Thursday: Dear Julian

Bank of America's new headquarters?

Please pay attention, Julian.

For the last 4 days, the country’s newspapers have been in a tizzy over the leaked State Department cables full of juicy gossip and how nobody likes Iran and whether Hillary should resign because she authorized American ambassadors to snoop on their buds at the UN.  (Ummm, no, that’s not a resignable offence.) And all this time, you’ve been sitting on the real bombshell: leaked documents from the Bank of America.

Why the f%^& have you been wasting our time with this note passing crap from the State Department?

Dish, Julian!  We want to know what the bastards have been up to and what they’ve been saying about us while they’ve taken trillions of dollars in taxpayer money to make up for the other-people’s-money they gambled away.  Oh, sure, we already know they think they’re the smartest dudes on the planet and we’re all a bunch of stupid suckers. (See Money Never Weeps from This American Life.  Priceless.)  But we want to see some perp walks, Jules.  You know, dudes shedding their bespoke suits for some neon orange jumper.  And for Gawd’s sakes, do it before Interpol catches up with you and the world shuts down your servers.

The scope of the theft of taxpayer dollars is breathtaking.  Am I reading this right?  Citigroup alone helped itself to $2.2 trillion?  From the AP, Fed ID’s Companies That Used Crisis Aid Programs, we get this (very short) summary:

New documents show that the most loan and other aid for U.S. institutions over time went to Citigroup ($2.2 trillion), followed by Merrill Lynch ($2.1 trillion), Morgan Stanley ($2 trillion), Bear Stearns ($960 billion), Bank of America ($887 billion), Goldman Sachs ($615 billion), JPMorgan Chase ($178 billion) and Wells Fargo ($154 billion).

The New York Times has a more detailed article on the Fed Bailout in Fed Documents Breadth of Emergency Measures.  It’s a wonder we didn’t have another Great Depression.  Once again, the Yanks come to the world’s rescue and bails out foreign banks as well.  The bastards have soaked us for every penny in the past couple of years, raising interest rates on credit cards and foreclosing at the drop of the hat, and they brought several countries to ruin.  Ireland, Spain, Greece, Iceland and now Italy, have all been taken to the cleaners by the monumental greed and carelessness of these jerks.  They should have been taken over two years ago.  Instead, they’re still walking around free, rewarding themselves generously and sticking it to the rest of us.

Citibank, Jules, do you have anything on Citibank?  Merill-Lynch?  Get it out there, Julian.  Don’t waste a minute more of our time.

Speaking of Citigroup, Peter Orszag, Obama’s former budget director, is in negotiations to join their investment banking unit. Wait!  Isn’t there some kind of rule about joining the corporation you might have been protecting in your previous capacity as a public servant?  Don’t you have to wait a couple of years?   (Ah, yes, here is an article from Aug 2010 that refers to the waiting period for ex-legislators and regulators before they can lobby.) Or does that only apply to actual public servants, like the Clintons, who were forced to divest themselves before Hillary became Secretary of State so as to avoid even a hint of a conflict of interest?  I guess that level of scrutiny and ethics doesn’t apply when it is a guy who has left the Obama administration, even if it once applied to Congress and everyone else in government.

So, Orszag is going to join one of the criminal organizations that held up the country at gunpoint.  Yeah, that doesn’t look the least bit sleazy or unethical.  I’m sure they’re going to say, “But he’s not going to lobby.  He’s just going to join the investment banking unit.  That’s not a conflict.”  Uh-huh.  If the Obama administration doesn’t dissuade this deal and doesn’t immediately institute new rules about how long its former officials have to wait, then we can pretty much dispense with that whole notion that somehow Obama’s administration will be holier than any previous administration of either party.

And let us not forget that it was Peter Orszag who recently wrote that ridiculous opinion piece in the NYTimes about how we should turn Social Security into a welfare program.  Let’s recap: Peter Orszag, former acolyte of Robert Rubin, is present during the worst days of the banking crisis and has a hand in structuring that pathetic stimulus package after the banks crippled the economy and now, he’s going to work for the very same guys who fleeced us.  He now tries to persuade taxpayers who have been diligently paying for their retirements all of their working lives to take a haircut on Social Security because he and his new buddies don’t want to pay back their generous tax breaks.  Have I got that right?

As for Social Security and the “new and improved” Bowles-Simpson charade of a deficit reduction proposal, Paul Krugman says this in Destroying Retirement in Order to Save It:

Let’s think about that. Right now we have a retirement system that has the great virtue of not being intrusive: Social Security doesn’t demand that you prove you need it, doesn’t ask about your personal life, doesn’t make you feel like a beggar. And now we’re going to replace that with a system in which large numbers of Americans have to plead for special dispensation, on the grounds that they’re too feeble to work for a living. Freedom!

It’s worse than that, Paul.  It’s more like having to beg your ex for child support and having him plead to the court that if he gives you money, you’re just going to spend it.  Alan Simpson does not like the obligation to pay Social Security to the people who invested in it.  F^&* that $hit.  I’m not going to be made to feel like a spendthrift floozy for wanting my hard earned money back when I retire.  If I don’t get it back, it will be like paying extra taxes all my working life so that the wealthy don’t have to pay theirs for all the public services government provides them.  Social Security works and I’m sick to death and angry as all hell when people like Alan Simpson trash it.  And Obama better not think he can act like some kind of hero by saving it.  Politicians who play games with people’s retirements to score votes are in for a rude awakening.

I don’t know what must be done to punish the wicked and hit the reset switch to get rid of the virtual debt all of us responsible, hard working people are being forced to pay to the gambling addicts.  But politicians better get a move on it.  There are a lot more voters than bankers and these days, you don’t have to watch campaign ads on TV if you have a DVR.  People are paying attention.

Am I done ranting yet?  For the moment.

Onto some promising news in the area of education.  It appears that an alert superintendant and a principal in Texas have discovered what I have long suspected: teachers reward compliance over actual knowledge mastered and this is showing up in standardized tests.  (I can just see this thread being highjacked by opponents of standardized testing.  Get over it, guys.  In the rest of the world, standardized tests are, well, standard.  This is a losing battle.)  In A’s for Good Behavior, the students with the best grades in the class were not always the students with the best test scores in terms of mastery of material.  Conversely, some of the students who got poor grades in class and seemed turned off by school, scored better than their honor roll counterparts.

I’ve seen this in action with my own eyes.  For nine miserable years, Brooke floundered in school.  Her tests were always outstanding, putting her in the top 1-2% in the state and nationally.  But this kid never made the honor roll.  Her teachers were constantly on my case to force her to turn in signed test papers that never made it home, fill out reams of pointless worksheets covering material she already knew and write drafts of papers with corrected mistakes that she never made.  She was misdiagnosed as having ADHD, was sent to detention on multiple occasions for minor infractions and humiliated in front of the class by one of her teachers for not having a pencil.  Points were taken off for breathing too loud.  For nine long years, I struggled to get the kid out of bed in the morning because she didn’t want to go to school.  She wasn’t a troublemaker.  She was bored out of her mind and tired of spinning her wheels in class not learning new material.

High school has been a blessing for Brooke.  She has skipped grades in several subjects and she’s now doing the work.  But it has been a constant struggle with the educational establishment and has been personally expensive as I have born the costs of additional testing, summer courses in math to keep her at her level and online courses to substitute for what the high school couldn’t or wouldn’t provide for her.

But Brooke is lucky in some ways.  I knew there was something wrong with the way she was being educated and took steps to correct it.  In my own extended family, I’ve seen what happens when a kid doesn’t have that kind of advocacy.  It’s not pretty. The study in Texas suggests that up to 10% of their students were being underserved because they failed to meet the teacher’s standards of compliance.  Meanwhile, a significant number of A students thought they were smarter than they actually were.

They’ll probably grow up to be bankers.

Story of the Week: WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange Releases Afghanistan War Logs

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange

The biggest story in the news today is the massive leak of government documents to three major newspapers: The UK Guardian, The New York Times, and Der Spiegel in Germany by Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.

He has been called “The Robin Hood of Hacking.” As the founder and public face of WikiLeaks, which posts secretive documents and information in the public domain, Julian Assange believes total transparency is in the good of the people. But Assange — who reportedly lives an itinerant existence, traveling the world with a back-pack and a computer — is himself a shadowy figure. Little is known about his life: he has refused to confirm his age in interviews or give a fixed address. But on July 26, mathematically-trained Australian changed the media landscape — and possibly the course of history — by releasing around 90,000 classified U.S. military records from the war in Afghanistan.

In 2006, Assange decided to found WikiLeaks in the belief that the free exchange of information would put an end to illegitimate governance. The website publishes material from sources, and houses its main server in Sweden, which has strong laws protecting whistleblowers. Assange and others at WikiLeaks also occasionally hack into secure systems to find documents to expose. In December, the website published its first document — a decision by the Somali Islamic Courts Union that called for the execution of government officials. WikiLeaks published a disclaimer that the document may not be authentic and “may be a clever smear by U.S. intelligence.”

The website went on to get several prominent scoops, including the release in April of a secret video taken in 2007 of a U.S. helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, including two unarmed Reuters journalists. Assange helped post the video from a safe-house in Iceland that he and the other WikiLeaks administrators called “the bunker.”

From The NYT yesterday: View Is Bleaker Than Official Portrayal of War in Afghanistan

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year….

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

Here is the NYT “War Logs” page that collects the related stories.

From today’s Der Spiegel article: The Afghanistan Protocol: Explosive Leaks Provide Image of War from Those Fighting It

The documents’ release comes at a time when calls for a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan are growing — even in America. Last week, representatives from more than 70 nations and organizations met in Kabul for the Afghanistan conference. They assured President Hamid Karzai that his country would be in a position by 2014 to guarantee security using its own soldiers and police.

But such shows of optimism seem cynical in light of the descriptions of the situation in Afghanistan provided in the classified documents. Nearly nine years after the start of the war, they paint a gloomy picture. They portray Afghan security forces as the hapless victims of Taliban attacks. They also offer a conflicting impression of the deployment of drones, noting that America’s miracle weapons are also entirely vulnerable.

And they show that the war in northern Afghanistan, where German troops are stationed, is becoming increasingly perilous. The number of warnings about possible Taliban attacks in the region — fuelled [sic] by support from Pakistan — has increased dramatically in the past year.

The documents offer a window into the war in the Hindu Kush — one which promises to change the way we think about the ongoing violence in Afghanistan. They will also be indispensible for anyone seeking to inform themselves about the war in the future.

Here is the UK Guardian page on the war logs with many stories based on the leaked information.

The Guardian has a video of Julian Assange: Julian Assange on the Afghanistan war logs: ‘They show the true nature of this war’

The Guardian has also prepared an interactive map with their selections of the most significant incidents covered in the war logs.

A good summary of the information in the logs at the Wired blog, Threat Level The story quotes the official Obama administration response to the leaks from the NYT:

“The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security,” said White House national security advisory General James Jones, in a statement Sunday. “Wikileaks made no effort to contact us about these documents — the United States government learned from news organizations that these documents would be posted.”

At the New Yorker, Amy Davidson highlights one shocking incident:

…an incident report dated November 22, 2009, submitted by a unit called Task Force Pegasus. It describes how a convoy was stopped on a road in southern Afghanistan at an illegal checkpoint manned by what appeared to be a hundred insurgents, “middle-age males with approx 75 x AK-47’s and 15 x PKM’s.” What could be scarier than that?

Maybe what the soldiers found out next: these weren’t “insurgents” at all, at least not in the die-hard jihadi sense that the American public might understand the term. The gunmen were quite willing to let the convoy through, if the soldiers just forked over a two- or three-thousand-dollar bribe; and they were in the pay of a local warlord, Matiullah Khan, who was himself in the pay, ultimately, of the American public. According to a Times report this June (six months after the incident with Task Force Pegasus), Matiullah earns millions of dollars from NATO, supposedly to keep that road clear for convoys and help with American special-forces missions. Matiullah is also suspected of (and has denied) earning money “facilitating the movement of drugs along the highway.”

…..The Obama Administration has already expressed dismay that WikiLeaks publicized the documents, but a leak informing us that our tax dollars may be being used as seed money for a protection racket associated with a narcotics-trafficking enterprise is a good leak to have. And the checkpoint incident is, again, only one report, from one day.

Glenn Greenwald also has a post on the leaks.

Greenwald tweeted a little while ago that if Julian Assange got the Nobel Peace Prize he would be much more deserving than the last guy who won it.

This story is huge! This is the modern-day “Pentagon papers” that could bring down the wars pushed by Obama’s “best and brightest.” It’s terrific that the story came out on a Sunday; this should be fodder for cable news all week. Let’s hope they have the guts to cover it.

Daniel Ellsberg, the guy who released the original Pentagon papers and was targeted by a “White House hit squad” in 1972, fears for the life of Julian Assange. He told The Daily Beast last month

Do you think Assange is in danger?

I happen to have been the target of a White House hit squad myself. On May 3, 1972, a dozen CIA assets from the Bay of Pigs, Cuban émigrés were brought up from Miami with orders to “incapacitate me totally.” I said to the prosecutor, “What does that mean? Kill me.” He said, “It means to incapacitate you totally. But you have to understand these guys never use the word ‘kill.’”

Is the Obama White House anymore enlightened than Nixon’s?

We’ve now been told by Dennis Blair, the late head of intelligence here, that President Obama has authorized the killing of American citizens overseas, who are suspected of involvement in terrorism. Assange is not American, so he doesn’t even have that constraint. I would think that he is in some danger. Granted, I would think that his notoriety now would provide him some degree of protection. You would think that would protect him, but you could have said the same thing about me. I was the number one defendant. I was on trail but they brought up people to beat me up.

You believe he is in danger of bodily harm, then?

Absolutely. On the same basis, I was….Obama is now proclaiming rights of life and death, being judge, jury, and executioner of Americans without due process. No president has ever claimed that and possibly no one since John the First.

What advice would you give Assange?

Stay out of the U.S. Otherwise, keep doing what he is doing. It’s pretty valuable…He is serving our democracy and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations, which are not laws in most cases, in this country.

Thank you Julian Assange! And thank you to Pvt. Bradley Manning, who is the probable source for the leaks to Assange and is now under arrest. Free Bradley Manning!!

Conflucians, as you work your way through this material, please post anything you think is important for us to know. This story must be pushed hard!

UPDATE: Here is the data that is posted at the WikiLeaks site. Each of the newspapers made their own choices about what information to reveal and what to hold back. The NYT negotiated with the WH in making their decisions. It will be interesting to see if they left out some material that the foreign papers include. The also claim they asked Assange not to post material that would be harmful to troops in the field, although that probably wasn’t necessary.