U.S. Army battling racists within its own ranks

By Daniel Trotta, Reuters

Tue Aug 21, 2012 1:00am EDT

White supremacists, neo-Nazis and skinhead groups encourage followers to enlist in the Army and Marine Corps to acquire the skills to overthrow what some call the ZOG – the Zionist Occupation Government. Get in, get trained and get out to brace for the coming race war.

If this scenario seems like fantasy or bluster, civil rights organizations take it as deadly serious, especially given recent events. Former U.S. Army soldier Wade Page opened fire with a 9mm handgun at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin on Aug. 5, murdering six people and critically wounding three before killing himself during a shootout with police.

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“We don’t really think this is a huge problem, at Bragg, and across the Army,” said Colonel Kevin Arata, a spokesman for Fort Bragg.

“In my 26 years in the Army, I’ve never seen it,” the former company commander said.

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That failed to stop former Marine T.J. Leyden, with two-inch SS bolts tattooed above his collar, from serving from 1988 to 1991 while openly supporting neo-Nazi causes. A member of the Hammerskin Nation, a skinhead group, he said he hung a swastika from his locker, taking it down only when his commander politely asked him to ahead of inspections by the commanding general.

“I went into the Marine Corps for one specific reason: I would learn how shoot,” Leyden told Reuters. “I also learned how to use C-4 (explosives), blow things up. I took all my military skills and said I could use these to train other people,” said Leyden, 46, who has since renounced the white power movement and is a consultant for the anti-Nazi Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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“We’re very strict on the tattoo policy here within this recruiting station,” said Sergeant Aaron Iskenderian, head of the Army recruiting office in Fayetteville, the Army town next to Fort Bragg.

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Iskenderian cited the example of a young man who came in recently with a tattoo of the Confederate flag.

“We’re in the South here. It’s considered Southern heritage. It’s on the General Lee,” Iskenderian said, referring to the car from the television show “The Dukes of Hazzard.”

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Academics who study white supremacists say proponents of the “infiltration strategy” of joining the U.S. military have adapted, telling skinheads to deceive military recruiters by letting their hair grow, avoiding or covering tattoos, and suppressing their racist views.

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“They are some of the most disciplined soldiers we have. They really want to learn to shoot those weapons,” Smith (former military investigator, now a professor of criminal justice at Austin Peay State University) said. “The problem wasn’t just that we were opening the floodgates to let them in. We let them out after prosecution or when their time was up and we didn’t let the police know.”

4 soldiers linked to terror plot; alleged leader tied to Washington

Mike Carter and Miyoko Wolf, Seattle Times

Monday, August 27, 2012 at 6:17 PM

Aguigui was home-schooled in Cashmere, Chelan County, joining the Army after graduation. He married fellow soldier Dierdre Wetzker at Fort Stewart, according to news reports and interviews with family.

Wetzker, 24, died last year at Fort Stewart while pregnant with the couple’s son. According to Orlin Wetzker, her uncle in Ogden, Utah, the family was told by law-enforcement officials that she may have been poisoned. A call to Aguigui’s parents’ home in Cashmere was not returned.

The prosecutors in the Georgia homicide case have called Wetzker’s death “highly suspicious,” but no charges have been filed.

According to court testimony, the group used some of the nearly $500,000 in insurance and death benefits to buy more than $87,000 worth of military-grade firearms and land in Washington state.

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In a videotaped interview with military investigators, Pauley said, Aguigui called himself “the nicest coldblooded murderer you will ever meet.” He used the Army to recruit militia members, who wore distinctive tattoos that resemble an anarchy symbol, she said. Prosecutors say they have no idea how many members belong to the group.

“All members of the group were on active duty or were former members of the military,” Pauley said. “He targeted soldiers who were in trouble or disillusioned.”

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In Washington state, she added, the group plotted to bomb a dam and poison the state’s apple crop. Ultimately, prosecutors said, the militia’s goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.

Fort Stewart spokesman Kevin Larson said the Army has dropped its own charges against the four soldiers in the slayings of Roark and York. The Military authorities filed their charges in March, but never acted on them. Fort Stewart officials Monday refused to identify the units the accused soldiers served in and their jobs within those units.

But, but, but…

Anarchy!

Anarchist Leader In Assassination Plot Was Apparently A Page At The 2008 GOP Convention

Geoffrey Ingersoll, Business Insider

Aug. 28, 2012, 8:57 AM

Shortly after the media frenzy over these "anarchist" militant revolutionaries and their alleged aspirations to overthrow the government (with $87,000 of weapons and multiple members with loose lips), Gawker revealed that their leader, Isaac Aguigui was apparently a page at the Republican National Convention in 2008.

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The caption of the photograph says “Republican National Convention page Isaac Aguigui watches from the edge of the floor at the start of the first session of the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota September 1, 2008.”

Move along, nothing to see.

U.S. Arms Sales Make Up Most of Global Market

By THOM SHANKER, The New York Times

Published: August 26, 2012

Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011.

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(A)greements with Saudi Arabia included the purchase of 84 advanced F-15 fighters, a variety of ammunition, missiles and logistics support, and upgrades of 70 of the F-15 fighters in the current fleet.

Sales to Saudi Arabia last year also included dozens of Apache and Black Hawk helicopters, all contributing to a total Saudi weapons deal from the United States of $33.4 billion, according to the study.

The United Arab Emirates purchased a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, an advanced antimissile shield that includes radars and is valued at $3.49 billion, as well as 16 Chinook helicopters for $939 million.

Oman bought 18 F-16 fighters for $1.4 billion.

(h/t Naked Capitalism)

Just in case you’ve never had that talk with your parents or spiritual adviser.

In the next 4 and a half hours all the actual events of the 2012 Republican National Convention will take place including the acceptance of credentials, adoption of rules, adoption of resolutions and the platform, and the roll call for the nomination of Willard “Mitt” Romney to be the Republican Party candidate for President of the United States (and the roll call for the nomination of Paul Ryan to be the Republican Party candidate for Vice-President of the United States).

Everything else is just propaganda.

And the only bit that has least little news worthiness to it is whether the Ron Paul supporters will get any air time.

Ron Paul’s Faithful Continue To Make Noise; Floor Fight Tuesday?

by Liz Halloran, NPR

August 27, 2012 05:57 pm

Surrounded by microphones, cameras, scribbling reporters, they recounted their outrage at the RNC’s decision to deny seats to duly elected Ron Paul delegates from Maine and other states.

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Over at Romney’s native state of Michigan delegation area, a clutch of Ron Paul supporters who came to the convention as unbound delegates spoke of their misgivings about Romney.

“We personally think there’s not too much difference between Romney and Obama,” said Jacob Horward, 25, of Midland.

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The Paulites say that there are more of them embedded in state delegations than Republican officials are willing to acknowledge, and they are trying to organize a floor fight Tuesday to take on new proposed party rules that would hobble outsider candidates seeking to seat delegates at future conventions.

Many of the pro-Paul delegates were chosen at state party conventions, and not through the allocation process based on the results of presidential caucuses and primaries. The rules change would require that delegates be picked based on caucus and primary contest outcomes; not by state conventions.

Here’s how ABC News described the proposed rule change, and an Indiana Republican committeeman’s strong reaction:

“The new rule, however, gives presidential candidates veto power over their own delegates, representing a big boost in power for the candidates and a reduction for states. If Mitt Romney, for instance, didn’t like a delegate slated to cast a vote in his favor at the convention, Romney could throw him out and choose an alternate.

” ‘This is the biggest power grab in the history of the Republican Party because it shifts the power to select delegates from the state party to the candidate,’ Republican National Committeeman Jim Bopp of Indiana said in an e-mail message to fellow committee members obtained by ABC News. ‘And it would make the Republican Party a top-down, not bottom-up party.’ “

Politico reported this schedule last night and Reince Priebus has vowed there will be no more changes.

2:00 p.m.

• Color Guard Knights of Columbus
• Pledge of Allegiance by former Gov. Tim Babcock (Mont.)/ Tom Hogan (Fla.)
• National anthem sung by Philip Alongi
• Invocation by Rabbi Meir Soloveichik
• Opening procedural steps, appointment of convention committees

Welcoming remarks, and House and Senate candidates and RNC auxiliaries including:

• RNC Chairman Reince Priebus
• RNC Co-Chairman Sharon Day
• Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn
• Convention Chief Executive Officer William Harris
• Chairman of Tampa Bay Host Committee Al Austin
• Republican congressional candidates
• State Delegate Barbara Comstock (Va.)
• Rep. Tim Griffin (Ark.)
• Republican Senate candidates
• Republican National Committee auxiliaries

And then all the official business that happens at the Convention

• Consideration of convention committee reports
• Committee on Credentials Chairman Mike Duncan
• Committee on Permanent Organization Chairwoman Zoraida Fonalledas
• Convention Permanent Chairman Speaker John Boehner, presiding
• Official convention photograph
• Committee on Rules Chairman John Sununu
• Committee on Resolutions Chairman Gov. Bob McDonnell, R-Va.
• Committee on Resolutions Co-Chairman Sen. John Hoeven
• Committee on Resolutions Co-Chairman Rep. Marsha Blackburn
• Roll call for nomination of president of the United States
• Roll call for nomination of vice president of the United States

6:40 p.m.: Recess

And that’s it.  No more reason to watch except for the speeches.

Our coverage will continue with TheMomCat around 7 pm for the evening addresses.

The Week has a pretty useful guide.

The GOP convention: A viewer’s guide

The Week

posted on August 28, 2012, at 10:25 AM

Hot speakers.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) says in the 7 p.m. EDT hour on Wednesday, following a video of Ron Paul. Several other former Romney rivals will also speak: Rick Santorum (7 p.m. Tuesday), Tim Pawlenty (9 p.m. Wednesday), and Newt Gingrich (7 p.m. Thursday). There are also up-and-comers of note: Utah congressional candidate Mia Love (7 p.m. Tuesday), Texas Senate candidate Ted Cruz (9 p.m. Tuesday), and Gov. Martinez (10 p.m. Wednesday). Here’s the full schedule.

Will it all be on TV?  Depends on what kind of TV you watch.

ABC, NBC, and CBS will only broadcast the 10 p.m. to 11 p.m. speeches on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. PBS will begin its coverage at 8 p.m. each night. The big three cable news channels – CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC – will devote a lot more airtime to the convention, running intermittent coverage and commentary from the Tuesday opening until Thursday’s final gavel. Current TV will cover most of the convention, hosted by former Vice President Al Gore.

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The RNC is offering its own live stream on YouTube, plus a bunch of interactive features through its “Convention Without Walls” Facebook app, but you can also watch the convention unfold live online at Politico, ABC News, PBS NewsHour, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal – in fact, many of these sites have multiple simultaneous live streams, available for viewing on your computer, smartphone, or tablet (you can watch ABC’s three feeds at the same time via an iPad app). You can even watch a live feed of the anti-RNC protests, courtesy of Occupy Tampa, or real-time fact-checking from the Sunlight Foundation.

I’ll probably start out with MSNBC and switch to Current if I think it will help, but I may just have to retire to my fainting couch if there are any breaches in proper decorum and something exciting happens.

Feel free to chime in with your observations and outrages.

“I am not a number.  I am a HUMAN BEING!”

Below the fold lies painful, hurtful snark.  For those who may object on issues of taste and decorum, all I can say is “I warned you”.

Obama on Romney’s ‘extreme’ views

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press

20 hrs ago

Obama also offered a glimpse of how he would govern in a second term of divided government, insisting rosily that the forces of the election would help break Washington’s stalemate. He said he would be willing to make a range of compromises with Republicans, confident there are some who would rather make deals than remain part of “one of the least productive Congresses in American history.”

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Obama expressed confidence that even voters whose lives have not improved during his term will stick with him as they assess the two candidates.

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Obama’s view of a different second-term dynamic in Washington, even if both he and House Republicans retain power, seems a stretch given the stalemated politics of a divided government. He said two changes – the facts that “the American people will have voted,” and that Republicans will no longer need to be focused on beating him – could lead to better conditions for deal-making.

If Republicans are willing, Obama said, “I’m prepared to make a whole range of compromises” that could even rankle his own party. But he did not get specific.

The Age of Niallism: Ferguson and the Post-Fact World

By Matthew O’Brien, The Atlantic

Aug 24 2012, 10:32 AM ET

I don’t want to go too far down this Ferguson rabbit hole — we get it, he lied — but I do want to answer his response to my fact-check. Ferguson’s reading of my criticism was as lacking as his fidelity to facts. I tried to make clear that I was cataloging two categories of errors in his piece. There were untruths misleadingly framed as truths and truths misleadingly framed so as to be untruths. Or, as I put it, “a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts.”

Let’s take a quick detour into the meta. Ferguson objects that I don’t identify “a single error” and that I’m just offering my own opinions. The former is not true — his description of Obamacare and its budgetary impact are demonstrably false — but the latter is a legitimate point of debate. Ferguson prefers a very narrow definition of fact-checking; I do not think that is sufficient. Facts twisted out of context can be just as deceptive as outright falsehoods — sometimes even more so, because you can cloak them in claims of truthfulness.

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Ferguson gets some facts wrong. Ferguson gets some facts right, but frames them incompletely. Why the outrage? Because he’s treating facts as low-grade and cheap materials that are meant to be bent, spliced and morphed for the purpose of building a sensational polemic. Even more outrageous is that his bosses didn’t mind enough to force him to make an honest argument, or even profess embarrassment when its dishonesty came to light.

Ezra Klein Deems Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, and Elizabeth Warren (Plus Other Serious People) Not Credible

Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Ezra Klein demonstrated how far he’s has to descend into the Humpty Dumpty world of words meaning just what he chooses them to mean in order to defend failed Administration policies.

Washington DC’s Baghdad Bob waded into the fray over a an unconvincing apology in the New York Times for Obama’s bank-friendly response to the mortgage crisis. … While it’s now acceptable for the messaging apparatus to describe the policies as inadequate, the party line is lame: there was no support for bold measures and those big bad servicers were an insurmountable obstacle.

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Huh? Sorry, plenty of people vastly more credible than Klein had concrete recommendations at the time that would have been considerably better than Obama-Geithner program of coddling the banks.

For instance, Princeton economist Alan Blinder recommended a Home Owners Loan Corporation style mass refinance. She Who Must Not Be Named came out for it in her campaign. Joe Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, Mark Zandi, Jeff Merkley, Brad Miller, Ellen Seidman and others backed it. Krugman and Neil Barofsky have also argued the Administration could at a minimum have used $50 billion in unused TARP funds for mortgage mods. Adam Levitin (arguably the top US expert on mortgage securitizations) recently proposed(.pdf) a “bad bank” as a way to implement pooling and standardized restructuring of underwater mortgages. Top mortgage analyst Laurie Goodman has also long advocated principal modification, and she has established that they have much lower redefaults than other types of mortgage modifications.

Or how about using bankruptcy to write down mortgages to the current value of the house, something now done in bankruptcy for every type of collateralized loan except primary residences? Advocates of that approach included the Congressional Oversight Panel under Elizabeth Warren’s chairmanship, and more recently, the IMF. A bill passed in the House but was nixed in the Senate.

How about principal writedowns with shared appreciation mortgages, advocated by Andrew Caplan and Luigi Zingales? Even Greg Mankiw pointed to an approach suggested by John Geanakoplos and Susan Koniak a way to work around those pesky servicers. Dean Baker has pushed for an own to rent program.

This is far from a complete list. There were plenty of credible people who had concrete, specific proposals which would have done better than what the Administration implemented. When the benchmark is HAMP, which managed to make hundreds of thousands of borrowers worse off, or a mortgage settlement that institutionalizes servicer fraud and has already harmed mortgage investors helping pay for the settlement, it’s a low bar to beat.

So if you were honest about this issue, no matter where you draw the line, there were “credible” people who had proposals that were obviously better. And the evidence in part comes in the New York Times article that Klein mentions. It concedes that bankruptcy cramdowns might indeed have been a better idea than the Administration’s limp-wristed response. And don’t tell me Obama couldn’t have gotten this through. He was willing to whip personally to get Bernanke’s contested reappointment approved; he didn’t apply anywhere near that level of effort to this initiative.

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(T)he mortgage/housing issue is charged because, as Barofsky stressed, the Administration deliberately chose to use homeowners to foam the runway for banks.

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That of course means that it is a priority for Obama to obscure the fact that he chose the banks over ordinary citizens on housing, the single biggest source of wealth for most families.

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So to defend this Administration’s sorry record, loyalists like Klein have gone from practicing sophistry to agnotology. In a perverse way, that’s encouraging, because it’s a sign that it’s becoming more difficult for the pundit class to deny the facts on the ground.

GOP Intellectual Decline, Monetary Edition

Paul Krugman, The New York Times

August 24, 2012, 3:42 pm

(T)he GOP platform will reportedly include a call for steps toward a return to the gold standard.

The really strange thing about all this is that this turn toward hard-money mysticism is taking place even as events have demonstrated that the advantages of not being on a gold standard, of having a fiat currency that can be printed freely in emergencies, are even greater than standard analysis had supposed.

Mark Thoma links to an old piece of mine that I think does a pretty good job of laying out that standard case; but we now know that there’s a major additional concern, the ability of the central bank to act as lender of last resort to the government as well as private banks. Consider, as Paul De Grauwe has in one of the most important analyses (pdf) to come out of the crisis, the contrast between Spain and the UK.

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(B)orrowing costs have soared in Spain, while falling in Britain.

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So the GOP has decided that we must reject the evils of fiat money and go for the gold standard at precisely the moment when events have demonstrated that fiat money is a really useful thing and the loss of flexibility that comes from ending fiat currencies can be utterly disastrous. What’s going on?

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In this sense fiat money is like, oh, Social Security. The problem it creates for conservatives is not that it doesn’t work, but that it does – which is a challenge to their philosophy. And so it must die.

What these pieces all have in common is the demonstrated failure of trickle down supply side Chicago School Voodoo Economics.

(h/t Naked Capitalism)

Spain Deficit Goals at Risk as Cuts Consensus Fades: Euro Credit

By Angeline Benoit, Bloomberg News

Aug 22, 2012 3:23 AM ET

The Socialist president of the northern Basque Country Patxi Lopez today told Cadena Ser radio he is moving local elections initially scheduled for March 2013 forward to Oct. 21 in order for Basques to choose how to deal with the crisis. “There is a lot of uncertainty about the future and our economic model is what counts,” he said.

The Andalusia region said Aug. 1 it will take the state to court on 2012 debt ceilings. It should be allowed to borrow more as its burden is 10.6 percent of its GDP compared with a 13.5 percent regional average, it said.

The 17 semi-autonomous governments won’t keep their economic promises this year, according to a report released this week by the Fedea research institute in Madrid. It forecast overspending for the regions may reach 4 percent of GDP, compared with 3.3 percent last year and a target of 1.5 percent.

The government has ruled out cutting pensions next year and extended a temporary benefit for long-term jobless people to stem growing discontent, Afi’s Herce said. “Rajoy’s strategy is to wait and say little to avoid political damage in the short term.”

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Support for Rajoy’s PP has slipped 8 percentage points since it won 40.6 percent of votes in a landslide in November. Since then, Rajoy has announced more than 100 billion euros of budget cuts, raising income and value-added tax, scrapping a tax break for home owners and cutting civil servants’ wages, unemployment benefits and health care and education spending against his word.

Italy Looks ‘Perilously Close’ To Getting Shut Out Of The Bond Markets

Mamta Badkar, Business Insider

Aug. 21, 2012, 11:30 PM

Italian GDP contracted for the last 12 months and the country is now looking at a longer and deeper recession than was previously expected.

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Societe Generale’s James Nixon points out three key points about Italian debt and its economic growth:

1. Italy has extremely high debt-to-GDP and to bring this in control, the government is pushing austerity. This austerity along with a credit crunch are hurting economic growth.  Nixon projects Italian GDP to decline 2.3 percent in 2012, and 1.4 percent in 2013, and expects it to be flat in 2014. The IMF puts Italy’s long-term growth rate at 0.5 percent per annum.
2. Rising unemployment is impacting consumer confidence and has caused a drop in private consumption.
3. Finally, to achieve fiscal consolidation Italy is raising taxes on consumption and property, both sectors that are being hit hard by unemployment and tight conditions in the banking sector. “Italy also faces a significant increase in its service costs which, if not addressed, threatens to wipe out all of the consolidation planned for next year.”

Here’s another great song in the Techno genre that’s too fast to dance to.  Kind of odd that Depeche Mode is still around and Ultravox isn’t.  It’s like Maddona and Cindy Lauper, I always liked Cindy better.

Sleepwalk

Sleepwalk kind of peters out into Side B Waiting at 3:10, but this is the studio version with the soprano organ part clearly audible.

Why We Don’t Spend As Much Time Denouncing Republicans As We Do Democrats

Bruce A. Dixon, Black Agenda Report

Wed, 08/22/2012

We know who and what the Republican party is.

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In today’s political ecology, the job of Republicans is to provide political camouflage to right wing Democrats like the last two Democratic presidents Clinton and Obama, by moving still further rightward, even past the boundaries of lunacy.

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The fact is that 120% evil Republicans offer the only justification for our support of 100% evil Democrats. And with the dissolution of what used to be the black consensus for equality, civil liberties, full funding for public education, and opposing war spending and corporate privilege, Obama-era Democrats continue to flee rightward toward war, privatization and austerity.

This deformed puzzle is not the political logic of free and responsible people. It’s the cramped and twisted reasoning of someone trapped in a box urgently trying to convince himself that it’s not really a box, that pragmatic acceptance of the box as the whole of the great and free universe is really all that can be hoped, struggled and strived for. It’s not. Only a beaten, cowed and enslaved people can imagine their forbears sacrificed and struggled for them to choose among greater and lesser, but both still monstrous evils.

We at Black Agenda Report spend more time denouncing Democrats because they act like and enable Republicans. We don’t spend as much time denouncing the party of white supremacy because Republicans rarely bother to pretend to be anything else.

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That’s what choosing “lesser evils” has earned us. It’s time to chuck the fake choice between evil Republicans and slightly less evil Democrats. It’s time not just to think, but to climb outside the two-party, lesser-evil box, to breathe the free air and get ready for something new.