry cured hams and bacon tend to mold under certain conditions.

With Smithfield bacon, you're getting a lot worse than mold for your money.

Protesters Disrupt Senate Committee for Single-Payer

I thought it was really poor that Sen. Max Baucus, Democrat in charge of the Finance Committee, laughs at these demonstrators at first, suggesting what he needs is more police in response to the protester saying single-payer needs a seat at the table. He redeems himself a bit with his statements at the end. But nonetheless, these Senators won't put single-payer on the table. What gives?

Banks win, homeowners lose in Senate

Check out my latest radio story on KBOO 90.7 about home foreclosures in Portland and how banks are still failing to modify loans.

The following editorial is reprinted here from the only non-profit mainstream daily newspaper in the country, the St. Petersburg Times.

For original article click here.

May 5, 2009 -- The score: Banks 1, Homeowners 0. That is because the U.S. Senate has caved in to the banking lobby and refused to allow bankruptcy judges to modify primary residential mortgages for homeowners facing foreclosure. This would have been the best way to prevent hundreds of thousands of foreclosures, because the threat of court-mandated modifications would have prodded more banks and loan servicers into negotiating in good faith with struggling homeowners. President Barack Obama, who claimed to support the idea, didn't fight hard enough for it and the banks won.

The Senate defeated an amendment last week to give bankruptcy judges the power to alter the terms of home mortgages. The opponents who sided with the mortgage industry over homeowners included 12 Democrats and 39 Republicans — including Florida Republican Mel Martinez. You would think a senator from the state with the second highest mortgage foreclosure rate in the country last year would have seen the wisdom of giving bankruptcy judges more discretion. Florida Democrat Bill Nelson showed commendable backbone, standing up to the banking lobby and voting for the amendment.

The banks fought hard to send this modest initiative down in flames and prevent federal judges from lowering interest rates, extending payment periods or reducing principal — known in banking parlance as "cramdown." Primary residential mortgages are the only type of loan that cannot be restructured in bankruptcy court.

Majority Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois, who was the measure's chief champion, declared that banks "are still the most powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place." Many of these banks, including Wells Fargo, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, are recipients of taxpayer-funded bailout money. Essentially, they are using taxpayers' money to fight against a public policy that would have helped many taxpayers — including many in Florida. And the Senate let them win.

Smithfield CEO Denies Swine Flu Connection; Stock Rises

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but it appears that a local television station -- WTKR in Norfolk, Virgina -- actually did some damn good investigative reporting on the swine flu. Looks like Smithfield Farms took notice of reporter Mike Mather as well. Mather lands the first interview with Smithfield CEO Larry Pope for his unequivocal denial.

And he went to La Gloria and didn't wear a mask.

"Had it not been called the swine flu, Smithfield wouldn't even be involved in this discussion at all," Pope said. "You find a boy in southern Mexico who gets sick. There happens to be a Smithfield facility near it and Boom, you have the linkage right there by some people's standards."

Smithfield volunteered to genetically test its hogs outside La Gloria and had its own consultants deliver samples to a University of Mexico laboratory. Results are due out next week, but Smithfield hasn't decided yet whether to make those results public.

Say what? I guess it depends on the outcome, of course. Initial tests by Mexican officials reportedly failed to find swine flu on Smithfield hogs, instead linking it possibly to Asian pigs.

Pope was already hedging. "Even if that farm is determined to have that (H1N1 flu), there's still no indication it went from that farm to that little boy."

Pope had been in the news lately lamenting how the company's poor press coverage was hurting pork sales. But wait, Oh Gee Willakers, the stock rose again just today thanks in part to positive press such as this piece in Business Week, which linked the strain to Canadian pigs.

I would say even if Smithfield isn't to blame for the flu outbreak, it's as good a time as ever to expose its despicable practices thanks to NAFTA which let it poison poor Mexican towns. Here's a great Rolling Stones piece many people are referencing on the net.

We should rewrite our trade agreements immediately and boycott factory farmed meat products. Meat labeled "organic" is your best bet. Remember Michael Pollan's advice: Eat food, Not too much, Mostly plants.


While we're on the topic of swine flu, I'd like to point out the recent stats on the outbreak. The death toll dropped quite a bit from initial counts. Check out this piece in the Philippine News with a nice rundown about the side effects of Tamiflu (which by the way Donald Rumsfeld is heavily involved through maker Gilead Sciences) and chances the virus could be germ warfare:

According to the World Health Organization, 1,490 confirmed swine flu cases have now been reported in 21 countries, resulting in a total of 30 deaths. It said Mexico has reported 822 confirmed cases, including 29 deaths. No deaths from the virus have occurred in countries other than Mexico and the United States, WHO said.

How NAFTA Caused the Swine Flu

With all the nonstop around the clock threat level alerts by every media outlet in America, surprisingly little if any coverage has been given to the cause or the origin of the swine (ahem) H1N1 flu virus.

After Mexican media reported for a month about the virus origin, on Friday news finally made the US mainstream media that the epicenter of the swine flu was La Gloria, a town of 3,000 people located downwind from the Carroll Ranches hog farm owned and operated by Virginia-based Smithfield Farms. Residents had reported falling ill since February. Mexican officials said on Saturday, they didn't believe Smithfield could be to blame and that the virus came from Asia. But questions remain.

Here's a video from the AP about Ground Zero in La Gloria outside Mexico City and the first known boy to contract the virus.



Even with a decent amount of coverage about the origin, virtually none of the mainstream outlets would dare question the root cause of the pandemic, which is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Of course, Democracy Now! was one of the first to connect the dots.

Here's another good article by New America Media.

The following comes from a piece by Al Giordano, special to the Narco News, one of the best rundowns of events and links to NAFTA that I found on-line.

April 29, 2009 --US and Mexico authorities claim that neither knew about the “swine flu” outbreak until April 24. But after hundreds of residents of a town in Veracruz, Mexico, came down with its symptoms, the story had already hit the Mexican national press by April 5. The daily La Jornada reported:

Clouds of flies emanate from the rusty lagoons where the Carroll Ranches business tosses the fecal wastes of its pig farms, and the open-air contamination is already generating an epidemic of respiratory infections in the town of La Gloria, in the Perote Valley, according to Town Administrator Bertha Crisóstomo López.

The town has 3,000 inhabitants, hundreds of whom reported severe flu symptoms in March.

CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta, reporting from Mexico, has identified a La Gloria child who contracted the first case of identified “swine flu” in February as “patient zero,” five-year-old Edgar Hernández, now a survivor of the disease.

By April 15 – nine days before Mexican federal authorities of the regime of President Felipe Calderon acknowledged any problem at all – the local daily newspaper, Marcha, reported that a company called Carroll Ranches was “the cause of the epidemic.”

La Jornada columnist Julio Hernández López connects the corporate dots to explain how the Virginia-based Smithfield Farms came to Mexico: In 1985, Smithfield Farms received what was, at the time, the most expensive fine in history – $12.6 million – for violating the US Clean Water Act at its pig facilities near the Pagan River in Smithfield, Virginia, a tributary that flows into the Chesapeake Bay. The company, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped hog waste into the river.

It was a case in which US environmental law succeeded in forcing a polluter, Smithfield Farms, to construct a sewage treatment plant at that facility after decades of using the river as a mega-toilet. But “free trade” opened a path for Smithfield Farms to simply move its harmful practices next door into Mexico so that it could evade the tougher US regulators.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect on January 1, 1994. That very same year Smithfield Farms opened the “Carroll Ranches” in the Mexican state of Veracruz through a new subsidiary corporation, “Agroindustrias de México.”

Unlike what law enforcers forced upon Smithfield Farms in the US, the new Mexican facility – processing 800,000 pigs into bacon and other products per year – does not have a sewage treatment plant.

According to Rolling Stone magazine, Smithfield slaughters an estimated 27 million hogs a year to produce more than six billion pounds of packaged pork products. (The Veracruz facility thus constitutes about three percent of its total production.)

Reporter Jeff Teitz reported in 2006 on the conditions in Smithfield’s US facilities (remember: what you are about to read describes conditions that are more sanitary and regulated than those in Mexico):

Smithfield’s pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs—anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.

The temperature inside hog houses is often hotter than ninety degrees. The air, saturated almost to the point of precipitation with gases from shit and chemicals, can be lethal to the pigs. Enormous exhaust fans run twenty-four hours a day. The ventilation systems function like the ventilators of terminal patients: If they break down for any length of time, pigs start dying.

Consider what happens when such forms of massive pork production move to unregulated territory where Mexican authorities allow wealthy interests to do business without adequate oversight, abusing workers and the environment both. And there it is: The violence wrought by NAFTA in clear and understandable human terms.

The so-called “swine flu” exploded because an environmental disaster simply moved (and with it, took jobs from US workers) to Mexico where environmental and worker safety laws, if they exist, are not enforced against powerful multinational corporations.

False mental constructs of borders – the kind that cause US and Mexican citizens alike to imagine a flu strain like this one invading their nations from other lands – are taking a long overdue hit by the current “swine flu” media frenzy. In this case, US-Mexico trade policy created a time bomb in Veracruz that has already murdered more than 150 Mexican citizens, and at least one child in the US, by creating a gigantic Petri dish in the form pig farms to generate bacon and ham for international sale.

None of that indicates that this flu strain was born in Mexico, but, rather, that the North American Free Trade Agreement created the optimal conditions for the flu to gestate and become, at minimum, epidemic in La Gloria and, now, Mexico City, and threatens to become international pandemic.

Welcome to the aftermath of “free trade.” Authorities now want you to grab a hospital facemask and avoid human contact until the outbreak hopefully blows over. And if you start to feel dizzy, or a flush with fever, or other symptoms begin to molest you or your children, remember this: The real name of this infirmity is “The NAFTA Flu,” the first of what may well emerge as many new illnesses to emerge internationally as the direct result of “free trade” agreements that allow companies like Smithfield Farms to escape health, safety and environmental laws.

Oregon regulators under fire for health insurance rate hike approval

Attorney Charlie Ringo accused government watchdogs who oversee the Oregon health insurance industry today of an “outrageous breach of public trust.”

Ringo made the case before an administrative law judge in Tualitan on behalf of Karen Kirsch, a Regence individual health plan holder who along with 100,000 other Oregonians had their rates increased by 26 percent last July.

"Karen Kirsch said enough is enough," Ringo said. "She wasn't going to put up with a rate review process wholly inadequate for protecting Oregonians. It's unfair to 100,000 others."

Today's hearing comes eight months after the rate hike led a group of health reform advocates to rally on the streets outside the downtown Regence office in opposition to the hike.

In his opening statements, Ringo said the rate increase itself was not the issue. It was how the matter was decided.

Ringo suggests that political pressures may have led to the rate approval while rank and file employees within the department recommended approving a much lower rate increase.

Ringo cites a high-level meeting between Regence President Bart McMullan and Department Director Cory Streisinger just days before the final approval. One email between actuaries was titled “Gaming the System.”

Under state law, the Department of Consumer and Business Affairs has the power to approve or reject individual and small group health insurance rates. Streisinger was subpoened to testify, and the law judge, Allison Webster, tried to compel her testimony but Streisinger refused because she has the final say in the rate approval despite any of the judge's ruling.

The current administrative hearing is the first of its kind thanks in part to a law passed in 2007 making the rate filings a matter of public record on the Internet. To review other rate filings and to file an insurance complaint go to the Oregon Insurance Division Web site and click on Consumers.

Israeli war crimes well documented

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem documents on its Web site multiple instances of human rights abuses, violations of international law and war crimes committed by Israeli Defense Forces in their three-week siege of Gaza.

The crimes include the shooting of unarmed civilians, children bombed while standing in the street, and a widely reported story of Gaza residents shot while waving white flags and abiding by IDF orders. While the world shies away from the pictures of war, Palestinians have turned to Google with albums full of casualties.

Listen also this PRI radio report with testimony from Human Rights Watch that documents white phosphurous used by IDF troops to kill civilians in homes and schools.

Meanwhile, the tunnels from Gaza into Egypt are working again as evidenced by the NBC story embedded below.

There should be no doubt that US support in the form of weapons should end immediately. Israel has committed far too many war crimes to cast them aside as isolated incidents. They have abused our support just like the Bush Administration abused the support of the rest of the world after 9/11. It's one thing for President Obama to close Guantanamo and bring an end to the Iraq war, but quite another to prevent US weapons companies from doing business with Israel. This is clearly, without question, the right thing to do.

Now is the time to make your voice heard and email Obama today through the new Whitehouse.gov.

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Bush departs as Israel polishes off Gaza; no coincidence

President Bush gave his final (thank God) press conference the other day in which he demonstrated himself to be the same stupid moron, who can't control his body language or demeanor, that he showed himself to be more than eight years ago when he introduced himself to the American people.

It's no coincidence that Israel will conclude its pummeling of Gaza, having killed more than 1,100 (roughly 500 of whom were women and children) as the Obama administration prepares to take office. How many war crimes and violations of international law must Israel commit before some kind of International court takes action? I suppose after they prosecute Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld and Gonzalez for torture. The NY Times offers this thorough piece on the legal issues of war.

Israel yesterday, for the second time during the three week offensive, shelled a UN headquarters. The first, near the beginning of operations killed 40 Palestinians who sought refuge at the UN compound. The attack on the UN compound the other day destroyed hundreds of pounds of emergency aid supplies. The United Nations accused Israel of using white phosphurous,i an illegal substance under International law for anything other than illuminating a battlefield. Although Israel leaders claimed that Hamas fighters were firing from the compound, according to this New York Times report, an Israeli commander admitted privately that Hamas fighters were 100 yards or so from the compound. This comes also after an incident where Israeli troops shelled a house with more than 30 people in it and refused to allow relief workers, NPR reported.

Rest In Peace Horatio Alger

Like any nightmare, it takes awhile before you realize you're awake. It's taken me about three weeks (maybe four) to come to grips with the great power shift we're embarking on right now with Obama. I could hardly process all the policies we could change, shutting down Guantanamo Bay, restoring Habeas Corpus, reducing carbon emissions and ending No Child Left Behind. Here's a few thoughts on the changing world around us.

We live in cruel and unusual times. The death of the American Dream seems to have given off one last gasp of belly acid, lulling us into perhaps one final and eternal sleep. A bomb went off in a bank just south of here the other day in Woodburn. Could terrorism strike in Who-Knows-Where, Oregon? Conceivable, yes. But they arrested a White Man. Go back to bed. Yes, the nation is gripped by fear. Faced with the reality that a Black Man will in fact become President of the United States, gun sales across the country have soared. If the election showed that Hope had won over Fear, it didn’t prove there wasn’t still a healthy amount of mistrust and downright terror through Middle America.

In a month from now, the Great White Whale will finally vacate its illegitimate seat on the throne and condemn itself to the waste bin of seriously fucked up leaders who did more to bring the world to ruin than anything else. If the great gifts of all the bodhisattvas were to come true, Bush & Rumsfeld & Cheney & Rove would all find themselves behind bars for one simple but enormous dereliction of civil misconduct and modern law: They authorized torture. The senate report that came out last week proved it, that torture was OK’d at the highest levels, most notably Rumsfeld. Case closed. Shackle the bastards and rope ‘em up. These are no innocent times.

For the past eight years we’ve been living in the end times, most of us too despair to leave the confines of our fortified dwellings. We’ve been bombarded by mortars on all sides, first the environment, then education and of course the Great Myth of the War on Terror. We’ve become so used to defeat that it’s hardly real that the man who should take his place is the embodiment of such Hope and Promise. We can hardly imagine where to begin in putting our world back together.

But first, the reptile scum must stamp their last bloody tracks on our Constitution. The Bush years were a sad, predictable fate for a country that never seems to learn anything from history, G.W. himself the walking flesh of the ugliest – downright reptilian – American the world would ever know. Before this, people had only been acquainted with the cartoon version played by Chevy Chase and others. Thirty years after the great pigfucker of them all – Nixon – was thrown from office and his henchmen imprisoned, we allowed the same bunch of criminals to waltz right back into our house, acting naïve enough to believe that they couldn’t do that much damage. How bad could it be? Eight years later, and the death and destruction is much higher than we had ever imagined. Every day, we learn more about the house of cards we call our economy. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being thrown around like monopoly money. Retirement accounts are dropping like rotting apples, leaving the American dream to decay in the weeds. It’s dead, good and buried. Rest In Peace, Horatio Alger.

So we emerge now, like beasts from hibernation, to rebuild our nation’s greatest promise. But let us reflect on what we’ve learned not only about the Bush crime ring and degenerate scumsuckers of which they surround, but the nature of our own souls faced with such evil. I came over the years to believe, as Kurt Vonnegut once did, that street protests were about as effective as a banana cream pie. We took to causes in different ways, challenging a jaded generation from the 60s to look down over their bifocals and realize we were a lot more effective than they ever were because most of us actually cared about the causes and didn’t want to just dance around smoking dope and playing bongo drums on account of evil times. But we all should question whether we did enough to confront the darkness. I don’t know if I really did. I guess no amount of confrontation to such monumental injustice could live up to any decent notions of “reasonable” response. We ran out the clock and swore we’d move to Canada when alas: Enough American people woke up to elect the right man.

Iraq veterans against the war arraigned in debate arrests

Election reform savior could be close Senate races

While overall election reform may have fallen to the wayside, at least for the General Accounting Office and the mainstream media, there is a silver lining this year that could keep the issue in the national spotlight: Three close Senate races are still undecided.

In Alaska, serious concerns are being raised about election results where turnout numbers were substantially down from 2004 despite the state's own governor being on the ticket, a record12 percent increase in the August caucuses and never-before-seen record crowds at Obama rallies leading up to Election Day. Check out this post by Shannyn Moore, an Alaska blogger along with this story in the Washington Post. Alaska, by the way, uses optical scanners by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold) and it has a history of fishy (Halibut sized) wholly nontransparent election results. Here's Nate Silver's take at Fivethirtyeight.com where he asks, "What in the hell happened in Alaska?"

In Georgia, the runoff election between Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R) and Jim Martin (D) will be conducted once again on paperless, touschreen Accuvote voting machines made by Premier, the same machines also used in 2002 when Chambliss unseated Sen. Max Cleland (D) in another extremely stinky situation. The story, reported most extensively by Raw Story, involves a security patch that was hand-delivered by Diebold/Premier CEO Bob Urosevich and installed in just two Democrat-heavy counties. Regardless of a suspect security patch, touchscreen/DRE voting systems -- especially without a paper trail as is the case in GA -- are the most prone to failure and manipulation based on report after report by computer scientists. These same machines used in much of Georgia were used in Pennsylvania as well where a judge impounded yesterday all 185 of the completely unverifiable Diebold touchscreen voting machines. The same machines also had trouble in Colorado.

Touchscreen machines by ES&S, by the way, shown to be easily recalibrated had considerable difficulty in several states and reported two years ago by Dan Rather.

Finally, in Minnesota, the recount of the Franken (D) v. Norm Coleman (R-incumbent) race -- now within something like 200 votes -- will undoubtedly shed light on the ES&S M-100 optical scanners that caused problems in Michigan last week. Also, two of Minnesota's three largest counties use the Diebold Accuvote OS scanners, the same devices shown in the documentary Hacking Democracy to be easily hacked. Don't these election officials get the Internet? Good stories are at the Bradblog here and at Wired magazine's Threat Level blog here

For a complete rundown of how machines for all four of the top voting machine manufacturers failed misserably this year, read John Gideon's Daily Voting News here. But don't consult the Associated Press or CBS News, among other sources, who declared that the voting system worked. Guess what schmuckos? It worked because the election was a landslide. Check out the close Senate races and the countless vote flipping and malfunction stories (they seemed to sprout up everywhere on Tuesday: here's another rundown) and you'll see a world of hurt that if not addressed soon will continue to amount to a serious national security risk.

Will widespread election problems be forgotten with Obama landslide?

Today, we may breath easier. Our image in the eyes of the world has instantly been redeemed. We have turned the tide of history. This is a victory for the middle class and the poor, a victory of hope over fear that says we don't want to hear one more word from Sarah Palin and John McCain. Thank God.

Besides the overwhelming historical significance, Barack Hussein Obama will be a tremendous president.

In Portland, Oregon the streets were filled with revelers. An impromptu rendition of the Star Spangled Banner broke out at Pioneer Square. (see video below) People marched down Broadway in celebration complete with what looked and sounded like the March Fourth Marching Band (though I can't find the video I saw on TV last night). It was nice to see the city filled with celebration rather than riots, which I'm sure was planned had McCain won.

I was on the radio last night broadcasting live at KBOO 90.7 FM in Portland. You can listen to some of what we put out here.

Two noteworthy observations: #1 CNN used a hologram to beam reporters into the studio. I can't wait to see it on the Daily Show. #2 Sometime in the late afternoon the McCain-Palin campaign put out their last and final press release, like a final shot from a pistol as they go down, in which they detail alleged voter fraud in several battleground states. Topping the list is a claim that a "black panther" is threatening voters in Pennsylvania. Read this hilarious press release here, the last gasp of the McCain campaign.

As I write this on Wednesday morning, several states are still undecided. In Missouri, McCain is ahead by just about 6,000 votes. In North Carolina, Obama is up by about 12,000 votes.

In the Senate races, Al Franken (D) is calling for a recount with results showing he's behind by just 700 votes in Minnesota. Franken raised the issue of irregularities in a statement this morning saying, for instance, that in Minneapolis, poll workers ran out of registration materials. Funny thing is, just the day before, the GOP leveled yet another attack on ACORN, this one is Minnesota alleging the voter rolls were rife with irregularities. The only difference is the GOP claims have nothing to do with actual voters and Franken's claim does.

In Oregon, It looks like Sen. Gordon Smith (R) took a 7,000 vote lead over Jeff Merkley overnight, but neither side has declared anything yet still with 67 percent of precincts reporting. Several pollsters are calling it for Merkley because of how many votes remain to be counted from Democrat-rich Portland. Saxby Chambliss (R) looks like he might keep his senate seat (barely) in Georgia, now with a lead of about 14,000 votes. But reports are saying there will be a runoff election in December because Chambliss failed to get more than 50 percent of the vote. So a lot could change.

In Alaska, Ted Stevens (R) is maintaining a 4,000 vote lead against Mark Begich. Hello Senator Palin.

California meanwhile passed a ban on gay marriage (Measure 8) while at the same time passing Measure 2 that gives chickens and other farm animals the right to free range. So let me get this straight: Something like 900,000 Californian's prefer giving animal rights to chickens rather than civil rights to homosexuals. What a bizarre group of people we are. One civil rights barrier at a time I guess.

The real danger with this landslide win for Obama is that the major issues that emerged this year with the election system will be forgotten from the many barriers to voting, outright suppression, voting machine malfunctions and the long, long lines that sprouted up virtually everywhere yesterday.

There are several good sources to get a handle on what people experienced yesterday. One is the Ourvotelive blog based on the 200,000 reports (80,000 on Election Day) called in to 1-866-our-vote.

Here's a quick summary of their reports:

IMPROVE VOTER REGISTRATION PROCESS
The most prevalent and alarming challenge to our electoral process today came in the form of voter registration problems. Voters across the country arrived at the polls to find that their registrations had never been processed, that their names had been purged from voter lists, or that they had missed the registration deadlines altogether. Our first priority for improving this flawed system should be to make the registration process fair, accurate and efficient.

COMBATTING DECEPTIVE PRACTICES
Voters in nearly a dozen states today received misinformation about polling locations, times and rules. It’s easier than ever to disseminate deceptive information quickly – and with new mediums – and our election system needs to adapt accordingly to combat these practices and minimize the effects of partisan tricks.

UPGRADE THE ADMINISTRATION PROCESS
Today in Ohio, Missouri, Virginia and numerous other states, eligible voters were forced to cast provisional ballots because of ballots shortages, and were hampered by poorly trained poll workers, and broken voting machines. These problems could have been avoided if the administration of our electoral process provided officials and poll locations with the resources needed to handle the weight of full participation.

EXPANDING THE VOTE
We saw fewer problems in states with early voting. Early voting takes pressure off the system by easing the crush on Election Day, and by providing a margin for error when testing new systems of election administration. Today’s voters should not be constrained to a single day in which to cast a ballot.

Also, check out the roundup of election snafus at Alternet and the always incredible tally of election problem reports at VotersUnite.org. We should not forget that our election system is seriously flawed. We should push for universal registration and hand-counted paper ballots. Period.

Democrats won't say a word about this (mark my words) because they won, and it would risk sounding like a sore winner. Why else would they say nothing about the seriously unprepared states of Pennsylvania and Virginia and the purging that went on in Colorado. Because they knew they would win anyway. Change will still not come easy. The fight must continue to restore the most basic fundamental component of Democracy: our right to vote.

Here's a news story from last night showing the reaction just a few blocks from my house.

Election Day voting problems MO, NV, MI, PA, FL

Startling reports of voting problems have already started coming in from Missouri, Nevada, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida.

In Missouri, Ourvotelive.org is reporting that more than 700 voters waited over eight hours to cast absentee ballots in Kansas City. The voters were reportedly given misinformation and told to return to the polls after they closed.

Bradblog.com is reporting widespread problems in Nevada and Michigan.

Here's a CNN story that details various problems in nearly a dozen states. CBS news has a similar roundup along with hundreds of other reporters instantly clued in to the disastrous election system in this country.

As expected in Philladelphia, voting machines have broken down forcing poll workers to hand out emergency paper ballots. You can thank the NAACP and not the Obama campaign or the Democratic secretary of state.

Here's an interesting bit of information about absentee voting in Florida. Those in Oregon, where we vote entirely by mail, and Washington where they vote almost entirely by mail, take for granted that we are notified when our signature doesn't appear to match and we have until 10 days after the election to correct it. If there is no signature, however, the ballot is thrown out.

In Florida, any absentee ballot that a poll judge deems the signature doesn't match, that ballot is immediately thrown out. Roughly 500 ballots out of 1,600 in Jacksonville, Florida were thrown out because of this. No ifs ands or buts about it. That's it. No notice. No nothing.

Also in Florida, long lines are being cause by the voter registration computer system, and not the optical scanners.

By the way, are we so jaded in this country by the low expectations of "democracy" that we accept having to wait in enormous lines to cast a ballot. As one African American woman ured at Videothevote.org said in Florida about the lines, "People need to just get over themselves." I'm sorry but eight-hour lines, one-hour lines for that matter, are unacceptable in the United States of America. These election officials knew there would be high voter turnout. These long lines are no accident.

Our Vote Live hot-line reports and judges weigh in from Virginia, Colorado

I've reposted below from Ourvotelive.org. This is a daily summary of the 8,000 reports received yesterday alone into its 1-877-Our-Vote hot line to report problems facing voters throughout the country.

But first, I'm starting to lean toward problem states being Pennsylvania, Virginia and Colorado, but they each may have large enough margins for Obama not to matter. Both PA and VI were identified along with Ohio for being ill-prepared for voter turnout by the Advancement Project. There was a lawsuit by NAACP and others in PA over paper ballots that we've read about here and the Bradblog, which reports many PA counties still can't comply.

In Virginia, last week a similar suit was filed over disparities in how polling place sites were distributed and how ill-prepared the state is to handle voter turnout, especially in poor and minority areas. A judge is expected to hear the case today.

In Colorado Secretary of State Mike Coffman is a dilinquint who thinks he can do whatever he wants.

Just hours after agreeing to restore 20,000 voters to rolls who a judge ruled were improperly purged, Coffman just plain flaunted the judges ruling and purged another 145. The judge on Friday demanded Coffman restore those voters too.

Get this, according to this Denver Post story:

In a statement, Coffman said he believed the judge's original order did not require him to stop the purges but rather said the settlement left the "processes leading up to Election Day" unchanged.

So a judge tells you not to do something and you think he's just referring to that something you did before, and not the same something you plan to continue doing. How interesting. Coffman's going to make a great Congressman.

By the way, be sure to check out PBS Now's terrific coverage of America's election system.

Some key issues from the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law's OurVoteLive.org:

• Katrina displacement: People who moved out of their damaged homes after hurricane Katrina are reporting confusion about their registration status and voting precinct to Election Protection's 866-OUR-VOTE hotline. Voting rights experts are working to resolve these questions to ensure that all eligible voters from the New Orleans area can exercise their right to vote in this historic election.

• Absentee voting problems are being widely reported, with particularly high rates in Virginia, Ohio and Florida. In one example, a caller from Florida had requested absentee ballots for herself and her husband, a stroke survivor who is unable to go to the polls. Neither ballot has arrived and if they don’t, she will be unable to vote as she is unable to leave her husband’s side to go to the polls.

• Polling place problems – such as extremely long lines – are of great concern to voters in Florida and Georgia, particularly in Miami-Dade and Broward counties in Florida, and Fulton County in Georgia.

Election protection toolkit by Black Box Voting

Bev Harris at Black Box Voting sent out an email today featuring the following four videos showing what anyone can do to monitor the polls in their area. I pasted the email below and embedded the Youtube clips for easy viewing. If you're having trouble viewing these through Firefox, download this Flashblocker. It's a clean program and will actually block many of those annoying ads that bog down your web browser. Then click on the 'F' to activate a video.

1. Protect the Count - most locations in America(4 min)
Takes 90 minutes on Election Night. You can even go out after polls have closed. Please also view video # 3, because it shows what to look for to identify tampered poll tapes and the kinds of small errors on tapes that can appear with memory card tampering. Upload any video you take to http://www.videothevote.org - Post link or comments for what you found in the state and jurisdiction at http://www.blackboxvoting.org

2. Protect the Count - Absentee / Central Count (8 min)
(Applies to 13 states with CENTRALLY COUNTED ballots and/or HEAVY ABSENTEE VOTING)
These are the most challenging Protect the Count locations.

3. Protect the Count - New England / New Hampshire(5 min)
If you live anywhere in New England and can drive to any voting machine location in New Hampshire to observe and video poll closing, please do so. If you live anywhere in America that has polling place results tapes, please look at this video to see what tampered tapes look like.
Contact Protect the Count - New Hampshire organizers at protectthevote@gmail.com
You can view the list for which New Hampshire locations use voting machines here:
http://www.bbvforums.org/forums/messages/157/157.html

4. Protect the Count - New York (9 min)
New Yorkers are probably in the best shape for Election 2008, but not for long. This shows the details of how the counting of the lever machines proceeds after polls close, and gives you the details of the fight New Yorkers will have on your hands in 2009.

We're counting on you to be as proactive as possible to fight for your voting rights. The actions in the Protect the Count series are self-serve, simple to do, and designed for just grabbing a neighbor or a buddy and taking action. Don't worry about blanketing every area or organizing the whole state. Don't worry about redundant efforts -- the more the merrier! Just pick a place and DO it. I guarantee it will be a fascinating and important experience, and could provide THE crucial evidence in the very undesirable event that the election turns out not to be fair.

Finally, here's why we should pro-actively protect the vote in places such as Philadelphia. This video was produced by citizen journalists Danielle Ivory and Lagan Sebert for the American News Project.



For more noteworthy citizen reports check these out at videothevote.org.

Are you a real American?

Voting irregularities everywhere: Watch them Live on your PC and do something

Any journalist looking for a story of voting irregularities doesn't have to look much further than a personal computer.

An amazing resource at Our Vote Live runs a live ticker of reports from voters coming into its hot line at 1-866-Our-Vote. I'm noticing a lot of absentee ballot problems and vote-flipping reports happening everywhere. I don't know about you, but I can't watch these reports roll by for very long because it actually makes me feel as though my internal organs are turning inside out. In fact, all this voter suppression news and court battles taking place everywhere is having the same effect.

For instance, check out this story showing two hour lines in Colorado Springs on the last day of early voting where the county decided to go from six polling places two years ago to three polling sites this year despite record breaking turnout. A woman in line reports that she wasn't provided any confirmation of her registration and wasn't granted the absentee ballot she requested.

Or this college kid in Virginia who had his voter registration denied because he used two different types of pens. He explains that the ink ran out in the first pen.

These stories are endless. For a summary of what they are hearing thus far, read this blog post by Joseph Lorenzo Hall, one of the computer scientists who worked on Ohio's Everest report. In particular I thought this was interesting:

A caller from Manassas, Virginia reports (OVL#14318) a possible miscalibration of the machine; however, in this case the extent of the miscalibration seems to vary across the screen. In the EVEREST study of voting systems in Ohio (I was part of that team), we pointed out (see pg. 71) that selective miscalibration could be used as a way to frustrate voter intentions. However, Manassas uses the Sequoia AVC Edge, and in the EVEREST report that attack was specific to the ES&S iVotronic which has a more complicated calibration algorithm (involving 20 individual calibration targets instead of a handful). Anyway, this isn't direct evidence that this is happening or that anyone intentionally miscalibrated a machine, it's just the first evidence I've seen of a voter noting a difference in miscalibration across the screen.

Another really cool way to feel like you're everywhere all at the same time (Isn't that what the Internet is all about?) is to keep an eye on Videothevote.org. Some are innocuous, but others like the ones I posted yesterday will blow your mind. It makes me so unbelievably furious that we allow these corrupt corporations and their worthless machines into our voting system.

Call the Secretaries of States and your elected officials: Tell them you demand paper ballots.

For citizens concerned about their own vote, Alternet has a story that lists a handful of online and high-tech tools to find your polling place and successfully cast a ballot.

And read Steal Back Your Vote by Greg Palast, RFK Jr., and company.

Colorado restores purged voters; Vote-flipping caught on camera; And Penn SoS (a Democrat!) still won't grant EVERYONE right to paper ballots

Colorado has agreed in federal court to restore the voting rights of roughly 20,000 voters who were illegally purged by Republican Secretary of State Mike Coffman, according to the NY Times.

The Advancement Project, who filed suit (not the Democratic Party mind you) argued successfully that the voters were wrongfully removed from the voter rolls within 90 days of the election. Coffman said voters were purged because they moved or were registered twice. Under Colorado's former SoS, Donetta Davidson, the state changed or canceled 1-in-5 voters (more than 500,000 registrations) between 2004 and 2006. The status of those purged voters have never been challenged.

Today the Rocky Mountain News is reporting that Coffman is still defying the court order prompting an emergency hearing agreed to by the court. It's unclear whether this will resolve the issue pertaining to 35,000 voters who requested mail-in ballots, but who have not have had their identity verified in Colorado, forcing them to cast provisional ballots instead.

By the way, Coffman is expected to be elected to Congress this year. How on earth someone who is charged with regulating the election system is allowed to run for office at the same time is completely beyond me.

What's also remarkable about this story is that the illegal purges by Colorado have been reported extensively by the NY Times and others -- including my own story at Miller-McCune.com -- but the Obama Campaign and the Democratic Party didn't think it was necessary to file a lawsuit. What gives? Do they not have the money for legal fees?

In other Colorado voting news, vote-flipping has been reported on a Diebold Accuvote (failing to register Democratic votes as virtually all vote-flipping stories go: Coincidence?) and thankfully the Adams County Clerk has taken action. These early vote-flipping stories are opening up a dangerous precedent that give maintenance personnel -- who often work for contracted vendors without any oversight -- the opportunity to recalibrate the voting machines. This is exactly how computer scientists have proven these machines can be so easily hacked.

For more stories on vote-flipping go to Videothevote.org and watch the videos embedded below.

Also unexplainable is Democrats' no-show appearance over the outrageous decrees by Pennsylvania Secretary of State Pedro Cortes, a Democrat, who refuses to throw away his state's massively faulty touchscreen and push button electronic voting machines (which do not have a paper trail) and broke down repeatedly during the primary.

Two days ago a court ordered Cortes to offer voters paper ballots if at least half of the machines in a particular precinct break down. Cortes wanted to only give voters an option to vote on paper if ALL the machines broke down. Alas, he issued the following directive in compliance with the court. But as Bradblog.com is reporting today, 80 percent of counties are unprepared for paper voting.

Once again, the Obama Campaign and the so-called Democrats in Pennsylvania are completely MIA. Have they not read any of the news stories about these horrendous voting machines?

This is why these machines can't be trusted. This is from West Virginia:



Here's an actual testimonial also from West Virginia during early voting:

Florida's first caging; the aim (perhaps) of McCain's misleading mailers; and other voter suppresion updates from the nation's favorite swing state

Just as Florida Gov. Charlie Crist declares a voting emergency and extends early voting hours because of record turnout and widespread machine malfunctions, a hodge-podge of election suppression activity has been brewing for the past week in Florida.

Chief among them are voters, such as Marilyn Fielding featured in this Naples Daily News story, who was forced to cast a provisional ballot because she applied for an absentee ballot in Connecticut, even though the voter says she never made such a request.

Could this be the aim of the misleading McCain mailers sent out in September across the country and Florida?

“We are receiving many, many reports from poll watchers that provisional ballots are given out much too often to our voters in Lee County,” said Nancy Troy, a Democratic Party activist. “The poll watchers in Lee County are telling us it's hard to keep up with all of them.”

Other issues include a vigilante sheriff candidate who marks the first story of GOP caging in the state; a dispute over amending registration records at the polls; and blocked (temporarily) federal poll watchers.

In Glades County, it’s sheriff candidate Robert Wilson who broke the ice for the GOP caging effort. But Wilson says he took it upon himself to crunch voter registration records against things such as home foreclosures to form the basis for a challenge. As the Miami Herald notes today, the list is almost all Democrats, “save a dead Republican or two.”

The dispute over provisional balloting pertains to a legal opinion in a letter by the lead attorney for the Florida Association of Supervisors of Elections. In a letter last week Robert Labasky basically told every election supervisor in the state to ignore Florida Secretary of State Kurt Browning's directions for how to handle new voters unverified due to the state's controversial "no-match" law.

Labasky said election supervisors could allow voters to amend their registration records at the polls. This just in: Broward County announced it will follow Labasky's advice.

Browning said voters have to cast a provisional ballot regardless what they could show an election judge at the polls, forcing voters to return to an election office within 48 hours. He even threatened legal action against the election supervisor in Pinellas County who wanted to actually ( bless her heart) make voting easier. The opinion by Labasky did, however, give discretion to election supervisors if they chose to follow Browning’s advise.

More than 12,000 voter registrations were "unverified," according to the St. Pete Times today. The matches are done against the Social Security Administration database, which has an acknowledged error rating of 28.5 percent.

Last week Browning showed a soft side in another matter when he came around and decided to “encourage” four county election supervisors to allow a team of federal observers at polling sites.

Sequoia admits Colorado ballot mistake following report on widespread voting machine troubles

Private corporations just can't be trusted to run our elections. Period.

Back in August, VotersUnite.org put out a report detailing the control election officials across the country have turned over to private corporations. I wrote about it at Miller-McCune.com and Ellen Theisen at VotersUnite was featured on CNN. (See video link to the right.)

Last week revealed a story from Colorado further demonstrating the danger of this most undemocratic practice putting contracted vendors in charge of printing and mailing out our ballots.

Denver election officials discovered that 11,000 mail-in ballots were never sent by election vendor Sequoia Voting Systems, even though the company said it mailed all 21,450 ballots.

This is the same corporation, you may recall, that tried to get a report about its faulty voting machines suppressed. But a New Jersey Superior Court Judge earlier this month released the report showing that Sequoia voting machines in New Jersey, all of Louisiana and a few counties in Colorado, Virginia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania had serious security risks and failures.

It's time to kick these secretive, incompetent, Democracy-destroying private corporations out of our election system!

DOJ voter suppression rolls on; the DNC's obscure election protection; and advocates fill civil rights void

Two years after the US Justice Department was exposed for politicizing its Civil Rights Division into what should more aptly be named the Voter Suppression Division, the top federal prosecutors are at it again just a week before Election Day.

Instead of looking into widespread reports of illegal voter purges, voter intimidation, faulty voting machines and the shortage of polling places in minority districts, the US Justice Department together with the FBI has instead (oh so predictably) turned its complete attention to the myth of voter fraud. Mainly, the FBI is going after ACORN and the Justice Department is taking on Ohio's 200,000 contested voters who Republicans want to remove from the rolls because of a typo.

Now if that's not about the most un-American thing I've ever heard.

In just about every swing state, voting rights groups have gone to court in opposition to state policies that appear to violate the law. Meanwhile, Republicans went to court to block the vote.

Just today, the Advancement Project announced it would level the first lawsuit -- finally -- against Colorado for two state policies that remove people from the voter rolls within 90 days of an election. That would seem a clear violation of the National Voter Registration Act, but the Justice Department nor voting rights groups or Democrats for that matter had been willing to touch it. The Advancement Project felt empowered to file suit coming off a recent win in Michigan that restored 1,800 voters to the rolls based on a similar argument.

In New Mexico, it's Project Vote and other civil rights groups that are suing the New Mexico GOP for allegedly intimidating voters. Republican attorney Pat Rogers reportedly hired a private investigator to question voters who registered through ACORN. The voters, all Hispanics in Albuquerque, said they felt harassed, one driven to tears.

In each of these cases, Democrats could stand up for voters too. But they haven't. As for the faulty machines still being used in far too many states, the Democrats and the Obama campaigns are complacent as well.

The NAACP had to sue in Pennsylvania to have the state offer paper ballots when at least 50 percent of the voting machines malfunctioned. Current law wouldn't allow paper ballots until all the machines in a particular precinct broke down. The Republicans are of course fighting this in court even though the Democratic Party and Democratic state officials are noticeably MIA.

For those worried about the lack of oversight this election, keep in mind that thousands of lawyers will descend on the polls not only by the Dems but the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights through reports into 1-866-Our-Vote and attorneys on the ground. We can all see what they're getting here at Ourvotelive.org.

According to AlterNet here and here, Obama's election protection efforts HAVE been doing SOMETHING. There's this bit about Ohio Green Party efforts.

The DNC's current plan appears to rely on campaign volunteers to call random precincts in red counties in swing states to collect the reported results. In contrast, the Ohio Green Party will be stationing observers at polling places and in the county Board of Election office to conduct an independent vote count by comparing the number of people who sign into vote with the reported totals. The Green Party response will not reveal if GOP loyalists with access to the vote-counting machinery have programmed software to reallocate the percentage of the vote awarded to McCain and Obama. But it will guard against stuffing ballot boxes if it can deploy enough election observers in Ohio's reddest counties.

In Florida, I got the following message from a poll watcher working parallel DNC efforts.

I'll be in the tabulation room with the canvassing board making sure the Votes get counted. Our Election Protection teams will have been at the precinct all day and their final task is to review the closing and collect the Precinct totals. The Lawyers & I will make sure the same results from the Precincts are put into the Tabulator.

Republicans suffer setbacks in voter suppression efforts

Originally posted at Miller-McCune.com

Ongoing efforts to limit the number of voters in Ohio, Indiana, Wisconsin and Nevada - all predicated on the fear of voter fraud and all launched by Republicans -- suffered major setbacks this week.

The decisions, either by judges or secretaries of state, bring to a close several of the legal battles detailed in the latest compendium of swing-state disputes Miller-McCune.com reported earlier this week, and focus on the right to vote trumping the fear of fraud.

In general, Republicans in at least 10 swing states have cited problems with new registrations - including some clearly spurious applications submitted across the nation -- creating the possibility of widespread voter fraud. Democrats have generally responded in two ways, calling the GOP efforts an attempt to disenfranchise a wave of newly signed-up (and generally pro-Barack Obama) voters and noting that it's difficult for a phony registration by say "Mickey Mouse" to end up as a cast ballot.

In Ohio, Republicans on Thursday withdrew a case before the Ohio Supreme Court that would've jeopardized the ability of more than 200,000 registrants to vote because of typos and other minor discrepancies on their voter registration records. Republicans lost a similar case before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.

At the same time, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner issued a directive saying that election officials may not challenge a voter on Election Day "based solely on the fact that the person offering to vote has been the subject of a data discrepancy between computer records maintained by the Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles" (including Social Security Administration data) and that person's voter registration record. In September, Brunner issued another directive saying voters can't be challenged based solely on returned mail.

In Indiana, on Wednesday a judge threw out a lawsuit by Republicans aimed at shutting down three early voting sites in Lake County (part of the Chicago metro area) Democratic strongholds. On Thursday, Lake County Republicans appealed their case to the Indiana Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the early voting sites are staying.

In Wisconsin, a judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by state Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen, who wanted the state to use a computer database known to be inaccurate as a way to verify voters' eligibility. The judge said the case should be decided by the state's Government Accountability Board, which already ruled against Van Hollen's request. When the six-member board ran their own registration records through the computer, it threw out four of them.

Van Hollen says he will appeal the case.

Finally, Nevada Secretary of State Ross Miller ruled on Thursday that voters should be allowed to correct mistakes or incomplete information on their voter registration records at the polls during early voting. The Nevada Republican Party had wanted those voters to cast provisional ballots.

Let the vote-flipping/malfunctions begin: Incidents reported in FL, WV, TN, stay tuned for more

Have you forgotten about the electronic voting machines, not just the touch screens -- mind you -- but the optical scanners that read paper ballots? As I reported back in May, they are extremely faulty and easily hackable.

Well...reports of vote-flipping and malfunctions have already started coming in. The Raw Story reports on CNN reporter John Zarella's own experience in Florida where he waited three hours to vote early because the machines were malfunctioning. Other similar reports of voting machine problems were reported elsewhere in the state. I personally heard an account about machines in Lee County. Also, in Jacksonville and Miami, voters had problems. Florida, remember, threw away most of their DRE (touchscreen and push-button) machines, but as you may well know, the optical scanners -- made by the same shady, secretive companies -- are just as troublesome.

This is completely insane. Our votes are being counted in a secretive black box, the details of which we will never know. The American people would be raising holy hell if the MSM would actually tell them.

Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com also reported yesterday on two vote-flipping incidents. One in Tennessee was experienced by the makers of the documentary Uncounted. The touch screen buttons were not registering a selection after multiple attempts. At one point the vote-flipped from Obama to the Green Party candidate. Even the poll workers couldn't figure it out. After dozens of tries, their vote was apparently counted, but who knows because there isn't a paper trial on those machines. Brad notes that they are ES&S iVotronic, the same machines used in the highly suspicious Sarasota County elections in 2006 that still has failed to account for 18,000 missing votes.

Also, two counties in West Virginia experienced vote-flipping.

Finally, check out this investigative report on ES&S.

Luckily, the Green Party is planned to heavily stack poll watchers in Red counties, particularly in Ohio, where the vote can be padded for McCain. Here's a good story about the election protection effort.

Ohio SoS Brunner gets death threats: She must be doing something right

If you wondered whether the Republican war on voting has reached full steam, consider the story that broke yesterday detailing how Ohio SoS Jennifer Brunner has been the target of death threats and a mysterious white powder delivered in the mail.

Also yesterday the Ohio SoS Web site was reestablished after a security breach. Read the press release about the incident here.

Death threats against Brunner come on the heels of a rash of burglaries and vandalism against ACORN, which registered 1.3 million mostly poor or minority voters. There's no doubt this comes in relation to statements made about ACORN and potential voter fraud by John McCain and leading Republicans. Remember McCain's statement in the last debate? "ACORN is destroying the fabric of Democracy."

While Republicans go around carrying on about ACORN and a few faulty voter registration records, Republicans are practicing election fraud on steroids.

The latest dispute that could seriously steal the election involves a dispute over 200,000 new voters this year whose social security or motor vehicle record did not exactly match their voter registration records.

Last week, the US Supreme Court ruled that the 200,000 voters can stay on the rolls, but Republicans have now taken the matter to the Ohio Supreme Court where a more favorable set of judges may shift in their favor.

This is all disturbingly reminiscent of 2004 when Republic SoS Kenneth Blackwell and county officials in Ohio purged more than 300,000 voters from the rolls leading up to Election Day, not to mention the 35,000 Republicans directly challenged at the polls based on returned mail.

Things have changed in Ohio. Brunner is defending voting rights and restoring due process. So it's no wonder that Republicans are threatening the life of a public official when things dont' go their way.

Joe the Plumber unwillingly becomes best Obama pitch yet

Joe the Plumber has become Joe the Camel of this campaign. As the media swarmed like flies on shit to this self-proclaimed, self-made man, they discovered some startling things about Mr. Joe/Samuel: He makes no where near $250,000 and he owes close to $2,000 in back taxes. He makes $40,000, according to reporters who looked up his divorce records. Joe would actually get a greater tax break under Obama. And he doesn't even have a plumber's license.

Now reporters have connected another dot in Joe's story, that he would be barred from voting if Republicans had their way in Ohio. Admittedly, that's reaching a bit far on the Plumber Joe story. But it is true. That's because Joe's last name on his voter registration record is misspelled. Reporters must have spotted it while checking on his party affiliation.

Florida, has the most stringent matching criteria for registering new voters. And Colorado has about the loosest voter-roll purging criteria.

I guess it doesn't really matter who Joe is. I agree with Fox News, which said the media had Plumber Fatigue. There's probably a rich guy out there who's bitter about potential tax increases. But it wouldn't be Joe, and it wouldn't be the thousands cheering for McCain at his rallies.

The story of Joe and how he believes that somehow the Bush tax cuts helps him is such a clear demonstration of how Republicans vote against their self interest. It's Obama that argues they should keep more of their money. McCain and every Republican since Reagan has a way of defending the rich by making it seem like they're defending everyone. These Republicans who say they can't trust a Democrat to cut taxes forget that they aren't rich. McCain talks about a tax giveaway. What do you call the stimulus checks?

How sweet it is that the McCain poster boy has now become the poster boy for Obama not only demonstrating that any company, or plumbing company for that matter, which takes in $250,000 a year is very rare (about 5-in-100 rare) but also for how loose matching criteria led by Republicans to purge voter rolls can nab legal voters.

McCain's "clean election" committee a Bush-like contradiction

The Oxdown Gazette care of Bradblog.com has this interesting bit about John McCain's so-called "Clean Election and Voter Fraud Committee." The insight: That at least five of the 21 members have been involved in GOP-related vote suppression or false claims of voter fraud.

A member of the committee, Tom Davis, former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was openly laughed at by a room of journalists recently at the National Press Club when he said the GOP would never be involved in any voter suppression.

See The Oxdown for more details about the others caught in direct quote.

McCain has gone insane

This will surely get the McCain-has-lost-his-mind theorists going. Check out this photo taken from the debate the other night. What the F? He apparently was reacting with self humiliation to losing his sense of direction. This isn't the first time he's been lost on stage. Here he is caught on video. Some have speculated he suffered a seizure as the left side of his face seemed to crease just before his lapse in directional awareness. Brave New Films already launched this eye-opening look at McCain's health. Greenwald also put this insightful film out about the hatred and slander being extolled by right-wing bigots linking it directly to statements repeated by Sarah Palin.

GOP war on voting in full swing, Colorado voter purges explained and the biennial campaign against ACORN

Voter purges soared into the news last week because of a New York Times article that reported much of the same material I've been writing about at Miller-McCune.com and other diligent reporters have covered -- that at least nine states were/are improperly removing people from their voter registration lists.

It's much more sexy than the countless barriers to voting that we chronicled for KBOO radio last week. But alas, the New York Times, our savior of record.

The Associated Press responded with a story starting out like it's going to criticize the Times for some reason and then spins off a story of it's own. Far better than the Denver Post article in response to another voter purge story raised by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Greg Palast about Colorado.

The two came out with a multi-media blitzkrieg, hawking DVDs, BBC Newsnight exclusives and -- would you believe -- comic books. They have a funny way, no doubt, of not revealing any kind of details that would make the story sound plausible. Almost more shocking than Kennedy's shocking claims of Colorado having canceled a quarter of its voter rolls, is Palast's claim that he and RFK Jr. are the only two investigators looking into this stuff.

"It's just me and Robert Kennedy Jr." he told KJFK's The Solution Zone (second sound clip).

The truth is there is a lot of truth to Greg's statement about Colorado, much of it online by the Election Assistance Commission. (Read on) Odd, given The Denver Post responded this way at the end of an article about cross-party accusations.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State Mike Coffman's office flatly denied charges recently levied by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that a quarter of Colorado voters have been taken off registration rolls.

Kennedy on his radio show this weekend alleged that a so-called "perfect match" clause in the Help Americans Vote Act has led Republicans to purge Democrats from voter rolls by using a computer system to compare "your registration application to all other government records of you in the state," according to a transcript posted on Air America's website. If there are any discrepancies, Kennedy said, "they remove you from the voting rolls."

Secretary of State spokesman Rich Coolidge said: "That is patently false. There is no basis in fact," he said. "There is no requirement . . . that there be a perfect match."

When they say Colorado purged 1 in 5 voters, they're talking about the Election Assistance Commission report covering 2005 and 2006, which shows that Colorado leads the nation in purging voters, having canceled 19.4 percent of the voter rolls.

I called Coolidge myself for my article at Miller-McCune.com. Coolidge this time acknowledged at least the basis in fact, then explained that the numbers include anyone who changed their address or made any other changes to their voter registration record. So saying they were canceled is not entirely correct, an error the NY Times also commits.

Meanwhile, as if sensing a defeat in widespread sympathy toward voters, Republicans launched -- with cooperation of law enforcement throughout the country -- it's most aggressive attack against ACORN in recent history, launching raids in Nevada, Ohio, Missouri and Florida. Would you believe, those states are also swing states and ACORN has registered 1.3 million new voters this year. FOX News is having an absolute field day. As we speak the ACORN's web site is down.

We interviewed in our KBOO studios Michael Slater, creator of Project Vote, which works closely with ACORN on voter registration campaigns. He talked about the myth of voter fraud and other topics related to voting disparities.

That was last week. What we're seeing play out this week is the GOPs largest, most aggressive campaign at complete and total opposition to the democratic process.

The assault on ACORN is a biennial campaign to vilify a group that's registered 148,000 in Pennsylvania, 152,000 in Florida, over 217,000 in Michigan, and over 238,000 in Ohio. The majority are low- to-moderate income people, 60-70 percent are African American or Latino, and over half are under the age of 30.

You can guess what? Republicans don't like it. Let alone the fact that any investigation into ACORN resulted from the group's own willingness to share records with the police, and let alone -- most importantly -- that NO ONE has ever tried to vote using any of the supposed ACORN frauds.

In Ohio, over the past several weeks, we can string a pattern together through a series of court actions. Had this been 2004, let's remember, there would never be the need because former SoS Ken Blackwell did everything the GOP wanted. Current SoS Jennifer Brunner (D) has been a Godsend for voting rights.

• Last week, a judge ruled -- in a lawsuit by the Ohio Republican Party -- that the state had to share with county election officials a list of names for which the state requested social security matches. Based on the Help America Vote Act, states must only request SS numbers when there's no driver's license record. There were 740,000 requests for verification to the Social Security Administration since Oct. 1, 2007, based on this AP story. Roughly 660,000 new voters in Ohio registered since the start of 2008. This could open the door to mass challenges ala 2004 when the Ohio GOP challenged 36,000 voters based on returned mail.
  

• The early voting window that brought many homeless people to the polls where new voters could register and vote on the same day ended last week despite GOP opposition.
  

• Republicans are also opposing Brunner's directive restoring due process to the state's challenge statutes.

• The GOP is suing in another case against Brunner's decision to throw-out Republican-sponsored absentee ballot request forms because of extraneous information. On this point, the GOP wants to count expand voting because they shot themselves in the foot. Some voter rights groups oppose Brunner on this one. But what a difference four years makes in Ohio.

KBOO Election Special -- Reboot the Vote

Yesterday, the election integrity program Meghan and I have been working on for the past two weeks aired on KBOO radio, our local community radio station. This was the longest radio program we completely produced ourselves and very satisfying due to its mind blowing content. Have a listen. Look out Ira Glass.

Introduction: Full Spectrum Listening

Chapter 1: The Truth of Voter Fraud

Chapter 2: Disenfranchisement

Chapter 3: Counting the Votes

Wall Street gambling led world market collapse

I've resisted writing here about what's becoming, as of yesterday, a worldwide market collapse because, like so many others, I understand very little about global economics.

I know I'm not alone also in saying that two recent episodes of This American Life aired nationally on NPR clarified two glaring loopholes that allowed investment banks and hedge funds to get out of hand: Credit default swaps and stock market short sales. Both create a situation where gamblers are voting with the house, betting in essence for the market to fail.

Watch the 60 Minutes story largely about credit default swaps, also this week, subtitled How some arcane Wall Street financial instruments magnified economic crisis. In it, an expert estimates the credit swap market was worth $60 trillion.

Tune in to Another Frightening Show About the Economy, which aired on Oct. 10. This show describes in the easiest way to understand terms, the complex world of credit default swaps.

And before that, TALs Giant Pool of Money episode.

Also check out the Top 10 Bailout Sweeteners at Taxpayers for Common Sense.

Meanwhile, reporters digging into the bailout bill found a one-week time frame to award the contracts to administer the bill "using special contracting authorities that enable it to retain private portfolio managers, custodians and other financial services consultants without following standard acquisition procedures," according to the Washington Post.

The article continues:

The department's quick turn to the private sector will help it prepare for the massive task of overseeing mortgages and other financial assets to be acquired by the government as part of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act that was approved by Congress and signed by President Bush on Friday.

But it means that the government has little time to assess the companies that will be partners in what could become one of the largest public-sector funds in American history. Some of the same firms that have played roles in the rise and collapse of the mortgage-backed securities market may end up guiding the government as the bailout unfolds, department officials said.

Contracting specialists said the department has the authority to retain "financial agents" to manage money on its behalf. By using that authority at a rapid clip, instead of through traditional acquisition procedures, the government creates a risk that it won't hire the best firms at the best price, they said.

In this case, the department issued requests for proposals on Monday and expects to being hiring advisers as soon as Friday.