The problem isn’t simply that we’re failing to address climate change but that we’re continuing to aggravate it, flaunt it, inflict it on others. War, you might say, is a pre-enactment of global warming, a sneak preview of what happens when the world we live in turns viciously inhospitable.

Thursday, July 12, 2012 by Common Dreams

War and Climate Change

by Robert C. Koehler

The heat backs up across the country, causing drought, wildfires, a mega-storm on the East Coast. More than 4,000 “hottest day” records have been shattered in the U.S. in the past month.

“The ecological ego matures,” Theodore Roszak wrote 20 years ago in The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology, “toward a sense of ethical responsibility to the planet that is as vividly experienced as our ethical responsibility to other people. It seeks to weave that responsibility into the fabric of social relations and political decisions.”

Social change of real value is slow-going indeed. How do we manifest responsibility to the planet? A serious consensus is building across the globe that doing so is crucial, that the weather extremes of recent years are no less than global warming in action, the result of centuries of unbridled, industrial-ageirresponsibility toward the planet, and something fundamental has to change in how we live our lives and sustain ourselves, but our leadership, certainly in this country, seems incapable of addressing an issue of such complexity.

President Obama, who campaigned as a new kind of leader, perpetuates, in the name of national security, assassination by drone. Meanwhile, every real issue of national security, including climate change, is ignored. Every problem we face either has an us-vs.-them solution or no solution at all — indeed, no existence as a problem. A year ago, when wildfires ravaged the state of Arizona, the best John McCain could do was blame it on illegal immigrants.

We’re stuck in a paradigm of domination, but we can’t fight our way out of the ecological disaster we’ve brought on ourselves. Perhaps, having brought the hell of war to the Middle East over the last two decades, we’re symbolically reaping what we’ve sown.

My friend Rebecca Hoffberger, who lives in Baltimore, spent the city’s recent blackout taking care of her 99-year-old father. She wrote to me that the experience — of having no electricity for days during 100-degree heat — made her think about our bombing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and how “civilians in countries we make war with had no power for months, sketchy access to water, etc. Their predicament was so far worse than ours. . . .

“So we lost expensive food from freezers and such, but the folks on the ground who had had elevators and running water and computer access and jobs to go to (no longer did). And not for the five days that D.C. and Virginia and Maryland citizens have been put out, but for months and years.”

Fourth of July 2012, she suggested, should be a time to reflect on “our massive blackout and feel more consciously what life is like for those abroad. Some of these cities were as modern as any of ours. We reduce people to a day-to-day focus on just how to get elders dinner, kids medicine, jobs maintained under conditions that must make them curse our presence and very existence.”

This begins to get at it. The problem isn’t simply that we’re failing to address climate change but that we’re continuing to aggravate it, flaunt it, inflict it on others. War, you might say, is a pre-enactment of global warming, a sneak preview of what happens when the world we live in turns viciously inhospitable.

These summers of drought and wildfire give us glimpses of our future.

For instance, corn yields have fallen precipitously this summer in the driest parts of the Midwest, according to Bloomberg News. The story, which ran in the St. Paul Pioneer Press, quotes a plant biologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana: “You couldn’t choreograph worse weather conditions for pollination. It’s like farming in hell.”

And Joe Romm, writing at ThinkProgress.org, noted that “the Earth has warmed only a bit more than one degree Fahrenheit since the catastrophic Dust Bowl (of the 1930s) — and we are poised to warm an astounding nine to eleven degrees Fahrenheit this century if we stay anywhere near our current greenhouse gas emissions path.”

How do we manifest responsibility to the planet? Will it take collective discomfort of Dust Bowl proportions even to bring this question into mainstream consideration? The paradox surrounding these questions is that we can’t ask them in fear. Fear generates simplistic, short-term thinking and results in the sort of solutions that find an enemy to blame or drive people into “end times” survivalist mode.

And this is what I fear. As the background conditions for global warming intensify, creating local situations in which random weather patterns are more likely to turn extreme, humanity might fall into the same pattern to a greater degree than we already have: focusing with increasing desperation on holding onto our possessions and lifestyle and thereby aggravating the very conditions putting them in jeopardy.

To avoid doing so will take courage. As the climate crisis intensifies, my prayer is that this quality, rather than fear, is what emerges in the heat.

Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.

But the corporate media's bias toward giving credence to official claims from both political parties means you have to treat that question of fact as a matter of opinion--which, of course, is a problem, if you think that separating fact from misinformation is a key part of a journalist's job.

Published on Thursday, July 12, 2012 

by Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

Small Business Baloney: GOP Tax Claims 

Should Be Factchecked

by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Barack Obama's July 9 announcement that he would extend the Bush tax cuts for income below $250,000 prompted the expected response from Republican politicians and presidential candidate Mitt Romney: This is a tax increase on "small businesses."

That is false. But most news reports won't say so.

The New York Times (7/10/12) told readers that Obama

said that 98 percent of households and 97 percent of small businesses would receive a tax cut under his plan. But Republicans said the president’s proposal would amount to a broad tax on small businesses because many business owners report their profits as personal income.

 

In the Washington Post (7/10/12), readers learned that Republicans "charged that the president's plan would raise taxes on small-business owners." That point was illustrated by quotes from House Speaker John Boehner and and a representative for the Romney campaign, which were balanced with the statement that "Obama said his plan would cover 98 percent of the working public and 97 percent of small-business owners."

The headline of a USA Today story (7/10/12) captured the same spirit: "Obama Seeks to Extend Tax Cuts for Middle Class; GOP Critics Say Plan Will Hurt Small Business."

On ABC's Good Morning America, Jonathan Karl (7/10/12) reported, "Romney says raising taxes on those with higher incomes means raising taxes on small businesses."

Newspaper stories the following day followed a similar pattern: Republicans say this is a tax on small businesses, while Obama says it is not. In theWashington Post (7/11/12), Romney "said the president's plan would keep taxes at the same level for many Americans while raising taxes on what he called 'job creators and small businesses.'"

The Los Angeles Times (7/11/12) added another layer of inaccuracy by reporting that Obama's plan "would extend George W. Bush-era tax cuts for those making up to $250,000 a year but not for upper-income Americans." That is incorrect; wealthy Americans will also receive a tax cut on the income they earn up to the $250,000 level (Citizens for Tax Justice, 6/20/12; NYMag.com, 7/9/12).

This Republican small business argument is a familiar one; in 2010 Republicans sought to portray any increase in taxes on income above $250,000 as a tax on small-business owners (FAIR Action Alert, 9/13/10).

Then, as now, the argument is almost entirely bogus. The share of filers who could qualify as small business owners is tiny--about 2 percent of small business owners, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. The increase would affect, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, about 3 percent of filers who claim any business income (Think Progress, 7/9/12).

So why don't reporters just say that? Some who try to put the numbers in context seem afraid to call out one side for being deceptive. On CBS Evening News (7/9/12), Norah O'Donnell reported the story this way:

Mitt Romney said today that the president's proposal would mean a massive tax increase on job-creators and small businesses. Many of those small businesses pay at an individual tax rate. But the president said it would affect just 3 percent of small businesses. Still, Scott, that would affect about 250,000 small businesses.

Turning the tiny percentage into a number that sounds impressive seems a pretty clear attempt to make viewers think the Romney campaign had a point.

One part of the newspaper did explain the dispute clearly: The New York Times editorial page (7/10/12), which called the Republican argument about small business "nonsense."

But the corporate media's bias toward giving credence to official claims from both political parties means you have to treat that question of fact as a matter of opinion--which, of course, is a problem, if you think that separating fact from misinformation is a key part of a journalist's job.

And the failure to challenge Republican distortions gives them no reason to stop making them. As the Los Angeles Times reported (7/10/12), "Polls also show that Republicans do better when they frame upper-income tax increases as a threat to small businesses, a group that voters tend to like."

That is especially true when media don't tell the public that the claim is almost entirely bogus.

© 2012 Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting

The U.S. is now involved, directly and by proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding list of regional enemies. They include al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa; the Islamist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria; possible al-Qaeda-linked militants in post-Qaddafi Libya; Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan; Mali’s Islamist Rebels of the Ansar Dine, al-Shabaab in Somalia; and guerrillas from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

Tomgram: Nick Turse, America's Shadow Wars in Africa

Posted by Nick Turse at 9:27am, July 12, 2012.

Here’s an odd question: Is it possible that the U.S. military is present in more countries and more places now than at the height of the Cold War?  It’s true that the U.S. is reducing its forces and giant bases in Europe and that its troops are out of Iraq (except for that huge, militarized embassy in Baghdad).  On the other hand, there’s that massive ground, air, and naval build-up in the Persian Gulf, the Obama administration’s widely publicized “pivot” to Asia (including troops and ships), those new drone bases in the eastern Indian Ocean region, some movement back into Latin America (including a new base in Chile), and don’t forget Africa, where less than a decade ago, the U.S. had almost no military presence at all.  Now, as TomDispatch Associate Editor Nick Turse writes in the latest in his “changing face of empire” series, U.S. special operations forces, regular troops, private contractors, and drones are spreading across the continent with remarkable (if little noticed) rapidity.

Putting together the pieces on Africa isn’t easy.  For instance, only the other day it wasrevealed that three U.S. Army commandos in a Toyota Land Cruiser had skidded off a bridge in Mali in April.  They died, all three, along with three women identified as “Moroccan prostitutes.”  This is how we know that U.S. special operations forces were operating in chaotic, previously democratic Mali after a coup by a U.S.-trained captainaccelerated the unraveling of the country, leading more recently to its virtual dismemberment by Tuareg rebels and Islamist insurgents.  Consider this a sample of what Nick Turse calls the U.S. military’s “scramble for Africa” in a seamy, secretive nutshell.

So here’s another question: Who decided in 2007 that a U.S. Africa Command should be set up to begin a process of turning that continent into a web of U.S. bases and other operations?  Who decided that every Islamist rebel group in Africa, no matter how local or locally focused, was a threat to the U.S., calling for a military response?  Certainly not the American people, who know nothing about this, who were never asked if expanding the U.S. global military mission to Africa was something they favored, who never heard the slightest debate, or even a single peep from Washington on the subject. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Turse discusses the Pentagon’s shadowy, but fast-expanding mission in Africa, click here or download it to your iPod here.)  Tom

Obama’s Scramble for Africa 

Secret Wars, Secret Bases, and the Pentagon’s “New Spice Route” in Africa 

By Nick Turse

They call it the New Spice Route, an homage to the medieval trade network that connected Europe, Africa, and Asia, even if today’s “spice road” has nothing to do with cinnamon, cloves, or silks.  Instead, it’s a superpower’s superhighway, on which trucks and ships shuttle fuel, food, and military equipment through a growing maritime and ground transportation infrastructure to a network of supply depots, tiny camps, and airfields meant to service a fast-growing U.S. military presence in Africa. 

Few in the U.S. know about this superhighway, or about the dozens of training missions and joint military exercises being carried out in nations that most Americans couldn’t locate on a map.  Even fewer have any idea that military officials are invoking the names of Marco Polo and the Queen of Sheba as they build a bigger military footprint in Africa.  It’s all happening in the shadows of what in a previous imperial age was known as “the Dark Continent.”

In East African ports, huge metal shipping containers arrive with the everyday necessities for a military on the make.  They’re then loaded onto trucks that set off down rutted roads toward dusty bases and distant outposts.

On the highway from Djibouti to Ethiopia, for example, one can see the bare outlines of this shadow war at the truck stops where local drivers take a break from their long-haul routes.  The same is true in other African countries.  The nodes of the network tell part of the story: Manda Bay, Garissa, and Mombasa in Kenya; Kampala and Entebbe in Uganda; Bangui and Djema in the Central African Republic; Nzara in South Sudan; Dire Dawa in Ethiopia; and the Pentagon’s showpiece African base, Camp Lemonnier, in Djibouti on the coast of the Gulf of Aden, among others.

According to Pat Barnes, a spokesman for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM), Camp Lemonnier serves as the only official U.S. base on the continent.  “There are more than 2,000 U.S. personnel stationed there,” he told TomDispatch recently by email.  “The primary AFRICOM organization at Camp Lemonnier is Combined Joint Task Force -- Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA). CJTF-HOA's efforts are focused in East Africa and they work with partner nations to assist them in strengthening their defense capabilities.”

Barnes also noted that Department of Defense personnel are assigned to U.S. embassies across Africa, including 21 individual Offices of Security Cooperation responsible for facilitating military-to-military activities with “partner nations.”  He characterized the forces involved as small teams carrying out pinpoint missions.  Barnes did admit that in “several locations in Africa, AFRICOM has a small and temporary presence of personnel. In all cases, these military personnel are guests within host-nation facilities, and work alongside or coordinate with host-nation personnel.”

Shadow Wars

In 2003, when CJTF-HOA was first set up there, it was indeed true that the only major U.S. outpost in Africa was Camp Lemonnier.  In the ensuing years, in quiet and largely unnoticed ways, the Pentagon and the CIA have been spreading their forces across the continent.  Today -- official designations aside -- the U.S. maintains a surprising number of bases in Africa.  And “strengthening” African armies turns out to be a truly elastic rubric for what’s going on.

Under President Obama, in fact, operations in Africa have accelerated far beyond the more limited interventions of the Bush years: last year’s war in Libya; a regional drone campaign with missions run out of airports and bases in Djibouti, Ethiopia, and the Indian Ocean archipelago nation of Seychelles; a flotilla of 30 ships in that ocean supporting regional operations; a multi-pronged military and CIA campaign against militants in Somalia, including intelligence operations, training for Somali agents, a secret prison, helicopter attacks, and U.S. commando raids; a massive influx of cash for counterterrorism operations across East Africa; a possible old-fashioned air war, carried out on the sly in the region using manned aircraft; tens of millions of dollars in arms for allied mercenaries and African troops; and a special ops expeditionary force (bolstered by State Department experts) dispatched to help capture or kill Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and his senior commanders.  And this only begins to scratch the surface of Washington’s fast-expanding plans and activities in the region.

To support these mushrooming missions, near-constant training operations, and alliance-building joint exercises, outposts of all sorts are sprouting continent-wide, connected by a sprawling shadow logistics network.  Most American bases in Africa are still small and austere, but growing ever larger and more permanent in appearance.  For example, photographs from last year of Ethiopia’s Camp Gilbert, examined by TomDispatch, show a base filled with air-conditioned tents, metal shipping containers, and 55-gallon drums and other gear strapped to pallets, but also recreation facilities with TVs and videogames, and a well-appointed gym filled with stationary bikes, free weights, and other equipment.

Continental Drift

After 9/11, the U.S. military moved into three major regions in significant ways: South Asia (primarily Afghanistan), the Middle East (primarily Iraq), and the Horn of Africa.  Today, the U.S. is drawing down in Afghanistan and has largely left Iraq.  Africa, however, remains a growth opportunity for the Pentagon.

The U.S. is now involved, directly and by proxy, in military and surveillance operations against an expanding list of regional enemies.  They include al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in North Africa; the Islamist movement Boko Haram in Nigeria; possible al-Qaeda-linked militants in post-Qaddafi Libya; Joseph Kony’s murderous Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in the Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan; Mali’s Islamist Rebels of the Ansar Dine, al-Shabaab in Somalia; and guerrillas from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula across the Gulf of Aden in Yemen.

A recent investigation by the Washington Post revealed that contractor-operated surveillance aircraft based out of Entebbe, Uganda, are scouring the territory used by Kony’s LRA at the Pentagon’s behest, and that 100 to 200 U.S. commandos share a base with the Kenyan military at Manda Bay. Additionally, U.S. drones are being flown out of Arba Minch airport in Ethiopia and from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean, while dronesand F-15 fighter-bombers have been operating out of Camp Lemonnier as part of the shadow wars being waged by the U.S. military and the CIA in Yemen and Somalia.  Surveillance planes used for spy missions over Mali, Mauritania, and the Sahara desert are also flying missions from Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, and plans are reportedly in the works for a similar base in the newborn nation of South Sudan.

U.S. special operations forces are stationed at a string of even more shadowy forward operating posts on the continent, including one in Djema in the Central Africa Republic and others in Nzara in South Sudan and Dungu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  The U.S. also has had troops deployedin Mali, despite having officially suspended military relations with that country following a coup.

According to research by TomDispatch, the U.S. Navy also has a forward operating location, manned mostly by Seabees, Civil Affairs personnel, and force-protection troops, known as Camp Gilbert in Dire Dawa, Ethiopia.  U.S. military documents indicate that there may be other even lower-profile U.S. facilities in the country.  In addition to Camp Lemonnier, the U.S. military also maintains another hole-and-corner outpost in Djibouti -- a Navy port facility that lacks even a name.  AFRICOM did not respond to requests for further information on these posts before this article went to press.

Additionally, U.S. Special Operations Forces are engaged in missions against the Lord’s Resistance Army from a rugged camp in Obo in the Central African Republic, but little is said about that base either.  “U.S. military personnel working with regional militaries in the hunt for Joseph Kony are guests of the African security forces comprising the regional counter-LRA effort,” Barnes told me.  “Specifically in Obo, the troops live in a small camp and work with partner nation troops at a Ugandan facility that operates at the invitation of the government of the Central African Republic.”

And that’s still just part of the story.  U.S. troops are also working at bases inside Uganda.  Earlier this year, elite Force Recon Marines from the Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force 12 (SPMAGTF-12) trained soldiers from the Uganda People's Defense Force, which not only runs missions in the Central African Republic, but also acts as a proxy force for the U.S. in Somalia in the battle against the Islamist militants known as al-Shabaab.  They now supply the majority of the troops to the African Union Mission protecting the U.S.-supported government in the Somali capital, Mogadishu.

In the spring, Marines from SPMAGTF-12 also trained soldiers from the Burundi National Defense Force (BNDF), the second-largest contingent in Somalia.  In April and May, members of Task Force Raptor, 3rd Squadron, 124th Cavalry Regiment, of the Texas National Guard took part in a training mission with the BNDF in Mudubugu, Burundi.

In February, SPMAGTF-12 sent trainers to Djibouti to work with an elite local army unit, while other Marines traveled to Liberia to focus on teaching riot-control techniques to Liberia’s military as part of what is otherwise a State Department-directed effort to rebuild that force.

In addition, the U.S. is conducting counterterrorism training and equipping militaries in Algeria, Burkina Faso, Chad, Mauritania, Niger, and Tunisia.  AFRICOM also has 14 major joint-training exercises planned for 2012, including operations in Morocco, Cameroon, Gabon, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Senegal, and Nigeria. 

The size of U.S. forces conducting these joint exercises and training missions fluctuates, but Barnes told me that, “on an average basis, there are approximately 5,000 U.S. Military and DoD personnel working across the continent” at any one time.  Next year, even more American troops are likely to be on hand as units from the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division, known as the “Dagger Brigade,” are scheduled to deploy to the region.  The roughly 3,000 soldiers in the brigade will be involved in, among other activities, training missions while acquiring regional expertise.  "Special Forces have a particular capability in this area, but not the capacity to fulfill the demand; and we think we will be able to fulfill the demand by using conventional forces," Colonel Andrew Dennis told a reporter about the deployment.

Air Africa

Last month, the Washington Post revealed that, since at least 2009, the “practice of hiring private companies to spy on huge expanses of African territory… has been a cornerstone of the U.S. military’s secret activities on the continent.”  Dubbed Tusker Sand, the project consists of contractors flying from Entebbe airport in Uganda and a handful of other airfields.  They pilot turbo-prop planes that look innocuous but are packed with sophisticated surveillance gear.

America’s mercenary spies in Africa are, however, just part of the story.

While the Pentagon canceled an analogous drone surveillance program dubbed Tusker Wing, it has spent millions of dollars to upgrade the civilian airport at Arba Minch, Ethiopia, to enable drone missions to be flown from it.  Infrastructure to support such operations has been relatively cheap and easy to construct, but a much more daunting problem looms -- one intimately connected to the New Spice Route.

“Marco Polo wasn't just an explorer,” Army planner Chris Zahner explainedat a conference in Djibouti last year.  “[H]e was also a logistician developing logistics nodes along the Silk Road. Now let's do something similar where the Queen of Sheba traveled."  Paeans to bygone luminaries aside, the reasons for pouring resources into sea and ground supply networks have less to do with history than with Africa’s airport infrastructure.

Of the 3,300 airfields on the continent identified in a National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency review, the Air Force has surveyed only 303 of them and just 158 of those surveys are current.  Of those airfields that have been checked out, half won’t support the weight of the C-130 cargo planes that the U.S. military leans heavily on to transport troops and materiel.  These limitations were driven home during Natural Fire 2010, one of that year’s joint training exercises hosted by AFRICOM.  When C-130s were unable to use an airfield in Gulu, Uganda, an extra $3 million was spent instead to send in Chinook helicopters.

In addition, diplomatic clearances and airfield restrictions on U.S. military aircraft cost the Pentagon time and money, while often raising local suspicion and ire.  In a recent article in the military trade publication Army Sustainment, Air Force Major Joseph Gaddis touts an emerging solution: outsourcing.  The concept was tested last year, during another AFRICOM training operation, Atlas Drop 2011.

“Instead of using military airlift to move equipment to and from the exercise, planners used commercial freight vendors,” writes Gadddis. “This provided exercise participants with door-to-door delivery service and eliminated the need for extra personnel to channel the equipment through freight and customs areas.”  Using mercenary cargo carriers to skirt diplomatic clearance issues and move cargo to airports that can’t support U.S. C-130s is, however, just one avenue the Pentagon is pursuing to support its expanding operations in Africa.

Another is construction.

The Great Build-Up

Military contracting documents reveal plans for an investment of up to $180 million or more in construction at Camp Lemonnier alone.  Chief among the projects will be the laying of 54,500 square meters of taxiways “to support medium-load aircraft” and the construction of a 185,000 square meter Combat Aircraft Loading Area.  In addition, plans are in the works to erect modular maintenance structures, hangers, and ammunition storage facilities, all needed for an expanding set of secret wars in Africa.

Other contracting documents suggest that, in the years to come, the Pentagon will be investing up to $50 million in new projects at that base, Kenya’s Camp Simba, and additional unspecified locations in Africa.  Still other solicitation materials suggest future military construction in Egypt, where the Pentagon already maintains a medical research facility, and still more work in Djibouti.

No less telling are contracting documents indicating a coming influx of “emergency troop housing” at Camp Lemonnier, including almost 300 additional Containerized Living Units (CLUs), stackable, air-conditioned living quarters, as well as latrines and laundry facilities.

Military documents also indicate that a nearly $450,000 exercise facility was installed at the U.S. base in Entebbe, Uganda, last year.  All of this indicates that, for the Pentagon, its African build-up has only begun.

The Scramble for Africa

In a recent speech in Arlington, Virginia, AFRICOM Commander General Carter Ham explained the reasoning behind U.S. operations on the continent: “The absolute imperative for the United States military [is] to protect America, Americans, and American interests; in our case, in my case, [to] protect us from threats that may emerge from the African continent.”  As an example, Ham named the Somali-based al-Shabaab as a prime threat.  “Why do we care about that?” he asked rhetorically.  “Well, al-Qaeda is a global enterprise... we think they very clearly do present, as an al-Qaeda affiliate... a threat to America and Americans.” 

Fighting them over there, so we don’t need to fight them here has been a core tenet of American foreign policy for decades, especially since 9/11.  But trying to apply military solutions to complex political and social problems has regularly led to unforeseen consequences.  For example, last year’s U.S.-supported war in Libya resulted in masses of well-armed Tuareg mercenaries, who had been fighting for Libyan autocrat Muammar Qaddafi, heading back to Mali where they helped destabilize that country.  So far, the result has been a military coup by an American-trained officer; a takeover of some areas by Tuareg fighters of the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, who had previously raided Libyan arms depots; and other parts of the country being seized by the irregulars of Ansar Dine, the latest al-Qaeda “affiliate” on the American radar.  One military intervention, in other words, led to three major instances of blowback in a neighboring country in just a year. 

With the Obama administration clearly engaged in a twenty-first century scramble for Africa, the possibility of successive waves of overlapping blowback grows exponentially.  Mali may only be the beginning and there’s no telling how any of it will end.  In the meantime, keep your eye on Africa.  The U.S. military is going to make news there for years to come.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of

 TomDispatch.com.  An award-winning journalist, his 


work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, 


andregularly at TomDispatch. He is the author/editor of 


several books, including the recently published 


Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 


2001-2050 (with Tom Engelhardt).  This piece is the 


latest article in his series on “the changing face of 


American empire,” which is being underwritten by 


Lannan Foundation. You can follow him on Tumblr. To 


catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio 


interview in which he discusses the Pentagon’s shadowy, 


but fast- expanding mission in Africa. 

Financial Times associate editor, John Gapper, wrote that the UK is plagued by “a set of too-big-to-fail investment banks in which amoral behavior is deeply embedded.” The paper derided what it called “the rotten heart of the financial system” engaged in “nothing less than a long-running confidence trick played on the public for personal and institutional advantage,” adding, “This was market-rigging on a grand scale. It is hard to think of anything more damning - or more corrosive of the reputation of capitalism.”

July 12, 2012 - Issue 480

The Financial System’s Rotten Heart

Left Margin  

By Carl Bloice

BC Editorial Board

The Conservative Party head of the British government, Prime Minister David Cameron, condemned the “spivvy and probably illegal” activity of Barclays and other banks involved in fixing interest rates. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, (treasury secretary) George Osborne, called the Barclays affair "symptomatic of a financial system that elevated greed above all" and "brought economy to its knees." Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer newspaper’s chief political commentator, wrote about “the moral cesspit of the City” (what we call Wall Street), which he said should make the case “for radical reform of how we do capitalism,” adding that the country’s bankers are “greedy, reckless and incompetent” and “shameless” and that “they fleece their customers” and as a result “our whole society has been warped.” Financial Times associate editor, John Gapper, wrote that the UK is plagued by “a set of too-big-to-fail investment banks in which amoral behavior is deeply embedded.” The paper derided what it called “the rotten heart of the financial system” engaged in “nothing less than a long-running confidence trick played on the public for personal and institutional advantage,” adding, “This was market-rigging on a grand scale. It is hard to think of anything more damning - or more corrosive of the reputation of capitalism.” The editors of the Guardian thundered “our own society - and economy - have been warped and corrupted” by the banks’ behavior.

Against this backdrop, Rolling Stone’s sharp economics writer, Matt Taibbi, asked out loud last week: “Why is Nobody Freaking Out About the LIBOR Banking Scandal?” “This story is so outrageous that it shocks even the most cynical Wall Street observers,” he wrote July 3.

The major U.S. media have pretty much ignored or downplayed the story that unfolds nightly on the BBC - the story of what the British government’s Business Secretary, Vince Cable, said unmasked “a moral quagmire of almost biblical proportions.”

There have been a few exceptions to the general media avoidance of the subject in the U.S. The reaction on this side of the pond has been “mainly a shrug” wrote columnist, Joe Nocera, in the New York Times last Saturday. “Perhaps we’re suffering from bank-scandal fatigue, having lived through Bank of America’s various travails, and the Goldman Sachs revelations, and, most recently, the big JPMorgan Chase trading loss. Or maybe LIBOR is just hard to gets one’s head around.”

“But the Brits have this one right,” wrote Nocera. “They may not understand the intricacies of LIBOR any better than we do, but they sense, powerfully, that banks have once again made a mockery of the role that society entrusts to them.”

“…yes, just when you thought the Street had hit bottom, an even deeper level of public-be-damned greed and corruption is revealed,” wrote economist, Robert Reich, Sunday.

And, in a commentary titled, “Crime of the Century,” Robert Scheer, editor oftruthdig.com concluded that “behind the world’s financial edifice lies a reeking cesspool of unprecedented corruption.”

“But Wall Street has almost surely been involved in the same practice, including the usual suspects — JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, and Bank of America - because every major bank participates in setting the LIBOR rate, and Barclay's couldn't have rigged it without their witting involvement,” Reich continued.Reich throws cold water on the idea that this is a solely British scandal. “So far, the scandal has been limited to Barclay's, a big London-based bank that just paid $453 million to U.S. and British bank regulators, whose top executives have been forced to resign, and whose traders' emails give a chilling picture of how easily they got their colleagues to rig interest rates in order to make big bucks,” he wrote.

The Economist said, “looks less like rogue trading, more like a cartel.”

In a nutshell, the now transatlantic scandal involves bank executive giving false reports to the agency that sets the London Interbank Exchange Rate (LIBOR). Based on the information provided, the interest rate is set for the banks’ borrowing from each other on a day-to-day basis. As Taibbi described the process, “When LIBOR rates are high, it suggests that the banks’ confidence in each other is low, and high LIBOR rates are generally an indicator of shaky financial health among the banks. If the banks manipulated LIBOR, they did it to make themselves look healthier, but this had the consequence of affecting hundreds of trillions of dollars’ worth of financial products worldwide.” One estimate is that this affects as much as $500 trillion, ranging from home mortgages with variable rates to student loans to what’s in your wallet.

Possibly as many as 20 banks, including several big ones, are under investigation for their part in the fraud. “This could only happen in a City in which cheating and deception have become institutionalized,” wrote Rawnsley.

Clearly, some of the biggest figures in the legions of the 1 percent have moved in a big way beyond making money the old fashioned way and have instead turned to looting.A number of the other British banks are said to be in secret negotiations with authorities, aiming to avoid criminal charges through fines the way Barclays has. U.S. authorities are said to be looking into the dealings of a number of major banks. On Sunday The Independent reported that “The LIBOR fixing scandal is set to explode across the continent in the coming weeks as it emerged that German regulators have launched an intensive probe into Deutsche Bank - one of the City's biggest employers - over the affair.”

“Austerity has redrawn the boundaries,” wrote Philip Stephens, associate editor and chief political commentator at the Financial Times. “The cost of the financial crash was borne by the hard-working classes. Now it turns out that the banks who were gambling with taxpayers’ money were also selling them fraudulent insurance policies. Tax cheating by the wealthy is now recognized as imposing an added burden on everyone else.”

“One by one, institutions that people once depended on - banks, parliament, police, press - have been exposed as, if not legally corrupt, then rotten with greed,” wroteGuardian columnist, Jonathan Freedland, last Saturday. “Football fans are learning that even their beloved teams are not immune: Manchester United supporters despaired this week as they saw their club move towards a flotation on the New York Stock Exchange, in an effort to pay back a chunk of the £423m debt that the Glazer family loaded on to United when they bought it seven years ago.”

“Dip into any radio phone-in or online comment thread and you can hear the fury all this is creating,” continued Freedland. “It's easy to dismiss the current mood as hysteria, and the public's anger is certainly inchoate. The clear alternative ideologies around which collective rage cohered in, say, the 1930s are absent now. No one believes the masses are about to storm the palace. But the crisis of institutions is real.”

Labor Party leader, Ed Miliband, made a salient point the other day when he noted that "Not one person has gone to jail for what happened during the financial crisis.” “Why is it that when you shoplift £50-worth of goods you go straight to jail but when you fiddle, lie and cheat your way through the system, gaining millions of pounds, you get away with a slap on the wrist - if that," he said.“The restoration of integrity in banking will not happen without changes in the law to introduce serious criminal sanctions against venal traders and grossly negligent bosses,” wrote Rawnsley. One of those involved in the latest scandal wrote to another: "Done… for you big boy." The endemic corruption of financial institutions will go on until they know they are being watched, they know the chances of being caught are high, and they know that the penalties for transgression are severe. These ‘big boys’ have to be taught that they are not too big to jail.”

“After last summer's urban disorders, the police were imaginative in the use of the law to apprehend those involved,” Rawnsley commented. “The courts handed down sentences to looters which were designed to be exemplary. A college student, with no previous convictions, was imprisoned for six months for nicking a £3.50 pack of bottled water. Yet there is serious doubt whether it will be possible to prosecute banksters who perpetrated a massive con involving sums which would buy many millions of bottles of water.”

Washington Post real estate blogger, James Downie, suggests that the banksters can be prosecuted in the U.S under the federal statue against wire fraud. Commenting on “The banking scandal Wall Street fears,” he called for prosecuting the banks involved “as thoroughly as possible.” “The traders and submitters directly involved in rigging-for-profit should go to jail.”

Last week, a New York Times editorial held out the possibility that the U.S. Justice Department might decide to prosecute somebody at Barclays.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Romney reportedly took in $50,000 in a speaking fee from Barclays last year.Last week, right after Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays - who last year hauled in $27.7 million in total remuneration - resigned from his post. He also bowed out as a host for an upcoming fund raising dinner in London forU.S. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. (Price of admission: between $25,000- $75,000.)

“Not since Clement Attlee has there been a first-time government with such reforming zeal,” Financial Times Executive Comment Editor, John McDermott, commented last week about the Cameron regime. “Yet there appears to be little sense of what the priority is for the next three years.

“This should be to prove that capitalism can work for the many and not just the few.”

Good luck with that one.

These are not good days for the “free market economy.” Its ability to deliver economic justice and security is in question and its reputation is under fire.

“While Barclays has been dominating the news, we hardly noticed that, at the same time, the British pharmaceutical giant, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), was fined £1.9bn for bad practices in the US,” wrote Andreas Whittam Smith last week in the Independent. “This is six times more than Barclays has been fined for dishonestly manipulating interest rates.

“These crimes are at least as reprehensible as Barclays', or perhaps worse, as GSK was putting people's physical wellbeing at risk. From which we can conclude that we are not confronting something arising out of the special nature of banking or out of the particular characteristics of the drugs industry. Rather it is the culture of contemporary business that is the problem. Corrupt practices have spread far and wide. They are occurring on a scale that is unprecedented.”

Such is the state of contemporary capitalism. It seems to just get worse and worse.

“The problem facing western democracies is doubt about the ability of government to deliver rising living standards,” wrote McDermott. He went on to quote a remark made by Osborne in January: “My argument is that the way to address this doubt is not to run away from capitalism but to run towards it.” “The future of this government will depend on whether he and Mr. Cameron can do this without falling flat on their faces," offered McDermott.

“At one time the Labour Party was committed to public accountability and control of the commanding heights of the economy. It supported public ownership of major services and industries,” wrote Jeremy Corbyn, who is Labour MP for Islington North, in the leftwing Morning Star the other day. “Over the years, particularly under new Labour, the party retreated from this and under Blair privatization was promoted.”

“Now is the time, more than ever, to call for public ownership and control of the banking system and financial service industries,” wrote Corbyn. “Only in this way can there be stability in people's lives and investment in productive industries and vital services.”

We aren’t there yet; but we should be.

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member and Columnist, Carl Bloice, is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. Click here to contact Mr. Bloice.