Senator McCaskill spoke at the Democratic Convention and asserted:

For eight years we have watched our government take care of the powerful, the few and the extremely wealthy. We have seen our dream put at risk by George Bush's Washington. John McCain is running for four more years of the same old politics and exact same failed policies that we had under George Bush. They did tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, they're doing everything Big Oil asks for, and look where we are.

Come on, America. Let's call on our common sense and stay focused on what's important. We cannot choose that path again. That's a risk the American people cannot afford to take. I have seen Barack Obama in the Senate, and I've been by his side on the campaign trail. I know he will bring the change we need in Washington.

I saw him take on both parties to help pass the farthest-reaching ethics reform since Watergate. That's the change we need. I saw him run a campaign that hasn't taken a dime from federal lobbyists and PACs. That's the change we need. I know that this son of a single mom will stand up for the dreams of our daughters. And I know that John McCain won't.

There is only one candidate in this race who has fought for equal pay for equal work by America's women. That candidate is Barack Obama. There is only one candidate offering real tax relief for the middle class, health care that is affordable and accessible and protection of Social Security today, tomorrow and forever. That candidate is Barack Obama.

It all depends on how clearly you see America -- how clearly you see the best of America. John McCain has been in Washington for almost 30 years. Maybe that's why he has a campaign run by Washington lobbyists and thinks the fundamentals of the economy are strong. In Missouri we have a ringside seat to the real America, and I can assure you it looks much different.

Watch Obama's latest Television ad, here

Anthrax Attack: Revelations of 2001

Source: The New York Times [edited] <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10andrews.html?ref=opinion>

8-12-08  On Wednesday [6 Aug 2008], the United States Justice Department revealed its evidence that Dr. Bruce E. Ivins, on his own, committed the worst act of bioterrorism in the country's history. This 18-year veteran scientist of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., is accused of killing 5 people and sickening 17 others in the fall of 2001. Dr. Ivins died on 29 Jul 2008 of an apparent suicide without a chance to give his side of the story.

After reading the affidavits and listening to the Justice Department briefing, I was both disheartened and perplexed by the lack of physical evidence supporting a conviction...read more of this revealing story

It’s Never Too Late to Impeach Bush

"A moment I've been dreading. George (Bush Sr.) brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida: the one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."
-- Ronald Reagan in his recently published diaries , written May 17, 1986

8-12-08 It’s good to know there are still at least some politicians who are trying to oust the president. Dennis Kucinich gave notice on 6/9/08 that he intended to introduce 35 Articles of Impeachment to the House of Representatives (Congress). The next day he was joined by Robert Wexler. Reports say the House chamber was almost empty when he introduced this resolution. In order to get an impeachment of the President, the House must agree to pass a resolution that Bush is a traitor or guilty of other high crimes...more

Constitutional Seminar is coming to Florida!  Learn what knowing the U.S. Constitution can do for you.   
Citizen's Against Legal and Moral Abuse
Jack and Margy Flynn Saturday & Sunday, September 6th & 7th

John McCain's Chilling Project for America

What Brain Science Tells Us About Religious Belief

Pew Forum Faith Angle Conference, Key West, Florida
June 4, 2008

What does brain science add to age-old debates about the existence of God and the value of religion? Can political parties and religious groups use scientific insights to influence the beliefs of others? Are scientists as a group becoming more open to ideas of religion and spirituality? Recent advances in neuroscience and brain-imaging technology have offered researchers a look into the physiology of religious experiences. In observing Buddhist monks as they meditate, Franciscan nuns as they pray and Pentecostals as they speak in tongues, Dr. Andrew Newberg, a radiologist at the University of Pennsylvania, has found that measurable brain activity matches up with the religious experiences described by worshippers. The social, political and religious implications of these and other findings are just beginning to permeate the broader culture, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks, who has been tracking new developments in the field.

Speakers:
David Brooks, Columnist, The New York Times
Andrew Newberg, Assistant Professor, Department of Radiology, University of Pennsylvania

Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics and Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpted transcript, ellipses have been omitted to improve readability.

Andrew Newberg, Michael Cromartie and David Brooks

Andrew Newberg: How does the brain tell us when we are free? What goes on within us that the brain says to us "Yes, you're okay, you can do whatever you want to do," or "No, this is not okay?" How does our brain actually change or transform? This is a critical issue if we're going to change the views of a voter, if we're going to change a person's religion. If one of these things happens to a person, something's got to be changing in the brain as well. How do we understand what the brain can do?

I wrote, with my colleague, a paper on forgiveness and revenge several years ago, about what would be the neuropsychological correlates of that. It becomes very interesting: how we think about ourselves, how we have a construction of ourselves, and how that self relates to other individuals, and how we reconcile when somebody has injured or harmed us. This is part of how I can tie in some of the topics I'll be covering with some of the topics that have been more broadly discussed here at Key West.

Liberal and conservative brains

There have been some studies that have looked at political perspectives, trying to understand what happens in the brain of people who are Republicans and the brains of people who are Democrats. We talked about some of this, and I'd just highlight a couple of interesting studies. One was an fMRI study, which is a magnetic resonance imaging that looks at blood flow and activity in the brain, and it showed that people who scored higher on liberalism tended to be associated with stronger what they called conflict-related anterior cingulate activity. Now, what that means is, you have a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate, which helps you mediate when things are in conflict with the way you already believe.

The researchers then interpreted this, and we can go into all the questions about how should we interpret these studies. People who had greater liberalism seemed to do better or were more sensitive to altering some habitual response pattern, implying that they were more open to change, more open to other ideas, more open to conflict, than people who scored lower on liberalism. Does that mean something about people who consider themselves to be liberals versus conservatives, Republicans versus Democrats?

Of course all people, regardless of what their particular perspectives are, when they're viewing their own candidate, that has a different effect in their brain than when they are viewing a candidate from the opposite party. When you're looking at somebody from the opposite party, or thinking about them, it tends to activate the amygdala, the limbic areas, again, that tend to trigger more of an emotional response, whereas when you're looking at people who are concordant with your views and beliefs, that tends to activate some of the areas of the frontal lobe and also that anterior cingulate that helps you mediate your conflict-resolution powers.

To me, one of the most interesting aspects of this whole area is more philosophical, more theological, and thinking about what does this mean in terms of how we believe in religion, and the religious beliefs that people hold. Does this tell us something about those beliefs and experiences? When somebody has the experience of being in God's presence, and we can get a brain scan of that, what does that mean, what does that say, and how can we interpret that either for religion, against religion, or in some other alternative perspective of simply just trying to understand it better?

Now, beliefs themselves have a tremendous power over us, and I look at this all the time in the context of the placebo effect. Unfortunately, I think the healthcare system severely overlooks how beliefs have power over what happens to somebody. I'm sure probably all of you know somebody who's dealt with a severe medical problem, maybe cancer or heart disease. We have always noted, at least anecdotally, that when people have that spirit and drive to get better, they seem to have a much higher likelihood of doing that, whereas those who are ready to give up tend not to do that well. That also goes to the importance of how beliefs affect our whole body, not just the brain itself.

Of course, we can also look at religious and spiritual beliefs, which is what I will try to focus my talk on throughout the day here. I always try to come at this from a philosophical perspective. Why do we believe anything at all? It is an infinite universe for all intents and purposes. We are able to be subjected to only a very, very small amount of that information [and] an even smaller amount of that information is ultimately put into your consciousness. If you talk to somebody for 45 minutes, they are going to remember maybe three or four things. So our brain is trying to put together a construction of our reality, a perspective on that reality, which we rely on heavily for our survival, for figuring out how to behave and how to act and how to vote.

So what are beliefs? Again, I apologize, but I always come at this from a scientific perspective. I am defining beliefs biologically and psychologically as any perception, cognition, emotion, or memory that a person consciously or unconsciously assumes to be true. The reasons I define beliefs in this way are several-fold. One is that we can begin to look at the various components that make up our beliefs. We can talk about our perceptions. We can talk about our cognitive processes. We can talk about how our emotions affect our beliefs. And we can also look at how they ultimately affect us. Are we aware of the beliefs we hold? Or are they unconscious? And which ones are unconscious and which ones are conscious?

Several interesting studies have shown that when you show faces of a person of a different race to people, it activates the amygdala, the area that lights up when something of motivational importance happens to us. But if you show pictures of people of a different race that are people they know, and maybe it is a famous person or a friend, then the amygdala doesn't light up. So they tend to have this ability to culturally, cognitively overcome what might be their initial response.

We can look at all these different forces on our beliefs. We can look at our perceptual processes, our cognitive processes, the emotions we have, the social interactions we have, to see how beliefs are so heavily influenced. One of the take-home points I always hope to get across is that as much as we hold onto our own beliefs very strongly -- and I think it is appropriate for us to do so -- we also have to keep in mind they are far more tenuous than we often like to believe.

Let me go through some of these processes in a bit more detail. Let's talk about our perceptions. The brain is out there trying to take in a huge amount of information and make some coherent picture of the world for us. But, unfortunately, the brain makes lots of mistakes along the way. The most important problem with that is it doesn't bother to tell us when it does make a mistake.

If we are listening to a speech, if we are thinking about an idea, if a friend is telling us something, how well are we really doing at gathering that information out there? How easy is it for us to be manipulated in terms of the beliefs we hold?

Now we move over to the cognitive functions of the brain. We talk about the parietal lobe, which is very involved in abstract reasoning and quantization. Parts of the parietal lobe are involved in helping us orient our self in the world and establishing a relationship between our self and the rest of the world. The temporal lobe, which is along the side of the brain; the cortex areas help us to understand language; and the inner parts of the temporal lobe are where our limbic system is -- I'll talk about that in just a second -- that helps us with understanding our emotional responses to whatever stimuli are out there in the world.

The frontal lobe helps us with our behaviors and executive functions, the functions of deciding what we need to do: what we're going to do tomorrow, keeping our schedule, keeping our checkbook, and so forth, while also mediating our emotional responses. There is a push-pull between our frontal lobe and limbic system that can get out of whack sometimes. If we get overly emotional, our frontal lobes shut down, and if we become over-logical, our emotional areas shut down. There is a lot of push and pull that goes on in these different parts of the brain.

Emotions are also important for placing value on beliefs. So it's not just that we feel we should do something for the environment, it's not just that we feel we should be a Republican or a Democrat, but we start to imbue those choices with emotions. We feel strongly about the ways in which we believe, and of course this can help us form beliefs. The downside of our emotions can be in how they help us defend our beliefs. There has been a lot of research looking at when people start to feel combative and antagonistic toward people who disagree with them. This can be how we start to see religious conflicts occur throughout the world: It is not just that people disagree with each other, but that they get emotional about it. They start to feel hatred.

The emotional areas of the brain are in part of the brain called the limbic system, which is embedded in the more interior parts of the brain. Here is that amygdala, which tends to light up whenever something of motivational importance happens to us. The hippocampus, which is right behind that, helps to regulate our beliefs, but also helps to regulate our emotions and write into our memories the ideas that come about from emotionally salient events. That is why we all remember exactly what was happening to us on September 11, 2001.

As we were talking earlier today, the social milieu we are in becomes very important in influencing our beliefs. We are continuously influenced by those around us. This goes all the way back to when we are a child and the influence of our parents helps us form our initial beliefs, which write into our brain at a very early age the beliefs we carry with us throughout our lives. That is why it is difficult to change your religious beliefs. It is difficult to even change your political beliefs as time goes on. If you look at the large population, very few people ultimately do change their beliefs in any very dramatic way because those are written very deeply into our brain at very early ages. But ultimately, as we do grow up, we can be influenced, and we can change those beliefs, and that is part of what we have to look at: exactly how and why this happens.

The physiology of beliefs

So how do these beliefs form physiologically, and what does this tell us about religious and spiritual ideas, and why religion and spirituality are so ingrained in so many individuals and have been in every culture and every time? There are a couple of statements I like to use. One is that neurons that fire together, wire together. There is physiological support for that, that the more you use a particular pathway of neurons, the more strongly they become connected to each other. We prune back a lot of the neural connections we have as a child, so we ultimately go forward in our lives with a set of parameters through which we look at the world.

The other idea about neurons is the old use-it-or-lose-it concept, that when you stop thinking about certain things, when you stop focusing on something, then those connections go away. We all probably took courses in college we remembered a lot of at the time, but if we are not doing it anymore, then we don't remember it anymore.

How do we begin to invoke that? The practices and rituals that exist within both religious and non-religious groups become a strong and powerful way to write these ideas into our brain. The more you focus on a particular idea, whether it is political or religious or athletic, the more that gets written down into your brain and the more that becomes your reality. So that is why when you go to a church or a synagogue or a mosque, and they repeat the same stories, and you celebrate the same holidays that reinforce that, you do the prayers, and you say these things over and over again, those are the neural connections that get stimulated and strengthened. That is a strong part of why religion and spirituality make use of various practices valuable for writing those beliefs strongly into who you are.

Brains in meditation, prayer and worship

We have looked at a number of different religious and spiritual practices over the last decade or so. [These] SPECT (Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography) look at blood flow in the brain. We capture a picture of a person's brain when they are at rest or when they are in some kind of comparison state, and then when they are engaged in the practice, a practice like meditation, for example.

This is actually a slice through the brain. You are slicing through the brain, popping the top of the head off, and looking at what areas of the brain are the most active. The red areas are more active than what you see in the yellow, and then ultimately in the purple and the black areas. In this part of the brain called the frontal lobes, which I have labeled as an "attention area," because it helps focus our attention, we see a lot more of this red activity while the person is actively engaged in meditation than when the person is in the baseline state.

In the normal waking state, which was the baseline state, there is still a fair amount of activity in the frontal lobes because you have to be ready to attend to whatever is going on around you. But it is activated that much more when the person does this particular practice. I mentioned earlier the parietal lobe, which often functions as the orienting part of the brain. We have argued in some of our hypotheses that when people engage in these practices in a very deep way, they do two things. First, you are focusing on something, usually it is a sacred object or an image or something like that, but, second, you also screen out irrelevant information. As you do this, more and more information that normally goes to the orienting parts of your brain doesn't go there. So it keeps trying to give you a sense of yourself, an orientation of that self in the world, but it no longer has the information upon which to do that.

And if you look at the orientation area, it goes dramatically down in its activity during the meditation practice. It is mostly yellow and just a little bit of red, compared to what you see in the normal waking state. So this area of the brain becomes much less active. We think this is part of what is associated with somebody losing that sense of self. They feel at one with God, at one with their spiritual mantra, whatever it is they are looking at. This was a group of Tibetan Buddhist meditators.

We also looked Franciscan nuns in prayer. We saw some interesting similarities and differences. The nuns were doing a prayer called centering prayer, which is kind of meditation. They were focusing on a particular phrase or prayer. It is much more verbally based, I guess, than the meditation of the Tibetans. Again, one of the similarities we saw was a fair amount of increase in this red activity in the frontal lobes. So they activated their frontal lobes as they were

focusing on this particular prayer or phrase from the Bible.

They also activated the IPL or parietal lobe area. There is a much bigger glob of red in the prayer scan than what you see in the baseline scan. This is part of that verbal conceptual area in the temporal lobes, in the parietal lobes, that helps us think about abstract ideas and language. We didn't see this in the Buddhist meditators, who had a more visual practice. But we did see a similarity of decreases of activity in this orienting part of the brain; again, it's all more yellow with just a little bit of red, compared to what we saw in the original baseline state.

One of the more recent studies we did, which was very interesting, was a study of Pentecostals speaking in tongues. This was a much more exciting study for me because when you're looking at people who are meditating or in deep prayer, they're just sitting there and all the exciting stuff is going on inside, whereas when people are speaking in tongues all the exciting part is on the outside.

We had to come up with a different baseline because obviously if I showed you a person's scan while he or she was simply resting quietly, versus up and about and dancing and singing in tongues, of course you would see all kinds of changes in the brain. So the comparison state here was doing gospel-singing worship. They were up and about, dancing around, singing in English, compared to up and about, dancing around, singing but singing in tongues. One of the most interesting findings we saw in this particular study --these are four slices of the brain while they were singing, so these are just different levels through the brain.

The next slide is going to be the same person, now speaking in tongues. If you look in the frontal lobe area, where the arrows are pointing, as I toggle back and forth, you can see there's a lot less activity in the frontal lobes when the person is speaking in tongues. So when they started to speak in tongues, and we see this in all the people we studied, their frontal lobe activity goes down.

This actually makes a lot of sense because in contrast to the meditators and nuns, who are focusing on doing something, the way the Pentecostals describe speaking in tongues is they are not focusing on doing it; they let it happen. They just let their own will go away and allow this whole thing to take place. They don't feel like they're in control of this process. And the findings on the scan at least support the phenomenological experience they have.

I'm sure we'll get into a lot of interesting philosophical discussions on, "What is the reality here?" Obviously, for the Pentecostals speaking in tongues, they say this is God or the Holy Spirit who is speaking through them. What one might argue in that context is, "Your brain shuts down so you can allow the Holy Spirit to speak through you; this is how it works." On the other hand, if you don't believe speaking in tongues is really a spiritual event, then you might say, "Perhaps there's some other part of the brain that is taking over, that is causing this thing to happen. It's not the normal parts of the brain doing it, but it's some other part of the brain."

At this point we don't have that answer and this is, again, the big epistemological question about how we understand what reality is, how we begin to think about our beliefs about reality and what we can say, ultimately, about what these scans mean in the context of what's really going on. But I think there's still some very valuable information in at least understanding what's going on inside the person who is having this particular experience.

So if we're talking about religion as affecting our brain and our beliefs, we have to acknowledge that it must have some pretty profound effect on our brain if it is going to be something that has such a profound effect on us as people.

I have argued in the past that the brain's role in our overall life is to help us make some sense out of the world, and in so doing, to help maintain us. That's how it helps us to survive. We have to know not to cross the street when there's a red light, and what's okay to eat, and what's not okay to eat. It helps to make sure we do all the right things in the world.

It also helps us transcend ourselves, and by that I don't necessarily mean a religious transcendence, although that may be the ultimate expression of this, but we always grow and develop over time. There is this continual struggle, if you will, between wanting to maintain the status quo within ourselves and also knowing that we need to adapt and change as we go through our life, and our brain is capable of doing both. It holds onto beliefs very strongly to helps us figure out what we need to do in our world, but it can also change over time. All of us are still the same person we were when we were three years old, but we've learned a lot, and we've changed a lot over time. As we've gone through our lives, our brain has changed with us to adapt and help us survive.

Let me pause for a second and ask what we talk about when we're talking about people who are not religious. There is some evidence to suggest there are differences. Some of you may have read a book called The God Gene. It was an interesting study that showed there was a significant, although relatively mild, correlation between a gene that coded for what's called the VMAT-2 receptor, which has to do with serotonin and dopamine, two very important neurotransmitters in the brain, and feelings of self-transcendence. The fact that there's a correlation between the neurotransmitters and some feeling that's related to spirituality is interesting. Maybe there is something physiologically to this.

In our studies, we found -- going back to the thalamus that we talked about earlier -- that people who were long-term practitioners and meditators tended to have a lot more asymmetry: One side of their thalamus was much more active than the other, compared to the normal population of people who are not long-term meditators. I don't know what that means per se, but it seems to suggest that the ways in which we process information about the world might be fundamentally different.

One of the questions we have to ask is, if you are a non-believer or an atheist, is that the result of a lack of having such experiences, or are you having these experiences and then ultimately rejecting them? One of the examples we talked about in our last book was a woman who had a near-death experience. She described it as the full-blown near-death experience, with the light and all this kind of stuff, but said, "That was my brain dying." That was her interpretation of it, whereas other people have that experience, and they say, "That was me transcending into the next realm; that was my spiritual experience, and it was transformative; it changed who I was."

Here are a couple of websites if any of you are interested. We have a Center for Spirituality and the Mind [http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/radiology/csm/] that we've started at Penn, which is helping us consolidate a lot of the research. If any of you are interested in that survey I was mentioning you can go to the website, neurotheology.net. https://somapps.med.upenn.edu/neuro_t/

Read the full transcript and see the full set of slides at pewforum.org.

DeLauro Presses Defense Department Inspector General for Answers on Propaganda Program

Washington , D.C. – To hold the Pentagon accountable for its propaganda program, Congresswoman Rosa L. DeLauro (CT-3), a senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, lead a coalition of 40 Members in sending a letter to the Department of Defense Inspector General Claude M. Kicklighter to press for answers about the program. Specifically, the Members are seeking information, including whether the IG investigated the program or senior officials involved in the program, believes the program to be illegal, or feels that military contracting waste and fraud and abuse occurred.

“This extensive propaganda program should have been revealed, not by a newspaper, but long-ago by the DoD Office of the Inspector General, which is responsible for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse at the department, as well as promoting integrity and serving the public interest,” said DeLauro. “Now that the program has been halted, we must take the next steps to determine how high-ranking officials within the Pentagon were allowed to operate a program aimed at deceiving the American people.

“Not only must the Inspector General now account for what it did and did not know about this state-sponsored propaganda effort, but they must also explain why if they knew about the propaganda campaign it was allowed to proceed. Additionally, we are calling for the Inspector General to launch an investigation to ensure no detail surrounding this program remains hidden.”

“When the Department of Defense misleads the American people by having them believe that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals are simply replaying DoD talking points, the department is clearly betraying the public trust,” the letter concludes.

May 2, 2008

The Honorable Claude M. Kicklighter
Inspector General
U.S. Department of Defense
The Pentagon
Washington , DC 20301

Dear Inspector General Kicklighter:

We write to express our deep concern over an extremely troubling report recently published in The New York Times detailing a high-level, well thought out and extensive program within the Department of Defense to use military analysts to generate positive news coverage of the war in Iraq, conditions at the Guantánamo Bay detention center and other activities associated with the Global War on Terror. We believe that this unethical, and potentially illegal, propaganda campaign aimed at deliberately misleading the American public should have been disclosed long ago by your office, and not by a newspaper that needed to resort to suing the DoD for the information.

According to the report, in the earliest days of the Bush Administration, former Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs Torie Clarke began to build a network of “key influentials” that could generate support for then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s priorities and achieve what she called “information dominance.” In 2002, Ms. Clarke allegedly made a decision to make these “key influentials,” former military officers often with impressive military backgrounds, the main focus of the department’s public relations push to make the case to go to war. Responding to an interest from the White House, Ms. Clarke’s staff wrote summaries describing these analysts’ backgrounds, business affiliations and positions on the war.

At it’s peak, the Times reports that this behind the scenes network included more than 75 retired military analysts who were being briefed, often by high-level officials in a “powerfully seductive environment” (analysts reportedly met 18 times with Mr. Rumsfeld). The analysts then parroted the administration’s talking points on major television news programs and 24-hour cable news outlets, as well as over the radio and through op-ed articles or quotes in magazines, websites and newspapers. According to the article, internal Pentagon documents describe these military analysts as “message force multipliers” or “surrogates” who could be counted on to deliver administration “themes and messages” to millions of Americans “in the form of their own opinions.” Along with making the case for invading Iraq, these “themes and messages” included repudiating claims that U.S. troops were dying because of inadequate body armor, pushing back on reports of detainee mistreatment at the Guantánamo Bay prison facility and, according to Lawrence Di Rita, a former top aide to Mr. Rumsfeld, counteracting “the increasingly negative view of the war” that came with the rise of the insurgency. The DoD is even reported to have hired a private contractor to monitor and track the public comments of their military analyst surrogates. As one of them put it, this was “psyops on steroids.”

While we are deeply disturbed by the Pentagon’s taxpayer funded propaganda campaign, we find it equally troubling that the Pentagon used high-level access to DoD contracting officials as an enticement for these analysts to report the Bush Administration’s talking points on the war in Iraq . The military analysts involved in the Pentagon network reportedly represent more than 150 military contractors competing for the hundreds of billions of dollars made available by the Global War on Terror. These analysts were granted special access to the high ranking civilian and military leaders directly involved in determining how war funding should be spent. Such access gave the companies they represent a clear competitive advantage and may have created a culture in which analysts felt they needed to serve as the mouthpiece for the administration in order to gain military contracts for the companies they represent.

Your office is directly responsible for eliminating waste, fraud and abuse at the Department of Defense. Moreover, your mission includes promoting integrity and serving the public interest. This appears to be a high-level, well orchestrated program that was put in place that we presume your office is aware of. We therefore request your response to the following questions:

1) When did your office first become aware of this program and did you investigate the matter? If you did open an investigation please provide us with your report. If not, please explain why?

2) In every fiscal year since this program’s inception, Section 8001 of the yearly Defense Appropriations bills signed into law has made clear that “No part of any appropriation contained in this Act shall be used for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by the Congress.” Do you believe that the activities conducted through this program are in violation of that law or any other? If not, given that this program certainly cost money and was not authorized by Congress, please explain.

3) Do you believe that a situation in which individuals representing military contractors obtain unrivaled access to key senior officials and carry out the wishes of those officials creates an environment that is ripe for waste, fraud and abuse?

4) Your office includes a unit specifically charged with investigating senior officials. Along with Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Clarke, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Peter Pace and then Director of Operations for the Joint Chiefs James T. Conway were allegedly involved in the program. High-level officials outside of DoD were also reportedly involved, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and perhaps others inside the DoD as well. Has your office investigated any senior level DoD officials? If so, please provide your findings? If not, please explain why?

5) Has your office investigated whether any contract awards were compromised or tainted as a result of the special access granted to the military analysts?

6) We understand that in the aftermath of The New York Times story and facing criticism from Congress, Robert Hastings, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs determined the program should be suspended indefinitely pending an internal review. Can you please confirm whether your office is conducting this internal review and if so whether you believe the program should be permanently terminated and whether any similar programs in the future should be banned?

When the Department of Defense misleads the American people by having them believe that they are listening to the views of objective military analysts when in fact these individuals are simply replaying DoD talking points, the department is clearly betraying the public trust. Moreover, when these analysts are simultaneously representing defense contractors, the apparent conflict of interest can easily lead to fraud and abuse. We find this deeply troubling, and expect you will share our deep concern.

We thank you in advance for your prompt attention to this matter.

Sincerely,

The oil industry low-balls profits and the press goes along
COMMENTARY | May 12, 2008

One more time: in a free market system, profits are return on dollars invested, not return on sales or revenue. Is that too complicated, Mr. Will?

By Henry Banta

This is not another piece about oil prices. It is about how the media cover the oil industry and its political machinations. Over the past year, and with increasing intensity lately, the oil industry has engaged in a massive propaganda offensive claiming that its profits are no higher than many other industries. It makes this claim by comparing its return on sales with those of other industries. This is intentionally misleading and deceptive.

The very fact that a major industry is devoting massive resources to what is nothing more than an outrageous lie should be major news. Suppose Clinton, Obama, or McCain set out on a campaign of conspicuous lying? Wouldn’t it be news? Why should an industry with hundreds of billions of dollars in resources and a political agenda be immune? Why does it get a pass?

To understand why this is such an outrage and not just a dust-up over an arcane accounting issue requires a small – actually very small – bit of reflection of what profit means in a free market system. In the most basic sense it is the reward that the entrepreneurs get for taking the risks and putting up the money.  Profit is what the investors get back for putting up money. Profit is not the return on sales or revenue; it is the return on the dollars invested. It is this return on capital that enables the market to direct investment where it will make the most money, and be used most efficiently. It is at the heart of why we consider our economic system efficient. It is why we call it “capitalism.”  Comparing the return on sales for firms in different industries is meaningless.  It tells you nothing to know that Microsoft earned a 27 percent return on revenue while Verizon earned only 6.6 percent on its sales. 

By using a return on sales to make comparisons between industries, the oil industry is engaging in a gross deception. It is simply lying. No other word works. And the oil firms know better. They certainly do not talk that way to investors or the financial community.  As Peter Ashton pointed out on Nieman Watchdog last year (June 15, 2007), ExxonMobil got it right in its annual Financial and Operating Review for 2006. The quote is worth repeating:

The corporation’s total ROCE [return on capital employed] is net income excluding the after-tax cost of financing, divided by total corporate average capital employed. The corporation has consistently applied its ROCE definition for many years and views it as the best measure of historical capital productivity in our capital-intensive, long-term industry, both to evaluate management’s performance and to demonstrate to shareholders that capital has been used wisely over the long term.

[And also see this by Morton Mintz in Nieman Watchdog on how to report profits.]

The oil industry’s massive effort to divert the public’s attention has an obvious purpose. Why the major media don’t confront the issue is less obvious.  Last year Tim Russert, Washington bureau chief of NBC News, treated us to an interview with a CEO of a major oil company. One would have thought this would have presented a sitting duck for his brand of gotcha journalism. Alas, the subject never came up. Do his producers think that an issue so important to the industry has no real significance? Do they not read annual reports or financial statements? Do they need a refresher in Econ 101?

In fairness, one must admit that Mr. Russert has never pretended to have much interest in economic issues. George Will, on the other hand, would admit to no such limitation. Moreover, it is one thing to ignore the issue; it is another to join in the deception. In a Newsweek column (April 26, 2008) Mr. Will propounded questions for Senator Obama including this incantation of the industry line:

ExxonMobil’s profit of $40.6 billion annoys you. Do you know that its profit, relative to its revenue, was smaller that Microsoft’s and many other corporations’?

Coming from an intrepid defender of the free market this is no minor gaffe. He might be forgiven if he had noted that the nation’s largest corporation last year only earned a modest 3.4 percent on revenue. Of course, that would have exposed how silly his question was and how inappropriate his comparison.

I’d be remiss if I failed to mention an article that got it right – really right. Marianne Lavelle writing in U.S. News & World Report (February 1, 2008) observed that “There’s no business on the planet that gushes forth more profit than selling oil—nothing even close.” Making a comparison that should make Mr. Will blush, she notes that “If Exxon Mobil were a country, its 2007 profit would exceed the gross domestic product of nearly of nearly two thirds of the 183 nations in the World Bank’s economic rankings.” She goes on to explain the difference between return on sales and return on equity in language that even the laziest journalist could understand. She understands the significance of the fact that the oil industry as a whole earned a 27 percent return on equity and that this was 10 points higher than all other industries.

There are other issues raised by the industry’s propaganda offensive, like the amounts being reinvested. While these numbers in absolute terms seem large, over the last several years the actual rate of reinvestment has not been particularly high. In fact, the major companies have spent considerable sums buying back their own stock. For example, ExxonMobil’s capital and exploration expenditures in 2007 were $20.9 billion. But it spent $31.8 billion buying back its own stock, which certainly did nothing for meeting anyone’s energy needs.

What does all this matter anyhow? Doesn’t everyone expect the oil industry to lie? A long time ago, while working at the FTC on advertising issues, I had occasion to visit a considerable number of advertising agencies where, as a matter professional curiosity, I asked if one could sell a product with a claim that the consumer knew was untrue. Universally, the question provoked a laugh; of course they could. They all cited what they had learned from the world of political propaganda.

"End the denial of one, a few or many, all of the time; give all men and women a fair share for sustenance only; and goodness will mobilize. It does not take a village, nor its privateer corporation; it takes a good man, a good woman and, yes, freedom to trade. Inequity, interfering government and its surrogates are the problem, the unnecessary costs and producers of nothing, except human misery."

Prison and Tax Relief: A New Mind Set/The New Way

by R.O.Wirengard

Dear Governor,

It is hard for government to forsake the prison investor, who gave amply to campaigns; and the fundamentalist believing in an angry, full of vengeance and wrathful god, who votes for that government, so as to pre-empt and choke out any notion of the loving and forgiving god, of Jesus.

But even our dark age, brutal hangings of children in public squares, for stealing bread, did not solve the problem of hunger, and other children continued stealing bread, or they would die, regardless. Succeeding as thieves, however, it became a way of life for them and continues so today, where jobs and income are not available or insufficient to live on. The permanence of poverty and its vicious circle of denying some bread, all of the time, causing the theft of bread to recur, all of the time, they - a permanent miscarriage of Justice and its illegal but rational reaction for survival - are what needs to be broken.

I have heard it said that at least ninety-five percent of prisoners are not violent, and the remainder, I believe, belong in maximum security hospital wings; but it is for one, a few or many of the none-violent ones that I petition you, as follows.

Whereas our Florida spends an average of seventeen thousand dollars per year, per prisoner, this approaching a two billion dollar industry; therefor, let us free none-violent prisoner(s), pay each one a thousand dollars per month to access food and shelter, and place the remaining five thousand dollars into a healthcare pool, from which each will be dispensed/vouchered at the going rates of healthcare incidents, as need arises; provided that:

(1) Each will agree to forego, under our Florida Right to Work law, and we will exempt employers from minimum wage laws (in accordance with U.S. Constitution, Section 10, that no state shall make a law impairing contracts), and

(2) All agree that such employers pay seventy percent above agreed to wages into the fund that is costing us taxpayers seventeen thousand dollars per year, per prisoner.

In the long run, this simple, yet robust, program becomes self-sustaining, because, at the start, jobs become available easily, as freed prisoners can afford to work as apprentices, for nothing, or at low wages of a dollar an hour, because they have a living income, so as to improve skills and command higher and higher wages, in the longer run. They and we overcome our vicious, impoverishing processes - hunger - and private employers become allowed to employ - not reform, but overcome the cost of training people - for the ultimately higher paying , skilled job, from which everyone else also benefits.

I hereby petition you to release my none-violent nephew, Alfonso Antonio Gonzales, considered a career criminal, though he did not steal when he lived with me and my wife for free, for two years, tried desperately to work legitimately, but now is, for prior crimes and ineffective counsel, a prisoner, number 506332, A2-108L, at Apalachee Correctional Institution, in Sneads, Florida, to be released to me, under the above provisions, and a few other none-violent prisoners, who also are agreeable to the provisions.

We, with the help of a few others, perhaps Pastor Clark, will prove the new way; and Dr. Blass, if not your own staff, can set forth the computer program and hardware, to serve, track, and report results instantly of this, the new way of a new mind set.

It is a new way to reduce our prisons, which are not corrective anyway - crime goes up when our economy goes down, because we have more hunger and fewer jobs - meaning also that our freed prisoners, foregoing minimum wage barriers to work, can get jobs and will improve our economy; and reverse the tilt for crime to decline; and for tax relief also to be mobilized, which desperately is needed for our citizens, not just to balance budgets, but also to lower prices and eliminate costs of none-productive institutions

Sincerely submitted, petitioned and prayed for, R.O.Wirengard

“from a military point of view, the penalty, 2,400 (4,000+ in 2008) brave Americans whom we lost, 3,000 in an hour and 15 minutes, is relative.” said Pentagon Military Analyst.

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

The effort, which began with the buildup to the Iraq war and continues to this day, has sought to exploit ideological and military allegiances, and also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of the analysts have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Those business relationships are hardly ever disclosed to the viewers, and sometimes not even to the networks themselves. But collectively, the men on the plane and several dozen other military analysts represent more than 150 military contractors either as lobbyists, senior executives, board members or consultants. The companies include defense heavyweights, but also scores of smaller companies, all part of a vast assemblage of contractors scrambling for hundreds of billions in military business generated by the administration’s war on terror. It is a furious competition, one in which inside information and easy access to senior officials are highly prized……….John C. Garrett is a retired Army colonel and unpaid analyst for Fox News TV and radio. He is also a lobbyist at Patton Boggs who helps firms win Pentagon contracts, including in Iraq. In promotional materials, he states that as a military analyst he “is privy to weekly access and briefings with the secretary of defense, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other high level policy makers in the administration.” One client told 

Federal agencies, for example, have paid columnists to write favorably about the administration. They have distributed to local TV stations hundreds of fake news segments with fawning accounts of administration accomplishments Mr. Garrett’s special access and decades of experience helped him “to know in advance — and in detail — how best to meet the needs” of the Defense Department and other agencies.

In interviews Mr. Garrett said there was an inevitable overlap between his dual roles. He said he had gotten “information you just otherwise would not get,” from the briefings and three Pentagon-sponsored trips to Iraq. He also acknowledged using this access and information to identify opportunities for clients. “You can’t help but look for that,” he said, adding, “If you know a capability that would fill a niche or need, you try to fill it. “That’s good for everybody.”

There was little discussion about the actual criticism pouring forth from Mr. Rumsfeld’s former generals. Analysts argued that opposition to the war was rooted in perceptions fed by the news media, not reality. The administration’s overall war strategy, they counseled, was “brilliant” and “very successful.”

CNN, however, said it did not know the nature of McNeil’s military business or what General Marks did for the company. If he was bidding on Pentagon contracts, CNN said, that should have disqualified him from being a military analyst for the network. But in the summer and fall of 2006, even as he was regularly asked to comment on conditions in Iraq, General Marks was working intensively on bidding for a $4.6 billion contract to provide thousands of translators to United States forces in Iraq. In fact, General Marks was made president of the McNeil spin-off that won the huge contract in December 2006.

General Marks said his work on the contract did not affect his commentary on CNN. “I’ve got zero challenge separating myself from a business interest,” he said.

But CNN said it had no idea about his role in the contract until July 2007, when it reviewed his most recent disclosure form, submitted months earlier, and finally made inquiries about his new job.

“We saw the extent of his dealings and determined at that time we should end our relationship with him,” CNN said.

Full article at NY Times

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In My Own Words by Mauricio Rosas:

It is self-evident the GW Bush administration is corrupt to its core. Contracts are awarded to select corporations without or little oversight by Congress, brazenly ignoring the bidding process.   Without shame they bask in the glory of their collective gains from those alliances, some of which are teetering on the edge of being enemies of the United States.  

What started out as retaliation against a nation and its government (Afghanistan and the Taliban) who conscripted by Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda or acting on its own in the deliberate attack on 9/11 was a not the true objective of the Bush administration. It turns out those who advised and aligned with GW Bush to retaliate did so but with an ulterior motive, to attack Iraq.  Our soldiers were winning the war against Afghanistan and its government. American troops were within reach of capturing Osama Bin Laden, destroying the Al Qaeda network and the surrender of the Taliban. But that never happened. Instead those aligned to GW Bush diminished and practically stopped the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in order to orchestrate their grand scheme for a "New American Century."  Unbeknownst to the American people, the invasion of Iraq had been forethought.  The corporate aristocracy of the Bush administration invaded Iraq under false pretenses. They knew it would be a "Long War."  A war reaping huge profits for corporate military contractors and the oil industry.  They are a threat because their allegiance to greed, money and power far supersedes their allegiance to the Constitution of the United States.  

Abraham Lincoln foretold of such an enemy:

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to p