A new report issued today by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that the overall suicide rate rises and falls with the state of the economy — dating all the way back to the Great Depression.
The report, published in the American Journal of Public Health, found that suicide rates increased in times of economic crisis: the Great Depression (1929-1933), the end of the New Deal (1937-1938), the Oil Crisis (1973-1975), and the Double-Dip Recession (1980-1982). Those rates tended to fall during strong economic times — with fast growth and low unemployment — like right after World War II and during the 1990s.
During the depths of the Great Depression, suicide rates in America significantly increased. As the Globe notes:
The largest increase in the US suicide rate occurred during the Great Depression surging from 18 in 100,000 up to 22 in 100,000 …
We’ve previously pointed out that suicide rates have skyrocketed recently:
In a letter to The Lancet medical journal, scientists from Britain, Hong Kong and United States said an analysis of data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that while suicide rates increased slowly between 1999 and 2007, the rate of increase more than quadrupled from 2008 to 2010, Reuters reported.
The Great Recession may have been at the root of a great depression that caused suicides to soar among middle-aged Americans, a government report speculates.
The annual suicide rate for adults ages 35 to 64 spiked in the past decade, according to a study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And a shaky economy that nose-dived into the worst financial crisis since the Depression may be the biggest reason why.
***
The CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report said the annual suicide rate jumped 28.4% from 1999-2010.
It was the biggest increase of any age group, said the CDC, citing “the recent economic downturn” as one of the “possible contributing factors” for the increase.
“Historically, suicide rates tend to correlate with business cycles, with higher rates observed during times of economic hardship,” the report said.
David Stuckler (a senior research leader in sociology at Oxford), and Sanjay Basu (an assistant professor of medicine and an epidemiologist in the Prevention Research Center at Stanford), write in the New York Times:
The correlation between unemployment and suicide has been observed since the 19th century.
The economic downturn that has shaken Europe for the last three years has also swept away the foundations of once-sturdy lives, leading to an alarming spike in suicide rates. Especially in the most fragile nations like Greece, Ireland and Italy, small-business owners and entrepreneurs are increasingly taking their own lives in a phenomenon some European newspapers have started calling “suicide by economic crisis.”
***
In Greece, the suicide rate among men increased more than 24 percent from 2007 to 2009, government statistics show. In Ireland during the same period, suicides among men rose more than 16 percent. In Italy, suicides motivated by economic difficulties have increased 52 percent, to 187 in 2010 — the most recent year for which statistics were available — from 123 in 2005.)
Indeed, more Americans are killing themselves today than during the Great Depression. Specifically, there were were 123 million Americans in 1930. The maximum suicide rate during the depths of the Great Depression was 22 out of 100,000 Americans. That means that up to 27,060 Americans killed themselves each year.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein tesifies before the Senate in April 2010
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
They weren’t murderers or anything; they had merely stolen more money than most people can rationally conceive of, from their own customers, in a few blinks of an eye. But then they went one step further. They came to Washington, took an oath before Congress, and lied about it.
Thanks to an extraordinary investigative effort by a Senate subcommittee that unilaterally decided to take up the burden the criminal justice system has repeatedly refused to shoulder, we now know exactly what Goldman Sachs executives like Lloyd Blankfein and Daniel Sparks lied about. We know exactly how they and other top Goldman executives, including David Viniar and Thomas Montag, defrauded their clients. America has been waiting for a case to bring against Wall Street. Here it is, and the evidence has been gift-wrapped and left at the doorstep of federal prosecutors, evidence that doesn’t leave much doubt: Goldman Sachs should stand trial.
The great and powerful Oz of Wall Street was not the only target of Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, the 650-page report just released by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan, alongside Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma. Their unusually scathing bipartisan report also includes case studies of Washington Mutual and Deutsche Bank, providing a panoramic portrait of a bubble era that produced the most destructive crime spree in our history — “a million fraud cases a year” is how one former regulator puts it. But the mountain of evidence collected against Goldman by Levin’s small, 15-desk office of investigators — details of gross, baldfaced fraud delivered up in such quantities as to almost serve as a kind of sarcastic challenge to the curiously impassive Justice Department — stands as the most important symbol of Wall Street’s aristocratic impunity and prosecutorial immunity produced since the crash of 2008.
To date, there has been only one successful prosecution of a financial big fish from the mortgage bubble, and that was Lee Farkas, a Florida lender who was just convicted on a smorgasbord of fraud charges and now faces life in prison. But Farkas, sadly, is just an exception proving the rule: Like Bernie Madoff, his comically excessive crime spree (which involved such lunacies as kiting checks to his own bank and selling loans that didn’t exist) was almost completely unconnected to the systematic corruption that led to the crisis. What’s more, many of the earlier criminals in the chain of corruption — from subprime lenders like Countrywide, who herded old ladies and ghetto families into bad loans, to rapacious banks like Washington Mutual, who pawned off fraudulent mortgages on investors — wound up going belly up, sunk by their own greed.
Read Full Article Here
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Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever
The Illuminati were amateurs. The second huge financial scandal of the year reveals the real international conspiracy: There’s no price the big banks can’t fix
Conspiracy theorists of the world, believers in the hidden hands of the Rothschilds and the Masons and the Illuminati, we skeptics owe you an apology. You were right. The players may be a little different, but your basic premise is correct: The world is a rigged game. We found this out in recent months, when a series of related corruption stories spilled out of the financial sector, suggesting the world’s largest banks may be fixing the prices of, well, just about everything.
You may have heard of the Libor scandal, in which at least three – and perhaps as many as 16 – of the name-brand too-big-to-fail banks have been manipulating global interest rates, in the process messing around with the prices of upward of $500 trillion (that’s trillion, with a “t”) worth of financial instruments. When that sprawling con burst into public view last year, it was easily the biggest financial scandal in history – MIT professor Andrew Lo even said it “dwarfs by orders of magnitude any financial scam in the history of markets.”
That was bad enough, but now Libor may have a twin brother. Word has leaked out that the London-based firm ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, is being investigated by American authorities for behavior that sounds eerily reminiscent of the Libor mess. Regulators are looking into whether or not a small group of brokers at ICAP may have worked with up to 15 of the world’s largest banks to manipulate ISDAfix, a benchmark number used around the world to calculate the prices of interest-rate swaps.
Interest-rate swaps are a tool used by big cities, major corporations and sovereign governments to manage their debt, and the scale of their use is almost unimaginably massive. It’s about a $379 trillion market, meaning that any manipulation would affect a pile of assets about 100 times the size of the United States federal budget.
It should surprise no one that among the players implicated in this scheme to fix the prices of interest-rate swaps are the same megabanks – including Barclays, UBS, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and the Royal Bank of Scotland – that serve on the Libor panel that sets global interest rates. In fact, in recent years many of these banks have already paid multimillion-dollar settlements for anti-competitive manipulation of one form or another (in addition to Libor, some were caught up in an anti-competitive scheme, detailed in Rolling Stone last year, to rig municipal-debt service auctions). Though the jumble of financial acronyms sounds like gibberish to the layperson, the fact that there may now be price-fixing scandals involving both Libor and ISDAfix suggests a single, giant mushrooming conspiracy of collusion and price-fixing hovering under the ostensibly competitive veneer of Wall Street culture.
Why? Because Libor already affects the prices of interest-rate swaps, making this a manipulation-on-manipulation situation. If the allegations prove to be right, that will mean that swap customers have been paying for two different layers of price-fixing corruption. If you can imagine paying 20 bucks for a crappy PB&J because some evil cabal of agribusiness companies colluded to fix the prices of both peanuts and peanut butter, you come close to grasping the lunacy of financial markets where both interest rates and interest-rate swaps are being manipulated at the same time, often by the same banks.
“It’s a double conspiracy,” says an amazed Michael Greenberger, a former director of the trading and markets division at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and now a professor at the University of Maryland. “It’s the height of criminality.”
The bad news didn’t stop with swaps and interest rates. In March, it also came out that two regulators – the CFTC here in the U.S. and the Madrid-based International Organization of Securities Commissions – were spurred by the Libor revelations to investigate the possibility of collusive manipulation of gold and silver prices. “Given the clubby manipulation efforts we saw in Libor benchmarks, I assume other benchmarks – many other benchmarks – are legit areas of inquiry,” CFTC Commissioner Bart Chilton said.
But the biggest shock came out of a federal courtroom at the end of March – though if you follow these matters closely, it may not have been so shocking at all – when a landmark class-action civil lawsuit against the banks for Libor-related offenses was dismissed. In that case, a federal judge accepted the banker-defendants’ incredible argument: If cities and towns and other investors lost money because of Libor manipulation, that was their own fault for ever thinking the banks were competing in the first place.
“A farce,” was one antitrust lawyer’s response to the eyebrow-raising dismissal.
“Incredible,” says Sylvia Sokol, an attorney for Constantine Cannon, a firm that specializes in antitrust cases.
The federal rescue of Wall Street didn’t fix the economy – it created a permanent bailout state based on a Ponzi-like confidence scheme. And the worst may be yet to come
It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you’d think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we’ve been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?
Wrong.
It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.
But the most appalling part is the lying. The public has been lied to so shamelessly and so often in the course of the past four years that the failure to tell the truth to the general populace has become a kind of baked-in, official feature of the financial rescue. Money wasn’t the only thing the government gave Wall Street – it also conferred the right to hide the truth from the rest of us. And it was all done in the name of helping regular people and creating jobs. “It is,” says former bailout Inspector General Neil Barofsky, “the ultimate bait-and-switch.”
The bailout deceptions came early, late and in between. There were lies told in the first moments of their inception, and others still being told four years later. The lies, in fact, were the most important mechanisms of the bailout. The only reason investors haven’t run screaming from an obviously corrupt financial marketplace is because the government has gone to such extraordinary lengths to sell the narrative that the problems of 2008 have been fixed. Investors may not actually believe the lie, but they are impressed by how totally committed the government has been, from the very beginning, to selling it.
THEY LIED TO PASS THE BAILOUT
Today what few remember about the bailouts is that we had to approve them. It wasn’t like Paulson could just go out and unilaterally commit trillions of public dollars to rescue Goldman Sachs and Citigroup from their own stupidity and bad management (although the government ended up doing just that, later on). Much as with a declaration of war, a similarly extreme and expensive commitment of public resources, Paulson needed at least a film of congressional approval. And much like the Iraq War resolution, which was only secured after George W. Bush ludicrously warned that Saddam was planning to send drones to spray poison over New York City, the bailouts were pushed through Congress with a series of threats and promises that ranged from the merely ridiculous to the outright deceptive. At one meeting to discuss the original bailout bill – at 11 a.m. on September 18th, 2008 – Paulson actually told members of Congress that $5.5 trillion in wealth would disappear by 2 p.m. that day unless the government took immediate action, and that the world economy would collapse “within 24 hours.”
To be fair, Paulson started out by trying to tell the truth in his own ham-headed, narcissistic way. His first TARP proposal was a three-page absurdity pulled straight from a Beavis and Butt-Head episode – it was basically Paulson saying, “Can you, like, give me some money?” Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat from Ohio, remembers a call with Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke. “We need $700 billion,” they told Brown, “and we need it in three days.” What’s more, the plan stipulated, Paulson could spend the money however he pleased, without review “by any court of law or any administrative agency.”
The White House and leaders of both parties actually agreed to this preposterous document, but it died in the House when 95 Democrats lined up against it. For an all-too-rare moment during the Bush administration, something resembling sanity prevailed in Washington.
So Paulson came up with a more convincing lie. On paper, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 was simple: Treasury would buy $700 billion of troubled mortgages from the banks and then modify them to help struggling homeowners. Section 109 of the act, in fact, specifically empowered the Treasury secretary to “facilitate loan modifications to prevent avoidable foreclosures.” With that promise on the table, wary Democrats finally approved the bailout on October 3rd, 2008. “That provision,” says Barofsky, “is what got the bill passed.”
But within days of passage, the Fed and the Treasury unilaterally decided to abandon the planned purchase of toxic assets in favor of direct injections of billions in cash into companies like Goldman and Citigroup. Overnight, Section 109 was unceremoniously ditched, and what was pitched as a bailout of both banks and homeowners instantly became a bank-only operation – marking the first in a long series of moves in which bailout officials either casually ignored or openly defied their own promises with regard to TARP.
Congress was furious. “We’ve been lied to,” fumed Rep. David Scott, a Democrat from Georgia. Rep. Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland, raged at transparently douchey TARP administrator (and Goldman banker) Neel Kashkari, calling him a “chump” for the banks. And the anger was bipartisan: Republican senators David Vitter of Louisiana and James Inhofe of Oklahoma were so mad about the unilateral changes and lack of oversight that they sponsored a bill in January 2009 to cancel the remaining $350 billion of TARP.
So what did bailout officials do? They put together a proposal full of even bigger deceptions to get it past Congress a second time. That process began almost exactly four years ago – on January 12th and 15th, 2009 – when Larry Summers, the senior economic adviser to President-elect Barack Obama, sent a pair of letters to Congress. The pudgy, stubbyfingered former World Bank economist, who had been forced out as Harvard president for suggesting that women lack a natural aptitude for math and science, begged legislators to reject Vitter’s bill and leave TARP alone.
In the letters, Summers laid out a five-point plan in which the bailout was pitched as a kind of giant populist program to help ordinary Americans. Obama, Summers vowed, would use the money to stimulate bank lending to put people back to work. He even went so far as to say that banks would be denied funding unless they agreed to “increase lending above baseline levels.” He promised that “tough and transparent conditions” would be imposed on bailout recipients, who would not be allowed to use bailout funds toward “enriching shareholders or executives.” As in the original TARP bill, he pledged that bailout money would be used to aid homeowners in foreclosure. And lastly, he promised that the bailouts would be temporary – with a “plan for exit of government intervention” implemented “as quickly as possible.”
Sen. Sherrod Brown and Sen. David Vitter hold a news conference to announce the details of ‘Too Big to Fail’ legislation.
Chris Maddaloni/CQ Roll Call
Last week, on April 24th, Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Louisiana Republican David Vitter introduced legislation called the “Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness Act of 2013 Act,” or the “Brown-Vitter TBTF Act” for short. The bill is a gun aimed directly at the head of the Too-Big-To-Fail beast.
During the Dodd-Frank negotiations a few years ago, Brown teamed up with Delaware Democrat Ted Kaufman to introduce an amendment that would have physically capped the size of the biggest banks. The amendment was bold and righteous but was slaughtered on the floor by a 61-33 margin, undermined by leaders of both parties – 27 Democrats voted against it.
Brown-Vitter offers a different and, in a way, more elegant solution to the problem than Brown-Kaufman. Rather than impose size limits, it simply insists that banks with over $500 billion in assets maintain higher capital reserves than are currently required. Companies like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup and Bank of America will have to keep capital reserves of about 15 percent, about twice the current amount.
The bill only has such tough requirements for just those few megabanks, which sounds unfair, except that the aim of the bill, precisely, is to level the playing field. Right now, the biggest U.S. banks enjoy a massive inherent market advantage in that they’re able to borrow money far more cheaply than other banks, because everybody on earth knows the government will never let them fail and will always bail them out in a pinch, making their debt essentially U.S.-government guaranteed. Studies have shown that these banks borrow money at about 0.8 percent more cheaply than other banks, and that this implicit government subsidy is worth about $83 billion a year just to the top 10 banks in America. This bill would essentially wipe out that hidden subsidy and make the banks bailout-proof.
As soon as Brown-Vitter was introduced, a very interesting thing happened. The Independent Community Bankers of America, or ICBA, issued a press release boosting the bill. “ICBA strongly supports this legislation,” the release read, “and urges all community banks to join the association in advocating passage of legislation to end too-big-to-fail.”
This was a big thing. It was the first time since the crisis that a prominent financial industry group opposed the will of the TBTF banks. I remember covering Dodd-Frank and being told by a number of members in the House and the Senate that the sentiment of many community bankers was for breaking up or at least curtailing the power of companies like Chase and Bank of America, but that the community banking lobby was not yet prepared to take that step.
But now, after the London Whale, the LIBOR scandal, the outrageous HSBC settlement and nearly five years of rapacious market-dominating behavior by these state-backed banks, the community banks have finally split off from TBTF.
This is another in a series of defections on this issue that in the past year has included many Republican politicians, numerous important financial regulators (even the New York Fed has taken a semi-stand against TBTF) and, hilariously, the creator of Too-Big-To-Fail himself, former Citigroup CEO and legendary lower-Manhattan raging asshole Sandy Weill. Weill was the man for whom the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed back in the nineties, so that his already-completed Citigroup merger could be legalized. But even he came out last year and said we have to break up the banks.
Naturally, there was going to be a response to Brown-Vitter from Wall Street. And we got it last week, shockingly not from one of the banks or a lobbying firm connected to the banks, but from the Standard and Poor’s ratings agency – supposedly a strict, humorlessly conservative auditor that should always abhor risk and look favorably upon greater safety and security. The very fact that such a company came out against a bill forcing banks to have safer balance sheets is in itself absolute proof of how completely fucked and corrupt our current system is.
The S&P report, entitled “Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks”, is so incredibly hysterical in its tone that, reading it, one cannot help but deduce that people on Wall Street are genuinely afraid of this bill. The paper essentially hints that forcing banks to retain more capital could lead to world financial collapse, the onset of a new Ice Age, mammoths roaming Nebraska, etc. “The ratings implications of the Brown-Vitter bill, if enacted, for all U.S. banks would be neutral to negative,” the report read. In the second paragraph, it reads:
If congress enacts the bill as proposed, Standard and Poor’s Ratings Services would have concerns about the economic impact on banks’ creditworthiness stemming from the transition to substantially higher capital requirements.
Having a ratings agency bent to monopolistic bank influence give a bad rating to a piece of legislation designed to . . . curb monopolistic bank influence is a bad surrealistic joke, like a Rene Magritte take on lobbying – Ceci n‘est pas une Too-Big-To-Fail!
Remember, one of the primary causes of the financial crisis in the first place was the corruption of the independent ratings agencies. In the crisis years, companies like S&P and Moody’s and Fitch were so desperate to avoid losing business from the big investment banks (who paid the ratings firms to rate products like mortgage-backed securities) that these companies often gave embarrassingly overenthusiastic grades to a generation of toxic assets.
The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in its final report placed blame for the crisis squarely on the shoulders of these firms. “The three credit rating agencies were key enablers of the financial meltdown. The mortgage-related securities at the heart of the crisis could not have been marketed and sold without their seal of approval,” the FCIC report read. “This crisis could not have happened without the rating agencies.”
So intellectually compromised ratings agencies were guilty before, because they were too quick to help Too-Big-To-Fail banks sell bad products into the world marketplace.
Now, an intellectually-compromised ratings agency is helping sell the very Too-Big-To-Fail system in an attempt to beat back a reform bill – an agency that once stated explicitly that it does not take public positions on legislation.
Years ago, Standard and Poor’s was involved a similar situation. In the mid-2000s, the Senate was considering creating a regulatory body with receivership powers that could have oversight over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. S&P, seemingly doing the bidding of Fannie and Freddie (which wanted no part of any new regulatory oversight), warned that such legislation might lead to a downgrade of the so-called Government-Sponsored Entities, or GSEs. In other words, if you pass this bill, we’re going to take a financial axe to Fannie and Freddie.
When then-Senator John Sununu asked then-S&P president Kathleen Corbet if it didn’t seem to her like the ratings agency was meddling in the legislative process by issuing such a dire warning, Corbet testily replied in the negative.
“First of all, Senator,” she said. “Standard & Poor’s does not advocate positions on any legislation.”
With that in mind, here are some of passages from S&P’s new report, “Brown-Vitter Bill: Game-Changing Regulation For U.S. Banks”:
If the requirements force banks to deleverage, a credit crunch could ensue and the U.S. economy might be thrown off course . . . the U.S. banking industry could become less competitive in world financial markets . . . All in all, the bill’s goal of ending TBTF could lead to unintended consequences – a destabilized financial system.
So Standard and Poor’s does not advocate positions on any legislation, mind you. It just thinks the world as we know it will end if this particular bill passes.
In reality, of course, about the only things that would be “destabilized” if TBTF ended would be the compensation packages for a small group of overpaid banking executives like Jamie Dimon. Another consequence might be that ratings agencies would actually have to work for a living, and earn reputations for honesty and integrity in the market, instead of getting endless streams of free money from big banks to give sparkly AAA ratings to every half-baked security or derivative instrument their obese, Fed-fattened clients cranked out.
Navy veteran Adam Legg said a long jobless spell after tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan left him feeling hopeless and led him to “go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you’re not there.”
By Bill Briggs, NBC News contributor
Hundreds of thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have been flying home to a fresh fox hole: A debt crater that’s sucking in entire military families and could be helping to fuel the veteran suicide crisis.
Courtesy Adam Legg
“I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 people working beneath me, in charge of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, computers,” said Adam Legg, a Navy veteran. “And then when I come home, not only can I not find a job, I can’t take care of my family.”
A bad job market, a long backlog for federal disability benefits, and occasionally unwise spending habits have been conspiring to strain the financial and mental health of many veterans, experts say.
“We keep hearing of suicides rising. How much pressure do you think one person can take?” asks Christopher Fitzpatrick, deputy director of VeteransPlus, a nonprofit that has fielded more than 170,000 calls from ex-service members with imminent financial concerns.
“No one wants to talk about the fact that there are other reasons, besides PTSD, for suicide at 2 in the morning. You know how we know? We have an online form people use to contact us, and we get those emails — they’re sent at 1, 2, 3, 4 in the morning. People are reaching out, literally: ‘Can you please help me? I’m losing everything.’”
It’s a problem that could get even worse in coming years, with more than one million service members expected to make the transition to civilian life.
Navy veteran Adam Legg, 30, ran into financial trouble following two tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. A jobless and hopeless period that began after his service separation in 2009 led him to “go weeks without smiling, walking around like a shadow, like you’re not there,” he said.
He couldn’t secure a job at his local McDonald’s or at dozens of other companies to which he applied in Central Florida. With a wife, Melissa, and a young daughter to feed, he maxed out a credit card that he was able to pay off with money he’d saved during his eight years in the Navy.
‘Very, very dark place’
But bigger bills — like the mortgage — went untouched. After losing his Florida home to foreclosure and two cars to repossession, Legg said he began to consider suicide.
“When you feel like you can’t take care of your family, feed them, shelter them, it’s a very, very dark place. A feeling of uselessness that maybe they would be better off if you’re not around,” Legg said.
“We’ve been below the poverty line, absolutely. I was a watch commander where I had 25 to 30 people working beneath me, in charge of millions of dollars worth of ammunitions, weapons, vehicles, computers. And then when I come home, not only can I not find a job, I can’t take care of my family. If it weren’t for my wife, if she was not supportive the way she was, I really don’t think I’d be here right now.”
According to VeteransPlus, fewer than 20 percent of their clients have stockpiled a six-month savings cushion while serving in Iraq or Afghanistan despite untaxed, hazardous-duty wages that fattened paychecks.
Some returning veterans planned to live off their credit cards until landing civilian work, even though the veteran unemployment rate is two points higher than the civilian rate, Fitzpatrick said. Some expected to support themselves via VA benefits, apparently unaware that average wait time for that money approaches — and sometimes eclipses — one year.
SEATTLE – Small businesses caught in the chaos of May Day are receiving some support from people involved in the protests.
Bill’s Off Broadway had a window broken when the march escalated into violence and vandalism on Capitol Hill. A nearby bar and a Walgreens also had windows smashed.
Protestor Elaine Simons said she was shocked to see the damage.
“It hit us to the core,” said Simons. “We were really upset to see a little business got hit when our message was really against banks and corportation, about unemployment and no health care.”
Simons said a group will gather at Bill’s Off Broadway on Wednesday to buy food and leave a good tip. She wants to show support for the workers caught in the middle on May Day.
Capitol Hill businesses ask why police pushed protesters their way
by ELISA HAHN / KING 5 News
Posted on May 2, 2013 at 6:49 PM
Updated Thursday, May 2 at 7:03 PM
In all the May Day violence, it was surprising there wasn’t more property damage than a few broken windows. All the windows were on Capitol Hill. And now businesses there are wondering why police pushed the protesters to their neighborhood.
Rowdy protesters broke windows of at least three businesses, Sun Liquor, Walgreens, and Bill’s on Broadway.
Don Stevens, owner of Bill’s on Broadway, believes police did a good job containing violence Wednesday night. But he wonders when they decided to get protesters out of downtown, why push them east to Capitol Hill?
“Where are they going to put them?” Stevens asked. “Where are they going to go? Where do you stop and say ‘We’re done with you now. We’ve gotten you far enough away from Westlake Center.’”
Report Finds Afghan Military Shrinking Not Growing
May 02, 2013
Military.com| by Kris Osborn
A U.S. government watchdog overseeing the Afghanistan reconstruction found the U.S. led effort to recruit, train and field the Afghan National Security Forces is about 20,000 troops below its stated goal of 352,000.
The U.S. led coalition force failed to meet the goal of 352,000 ANSF personnel by October 2012, although the Defense Department reported that it reached the goal of recruiting 352,000 ANSF personnel. These personnel are spread across the Afghan National Army, Afghan National Police, and the Afghan Air Force.
In fact, the ANSF end strength is shrinking, not growing. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction found that the number of personnel shrunk by about 4,000 troops and policemen between March 2012 and February 2013.
Inspectors noted how the U.S. led coalition has continually moved the date in which it hopes to reach the stated end strength. Defense Department officials have recently told SIGAR officials the goal is now to train, equip and field the personnel in the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police by December 2013, and the Afghan National Air Force by 2017.
A special inspector general discloses that as U.S. forces head for the exit, the Pentagon has not met its goal for enlarging the Afghan force left behind.
An Afghan National Army soldier practices drills at an outpost in Maiwand District, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, on January 29, 2013. (Andrew Burton/Reuters)
Since the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a signature goal of the war has been to increase the size of Afghan national security forces and give their members the skills to vanquish domestic terrorist groups and other security threats on their own.
But as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role have suddenly grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.
The Afghan National Army “did not yet have the ability to plan and conduct sustained operations without U.S. and Coalition support.”
A new report this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government has met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what is needed and what America and its allies can deliver in concert with the Afghan government.
The White House declared two months ago, in conjunction with the President’s State of the Union address, that the goal had been attained. Afghan “forces are currently at a surge strength of 352,000, where they will remain for at least three more years, to allow continued progress toward a secure environment in Afghanistan,” it said.
But on Tuesday, Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko challenged this rosy assessment, which White House officials said was based on data supplied by the Pentagon.
“The goal to ‘train and field’ 352,000 Afghan National Security Forces by last October was not met.” Sopko said in his latest quarterly report. Instead, as of Feb. 18, the number of personnel in the Afghan National Army, National Police and Air Force totaled 332,753, or about 20,000 fewer, according to data he said he collected from the Coalition-led transition command in Kabul.
Sopko said Afghan troop and police strength is actually declining, not rising – belying a longstanding goal of the U.S. intervention. There are now 4,700 fewer personnel than a year ago, he noted, drawing on the same data that the Pentagon routinely uses.
The discrepancy between the force size the White House has claimed and what the Afghans have actually been able to field is not a trivial one, Sopko’s report suggested. “Accurate and reliable accounting for ANSF personnel is necessary to ensure that U.S. funds that support the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are used for legitimate and eligible costs,” it said.
As a result, the discrepancy has triggered a wider audit by his organization into “the extent to which DOD [the Department of Defense] reviews and validates the information collected” from Afghan officials, Sopko said in the report. It will broadly assess “the reliability and usefulness” of what the Afghans – and the U.S. government – say about the force’s size.
In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, Sopko explained that “we are not implying that anyone is manipulating data. We are raising a concern that we don’t have the right numbers. We appreciate how difficult it is to get the correct numbers — but we need accurate numbers because we’re using those numbers to pay ANSF salaries, supply equipment and so forth.”
The financial stakes behind the numbers are huge. Sopko’s report says Congress has appropriated more than $51 billion so far “to build, equip, train and sustain the Afghan National Security Forces.”
But U.S. officials and watchdog groups have previously raised alarms about the existence of “ghost” personnel in the Afghan forces, whose salaries are still funded by Western aid but who quit the units to which they are assigned. The annual attrition rate for the Afghan army is nearly 30 percent, according to U.S. military commanders, provoking an enormous churn in the ranks that complicates accurate record-keeping.
Part of the problem, according to Sopko’s report, is that Western officials have allowed “the Afghan forces to report their own personnel strength numbers,” which are based on hand-written ledgers in “decentralized, unlinked and inconsistent systems.” The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which oversees the training effort, reported last year “there was no viable method of validating personnel numbers,” the report added.
But U.S. officials have added to the confusion by adopting a new definition of what it means to be a member of the Afghan security force, loosening its terminology in a way that enlarges the ranks to include all those “recruited” rather than those actually trained and field-ready.
For example, the Defense Department’s so-called Section 1230 reports, which track the progress of the war, including efforts to build an effective Afghan security force, said in April 2012 that “the ANSF are ahead of schedule to achieve the October 2012 end-strength of 352,000, including subordinate goals of 195,000 soldiers and 157,000 police.”
Government auditor challenges White House account of Afghanistan security
A special inspector general discloses that as US forces head for the exit, the Pentagon has not met its goal for enlarging the Afghan force left behind
20 hours, 20 minutes ago Updated: 14 hours, 28 minutes ago
Afghan National Army recruits practice a house clearing during training exercise in Kabul, Afghanistan.
Dar Yasin/AP
Since the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a signature goal of the war has been to increase the size of Afghan national security forces and give their members the skills to vanquish domestic terrorist groups and other security threats on their own.
But as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role have suddenly grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.
A new report this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government has met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what is needed and what America and its allies can deliver in concert with the Afghan government.
The White House declared two months ago, in conjunction with the President’s State of the Union address, that the goal had been attained. Afghan “forces are currently at a surge strength of 352,000, where they will remain for at least three more years, to allow continued progress toward a secure environment in Afghanistan,” it said.
But on Tuesday, Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko challenged this rosy assessment, which White House officials said was based on data supplied by the Pentagon.
“The goal to ‘train and field’ 352,000 Afghan National Security Forces by last October was not met.” Sopko said in his latest quarterly report. Instead, as of Feb. 18, the number of personnel in the Afghan National Army, National Police and Air Force totaled 332,753, or about 20,000 fewer, according to data he said he collected from the Coalition-led transition command in Kabul.
Sopko said Afghan troop and police strength is actually declining, not rising – belying a longstanding goal of the U.S. intervention. There are now 4,700 fewer personnel than a year ago, he noted, drawing on the same data that the Pentagon routinely uses.
The discrepancy between the force size the White House has claimed and what the Afghans have actually been able to field is not a trivial one, Sopko’s report suggested. ”Accurate and reliable accounting for ANSF personnel is necessary to ensure that U.S. funds that support the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are used for legitimate and eligible costs,” it said.
As a result, the discrepancy has triggered a wider audit by his organization into “the extent to which DOD [the Department of Defense] reviews and validates the information collected” from Afghan officials, Sopko said in the report. It will broadly assess “the reliability and usefulness” of what the Afghans – and the U.S. government – say about the force’s size.
Benghazi Gate – New Explosive Info On Attack In Libya – Whistleblowers Threaten By Obama Admin
Published on Apr 29, 2013
Potential Whistle Blowers Are Being Threaten By Obama Admin
Unbelievable Interview With Hidden Id Due To Fear Retroversion
Benghazi Gate – New Information On Benghazi Attack In Libya – Explosive Info From Conseal Id
More Info See Video Below
Benghazi Gate State Dept Withholding Benghazi Documents – Whistleblowers Threaten By Obama’s People? http://youtu.be/I9Lc3jNx2PQ
In a photo published in the December 2011 edition of State Magazine, the State Department’s in-house publication, a diplomatic security officer in Benghazi trains local Libyan guards in marksmanship. (State Department photo)
(CNSNews.com) – The February 17th Martyrs Brigade, a Benghazi-based militia with Islamist elements that the State Department hired as a “quick reaction force” (QRF) to protect the department’s mission in Benghazi, warned the State Department that it would not protect the movements of Amb. Chris Stevens when he visited there last September.
That warning was relayed to the regional security officer (RSO) at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli–the top security adviser to the ambassador–in an internal State Department email dated Sept. 9, 2012.
That was one day before Stevens departed Tripoli for Benghazi–for what was scheduled to be a five-day visit.
“[O]n September 8, 2012, just days before Ambassador Stevens arrived in Benghazi, the February 17 Martyrs Brigade told State Department officials that the group would no longer support U.S. movements in the city, including the Ambassador’s visit,” said a report on Benghazi released last week by the chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs, Intelligence, Oversight, Judiciary and Armed Services committees.
In a footnote, the report attributed this information to an “Email from Alec Henderson to John B. Martinec, ‘RE: Benghazi QRF agreement,’ (Sep. 9, 2012 11:31 PM).”
The fact that the militia gave the State Department prior warning that it would not support the ambassador’s movements in Benghazi raises new questions about the way the department handled security in Benghazi and its subsequent unwillingness to make department personnel available to congressional committees that are investigating the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) report, released on Dec. 18, had revealed that the February 17 militia was no longer protecting the movement of U.S. vehicles in Benghazi at the time of Stevens’ September visit to the city. But it did not say that this information had been delivered to the regional security officer in Tripoli the day before Stevens traveled to Benghazi.
In this photo published in State Magazine, the State Department’s in-house publication, then-Special Envoy Chris Stevens in 2011 tours the ruins of the ancient Byzantine city of Cyrene in Libya, protected by State Department Diplomatic Security officers. (State Department photo)
“At the time of Ambassador Stevens’ visit, February 17 militia members had stopped accompanying Special Mission vehicle movements in protest over salary and working hours,” said the ARB report.
A Senate Homeland Security Committee report issued on Dec. 30 also included some additional details the ARB report had not. It said: “In early September, a member of the February 17 Brigade told another RSO [State Department regional security officer] in Benghazi that it could no longer support U.S. personnel movements. The RSO also asked specifically if the militia could provide additional support for the Ambassador’s pending visit and was told no.”
A footnote in the Senate committee report attributes this information to an email sent to Charlene Lamb, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of state responsible for diplomatic security. The email was sent Sept. 20, 2012–nine days after the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. The footnote says: “REDACTED, e-mail message to Charlene Lamb, ‘Ambassador’s protective detail in Benghazi,’ September 20, 2012.”
Back on Oct. 10, 2012, when the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held an initial hearing on the Benghazi terrorist attack, it took testimony from Lamb and from Eric Nordstrom. Nordstrom had served as the RSO in Tripoli, but left Libya on July 26, 2012, when he was replaced as RSO by Martinec–more than six weeks before the Sept. 11, 2012 Benghazi attack.
Martinec was the RSO in Tripoli, and thus Amb. Stevens’ top security adviser, in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi. He was the RSO who received the internal Sept. 9 State Department email stating that the February 17 militia had warned that it would no longer support the movements of U.S. personnel in Benghazi–including the movements of Amb. Stevens. Martinec was also the RSO at the U.S. Embassy in Libya when the Benghazi attack occurred.
But–unlike Nordstrom, who did not get the warning from the February 17 militia and who was not the RSO at the U.S. Embassy in Libya when the Benghazi attack occurred–Martinec did not testify in the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Nor did the committee take testimony from the as-yet-anonymous RSO who was on temporary duty in Benghazi in September 2012 and, who, according to the Senate Homeland Security Committee report, heard directly from the February 17 militia that it would no longer support U.S. movements in the city.
The State Department’s Accountability Review Board concluded that the number of State Department security people on the ground in Benghazi had been inadequate even in the period that preceded the February 17 militia’s declaration that it would no longer protect the movements of U.S. personnel in the city.
“Overall, the number of Bureau of Diplomatic Security (DS) security staff in Benghazi on the day of the attack and in the months and weeks leading up to it was inadequate, despite repeated requests from Special Mission Benghazi and Embassy Tripoli for additional staffing,” said the ARB report.
Not only was the State Department facility in Benghazi understaffed, according to the ARB, it was also staffed with less experienced officers.
“Furthermore, DS’s reliance on volunteers for TDY [temporary duty] positions meant that the ARSOs [assistant regional security officers] in Benghazi often had relatively little or no prior DS program management or overseas experience,” said the ARB report. “For a time, more experienced RSOs were sent out on longer term TDYs, but even that appeared to diminish after June 2012, exactly at the time the security environment in Benghazi was deteriorating further.”
Both the ARB report and the Senate Homeland Security Committee report concluded that the Americans on the ground in Benghazi during the terror attack, including the State Department security officers, acted with great courage.
“The board determined that U.S. personnel on the ground in Benghazi performed with courage and readiness to risk their lives to protect their colleagues, in a near impossible situation,” said the ARB report.
“While our country spent Sept. 11, 2012, remembering the terrorist attacks that took place 11 years earlier, brave Americans posted at U.S. government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, were fighting for their lives against a terrorist assault,” said the Senate Homeland Security Committee report.
On Sept. 10, 2012—the day after RSO John Martinec at the Tripoli embassy got the email telling him that the February 17 militia would not support the ambassador’s movements in Benghazi—there were only three temporary duty State Department Diplomatic Security officers deployed at the department’s compound in that city. Stevens brought only two more with him when he went ahead with his trip to Benghazi that day—bringing the total number of State Department security personnel in that city to five.
The ARB report “found that plans for the Ambassador’s trip provided for minimal close protection security support, and that Embassy country team members were not fully aware of planned movements off compound.”
Benghazi Gate State Dept Withholding Benghazi Documents – Whistleblowers Threaten By Obama Admin
Published on Apr 29, 2013
Benghazi Whistleblowers Explosive Interview!
Benghazi Gate State Dept Withholding Benghazi Documents Whistleblowers Threaten By Obama admin
More Info See Video Below
Benghazi Gate – New Explosive Info On Attack In Libya – Whistleblowers Threaten By Obama’s People? http://youtu.be/Q8uYcYnDfTs
It was revealed for the first time today that the body of murdered Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was recovered by a secret two man Special “Ops” team that was not affiliated with any of the other security entities involved in the Benghazi attack.
This team, acting under their own initiative and armed with their own weapons, undertook this mission despite very little intelligence available for this exceedingly hostile and volatile environment. The information came to light this morning on WVOX’s Vernuccio/Allison radio show.
The previously undisclosed information was provided by former Army Ranger Jack Murphy who is the co-author along with Brandon Webb of Benghazi: The Definitive Report.
Murphy described in vivid detail the events of the attack including the fact that the hired gate security unit who came from a local militia brigade were armed only with cricket bats and fled the scene when the first RPG hit the front gate of the Temporary Mission Facility (TMF) around 9:40 PM Benghazi time.
He went on to describe the rescue of the TMF personnel by members of the nearby CIA Annex led by former Navy Seal Tyrone Woods. The rescue unit operated under an informal security agreement with the State Department but the effort was initially resisted by the Chief of Base at the annex. Within ten minutes of their arrival at the TMF, Woods and his team secured the survivors of the attack and the body of Sean Smith, a State Department Communications specialist and returned to the annex without being able to locate and recover Ambassador Stevens due to the intensity of the fire in the building where he was last located and the presence of both attackers and looters who were swarming through the compound.
Sources: 3 al Qaeda operatives took part in Benghazi attack
By Paul Cruickshank. Tim Lister. Nic Robertson and Fran Townsend, CNN
updated 6:53 PM EDT, Thu May 2, 2013
Demonstrators set the U.S. Consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, on fire on September 11, 2012. The U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. nationals were killed during the attack. The Obama administration initially blamed a mob inflamed by a U.S.-produced movie that mocked Islam and its Prophet Mohammed, but later said the storming of the consulate appears to have been a terrorist attack. View photos of protesters storming the U.S. Embassy buildings.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
“Three or four members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” took part, one source says
Western intelligence services suspect they may have been sent to carry out the attack
They were later traced to northern Mali, where the trail appears to have gone cold
(CNN) — Several Yemeni men belonging to al Qaeda took part in the terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last September, according to several sources who have spoken with CNN.
One senior U.S. law enforcement official told CNN that “three or four members of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” or AQAP, took part in the attack.
Another source briefed on the Benghazi investigation said Western intelligence services suspect the men may have been sent by the group specifically to carry out the attack. But it’s not been ruled out that they were already in the city and participated as the opportunity arose.
The attack on the compound and subsequently on a “safe-house” to which Americans had been evacuated left four U.S. citizens dead, including the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens.
Demonstrators on September 12 gather in Libya to condemn the killers and voice support for the victims in the attack on the U.S. Consulate.
If the AQAP members were dispatched to Benghazi, it would be further evidence of a new level of co-operation among jihadist groups throughout the Middle East and North Africa, counterterrorism analysts say.
According to one source, counterterrorism officials learned the identity of the men and established they had spent two nights in Benghazi after the attack. Western intelligence agencies began trying to track the men in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, but were always behind in their manhunt.
A burnt vehicle is seen at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 12.
They were later traced to northern Mali, where they are believed to have connected with a fighting group commanded by Moktar Belmoktar, a prominent jihadist leader, according to a senior law enforcement source.
The trail appears to have then gone cold. In early 2013, jihadists were driven out of many areas of northern Mali in a French-led offensive.
Another source briefed on the investigation had previously told CNN that Belmoktar had received a call in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack from someone in or close to the city. Whoever made the call was excited.
Half-burnt debris and ash cover the floor of one of the consulate buildings on September 12.
There is no proof the call was specifically about the attack, but the source says that is the assumption among those with knowledge of the call. One source says the phone call was discovered when a Western intelligence service trawled through intercepts of communications made in the wake of the attack.
CIA officials told CNN they had no comment on whether any call had been intercepted.
One other source briefed by Western intelligence told CNN a call was intercepted but said only that it was placed to an AQIM commander, not specifically Belmoktar.
Belmoktar is an Algerian terrorist operative linked to al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb who claimed responsibility for the attack on the In Amenas gas facility in southern Algeria in January this year. Some 38 people were killed during a three-day siege there.
The damage inside the burnt U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 13.
Chadian troops supporting the French intervention in Mali claimed in March that Belmoktar and others in his group had been killed during an operation in the remote Adrar des Ifhogas mountain range.
There has never been any confirmation of his death, and one source briefed by Western and regional intelligence officials told CNN that Belmoktar may have started operating in the “desert triangle” straddling the borders of Algeria, Niger and Libya.
U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement about the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Rose Garden at the White House on September 12 in Washington.
I have gone through the Oil Sands Fact Check site and honestly all I can find is boasting as to the boon in the US economy, jobs and the fact that activists are using the pipeline and tar sands oil as a scapegoat. Not once in all the supposed facts they have there do they address the real concerns, simply twisting the facts to their advantage. Painting themselves as responsible entities. Never once addressing that this substance is way more dangerous than oil to the environment and the water, especially. The tap dance over the fact by stating that tar sands oil has been transported into the US for decades.
What they fail to miss is this: Instead of reporting the factual analysis of the toxic substances that this tar sand emits they skirt over the fact claiming their emissions testing results. Now please correct me if I am wrong , but the major concern of environmentalists and activist is not the emissions once it is in the car. In fact the concern is of the damage the unrefined substance will do to the environment and the water shed if a spill were to take place. As we can see in Arkansas the substance is so toxic that the residents are already suffering from it’s effects .
They call themselves responsible entities, so then my question is this :
what is Exxon doing to make this right?
Exxon has stated that the water quality was within safe limits.
So what exactly does that mean ?
Are we to accept the status quo with regards to safety limits just as we are to accept that GMO’s are good for us even though there are more and more opponents coming out stating that it is in fact detrimental to human health?
What about the air quality? Or does that not matter?
Children are getting sick. People are becoming ill due to the toxic conditions.
Are we to believe this is acceptable ?
Or will this also be kept from the people and the sick treated like insignificant data as the people of the gulf were?
Good health once it has been compromised cannot be replaced.
Will your tar sands oil paycheck take care of it?
There is no amount of compensation that will replace good health. Nor erase catastrophic illness.
Or does it not matter because it isn’t your family?
I am sorry to break it to you , but unless you have a crystal ball that tells you otherwise . It could very well be you and your family that suffers next! Do not delude yourself by detaching from the reality of things entertaining the belief that it won’t happen to you . I am sure the people of Mayflower , Arkansas never imagined they would now be mired in this poison. Their children getting sick and their homes surrounded, helpless waiting for some heartless oil company to decide whether the clean up is worth the expense. Not the lives of the people affected by their poison, but their bottomline.
Don’t kid yourself!
With the lack of responsibility and lack of corrective action taken by oil companies in Africa. With leaking pipelines and toxic sludge where lakes had once been. Dead soil where crops were once grown.
How can anyone in their right mind take the word of these companies as to their integrity and responsibility?
We have seen what BP did in the Gulf Of Mexico.
Do you truly consider what was done in the gulf an adequate job of cleaning up the mess made by their incompetence and lust for profits?
The sea life dying as a result and scientists complaining that they have been legally gagged from making their findings available to the public.
Restrained by whom?
The oil companies?
No restrained by the government that is supposed to be looking out for our benefit. Instead they are protecting the Oil Companies interests.
Is this the kind of safety measure you want?
The reins handed over to a company who’s haste for fattening up their bottom line poisons our earth , our air and our water so that they can police themselves?
How many journalists were kept away from the Gulf to keep them from reporting what they saw there?
How many reporters were kept from Mayflower, Arkansas for the same reason?
Everyone is crowing about the jobs the tar sands oil will bring to the US.
Are you truly understanding what you are asking for?
Do you even understand that Mayflower Arkansas could be anywhere in the heartland?
Do you realize what would happen if that pipeline leaked into the water shed.?
It would not be someone else’s problem , it would be everyone’s problem . You are looking for jobs, yes we understand. We all live here in the States and we are all going through the same hard times. We all need to work and we all need to pay our bills.
Where do we draw the line at what is admissible and what is over the not?
There is only one Earth and when she is completely trashed where will you go ?
Will your job with tars sands oil help you bring her back ?
Will you be able to remove the horrible toxins deposited by your tars sands oil from the earth,the rivers, the water?
Are you not paying attention to what is happening around you?
I want you to understand one very important thing. The responsibility for the destruction of our environment is not just on the oil companies. It is on everyone of you who don’t give it a second thought. On everyone of you that takes clean air ,and water for granted. On everyone of you that places a job over the well being of your children and your fellow American’s children. This is not a game this is a very hazardous situation that has grave consequences and until all of you realize that , we are lost.
Money has become the denominating factor in our lives.
What happened to principal , responsibility and honor.
What happened to doing what is right ?
Where is the concern for our children’s well being?
I see my fellow citizens on a collision course with destruction, hell bent on ignoring the warning signs. Their eyes on the prize of money and material things.
One wonders how much that money and those materials possessions will help when you can no longer give your child a cup of clean , safe water to drink?
On March 29, an oil pipeline running through Mayflower, Arkansas experienced a leak that resulted in the evacuation of 22 homes and immediate clean up efforts from the pipeline’s operator, ExxonMobil. According to reports, the Pegasus line was carrying Wabasca Heavy crude oil – a blend of crude produced in the Athabasca oil sands region in Alberta.
Of course, in the minds of oil sands opponents, all pipelines are made alike and are uniformly threatened by oil sands crudes. In fact, following the news of the incident, Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) stated:
“This latest pipeline incident is a troubling reminder that oil companies still have not proven that they can safely transport Canadian tar sands oil across the United States without creating risks to our citizens and our environment.”
We have the top five reasons why that’s not the case.
1) Oil sands crudes have been transported safely in the U.S. for more than 40 years. Accident reports from the Pipeline & Hazardous Material Safety Administration (PHMSA) from 2002 through mid-2012 show zero internal corrosion-related releases from pipelines carrying diluted bitumen.
2) Oil sands crudes are not more corrosive than other crude oils. In a 2011 report, Canadian research group Alberta Innovates found that acid and sulfur compounds found in oil sands crudes “are too stable to be corrosive and some may even decrease corrosion.” Recent testing and studies by ASTM International and Penspen support this conclusion.
3) Oil sands crudes are transported at comparable pipeline pressures as other heavy crude oils. All U.S. pipelines must operate under Maximum Operating Pressure limitations administered by PHMSA. In other words, pipelines are constructed to specifications that ensure they can handle the intended operating pressure and the type of liquid that flows through them.
4) Oil sands crudes are not heated for transportation in pipelines above the temperature of other crude oils. The range of temperatures for all crude oils from Canada is 40-135 degrees Fahrenheit. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Code for Pipeline Transportation Systems forLiquid Hydrocarbons and Other Liquids does not consider pipeline temperatures to be elevated unless they exceed 150 degrees Fahrenheit.
5) Keystone XL would “have a degree of safety over any other.” As mentioned in point #3, pipelines must meet certain specifications before transporting any type of crude, no matter if it’s heavy or light. Keystone XL, which will also carry heavy oil from Alberta, is going above and beyond those requirements by adopting 57 extra safety measures, leading the State Department to declare that the project would “have a degree of safety over any other.”
LITTLE ROCK, Ark., April 30 (UPI) — There’s been a “toxic soup” hanging over residents in Mayflower, Ark., as a result of an Exxon Mobil oil pipeline accident, a citizen’s group said.
Exxon said about 5,000 barrels of oil was released last month from a 22-foot rupture on its Pegasus pipeline in Mayflower. The pipeline, built in the 1940s, was carrying a diluted form of Canadian crude oil, dubbed oil sands, at the time of the spill.
Air samples taken March 30, the day after the incident, indicated high levels of compounds considered harmful to human health. The samples were conducted by a student activist trained by the Faulkner County (Ark.) Citizens Advisory Group and Global Community Monitor.
“Total toxic hydrocarbons were detected at more than 88,000 parts per billion in the ambient air and present a complex airborne mixture or soup of toxic chemicals that residents may have been exposed to from the Mayflower tar sands bitumen spill,” Neil Carman, a representative from the Texas chapter of the Sierra Club, said in a statement.
Exxon admitted to finding levels of benzene and other harmful chemicals in early samples taken at Mayflower. It said air and water quality was within safe limits in the weeks following the spill, however.
The report, published by the activist groups, said residents are showing signs of exposure to chemicals ranging from benzene, a carcinogen, to toluene, a central nervous system depressant, more than four weeks after the spill.
Roughly four weeks after the spill took place, many basic details are still unknown to the public, according to recent reporting by InsideClimate News. Questions include what exactly caused the spill, how big was the spill exactly, and how long did it take for emergency responders to react to the spill, to name a few.
But one thing is certain according to the new study: For the residents of Mayflower, quality of life has been changed forever.
All of these chemicals are hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), “regulated under the 1990 Federal Clean Air Act amendments as the most toxic of all known airborne chemicals,” as explained in the press release summarzing the study.
FILE – In this Oct. 18, 2010 file photo, an Amazon.com package is prepared for shipment by a United Parcel Service (UPS) driver in Palo Alto, Calif. States could force Internet retailers to collect sales taxes under a bill that overwhelmingly passed a test vote in the Senate Monday, April 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)
WASHINGTON (AP) — You don’t see this very often: a majority of Senate Republicans voting to make people who buy stuff on the Internet pay state and local sales taxes.
Anti-tax guru Grover Norquist isn’t happy about it and the conservative Heritage Foundation is questioning the senators’ conservative credentials. But the issue of taxing Internet sales is getting strong support from Republicans and Democrats alike.
The Senate could vote as early as Thursday on a bill to empower states to require online retailers to collect state and local sales taxes for purchases made over the Internet. Under the bill, the sales taxes would be sent to the states where a shopper lives.
On Wednesday, the bill passed a test vote in the Senate, 74 to 23, with 27 Republicans voting in favor. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., vowed to pass the bill this week, before senators leave for a scheduled vacation.
“This is a matter of equity and fairness,” said South Dakota Gov. Dennis Daugaard, a Republican. “The same people who are selling the same products should be paying the same taxes.”
Under current law, states can only require stores to collect sales taxes if the store has a physical presence in the state. As a result, many online sales are essentially tax-free, giving Internet retailers an advantage over brick-and-mortar stores.
It is part of GOP orthodoxy to oppose higher taxes, a central issue that divides Democrats and Republicans. That’s why the bill faces an uncertain fate in the House, where some Republicans regard it as a tax increase.
But supporters of the bill insist it is not a tax increase. Instead, they say, the bill merely provides states with a mechanism to enforce current taxes.
“This bill has nothing to do with imposing any kind of new tax or revenue generator,” said Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. “What this law does is allow states that already have laws on the books to carry out the implementation of those” laws.
By DONNA CASSATA and RICHARD LARDNER Associated Press
Denver Post
WASHINGTON—An interim report by House Republicans faults the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for security deficiencies at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, prior to last September’s deadly terrorist attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Senior State Department officials, including Clinton, approved reductions in security at the facilities in Benghazi, according to the report by GOP members of five House committees. The report cites an April 19, 2012, cable bearing Clinton’s signature acknowledging a March 28, 2012, request from then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Gene Cretz for more security, yet allowing further reductions. “Senior State Department officials knew that the threat environment in Benghazi was high and that the Benghazi compound was vulnerable and unable to withstand an attack, yet the department continued to systematically withdraw security personnel,” the report said. Release of the report comes as dozens of House Republicans separately have pushed for Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, to create a select committee to investigate the Sept. 11, 2012, attack. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the report Tuesday. The report also is highly critical of President Barack Obama and White House staff. In the days following the attack, White House and senior State Department officials altered what the report said were accurate “talking points” drafted by the U.S. intelligence community in order to protect the State Department. And contrary to what the administration claimed, the alterations were not made to protect classified information. “Concern for classified information is never mentioned in email traffic among senior administration officials,” according to the 43-page report. Last December, senior State Department officials acknowledged major weaknesses in security and errors in judgment that had been revealed in a scathing independent report on the deadly assault. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns and Deputy Secretary of State Thomas Nides admitted that serious management and leadership failures left the mission in Benghazi woefully unprepared for the terrorist attack. Clinton, testifying before Congress in the final weeks of her tenure, took responsibility for the department’s missteps and failures leading up to the assault. But she insisted that requests for more security at the diplomatic mission in Benghazi didn’t reach her desk, and reminded lawmakers that they have a responsibility to fund security-related budget requests. The report from the House committees is the latest broadside in what has been a long-running and acrimonious dispute between the Obama administration and congressional Republicans who have challenged the White House’s actions before and after the Benghazi attack. House and Senate Republicans for weeks fought for access to information about the attack and used the nominations of two key Obama administration national security officials—Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and CIA Director John Brennan—as leverage to obtain internal documents about the raid.
President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at Andrews Air Force Base on Sept. 14, 2012, when the caskets of Sean Smith, Chris Stevens, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty returned to the U.S.A. (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – Patricia Smith–the mother of Foreign Service Officer Sean Smith, who was murdered by terrorists in Benghazi seven months ago today–says that President Barack Obama and other administration officials did not follow-up on promises they made to her personally when she traveled to Washington, D.C. last September to meet the return to the United States of her son’s casket.
Mrs. Smith says she wants to know why her son and the others at the State Department compound in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012 were abandoned by their government.
“Please, Please help me find out who is responsible and fix it so no more of our sons and daughters are abandoned by the country they love,” she said in a letter sent Monday to Rep. Frank Wolf (R.-Va.)
“When I was in Wash. DC at the reception of the caskets, I asked for and received promises from Pres. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Leon Panetta, VP Biden and several other dignitaries in attendance,” Mrs. Smith said in her letter. “They all looked me directly in the eyes and promised they would find out and let me know. I got only one call from a clerk about a month later quoting from the time line, which I already had.”
Terrorists murdered State Department Information Management Officer Sean Smith in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012. (State Dept. photo)
Mrs. Smith told Rep. Wolf–to whom she had also placed an unsolicited telephone call on Monday afternoon–that she was endorsing legislation he has proposed—H. Res. 36—to establish a special House committee specifically for the purpose of investigating the Benghazi attack and how the Obama administration handled it and its aftermath.
Sean Smith, who signed up to serve in the U.S. Air Force when he was only 17 years old, was 34 when he died last Sept. 11. By then, he had served a decade in the State Department, working as information management specialist.
In addition to his mother and father, Smith also left behind his wife, Heather, and two children, Nathan and Samantha.
Wolf’s resolution now has 89 co-sponsors in the House and was endorsed last week by a group of 700 special operations veterans, led by retired Lt. Gen. Jerry Boykin, who worked with the Central Intelligence Agency, and was commander of Delta Force, and the U.S. Special Forces Command before becoming assistant secretary of defense for intelligence.
FLASHBACK: Obama on Day of Benghazi Attack and Tsarnaev’s Naturalization: ‘Our Country Is Safer’
April 21, 2013
President Barack Obama with Defense Secretary Leon Panetta an Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey at the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2012. (AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) – On Sept. 11, 2012, as he was campaigning for reelection, President Barack Obama went to the Pentagon to give a speech commemorating the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and tell Americans that he was successfully bringing the post-9/11 wars to a conclusion.
“Our country is safer,” Obama said.
Later that day, terrorists would attack the U.S. State Department mission and CIA Annex in Benghazi, Libya, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing, would be granted U.S. citizenship in Massachusetts.
“Today, the war in Iraq is over,” Obama said in his Sept. 11, 2012 speech at the Pentagon. “In Afghanistan, we’re training Afghan security forces and forging a partnership with the Afghan people. And by the end of 2014, the longest war in our history will be over.”
Obama said at the Pentagon that prior to 9/11/12 most of the victims would not have thought that a small number of terrorists could travel from overseas, enter the United States, and do great harm to us here.
A lawsuit filed against DNI Clapper’s office may finally get the Obama administration to release documents regarding the Benghazi tragedy without strings attached.
Credits:
WH Press Office
The Obama White House has decided to turnover documents related to the attack on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, according to news reports on Friday evening. But a non-government organization is continuing its lawsuit against Obama’s Office of National Intelligence to access the documents for itself.
Despite continuous cover-up allegations, misstatements, verbal gymnastics and other evasions, a top public-interest, watchdog group on Thursday announced that its officials had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against President Barack Obama‘s Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The FOIA lawsuit seeks access to records regarding the Sept. 11, 2012, attack by Islamists on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
During the violent terrorist attack, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were brutalized and murdered by radical Muslims associated with al-Qaeda. The documents requested from the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper include emails between top national security officials showing the debate within the administration over how to describe the attack and as well as other documents.
The non-profit, non-partisan Judicial Watch is seeking a questionable “talking points” memo indicating that intelligence officials believed from the outset that Islamic terrorists perpetrated the vicious attack despite public statements issued by Obama administration officials, including UN Ambassador Susan Rice and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that attributed the attack to a response to a YouTube anti-Mohammad video.
Judicial Watch seeks the following records in its FOIA request:
Any and all memoranda, assessments, analyses, and/or talking points regarding the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya and/or the killing of U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens produced by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence between Sept. 11, 2012 and Sept. 20, 2012. This request includes, but is not limited to, the “speaking points” memorandum referred to by Senator Dianne Feinstein during a televised interview on Oct. 17, 2012.
Demonstrators set the U.S. Consulate compound in Benghazi, Libya, on fire on September 11, 2012. The U.S. ambassador and three other U.S. nationals were killed during the attack. The Obama administration initially blamed a mob inflamed by a U.S.-produced movie that mocked Islam and its Prophet Mohammed, but later said the storming of the consulate appears to have been a terrorist attack. 
Demonstrators on September 12 gather in Libya to condemn the killers and voice support for the victims in the attack on the U.S. Consulate. 
A burnt vehicle is seen at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on September 12. 
Half-burnt debris and ash cover the floor of one of the consulate buildings on September 12.
The damage inside the burnt U.S. Consulate in Benghazi on September 13.
U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement about the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Rose Garden at the White House on September 12 in Washington. 
