Friday, February 26, 2010

International views on Israel

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Hillary Clinton blasts Greenspan on deficit

Thu Feb 25, 1:42 pm ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Thursday said she was heartbroken by the state of U.S. finances and laid the blame in part on “outrageous” advice from former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan.
Clinton, appearing before a congressional panel to defend the State Department’s $52.8 billion budget request for the 2011 fiscal year, said the Obama administration was well aware of the fiscal pressures battering average Americans.
“It breaks my heart that 10 years ago we had a balanced budget, that we were on the way of paying down the debt of the United States of America,” Clinton said.
“I served on the budget committee in the Senate, and I remember as vividly as if it were yesterday when we had a hearing in which Alan Greenspan came and justified increasing spending and cutting taxes, saying that we didn’t really need to pay down the debt—outrageous in my view,” she said.
Greenspan was named central bank chief by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and held the office until 2006, serving throughout the presidency of Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Seen an economic oracle when in office, Greenspan’s words regularly moved financial markets.
But his image became tarnished after he retired, with many blaming him for helping inflate a housing bubble that eventually burst, setting off a grave financial crisis and plunging the economy into recession.
Public concern about the debt mounted after the government posted a record $1.4 trillion deficit for the fiscal year that ended September 30. The issue looms large ahead of congressional elections in November.
Greenspan, known as a deficit hawk, late last year endorsed a proposed bipartisan commission to help make tough calls needed to bring U.S. debt under control.
Clinton noted that the 2011 budget request for the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development represented a $4.9 billion increase over 2010, most of which would fund work in the “frontline states” of Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
“We are now assuming so many of the post-conflict responsibilities, and that is the bulk of our increase,” Clinton said.

Republican Representative Ron Paul, who has helped lead congressional efforts to rein in the deficit, pressed Clinton on U.S. diplomatic spending including a plan for an expensive new U.S. embassy building in London
Clinton said the costs of the proposed modernist glass cube would be offset by savings on rent for satellite offices that embassy personnel must now use.
“I believe I can make the case that we’re not asking for new money,” she said.

Reuters

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Mass Layoffs by U.S. Manufacturers Surge in January

By definition, a mass layoff in the United States is those job cuts that involve 50 or more workers from the same company. Those types of events increased by 35 in January 2010 to 1,761, according to data released.

This is odd in that it has been asserted by government officials that we’re on the edge of new jobs being created in the U.S. economy. That doesn’t seem likely in the light of the real numbers and not just wishful thinking by politicians.

I believe the reason for the discrepancy is that companies were replenishing supplies, as I’ve mentioned before here, and those needs have probably been met in general, so as expected, the manufacturing jobs to produce them are no longer needed. At least that would be part of the reason for increase in mass layoffs.

The fact that there was an increase in mass layoffs shows there is a decline in demand for products; it’s as simple as that. So that means in a number of industries people and companies are tightening up again.

My view and the data so far seem to confirm it, is there is nothing in the numbers that confirm we’re on the verge of jobs being created in the United States any time soon.

In the manufacturing sector, there were 486 mass layoffs in January, with the consequences of 62,556 workers filing claims for unemployment.

I think one reason officials believed there was going to be an increase in jobs creation was because mass layoffs had been receding since August, giving the illusion that things had turned around. But, again, it’s the replenishment which was the major factor in the mix, not a real and sustainable change in the economy.

Since the latter part of 2007, jobs in the United States have been lost to the tune of 8.4 million.

Over the last 26 months, the Labor Department says mass layoffs have been at a huge 53,739 during that period of time to January, with 5,425,101 workers losing their jobs as a res

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Israel stole 2 billion dollars from Palestinian workers: 40-year deception exposed

Over the past four decades Israel has defrauded Palestinians working inside Israel of more than two billion US dollars by deducting from their salaries contributions for welfare benefits to which they were never entitled, Israeli economists have revealed.

A new report, “State Robbery”, to be published later this month, says the “theft” continued even after the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994 and part of the money was supposed to be transferred to a special fund on behalf of the workers.

According to information supplied by Israeli officials, most of the deductions from the workers’ pay were invested in infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories – a presumed reference to the massive state subsidies accorded to the Jewish settlements.

Nearly 50,000 Palestinians from the West Bank are working in Israel – following the easing of restrictions on entering Israel under the “economic peace” promised by Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister – and continue to have such contributions docked from their pay.

Complicit in the deception, the report adds, is the Histadrut, the Israeli labour federation, which levies a monthly fee on Palestinian workers, even though they are not entitled to membership and are not represented in labour disputes.

“This is a clear-cut case of theft from Palestinian workers on a grand scale,” said Shir Hever, a Jerusalem-based economist and one of the authors of the report. “There are no reasons for Israel to delay in returning this money either to the workers or to their beneficiaries.”

The deductions started being made in 1970, three years after the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began, when Palestinian workers started to enter Israel in significant numbers, most of them employed as manual labourers in the agriculture and construction industries.

Typically, the workers lose a fifth of their salary in deductions that are supposed to cover old age payments, unemployment allowance, disability insurance, child benefits, trade union fees, pension fund, holiday and sick pay, and health insurance. In practice, however, the workers are entitled only to disability payments in case of work accidents and are insured against loss of work if their employer goes bankrupt.

According to the report, compiled by two human rights groups, the Alternative Information Centre and Kav La’Oved, only a fraction of the total contributions – less than eight per cent – was used to award benefits to Palestinian workers. The rest was secretly transferred to the Finance Ministry.

The Israeli organizations assess that the workers were defrauded of at least 2.25bn dollars in today’s prices, in what they describe as a minimum and “very conservative” estimate of the misappropriation of the funds. Such a sum represents about 10 per cent of the PA’s annual budget.

The authors also note that they excluded from their calculations two substantial groups of Palestinian workers – those employed in the Jewish settlements and those working in Israel’s black economy – because figures were too hard to obtain.

Mr Hever said the question of whether the bulk of the deductions – those for national insurance – had been illegally taken from the workers was settled by the Israeli High Court back in 1991. The judges accepted a petition from the flower growers’ union that the government should return about 1.5 million dollars in contributions from Palestinian workers in the industry.

“The legal precedent was set then and could be used to reclaim the rest of these excessive deductions,” he said.

At the height of Palestinian participation in the Israeli labour force, in the early 1990s, as many as one in three Palestinian workers was dependent on an Israeli employer.

Israel continued requiring contributions from Palestinian workers after the creation of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, arguing that it needed to make the deductions to ensure Israeli workers remained competitive.

However, the report notes that such practices were supposed to have been curbed by the Oslo process. Israel agreed to levy an “equalization tax” – equivalent to the excessive contributions paid by Palestinians – a third of which would be invested in a fund that would later be available to the workers.

In fact, however, the Israeli State Comptroller, a government watchdog official, reported in 2003 that only about a tenth of the money levied on the workers had actually been placed in the fund.

The Finance Ministry has admitted that most of the money taken from the workers was passed to Israeli military authorities in the Palestinian territories to pay for “infrastructure programmes”. Hannah Zohar, the director of Kav La’Oved who co-authored the report, said she believed that the ministry was actually referring to the construction of illegal settlements.

The report is also highly critical of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union federation, which it accuses of grabbing “a piece of the pie” by forcing Palestinian workers to pay a monthly “organizing fee” to the union since 1970, even though Palestinians are not entitled to membership.

Despite the Histadrut’s agreement with its Palestinian counterpart in 2008 to repay the fees, only 20 per cent was returned, leaving 30m dollars unaccounted for.

The Histadrut was also implicated in another “rip-off”, said Mr Hever. It agreed in 1990 to the Israeli construction industry’s demand that Palestinian workers pay an extra two per cent tax to promote the training of recent Jewish immigrants, most of them from the former Soviet Union.

Mr Hever said that in effect the Palestinian labourers were required to “subsidise the training of workers meant to replace them”. The funds were never used for the stated purpose but were mainly issued as grants to the families of Israeli workers.

In one especially cynical use of the funds, the report notes, the money was spent on portable stoves for soldiers involved in Israel’s three-week attack on Gaza last year.

In response, the Finance Ministry called the report “incorrect and misleading”, and the Histadrut claimed it was “full of lies”. However, neither provided rebuttals of the report’s allegations or its calculations.

Mr Hever said the government body responsible for making the deductions, the department of payments, had initially refused to divulge any of its figures, but had partly relented after some statistics were made available through leaks from its staff.

Assef Saeed, a senior official in the Palestinian Authority’s Labour Ministry, said the PA was keen to discuss the issue of the deductions, but that talks were difficult because of the lack of contacts between the two sides.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

America’s Addiction to Disaster Porn

By David Sirota

January 29, 2010 ”Information Clearing House”—The black t-shirt — so tight, so come-hither. And oh, those safari button-downs — joke-worthy on Eddie Bauer mannequins, but on news correspondents, so ... enticing.

America missed these sartorial seductions, pined for their sweet suggestive nothings. And now, finally, a nation of television addicts can thank its disaster pornographers for bringing back the lurid garments — and the lustful voyeurism they evoke.

Yes, thousands of miles from the San Fernando Valley’s seedy studios, the adult entertainment business is alive and panting in Haiti. This year’s luminaries aren’t the industry’s typical muscle-bound mustaches of machismo — they are NBC’s Brian Williams pillow-talking to the camera in his Indiana Jones garb, CNN’s Sanjay Gupta playing doctor and, of course, CNN’s Anderson Cooper in that two-sizes-too-small t-shirt “rarely missing an opportunity to showcase his buff physique,” as The New York Times gushed. They are all the disaster porn stars in the media with visions of Peabodys and Pulitzers dancing in their heads.

And We the Ogling People drink it in.

Like any X-rated content, this smut is all flesh and no substantive plot. The lens flits between body parts and journalists pulling perverse Cronkite-in-Vietnam impressions (at one point, CNN showed Cooper and his t-shirt saving a child). But there is little discussion of how western Hispaniola was a man-made disaster before an earthquake made it a natural one.

Though neighboring the planet’s wealthiest nation, Haiti has long been one of the world’s poorest places. It sports 80 percent unemployment and a GDP smaller than the annual executive bonus fund at a single Wall Street bank. The destitution is tragic — and a reflection, in part, of colonial domination.

For much of the last two centuries, Western powers used embargo threats to force the country’s population of erstwhile slaves to reimburse their former European masters for lost “property.” As Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates recounts, America aided these efforts from the beginning because President Thomas Jefferson feared a successful black republic would “inspire slave insurrections throughout the American South.”

Crushed by this oppression, Haiti was then assaulted in the 1990s by American “free” trade policies that destroyed its agriculture economy and tried to turn the country into the world’s sweatshop.
In recent years, as the menace of Western-backed coups lurked, Haiti has at times been compelled to pay more interest on its debt than it received in foreign aid.

This is the real story of Haiti that the black t-shirts and safari button-downs (and, alas, their viewers) have never cared about. They’ve only noticed the country when a cataclysm provided more telegenic images than the daily death and despair of the island’s pre-earthquake squalor.

Even now, as the casualty count rises, disaster pornographers barely mention the macabre history. They know that doing so would break unspoken rules against holding up a foreign policy mirror to America and against riling the politicians and business interests that contributed to Haiti’s demise.

Rather than reporting on what made Haiti so poor and therefore its infrastructure so susceptible to collapse, we get clips of Haitians momentarily cheering “USA!” as food packages trickle into their devastated capital. Rather than inquiries about how poverty made Haiti so ill-prepared for rescue operations, the disaster pornographers instead obediently follow George W. Bush, who self-servingly says, “You’ve got to deal with the desperation and there ought to be no politicization of that.”

“Politicization” — so that’s the safe-for-TV euphemism they’re using these days, huh? Evidently, it must be avoided — evidently, nothing kills an audience’s heaving passion faster than “politics” or (God forbid) contextualized news.

Anything like that — anything beyond the exploitation of raw disaster porn — well, it might ruin the money shot.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

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Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

Now out of office, Chirac recounts that the American leader appealed to their “common faith” (Christianity) and told him: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

This bizarre episode occurred while the White House was assembling its “coalition of the willing” to unleash the Iraq invasion. Chirac says he was boggled by Bush’s call and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

After the 2003 call, the puzzled French leader didn’t comply with Bush’s request. Instead, his staff asked Thomas Romer, a theologian at the University of Lausanne, to analyze the weird appeal. Dr. Romer explained that the Old Testament book of Ezekiel contains two chapters (38 and 39) in which God rages against Gog and Magog, sinister and mysterious forces menacing Israel. Jehovah vows to smite them savagely, to “turn thee back, and put hooks into thy jaws,” and slaughter them ruthlessly. In the New Testament, the mystical book of Revelation envisions Gog and Magog gathering nations for battle, “and fire came down from God out of heaven, and devoured them.”

In 2007, Dr. Romer recounted Bush’s strange behavior in Lausanne University’s review, Allez Savoir. A French-language Swiss newspaper, Le Matin Dimanche, printed a sarcastic account titled: “When President George W. Bush Saw the Prophesies of the Bible Coming to Pass.” France’s La Liberte likewise spoofed it under the headline “A Small Scoop on Bush, Chirac, God, Gog and Magog.” But other news media missed the amazing report.

Subsequently, ex-President Chirac confirmed the nutty event in a long interview with French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, who tells the tale in his new book, Si Vous le Répétez, Je Démentirai (If You Repeat it, I Will Deny), released in March by the publisher Plon.

Oddly, mainstream media are ignoring this alarming revelation that Bush may have been half-cracked when he started his Iraq war. My own paper, The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia, is the only U.S. newspaper to report it so far. Canada’s Toronto Star recounted the story, calling it a “stranger-than-fiction disclosure … which suggests that apocalyptic fervor may have held sway within the walls of the White House.” Fortunately, online commentary sites are spreading the news, filling the press void.

The French revelation jibes with other known aspects of Bush’s renowned evangelical certitude. For example, a few months after his phone call to Chirac, Bush attended a 2003 summit in Egypt. The Palestinian foreign minister later said the American president told him he was “on a mission from God” to defeat Iraq. At that time, the White House called this claim “absurd.”

Recently, GQ magazine revealed that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld attached warlike Bible verses and Iraq battle photos to war reports he hand-delivered to Bush. One declared: “Put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground.”

It’s awkward to say openly, but now-departed President Bush is a religious crackpot, an ex-drunk of small intellect who “got saved.” He never should have been entrusted with the power to start wars.

For six years, Americans really haven’t known why he launched the unnecessary Iraq attack. Official pretexts turned out to be baseless. Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction after all, and wasn’t in league with terrorists, as the White House alleged. Collapse of his asserted reasons led to speculation about hidden motives: Was the invasion loosed to gain control of Iraq’s oil—or to protect Israel—or to complete Bush’s father’s vendetta against the late dictator Saddam Hussein? Nobody ever found an answer.

Now, added to the other suspicions, comes the goofy possibility that abstruse, supernatural, idiotic, laughable Bible prophecies were a factor. This casts an ominous pall over the needless war that has killed more than four thousand young Americans and cost U.S. taxpayers perhaps $1 trillion.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Jews use Holocaust as propaganda weapon, says Catholic bishop

Source

A SENIOR Catholic bishop in Poland claims Jews have stolen the tragedy of the Holocaust and exploited it as a propaganda weapon to gain “unjustified advantages”.
Bishop Tadeusz Pieronek’s remarks, during an interview with the Pontifex.Roma website, were published only hours before Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Poland to take part in commemorations to mark the 65th anniversary of the ADVERTISEMENT

liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

While stressing that the majority of people who died in Nazi Germany’s death camps had been Jewish, Bishop Pieronek, 75, a well-known figure in his homeland, criticised Jews for apparently claiming ownership of the slaughter at the exclusion of other ethnic groups and nationalities who perished.

“Undoubtedly, most of those who died in the camps were Jews but also on the list were Poles, Gypsies, Italians and Catholics.

“It should not be that one group steals this tragedy and uses it for propaganda purposes,” the bishop was quoted as saying.

He then added that the Holocaust had been used as a “propaganda weapon” by Jews to achieve “often unjustified advantages”.

In comments that could infuriate Israel still further, Bishop Pieronek went on to suggest that Jewish manipulation of the Holocaust had helped to silence international criticism of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.

He said: “When we see pictures of the wall (in the West Bank], we can see the colossal injustices committed against the Palestinians, who are treated like animals and have their rights violated, but, in the international lobbies, little is said. Let us establish an international memorial day for them.

“But they, the Jews, have a good press, because of their powerful financial resources – extremely powerful through the unconditional support of the United States.

“And this promotes a kind of arrogance, which I consider to be unbearable.”

Coming as the world prepares to mark International Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, the bishop’s comments could well unsettle Polish-Jewish relations.

Mr Netanyahu, speaking yesterday at a ceremony at Israel’s national Holocaust memorial where the blueprints of the Auschwitz death camp were unveiled for public viewing, said the lesson of the Holocaust was to “stop bad things when they are small”.

“There is new Jew-hatred in our midst. There are new calls for the extermination of the Jewish state,” the Israeli PM said, in comments that were believed to be directed at Iran.

Although Jerusalem and Warsaw enjoy good relations at a state level, some Jews accuse Poles of having had a role in the Holocaust, and still suspect the country of harbouring antisemitic sentiment.

But many Poles find such accusations insulting. They say people who make them are ignorant of the tremendous suffering Nazi forces inflicted on Poland during the war and that thousands of Poles died helping Jews. They also point to the fact their country now has a flourishing, if small, Jewish community.

Bishop Pieronek later denied making the more damning claim that the Holocaust was a “Jewish invention”, claiming it was added by the journalist who conducted the interview. Speaking to the Polish press, he said he had been referring to the use of the Hebrew word Shoah. “In this sense, the Jews invented the name of the Holocaust,” he said. “In contrast, genocide, the intention to destroy the Jewish nation, is the copyright of Nazi Germany.”

UK & Churchill Crimes Exposed from British Raj Indian Holocaust to Palestinian, Iraqi & Afghan …

UK & Churchill Crimes Exposed from British Raj Indian Holocaust to Palestinian, Iraqi & Afghan Genocides

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Gideon Polya writes:

I have listed below an expanded list of immense crimes in which Churchill was complicit as a racist soldier, politician, mass murderer and holocaust-denying writer – indeed he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his numerous published works, especially his six-edition set The Second World War in which he ignored his deliberate, remorseless murder of 6-7 million Indians in 1943-1945 I have provided estimates of violent and non-violent avoidable deaths in square brackets.

1. British Indian Holocaust (1.8 billion excess deaths, 1757-1947; 10 million killed in post-1857 Indian Mutiny reprisals; 1 million starved, 1895-1897 Indian Famine; 6-9 million starved, 1899-1900 Indian Famine; 6-7 million starved under Churchill, Bengali Holocaust 1943-1945].

2. Sudan atrocities horrendous British atrocities after the Battle of Obdurman 1898.

3. Boer (Afrikaaner) Genocide 28,000 Afrikaaner women and children died in British concentration camps, 1899-1902.

4. World War 1 promotion World War I Allied military and civilian dead 5.7 million and 3.7 million, respectively; German-allied (Central Powers) military and civilian deaths 4.0 million and 5.2 million; troop movement-exacerbated Spanish Flu Epidemic killed 20-100 million people world wide. 1918-1922.

5. WW1 Dardanelles Campaign in Turkey 0.2 million Allied and Turkish soldiers killed, 1915; precipitated 1915-1923 Turkish Armenian Genocide, 1.5 million Armenians killed.

6. UK and US invasion of Russia 1917-1919 millions died in the Russian Civil War and the subsequent Russian Famine; 7 million died in the circa 1930 Ukrainian Famine; and perhaps up to 20 million died overall in Stalinist atrocities.

7. British suppression of the Arab revolt in Iraq (invaded by Britain in 1914) .

8. Support for British Occupation and opposition to Indian self-determination 1757-1947 excess deaths, 1.8 billion; 1895-1897 famine deaths1 million; 1899-1900 Indian Famine, deaths6-9 million deaths; 1943-1945 Bengali Holocaust deaths 6-7 million.

9. World War 2 promotion World War 2 military deaths 25 million and civilian deaths about 67 million.

10. Promotion of Japan entry into World War 2 in order to involve the US and hence ensure victory 35 million Chinese avoidable deaths, 1937-1945; 6-7 million Indians starved, Bengal 1943-1945; millions more died in the WW2 Eastern Theatre.

11. Churchill knew Singapore was indefensible 8,000-15,000 killed, 130,000 captured in the 1941 Malaya campaign; 14,000 Australian, 16,000 British and 32,000 Indian troops surrendered in Singapore.

12. Churchill deliberately did not warn Americans about Pearl Harbor attack Eastern Theatre WW2 deaths 45 million.

13. WW2 Bengal Holocaust, Bengal Famine deliberate starving to death of of 6-7 million Indians; confessed by Churchill in a letter to Roosevelt.

14. Churchill rejected top scientific advice and supported bombing of German cities instead of protecting Atlantic convoys .016 million allied airmen killed; 0.6 million German civilians killed; Battle of the Atlantic almost lost; 7 million dead from famine in the Indian Ocean region related to halving of Allied shipping in 1943.

15. Churchill acknowledged the crucial importance of maintaining Hindu-Muslim antipathy to preserve British rule 1 million dead and 18 million Muslim and Hindu refugees associated with India-Pakistan Partition in 1947.

16. 1944 UK War Cabinet decision Partition of Palestine .

17. UK rejection of 1944 Brand plan to save Hungarian Jews 0.2-0.4 million killed by Nazis and Arrow Cross fascists out of 0.7 million; Zionists also opposed the Brand plan

18. British, American, Zionist, Australian and European adoption of Churchill’s holocaust commission and holocaust denying legacy, with post-war atrocities involving invasion, occupation, devastation and genocide .

Source http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/uk-churchill-crimes-exposed-from-british-raj-indian-holocaust-to-palestinian-iraqi-afghan-genocides/

Saturday, January 23, 2010

Aid piling up at UN’s ‘cold beer’ compound …

as red tape keeps aid from desperate Haitians - while UN staff have wi-fi and a bar

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It is a tale of two cities. One has ice-cold beers, internet access, thousands of men and billions of dollars’ worth of gleaming machinery, together with piles of food, blankets, generators and other aid relief from around the globe.
This is the heavily fortified US-controlled Port-au-Prince airport and neighbouring United Nations compound.
The other is the devastated city of Port-au-Prince, where the stench of death fills the air and starving people are in utter despair, still in need of the basic necessities of food, water, shelter and medical care.

Never, in more than 20 years of covering disasters, has the void between the might and power of the Westernised world and the penniless and pitiful people they have been mobilised to ‘save’ been so glaringly obvious to me.
This nearly two weeks after the earthquake that devastated Haiti’s capital, leaving an estimated 100,000 dead in the rubble and another 1.4million homeless.
Despite a vast worldwide aid effort – spurred on by pleas from celebrities such as George Clooney in Friday night’s Haiti Telethon – the lack of help reaching those who need it is such that even aid agencies on the ground are now admitting they have fallen woefully short.
Alejandro Chicheri, Press officer for the UN-funded World Food Programme, said: ‘Of course we would like to be doing more to help the people on the streets but the logistics are a nightmare.
‘These things take time and we are going as fast as we can.’
As I landed at Port-au-Prince airport on Friday on a charter flight funded by the charity World Vision from the neighbouring Dominican Republic, the tragedy was visible even before our jet touched down.

Vast swathes of the city are flattened and huge areas of makeshift ‘tent towns’ are visible from the air, along with long lines of people wandering aimlessly along the roads and gathering outside Western-controlled compounds like the UN’s in desperate hope of handouts.
The airport, now fully under the control of the US military, is like something out of a Hollywood action film. Choppers whirl overhead.
Huge vehicles rumble around filled with men in uniform. Large passenger and cargo jets, emblazoned with flags from around the globe, sit on the tarmac.
Some were being emptied of their crates of food, milk powder, rice and water. Others just sat idle.
Swarms of US military personnel and coastguards were busying themselves by working on their gleaming vehicles and aircraft.
Hundreds of blue-helmeted UN soldiers lined one edge of the runway but, during the hour I watched them, went nowhere as they visibly started wilting in the blazing 32C Caribbean heat.

Astonishingly, officials have set up a formal administrative procedure for those who choose to visit Haiti. You have to fill out two forms – one each for customs and immigration.
The form even queries whether your trip is ‘business or pleasure?’.
It took an hour after leaving the aircraft for photographer Nick Stern and me to travel the half-mile or so from the landing strip to a small building where a woman in uniform glanced at my passport and stamped it.
‘Welcome to Haiti,’ she said quietly.
The airport compound is, by any standards, an astonishing feat of organisation.
I spoke to Christian minister Brent Gambrell who was one of the first to arrive, just eight hours after the earthquake hit.

He has a long-established ministry in Haiti and is friends with US golfer Zach Johnson who loaned him his private jet to get there.
Mr Gambrell said: ‘I brought in aid supplies and when I landed there was a plane-load of Canadians here looking confused and asking me “Where do we go?”.
‘It was chaos for the first few days. The airport closed down because they couldn’t handle the flights wanting to come in. There was no organisation until the US military got involved.
‘But it has become more difficult to actually move the stuff out of here and get it to the people who need it. There is so much red tape and bureaucracy.’
He estimated the number of troops and aid workers now living and working inside the airport at around 8,000.
‘There were more,’ he said, ‘but most of the search-and-rescue teams are pulling out as there’s little chance of finding anyone else alive at this stage.’

Those leaving as the search for survivors was officially called off included 62 British rescue experts.
The UK teams pulled four people alive from the rubble, including a two-year-old girl trapped for three days.
Outside the airport, hundreds of Haitians are lined up, asking for help, water and work. Bonni Pierre Louis is one of the lucky ones.
He was hired as a translator by a search-and-rescue team. He told me: ‘It is heartbreaking to me. My sister lost her only daughter in the quake. I am making money and I have food and shelter. Outside it is bad, really bad. People I know were eating cat food but even that has run out now.
‘Most Haitians who can get out of the city are now going to the countryside. They are saving themselves. If you wait for aid, you wait a long time.’
There are some signs that the aid is starting to get to those who need it. Next to the airport, at the UN compound – from where I sat writing this, with internet access, near the light from a shower block and with an ice-cold beer from the on-base bar (complete with potted plants) – supplies are starting to go out.

Frenchman Alain Jaffre is the Program Controller for the World Food Programme. He told me the agency had started providing food to local orphanages and hopes to seriously start stepping up its efforts in the next few days.
On Wednesday, he and a team heard about the Coeur de la Nativitie orphanage, an hour’s drive north of the compound.
There, 56 children died but 78 survived.
His team set out in a low-key convoy with just one car full of food and supplies. He said: ‘I have been to many orphanages and usually the kids run up to you and they are smiling and playful. But not in this case. It was heartbreaking. It was like something
out of Romania.
‘There were children lying there with broken legs and arms, with no food. Their stomachs were swollen. We managed to get supplies in to them and we will be going back.
‘We were told about two five-year-old girls who survived under the rubble for four days. That is what keeps us going.’

David de Giles, a Parisian lawyer who is volunteering with the UN, said: ‘I was working in the old UN HQ at the St Christopher hotel when the earthquake struck. If I had not gone outside to make a phone call I would have been killed. I lost a lot of friends.
‘We are starting to get aid out to the orphanages but it is still very chaotic on the streets. It is not advisable to go in a big convoy with guys with guns because then it’s obvious you have food and there is a chance the orphanage might get looted.
‘There is no infrastructure so we are having to work through distribution problems before we head out.’
Late on Friday, the World Food Programme offered to take me to see one of the orphanages they are providing supplies to.
A gleaming white four-wheel-drive vehicle arrived in which we waited...and waited. I was told it was because we were expecting ‘a VIP guest’. In the end, the trip was cancelled. The VIP and her handlers had vetoed it.
I later learned the VIP was Princess Haya of Jordan. She flew in with supplies in her role as a UN Goodwill Ambassador, met her country’s troops then flew back to the Dominican Republic ‘for safety reasons’ – all in the comfort of a private 747.

Once you do get out into the earthquake area, it is the smell you notice first. Sick, sweet and acrid, it hangs in the air and permeates every pore.
They tell you to put Vicks in your nose and to cover your face with a scarf but nothing works. The smell of death is everywhere.
Yesterday I visited the remote Christ Roi area which was one of the poorest and most dangerous shanty towns even before the earthquake hit.
Flies and mosquitoes swarmed over every pile of rubble.
Even though it took me only 45 minutes by taxi from the UN HQ – where there are piles of food, water and medical supplies – when I reached the village of 600 people they said they had seen no aid workers at all.
One girl of eight called Addi had a gaping wound on her left leg that was already smelling and turning gangrenous. The leg was turning green.

I met a man called Cardel Arnold who lost his wife, son and daughter. He said he had recovered his wife’s body and burnt it but pointed to the pile of rubble that was once his pre-fabricated house and said: ‘The girls are still in there.’
Like the others in the village he now lives in a makeshift construction of bin liners and bits of discarded wood.
I was travelling with emergency medical services worker Ryan Flaherty, 22, from New Jersey.
He had stumbled across the area last week and had been ‘horrified’ that no aid had reached the village.
He said: ‘I have been begging for help but they just keep telling me it’s too dangerous to bring food and supplies in. But if it’s not too dangerous for you and it’s not too dangerous for me, why is it too dangerous for United Nations troops with guns? It’s disgusting that there is so much food and medical stuff so near and yet these people who are in desperate need are not getting it.’
We drove for an hour. On every street corner there were crudely-written hand-made signs saying ‘help us’ or ‘medicine and food needed here’.

One woman told me that she was too scared to be in any building now. ‘I just keep walking,’ she said. I passed hundreds of people just wandering aimlessly.
Some looters had set up improvised street stalls selling plundered tracksuits and
T-shirts at vastly inflated prices.
The biggest queues were outside stores with Western Union money wiring facilities.
Word had got out on Friday that Western Union was opening for business so that friends and family outside Haiti could wire in funds.
But all three stores I passed had armed guards outside the gates with the doors firmly locked. People were just waiting in hope.
Everywhere I went I saw mothers with babies washing clothes in filthy water. But they are the lucky ones. Many other children are now orphans.
When our taxi stopped they would come up and hold out their hands, and I wished I could give them all something but there were simply too many.
One boy of about six even hung on to the side of the taxi as we drove took off and we had to gently prise him off.
My gut instinct was to help him but everywhere I looked there were other children.
There were just so many.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Haiti aid flow grows; feuds over reaching victims

France’s Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet told The Associated Press that he had filed an official complaint to the US government after two French planes, one carrying a field hospital, were denied permission to land.

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Hungry, haggard survivors clamored for food and water Saturday as donors squabbled over how to get aid to Haiti and rescuers waged an increasingly improbable battle to free the dying before they become the dead.

Haiti’s government alone has already recovered 20,000 bodies - not counting those recovered by independent agencies or relatives themselves, Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told The Associated Press. He said a final toll of 100,000 dead would “seem to be the minimum.”

There were growing signs that foreign aid and rescue workers were getting to the people most in need - even those buried deep beneath collapsed buildings - while others struggled to cope with the countless bodies still left on the streets.

Crowds of Haitians thronged around foreign workers shoveling through piles of wreckage at shattered buildings throughout the city, using sniffer dogs, shovels and in some cases heavy earth-moving equipment.

Searchers poked a camera on a wire thorough a hole at the collapsed Hotel Montana and spotted three people who were still alive, and they heard the voice of a woman speaking French, said Ecuadorian Red Cross worker David Betancourt.

In Washington, President Barack Obama joined with his predecessors George W. Bush and Bill Clinton to appeal for donations to help Haiti and he sent Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton to the Caribbean nation.

“We stand united with the people of Haiti, who have shown such incredible resilience, and we will help them to recover and to rebuild,” Obama vowed.

Bellerive said an estimated 300,000 people are living on the streets in port-au-Prince and “Getting them water, and food, and a shelter is our top priority.”

The US military operating Haiti’s damaged main airport said it can now handle 90 flights a day, but that wasn’t enough to cope with all the planes sent by foreign donors and governments circling overhead in hopes of winning one of the few spots available on the tarmac.

France’s Cooperation Minister Alain Joyandet told The Associated Press that he had filed an official complaint to the US government after two French planes, one carrying a field hospital, were denied permission to land.

A plane carrying the prime ministers of two Caribbean nations also was forced to turn back late Friday due to a lack of space at the airport, the Caricom trade bloc announced.

Haitian President Rene Preval urged donors to avoid arguments.

“This is an extremely difficult situation. We must keep our cool to do coordination and not to throw accusations at each other,” Preval said after emerging from a meeting with donor groups and nations at a dilapidated police station that serves as his temporary headquarters.

With the National Palace and many ministries destroyed, Preval meets with ministers in the open air in a circle of plastic chairs.

On a street in the heavily damaged downtown area, the spade of a massive bulldozer quickly filled up with dead bodies headed for a morgue and immediate burial. Haiti’s Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told AP that disposing of bodies had become crucial.

“Sadly, we have to bring everybody to mass graves because we are racing against a possible epidemic,” told AP. Haitians already have been piling bodies and burning them.

Many in the city have painted toothpaste around their nostrils and beg passers-by for surgical masks to cut the smell.

The US Southern Command said it now has 24 helicopters flying relief missions - many from warships off the coast - with 4,200 military personnel involved and 6,300 more due by Monday.

But with aid still scarce in many areas, there were scattered signs that the desperate - or the criminal - were taking things into their own hands.

A water delivery truck driver said he was attacked in one of the city’s slums. There were reports of isolated looting as young men walked through downtown with machetes, and robbers reportedly shot one man whose body was left on the street.

An AP photographer saw one looter haul a corpse from a coffin at a city cemetery and then drive away with the box.

“I don’t know how much longer we can hold out,” said Dee Leahy, a lay missionary from St. Louis, Missouri, who was working with nuns handing out provisions from their small stockpile. “We need food, we need medical supplies, we need medicine, we need vitamins and we need painkillers. And we need it urgently.”

UN spokeswoman Elizabeth Byrs told the BBC that the Haiti earthquake was “one of the biggest disasters we’ve ever had to face.” The Red Cross estimates 45,000 to 50,000 people were killed in Tuesday’s magnitude-7.0 earthquake. A third of Haiti’s 9 million people may be in need of aid.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said the World Food Program was providing high-energy biscuits and ready-to-eat meals to around 8,000 people “several times a day.”

“Obviously, that is only a drop in the bucket in the face of the massive need, but the agency will be scaling up to feed approximately 1 million people within 15 days and 2 million people within a month,” he said.

The effort to get aid to the victims has been slowed by blocked roads, congestion at the airport, limited equipment and other obstacles. U.N. peacekeepers patrolling the capital said public anger was rising and warned aid convoys to add security to uard against looting.

International Red Cross spokesman Paul Conneally said a convoy with a field hospital and medical workers was heading into Haiti by road Saturday from the Dominican Republic because “it’s not possible to fly anything into Port-au-Prince right now. The airport is completely congested.”

The World Health Organization has said eight hospitals in Port-au-Prince were destroyed or damaged, severely curtailing treatment available for the injured.

Officials said damage to the seaport also is a problem for bringing in aid. The arrival Friday of the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson helped immediately by taking pressure off the airport. Within hours, an 82nd Airborne Division rapid response unit was handing out food, water and medical supplies from two cargo pallets outside the airport.

Others tried to help in smaller ways.

Milero Cedamou, the 33-year-old owner of a small water delivery company, twice drove his small tanker truck to a tent camp where thousands of homeless people are living. Hundreds clustered around to fill their plastic buckets.

“This is a crisis of unspeakable magnitude; it’s normal for every Haitian to help,” Cedamou said. “This is not charity.”

Medical teams from a dozen other nations set up makeshift hospitals to tend to the critically injured - who were still appearing.

“We have the hope we can find more people,” said Chilean Maj. Rodrigo Vasquez, whose teams were trying to save those trapped at the Hotel Montana. But others weren’t as hopeful. One Haitian woman sitting outside of the destroyed hotel spoke on her cell phone and sobbed. “No one’s alive in there,” she said in Creole.

And soon, it will be too late in any case.

“Beyond three or four days without water, they’ll be pretty ill,” said Dr. Michael VanRooyen of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative in Boston. “Around three days would be where you would see people start to succumb.”

Still, there were improbable triumphs.

“It’s a miracle,” said Anne-Marie Morel, raising her arms to the sky after a neighbor was found alive in the rubble of a home. If one person could be resuscitated from the utter destruction of this street, there remained hope that many other could still be found alive, she said.

“Nonsense, there is no God and no miracle,” shouted back Remi Polevard, another neighbor, who said his five children were somewhere under the nearby debris.

“How could he do this to us?” Polevard yelled.

The Gates Foundation and Monsanto Working Hand-in-Hand

We already knew that Virus Bill was bad, because of the spying application in Windows.

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Charity made in America - genocide=help - just look at Haiti.

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Gates Foundation = Monsanto
By Jill Richardson
La Vida Locavore, Jan 9, 2010
Straight to the Source

Gates Foundations = Monsanto now even more than ever. I should refine that statement. Gates Foundation = in favor of a pro-biotech, for-profit, unsustainable, scary, powerful approach to “feeding the world” (a.k.a. lining corporate pockets). And they have many ties to Monsanto including a brand new one. They just filled Rajiv Shah’s old job with Sam Dryden. Dryden’s resume is enough to make me throw up.

* 1973: Graduates from Emory with a BA
* 1973: Analyst at US Dept of Commerce Dept of Economic Analysis
* 1974-1980: Works at Union Carbide
* 1980: “led the spin-out of Union Carbide’s biotechnologies and related business operations and was subsequently co-founder, President and CEO of Agrigenetics Corporation” (a large seed company)
* 1985: Agrigenetics is bought out (presumably by Dow AgroSciences). Dryden leaves after the sale. Dryden founds Big Stone Inc “a private venture investment and development company focused on the life sciences.”

The firm participated in founding over a dozen companies in area such as biopesticides, novel nucleic acid-based therapeutics and diagnostic products, transgenic animals, fermentation based production of vitamins, pharmaceutical clinical trialing, environmental toxicological testing and bio therapeutics.

* Somewhere in this timeline, Drysden served as the “non-executive chairman” of Celgro, Inc. - an “independent venture of Celgene Corporation, a company focused on the development of novel, single-isomer, agricultural chemical compounds.”
* From there, he went on to become CEO of Emergent Genetics, Inc. (a biotech seed company and the third largest cotton seed company in the U.S.)
* 2005: Monsanto acquires most of Emergent Genetics (Syngenta buys the rest). Dryden goes to work at Monsanto.
* June 2006: Dryden becomes Managing Director of Wolfensohn & Company, an investment and consulting company founded by a former World Bank president (James Wolfensohn). Drysden’s focus is investing in alternative energies.

FYI, Union Carbide’s famous disaster in Bhopal, India occurred on December 3, 1984 - four years after Dryden left the company. The plant, which manufactured the pesticide carbaryl (a.k.a. Sevin), was established in 1969, which means it was put into operation long before Dryden worked at Union Carbide and it was in operation during Dryden’s entire time working there.

If that all ain’t scary enough, read about what this guy does in his spare time:

In addition to his for-profit activities, Sam has extensive pro-bono involvement in efforts relating to food security and international economic development.  Currently he is an advisor to The World Bank regarding rural development strategy.  He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.  Sam serves on the Nation Academies Panel on Science and Technology for Global Sustainability.  In the past, he served on the Steering Committee for the Global Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology, led by the World Bank.  He was a member of the Executive Council, as well as chair of the Private Sector Committee, of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.  He has been as advisor to the Rockefeller, McKnight and Macarthur Foundations and a member of the Design Advisory Committee and Scientific Advisory Board of its African Agricultural Technology Foundation—an organization created for the advancement of African food security.  In the mid-1980’s, Sam chaired a Rockefeller Brothers Fund development initiative to benefit developing country food security.  He also served on the Board of the South/North Development Initiative—a private Rockefeller Family foundation for alleviation of rural poverty in less developed countries through entrepreneurial development. He is a past member of the U.S. Government’s Agricultural Sciences and Technology Review Board.

Sam is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations and serves on its Advisory Committee on Intellectual Property and American Competitiveness.  In the past he served on its Study Group analyzing trade issues between the United States and Europe surrounding genetically modified foods.

Sustainability? Crop diversity? Food security? Are they joking? Also note that he’s got some Green Revolution credentials in there with his work with CGIAR and the Rockefeller Foundation. Then there’s his work with the World Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s not terribly surprising that Gates picked him really. The Gates Foundation just formally joined CGIAR, and Sylvia Mathews Burwell (Dryden’s new boss) is on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Thursday, January 07, 2010

How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA

A new model of the way the THz waves interact with DNA explains how the damage is done and why evidence has been so hard to gather.

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Cute and that is one of a kind of technology used in the so called Airport Body Scanner!

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Great things are expected of terahertz waves, the radiation that fills the slot in the electromagnetic spectrum between microwaves and the infrared. Terahertz waves pass through non-conducting materials such as clothes , paper, wood and brick and so cameras sensitive to them can peer inside envelopes, into living rooms and “frisk” people at distance.

The way terahertz waves are absorbed and emitted can also be used to determine the chemical composition of a material. And even though they don’t travel far inside the body, there is great hope that the waves can be used to spot tumours near the surface of the skin.

With all that potential, it’s no wonder that research on terahertz waves has exploded in the last ten years or so.

But what of the health effects of terahertz waves? At first glance, it’s easy to dismiss any notion that they can be damaging. Terahertz photons are not energetic enough to break chemical bonds or ionise atoms or molecules, the chief reasons why higher energy photons such as x-rays and UV rays are so bad for us. But could there be another mechanism at work?

The evidence that terahertz radiation damages biological systems is mixed. “Some studies reported significant genetic damage while others, although similar, showed none,” say Boian Alexandrov at the Center for Nonlinear Studies at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and a few buddies. Now these guys think they know why.

Alexandrov and co have created a model to investigate how THz fields interact with double-stranded DNA and what they’ve found is remarkable. They say that although the forces generated are tiny, resonant effects allow THz waves to unzip double-stranded DNA, creating bubbles in the double strand that could significantly interfere with processes such as gene expression and DNA replication. That’s a jaw dropping conclusion.

And it also explains why the evidence has been so hard to garner. Ordinary resonant effects are not powerful enough to do do this kind of damage but nonlinear resonances can. These nonlinear instabilities are much less likely to form which explains why the character of THz genotoxic
effects are probabilistic rather than deterministic, say the team.

This should set the cat among the pigeons. Of course, terahertz waves are a natural part of environment, just like visible and infrared light. But a new generation of cameras are set to appear that not only record terahertz waves but also bombard us with them. And if our exposure is set to increase, the question that urgently needs answering is what level of terahertz exposure is safe.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/

Geithner’s Fed Told AIG to Limit Swaps Disclosure

Jan. 7 (Bloomberg)—The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, then led by Timothy Geithner, told American International Group Inc. to withhold details from the public about the bailed-out insurer’s payments to banks during the depths of the financial crisis, e-mails between the company and its regulator show.

AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

The New York Fed took over negotiations between AIG and the banks in November 2008 as losses on the swaps, which were contracts tied to subprime home loans, threatened to swamp the insurer weeks after its taxpayer-funded rescue. The regulator decided that Goldman Sachs and more than a dozen banks would be fully repaid for $62.1 billion of the swaps, prompting lawmakers to call the AIG rescue a “backdoor bailout” of financial firms.

“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”

Geithner Had ‘No Role’

“Secretary Geithner played no role in these decisions,” Meg Reilly, a Treasury spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. “He was recused from working on issues involving specific companies, including AIG,” after his nomination for Treasury secretary on Nov. 24, 2008. Geithner “began to insulate himself weeks earlier in anticipation of his nomination,” she said in a separate statement.

Geithner, who was tapped by President Barack Obama, took the Treasury job in January, 2009. Mark Herr, a spokesman for New York-based AIG, declined to comment.

Issa requested the e-mails from AIG Chief Executive Officer Robert Benmosche in October after Bloomberg News reported that the New York Fed ordered the crippled insurer not to negotiate for discounts in settling the swaps. The decision to pay the banks in full may have cost AIG, and thus taxpayers, at least $13 billion, based on the discount the insurer was seeking.

The e-mail exchanges between AIG and the New York Fed over the insurer’s disclosure of the transactions show that the regulator pressed the company to keep details out of the public eye. Issa’s comments add to criticism from Republican lawmakers, including Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Representative Roy Blunt of Missouri, who wrote letters in the past two months demanding information from Geithner, 48, about the costs of the AIG bailout.

E-mail ‘Troubling’

Barney Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the e-mail exchanges were “troubling” and that he supports holding congressional hearings to review them.

AIG’s Dec. 24, 2008, filing was challenged privately by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which polices the adequacy of disclosures by publicly traded firms. The agency said in a letter to then-CEO Edward Liddy six days later that AIG should provide a Schedule A, which lists collateral postings for the swaps and names the bank counterparties that purchased them from the company. The Schedule A was disclosed about five months later in a filing.

Securities Lawyers

“Our position has always been that if AIG’s securities lawyers determine that AIG is legally obligated to make a particular filing or disclosure, then that is what AIG must do,” Thomas Baxter, general counsel for the New York Fed, said in a statement. He said it was appropriate for the New York Fed, as party to deals outlined in the filings, “to provide comments on a number of issues, including disclosures, with the understanding that the final decision rested with AIG’s securities counsel.”

Kathleen Shannon, an AIG deputy general counsel, wrote to the insurer’s executives in a March 12, 2009, e-mail about the conflicting demands from the New York Fed and SEC.

“In order to make only the disclosure that the Fed wants us to make,” Shannon wrote, “we need to have a reasonable basis for believing and arguing to the SEC that the information we are seeking to protect is not already publicly available.”

Deutsche Bank

Under pressure from lawmakers, AIG disclosed the names of the counterparties, which included Deutsche Bank AG and Merrill Lynch & Co., on March 15. The disclosure said AIG made more than $27 billion in payments without identifying the securities tied to the swaps or listing the value of individual purchases by each bank, details the Fed wanted to keep out, according to the March 12 e-mail from AIG’s Shannon.

Earlier that month, Fed Vice Chairman Donald Kohn testified to Congress that disclosure of the counterparties would harm AIG’s ability to do business. The insurer agreed to turn over a stake of almost 80 percent in connection to its bailout.

The e-mails span five months starting in November 2008 and include requests from the New York Fed to withhold documents and delay disclosures. The correspondence includes e-mails between AIG’s Shannon and attorneys at the New York Fed and its law firm, Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP. Tom Orewyler, a spokesman for Davis Polk in New York, declined to comment as did Shannon.

According to Shannon’s e-mails obtained by Issa, the New York Fed suggested that AIG refrain in a filing from mentioning so-called synthetic collateralized debt obligations, which bundled derivative contracts rather than actual loans.

‘No Mention of the Synthetics’

The filing “reflects your client’s desire that there be no mention of the synthetics in connection with this transaction,” Shannon wrote to Davis Polk on Dec. 2, 2008. “They will not be mentioned at all.”

AIG had about $9.8 billion of swaps protecting the synthetic holdings as of September 2008, the company said on Dec. 10, 2008. Goldman Sachs said in a press release last month that it was among banks that had losses on synthetic CDOs.

As part of a bailout that swelled to $182.3 billion, AIG and the Fed created Maiden Lane III, a taxpayer-funded facility designed to remove mortgage-linked swaps from the insurer’s books. Shannon told the New York Fed on Nov. 24, 2008, that AIG executives wanted to publicly disclose details about Maiden Lane the next day.

“Do you think it might be feasible to hold off on the Maiden Lane III 8K and press release until next week?” Brett Phillips, a New York Fed lawyer wrote in an e-mail that day. “The thinking is that the Maiden Lane III closing will be a less transparent event, and it might be better to narrow the gap between AIG’s announcement and the New York Fed’s publication of term sheet summaries.”

‘Guided By Your Counsel’

“Given the significance of the transaction, AIG would be best served by filing tomorrow,” Shannon wrote. “We will of course be guided by your counsel.” The document outlining the Maiden Lane agreement was posted on Dec. 2, 2008.

In at least one instance, AIG pushed for documents to be disclosed and then released the information.

“We believe that the agreements listed in the index (i.e., the Master Investment and Credit Agreement and the Shortfall Agreement) do not need to be filed,” Peter Bazos, a Davis Polk lawyer wrote on Nov. 25, 2008. “Please let us know your thoughts in this regard.”

AIG’s Shannon replied that “the better practice and better disclosure in this complex area is to file the agreements currently rather than to delay.” The agreements were included in the Dec. 2 filing.

More details of the negotiations over swaps payments emerged in November 2009 when Neil Barofsky, the special inspector in charge of policing the Troubled Asset Relief Program, assessed the Fed’s role in the bailout.

‘Entitled to Know’

“Federal Reserve officials provided AIG’s counterparties with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received,” Barofsky wrote in a Nov. 17 report. “The default position, whenever government funds are deployed in a crisis to support markets or institutions, should be that the public is entitled to know what is being done with government funds.”

The New York Fed may eventually recoup its loan to Maiden Lane III, the vehicle that obtained CDOs from the banks after paying to cancel the swaps, Barofsky wrote. According to a New York Fed report, the value of securities and cash held in Maiden Lane III climbed 4.5 percent to $23.5 billion in the three months ended Sept. 30.

AIG’s first rescue was an $85 billion credit line from the New York Fed in September 2008. The bailout was expanded three times and is valued at $182.3 billion. That includes a $60 billion Fed credit line, an investment of as much as $69.8 billion from the Treasury and up to $52.5 billion for Maiden Lane facilities to buy mortgage-linked assets owned or backed by the company.

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Mayo Clinic in Arizona to Stop Treating Some Medicare Patients

Just another OBAMA!

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By David Olmos

Dec. 31 (Bloomberg)—The Mayo Clinic, praised by President Barack Obama as a national model for efficient health care, will stop accepting Medicare patients as of tomorrow at one of its primary-care clinics in Arizona, saying the U.S. government pays too little.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.” Mayo’s move to drop Medicare patients may be copied by family doctors, some of whom have stopped accepting new patients from the program, said Lori Heim, president of the American Academy of Family Physicians, in a telephone interview yesterday.

“Many physicians have said, ‘I simply cannot afford to keep taking care of Medicare patients,’” said Heim, a family doctor who practices in Laurinburg, North Carolina. “If you truly know your business costs and you are losing money, it doesn’t make sense to do more of it.”

Medicare Loss

The Mayo organization had 3,700 staff physicians and scientists and treated 526,000 patients in 2008. It lost $840 million last year on Medicare, the government’s health program for the disabled and those 65 and older, Mayo spokeswoman Lynn Closway said.

Mayo’s hospital and four clinics in Arizona, including the Glendale facility, lost $120 million on Medicare patients last year, Yardley said. The program’s payments cover about 50 percent of the cost of treating elderly primary-care patients at the Glendale clinic, he said.

“We firmly believe that Medicare needs to be reformed,” Yardley said in a Dec. 23 e-mail. “It has been true for many years that Medicare payments no longer reflect the increasing cost of providing services for patients.”

Mayo will assess the financial effect of the decision in Glendale to drop Medicare patients “to see if it could have implications beyond Arizona,” he said.

Nationwide, doctors made about 20 percent less for treating Medicare patients than they did caring for privately insured patients in 2007, a payment gap that has remained stable during the last decade, according to a March report by the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, a panel that advises Congress on Medicare issues. Congress last week postponed for two months a 21.5 percent cut in Medicare reimbursements for doctors.

National Participation

Medicare covered an estimated 45 million Americans at the end of 2008, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the agency in charge of the programs. While 92 percent of U.S. family doctors participate in Medicare, only 73 percent of those are accepting new patients under the program, said Heim of the national physicians’ group, citing surveys by the Leawood, Kansas-based organization.

Greater access to primary care is a goal of the broad overhaul supported by Obama that would provide health insurance to about 31 million more Americans. More family doctors are needed to help reduce medical costs by encouraging prevention and early treatment, Obama said in a June 15 speech to the American Medical Association meeting in Chicago.

Reid Cherlin, a White House spokesman for health care, declined comment on Mayo’s decision to drop Medicare primary care patients at its Glendale clinic.

Medicare Costs

Mayo’s Medicare losses in Arizona may be worse than typical for doctors across the U.S., Heim said. Physician costs vary depending on business expenses such as office rent and payroll. “It is very common that we hear that Medicare is below costs or barely covering costs,” Heim said.

Mayo will continue to accept Medicare as payment for laboratory services and specialist care such as cardiology and neurology, Yardley said.

Robert Berenson, a fellow at the Urban Institute’s Health Policy Center in Washington, D.C., said physicians’ claims of inadequate reimbursement are overstated. Rather, the program faces a lack of medical providers because not enough new doctors are becoming family doctors, internists and pediatricians who oversee patients’ primary care.

“Some primary care doctors don’t have to see Medicare patients because there is an unlimited demand for their services,” Berenson said. When patients with private insurance can be treated at 50 percent to 100 percent higher fees, “then Medicare does indeed look like a poor payer,” he said.

Annual Costs

A Medicare patient who chooses to stay at Mayo’s Glendale clinic will pay about $1,500 a year for an annual physical and three other doctor visits, according to an October letter from the facility. Each patient also will be assessed a $250 annual administrative fee, according to the letter. Medicare patients at the Glendale clinic won’t be allowed to switch to a primary care doctor at another Mayo facility.

A few hundred of the clinic’s Medicare patients have decided to pay cash to continue seeing their primary care doctors, Yardley said. Mayo is helping other patients find new physicians who will accept Medicare.

“We’ve had many patients call us and express their unhappiness,” he said. “It’s not been a pleasant experience.”

Mayo’s decision may herald similar moves by other Phoenix- area doctors who cite inadequate Medicare fees as a reason to curtail treatment of the elderly, said John Rivers, chief executive of the Phoenix-based Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association.

“We’ve got doctors who are saying we are not going to deal with Medicare patients in the hospital” because they consider the fees too low, Rivers said. “Or they are saying we are not going to take new ones in our practice.”

To contact the reporter on this story: David Olmos in San Francisco at dolmos@bloomberg.net

Concern as China clamps down on rare earth exports

Neodymium is one of 17 metals crucial to green technology. There’s only one snag – China produces 97% of the world’s supply. And they’re not selling

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Why is Britain so concerned? Do they produce anything?

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Britain and other Western countries risk running out of supplies of certain highly sought-after rare metals that are vital to a host of green technologies, amid growing evidence that China, which has a monopoly on global production, is set to choke off exports of valuable compounds.

Failure to secure alternative long-term sources of rare earth elements (REEs) would affect the manufacturing and development of low-carbon technology, which relies on the unique properties of the 17 metals to mass-produce eco-friendly innovations such as wind turbines and low-energy lightbulbs.

China, whose mines account for 97 per cent of global supplies, is trying to ensure that all raw REE materials are processed within its borders. During the past seven years it has reduced by 40 per cent the amount of rare earths available for export.

Industry sources have told The Independent that China could halt shipments of at least two metals as early as next year, and that by 2012 it is likely to be producing only enough REE ore to satisfy its own booming domestic demand, creating a potential crisis as Western countries rush to find alternative supplies, and companies open new mines in locations from South Africa to Greenland to satisfy international demand.

Amid claims that Beijing is using its rare earths monopoly as a tool of foreign policy, the British Department of Business, Industry and Skills said it was “monitoring” the supply of REEs to ensure China was observing international trade rules.

Jack Lifton, an independent consultant and a world expert on REEs, said: “A real crunch is coming. In America, Britain and elsewhere we have not yet woken up to the fact that there is an urgent need to secure the supply of rare earths from sources outside China. China has gone from exporting 75 per cent of the raw ore it produces to shipping just 25 per cent, and it does not consider itself to be under any obligation to ensure supplies of rare earths to anyone but itself. There has been an effort in the West to set up new mines but these are five to 10 years away from significant production.”

After decades in which they were considered little more than geological oddities, rare earths have recently become a boom industry after the invention of a succession of devices, including iPhones and X-ray machines, which rely on their specific properties.

Global demand has tripled from 40,000 tonnes to 120,000 tonnes over the past 10 years, during which time China has steadily cut annual exports from 48,500 tonnes to 31,310 tonnes.

Worldwide, the industries reliant on REEs, which produce anything from fibre-optic cables to missile guidance systems, are estimated to be worth £3 trillion, or 5 per cent of global GDP.

Beijing announced last month that it was setting exports at 35,000 tonnes for each of the next six years, barely enough to satisfy demand in Japan. From this year, Toyota alone will produce annually one million of its hybrid Prius cars, each of which contains 16kg of rare earths. By 2014, global demand for rare earths is predicted to reach 200,000 tonnes a year as the green revolution takes hold.

Nearly all of China’s supply of rare earths comes from a single mine near the city of Baotou, in Inner Mongolia. The remainder comes from small and sometimes illegal mines in the south of the country, leading to devastating pollution from the poisonous and sometimes radioactive ores.

Environmentalists argue that this, coupled with widespread criticism of China’s stance during the Copenhagen climate summit, adds to the need for a “plurality” of rare earth resources. One campaigner said: “There are legitimate questions over Beijing’s control of these resources. Copenhagen showed they are not above putting national interest ahead of global efforts to curtail global warming.”

Once extracted and refined, the rare earth metals can be put to a dizzying range of hi-tech uses. Neodymium, one of the most common rare earths, is a key part of neodymium-iron-boron magnets used in hyper-efficient motors and generators. Around two tonnes of neodymium are needed for each wind turbine. Lanthanum, another REE, is a major ingredient for hybrid car batteries (each Prius uses up to 15kg), while terbium is vital for low-energy light bulbs and cerium is used in catalytic converters.

In October, an internal report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology disclosed proposals to ban the export of five rare earths and restrict supplies of the remaining metals. Beijing strenuously denied that the document was an accurate reflection of its strategy, saying it had no desire to reduce trade in rare earths. But The Independent understands that the level of demand in China means that supplies of at least two crucial REEs – terbium and dysprosium – are likely to be curtailed by as early as next year.

Dr Ian Higgins, general manager of Birkenhead-based Less Common Metals, which specialises in rare earth products, said: “There is a threat that in the next 12 to 18 months, there might be some quite severe shortages of these rare earths. That is certainly going to impact those hi-tech green industries outside China.”

Both Western countries and China are already dashing to secure new sources of rare earths. Last year, Australian regulators imposed restrictions on the purchase of one of the country’s richest rare earth mines, causing a Chinese company to walk away from a £400m deal to buy its operator.

European and North American companies are meanwhile racing to open or re-open mines in Canada, South Africa and Greenland amid calls in the US for government-backed loans to secure supplies of some REEs which are used in the guidance systems of missiles and laser-guided munitions. Toyota has effectively bought its own rare earth mine in Vietnam by signing an exclusive supply deal.

The Department for Business, Industry and Skills acknowledged the growing concern in Western capitals. A spokesman said: “We are monitoring the situation, particularly with regard to World Trade Organisation rules. We are working with UK industry to assess the long-term demand for strategically important resources, including rare earth elements.”