Call it an irony, if you will, but as the Obama administration struggles to slow down or halt its scheduled withdrawal from Afghanistan, newly elected Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is performing a withdrawal operation of his own. He seems to be in the process of trying to sideline the country’s major patron of the last 13 years — and as happened in Iraq after the American invasion and occupation there, Chinese resource companies are again picking up the pieces.
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In the new foreign policy that Ghani recently outlined, the United States finds itself consigned to the third of the five circles of importance. The first circle contains neighboring countries, including China with its common border with Afghanistan, and the second is restricted to the countries of the Islamic world.
In the new politics of Afghanistan under Ghani, as the chances for peace talks between his government and the unbeaten Taliban brighten, the Obama administration finds itself gradually but unmistakably being reduced to the status of bystander. Meanwhile, credit for those potential peace talks goes to the Chinese leadership, which has received a Taliban delegation in Beijing twice in recent months, and to Ghani, who has dulled the hostility of the rabidly anti-Indian Taliban by reversing the pro-India, anti-Pakistan policies of his predecessor, Hamid Karzai.
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As an official of the World Bank for 11 years, Ghani had dealt with the Chinese government frequently. This time, he left Beijing with a pledge of 2 billion yuan ($327 million) in economic aid for Afghanistan through 2017.
The upbeat statements of the two presidents need to be seen against the backdrop of the twenty-first-century Great Game in the region in which, after 13 years of American war, Chinese corporations are the ones setting records in signing up large investment deals. In 2007, the Metallurgical Corporation of China and Jiangxi Copper Corporation, a consortium, won a $4.4 billion contract to mine copper at Aynak, 24 miles southeast of Kabul. Four years later, China National Petroleum Corporation in a joint venture with a local company, Watan Oil & Gas, secured the right to develop three oil blocks in northwestern Afghanistan with a plan to invest $400 million.
In stark contrast, 70 U.S. companies had invested a mere $75 million by 2012, according to the Afghanistan Investment Support Agency. What Washington policymakers find galling is that China has not contributed a single yuan to pacify insurgency-ridden Afghanistan or participated in the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force in that country, and yet its corporations continue to benefit from the security provided by the presence of American soldiers.
In a war full of failures, the US counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan stands out: opiate production has climbed steadily over recent years to reach record-high levels last year.
Yet there is a clear winner in the anti-drug effort – not the Afghan people, but the infamous mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater.
Statistics released on Tuesday reveal that the rebranded private security firm, known since 2011 as Academi, reaped over half a billion dollars from the futile Defense Department push to eradicate Afghan narcotics, some 32% of the $1.8bn in contracting money the Pentagon has devoted to the job since 2002.
The company is by far the biggest beneficiary of counternarcotics largesse in Afghanistan. Its closest competition, the defense giant Northrop Grumman, claimed $250m.
According to the US inspector general for Afghanistan “reconstruction”, the $569m Academi got from US taxpayers paid for “training, equipment, and logistical support” to Afghan forces conducting counternarcotics, such as “the Afghan National Interdiction Unit, the Ministry of Interior, and the Afghan Border Police”.
Far from eradicating the deep-rooted opiate trade, US counternarcotics efforts have proven useless, according to a series of recent official inquiries. Other aspects of the billions that the US has poured into Afghanistan over the last 13 years of war have even contributed to the opium boom.
A senior HSBC executive has privately admitted that the bank is “cast-iron certain” to have another major regulatory breach in the future, and is struggling on multiple fronts to clean up its worldwide operations.
Global head of sanctions Lee Hale – whose recorded comments appear to contrast with public statements from HSBC’s chief executive that the bank has fundamentally transformed itself after recent scandals – said gaps remained in the bank’s compliance with sanctions policies and the screening of certain financial transactions.
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Hale was meeting with independent lawyers monitoring HSBC as part of a controversial 2012 deal with the US Department of Justice, in which the bank avoided prosecution over sanctions-busting and money-laundering in its Mexican branch in exchange for paying a $1.9bn fine and receiving additional regulatory scrutiny for a period of five years. The deferred prosecution agreement was signed by the then US attorney for the eastern district of New York, Loretta Lynch, who is now Barack Obama’s nominee for US attorney general.
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Explaining the past difficulty of overhauling sanctions standards at the bank, Hale said HSBC staff were not used to providing the required level of detail for compliance to sign off dispensations. He said: “I think it’s really the first time where we’ve looked to do this with the right level of rigour … the quality of the initial submissions was not great.”
The monitor is required each year to file a lengthy report to the Department of Justice, which in turn files a much shorter summary update to a court in New York. As the agreement was signed in December 2012, the head of the DoJ’s criminal division said HSBC had the “sword of Damocles” over its head should it not follow through on its commitments.
HSBC got a sweetheart deal from the Obama administration. It laundered vast amounts of money for Mexico’s murderous Sinaloa cartel, helped bust sanctions for terrorists and mass murderers, and did not cooperate with the investigation. The U.S. Attorney in charge of the case, Loretta Lynch, refused to prosecute any of the HSBC bankers or even sue them individually. Instead, there was a pathetic non-prosecution agreement limited to HSBC. Lynch is accused of not contacting either of the primary whistleblowers in the case. The failure to contact one of the whistleblowers has already blown up in Lynch’s face as it became public a few months ago that the governments of the U.S. and Europe were provided many years ago with data on HSBC’s Swiss affiliate that show it was helping terrorists, genocidal leaders, the most violent drug gangs, and tens of thousands of wealthy people evade taxes. Lynch failed to bring that case or use any of the invaluable data provided by the whistleblower who copied the files from the Swiss bank.
Now comes word that, like Standard Chartered, HSBC is failing to abide even by the pathetic sweetheart deal Lynch gifted HSBC’s criminal managers with. In the case of Standard Chartered, NY authorities came down on Standard Chartered with at least one foot on the neck. Lynch is made of considerably less stern stuff. She failed even to do the most obvious move of extending the agreement with HSBC.
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HSBC’s violations were a heaven sent opportunity for Lynch to undo the massive embarrassment of the shameful deal she gave HSBC – one of the world’s largest and most destructive criminal enterprises. She could use the “watchdog” report damning HSBC to state the reality – HSBC’s managers have acted in bad faith and violated the deal that would have got them off with no real prosecution. Lynch could now prosecute HSBC and its senior managers for all the frauds – including the vast frauds she missed last time because of her failure to talk with the whistleblowers. And the chances of that happening closely approach zero because Obama chose Lynch to continue Holder’s shameful policies of refusing to prosecute bankers rather than change those policies.
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Holder’s refusal to prosecute the bankers has led to “repeat offenses on Wall Street.” Ponder that which DealBook religiously refuses to ponder – if fraudulent bankers find they grow wealthy from the “sure thing” of fraud with no risk of prosecution or even being sued, why wouldn’t they respond with “repeat offenses” that would create a “pattern of corporate recidivism?” DealBook is very sympathetic to Holder and Lynch. They are portrayed as “grappling” with the thorny problem that because senior bankers realize that under Holder and Lynch they can grow wealthy and powerful by leading “repeat offenses” they will do so even though they promise “dad” (Holder) or “mom” (Lynch) that they’ll never do it again. (DealBook hates to use the “f” word to describe elite bankers’ frauds.)
As DealBook (hilariously) portrays the matter, Holder and Lynch “grapple” with this intractable and apparently inconceivable (in the Princess Bride sense of the word made famous by Vizzini) problem that the elite bankers keep on committing massive felonies helping terrorists and the world’s most violent drug gangs even after they look Holder and Lynch (dad and mom) straight in the eyes and solemnly promise to never hit their little brother and steal his toy truck again. Five minutes later, dad and mom hear a smack followed by the little brother breaking into tears and find big brother with little brother’s toy truck. Big brother, of course, solemnly says he never hit his little brother and the truck in his hand is not his little brother’s truck. Big brother, being sophisticated, even pleads in the alternative that if he is holding little brother’s truck it is because little brother gave him the truck. Except, that we’re not talking about toy trucks, but senior bank officers knowingly funding mass murder and terrorism.
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The truth is that Holder and Lynch are taking no meaningful efforts against what even DealBook now admits is “the pattern of corporate recidivism” by our most elite bankers. The only thing they “grapple” with is the bad publicity arising from the stench of that “pattern” of the most despicable and harmful elite financial frauds in history.
There can be no more incriminating indictment of the Nation’s leading federal prosecutors than the fact that even the sycophantic DealBook admits that on Holder and Lynch’s watch a “pattern” of recurrent frauds by our most elite CEOs has emerged – and those frauds commonly involve profiting from the banks aiding the funding of mass murderers. The administration has managed to turn into reality all those bad novels they sell in airport book stores that describe networks of criminal elite bankers financing terrorists, drug gangs, and venal and brutal kleptocrats with impunity from the laws.
What makes this piece by Joe Firestone so interesting is that it is full of reasons why your Republican Representatives should vote against TPP, especially if they’re crazy Tea-Baggers (don’t tell them I called them that of course, use ‘populist conservatives’ instead).
Why are we negotiating the TPP at all? Why is it the business of the Representatives of the people of the United States in Congress to support agreements that will mitigate the political risks borne by American businesses who chose to invest in other nations, as well as the political risks borne by foreign corporations, who choose to invest in the United States? Why is it their business to provide protection against such risks to foreign corporations beyond the protections we provide to our own corporations?
The “expectations” of business investors are their own business, not the public’s business; and there’s no reason why either the government of the United States or the governments of other nations should have to accommodate themselves to these expectations. If it is the will of the people of a nation as expressed through their representatives to pass legislation that destroys the “expectations” of business investors, then that’s just too bad for the investors.
Private businesses have no right to expect that their governments will protect them against risks that they alone choose to take, and that they alone will profit from. Risk is part of the game of investing. It’s business.
In free market ideology businesses are supposed to shoulder their risks. They’re not supposed to manipulate their political systems to get legislation providing them with financial protection at the expense of the public. That’s not capitalism, it’s lemon socialism; and it is also one of the key components of fascism.
How have we come to this pass that we view it as legitimate for American businesses to demand that the American public ought to ensure them against the business risks they take abroad? When did it become acceptable to insulate large multinational corporations against the hazards of their folly?
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The TPP provides for three-judge “courts” to conduct the dispute settlement proceeding. One of the judges is actually selected by the corporate plaintiffs. All of the judges are private attorneys who in other disputes may have represented corporate plaintiffs, and it is common for attorneys to be shifting roles from “corporate advocates” in one case to “judges” in another. Of course, the advocates get paid far more than the judges.
Can anyone imagine a more criminogenic environment than this, where all the incentives are aligned in such a way as to extract funds from state treasuries for the benefit of corporations and corporate attorneys alike? Where are the representatives of the various nation-states in these tribunals?
To add to the travesty, there are no limits on the tribunals in the size of the awards they can mandate. So, let’s get this straight, according to the TPP, tribunals staffed by private attorneys who frequently advocate for the very corporations whose complaints they are deciding upon have unconstrained authority to award damages of unlimited size to these same corporations and then the governments of the nations would be obligated to pay these awards. So, assuming present policies in effect for government financing in most nations including the United States, the governments would increase taxes or increase borrowing to pay these awards.
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So, tell me do we really want an international “trade agreement” that will expose the United States to unplanned levies from multinational corporations that would create budgetary political crises in the United States? Would any sane citizen want to take this risk, to mitigate the risks American investors take when they choose to invest overseas? Where does this craziness come from?
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“We’ve done this before” is no defense of a proposed agreement among 12 nations that would expose the citizens of each of them to the risks that properly belong to foreign corporations, or American corporations operating in foreign nations for their own profit. Such corporations are guests in the nations they do business in. They should not be given advantages that aren’t enjoyed by domestic businesses.
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With the TPP Congress is being asked to buy the proverbial pig in the poke. Well, they’ve previously bought three highly touted free trade agreements, and none of them has delivered net benefits to the American people in terms of net jobs created, or a higher standard of living for most of the population, or greater economic equality. So, I think the Administration, really needs to answer the question “What’s in it for us?” in concrete terms without delivering the glittering and deceptive generalities this President is so skillful at offering.
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Free trade is an ideological commitment for many. But there’s no doubt that general implementation of free trade rules would prevent the government from legislating industrial policy, and more specifically would limit the policy space of the government in nurturing industries that it viewed as vital to the American future or to American national security. In view of this, I would never approve any agreement prohibiting the government favoring the products of American companies, if the government wanted to follow such a policy.
Being able to “Buy American” is an essential aspect of the sovereignty of the United States. And in my view Congress and the President have no right to give away this aspect of our sovereignty.
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In my view, this trade-off isn’t in accord with public purpose, and it gives away key aspects of the sovereignty of the United States. In addition, it undermines American democracy and takes another step down the true road to serfdom.
Emphasis mine.
Nothing wrong with a little Mobying and Bi-partisanship say I.
By Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Fishman, The Intercept
25 Mar 2015
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday vehemently denied a Wall Street Journal report, leaked by the Obama White House, that Israel spied on U.S. negotiations with Iran and then fed the intelligence to Congressional Republicans. His office’s denial was categorical and absolute, extending beyond this specific story to U.S.-targeted spying generally, claiming: “The state of Israel does not conduct espionage against the United States or Israel’s other allies.”
Israel’s claim is not only incredible on its face. It is also squarely contradicted by top-secret NSA documents, which state that Israel targets the U.S. government for invasive electronic surveillance, and does so more aggressively and threateningly than almost any other country in the world. Indeed, so concerted and aggressive are Israeli efforts against the U.S. that some key U.S. government documents – including the top secret 2013 intelligence budget – list Israel among the U.S.’s most threatening cyber-adversaries and as a “hostile” foreign intelligence service.
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Previously reported stories on Israeli spying, by themselves, leave no doubt how false Netanyahu’s statement is. A Der Spiegelarticle from last fall revealed that “Israeli intelligence eavesdropped on US Secretary of State John Kerry during Middle East peace negotiations.” A Le Mondearticle described how NSA documents strongly suggest that a massive computer hack of the French presidential palace in 2012 was likely carried about by the Israelis. A 2014 article from Newsweek’s Jeff Stein revealed that when it comes to surveillance, “the Jewish state’s primary target” is “America’s industrial and technical secrets” and that “Israel’s espionage activities in America are unrivaled and unseemly.”
All of these stories, along with these new documents, leave no doubt that, at least as the NSA and other parts of the U.S. National Security State see it, Netanyahu’s denials are entirely false: The Israelis engage in active and aggressive espionage against the U.S., even as the U.S. feeds the Israelis billions of dollars every year in U.S. taxpayer funds and protects every Israeli action at the U.N. Because of the U.S. perception of Israel as a “threat” and even a “hostile” foreign intelligence service – facts they discuss only privately, never publicly – the U.S. targets Israel for all sorts of espionage as well.
Washington perpetually laments the loss of bipartisanship in this polarized political environment. But ordinary Americans might want to fear one example of bipartisanship’s return, and what it could mean for their pocketbooks.
John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi have been locked in negotiations to clear two of the biggest hurdles facing Congress this year: the so-called “doc fix” for Medicare reimbursement rates, and an extension of the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). We don’t have all the details, because the negotiations have taken place far from the public eye, with the release of the House and Senate budgets this week affording them cover.
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The “doc fix” refers to the rate the government pays doctors who see Medicare patients. A 1997 law created something called the “sustainable growth rate” or SGR that governs the level of payments. Since Medicare spending consistently outstrips economic growth, this translates into large reimbursement cuts under the SGR formula. If nothing is done by April 1, the reimbursement rate will fall by 21 percent. More important, doctors claim they would react to pay cuts by prioritizing other patients, making it harder for Medicare beneficiaries to get treatment.
This 21 percent cut should always be accompanied by the phrase “in theory,” because every potentially large rate cut since 2002 has been patched; hence the phrase “doc fix.” On 17 different occasions, Congress has made sure Medicare doctors get their expected paycheck, sometimes even adding a small raise, and often finding money somewhere else in the budget to offset it.
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Congress appears to want to stop having conversations with angry doctors every year, and have cast about for a permanent “doc fix” that would repeal and replace the old Medicare payment system. Doing this would cost $177 billion over the next decade, but the Boehner-Pelosi negotiations are looking at covering less than half this, around $70 billion in back-ended cuts, and letting the rest add to the budget deficits. To sweeten the pot for liberals, the emerging package would include a two-year, $30 billion extension of CHIP for 8 million children, at the boosted benefit levels under the Affordable Care Act. The tentative plan is for the House to vote next week, and throw it into the Senate’s lap just before the April 1 doc fix deadline.
It’s the other half of the cuts that get problematic. There would reportedly be more means-testing for Medicare beneficiaries, increasing premiums for seniors showing income over $133,000 and couples over $266,000. These seniors would have to pay 65 percent of their total costs under the new plan. This would go up at higher incomes. Means-testing historically dips lower and lower as budgeters try to get more out of beneficiaries, so this continues that ratcheting process for Medicare.
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But this would raise out-of-pocket expenses on all 9 million seniors with a Medigap plan, including the 86 percent of these beneficiaries who have incomes under $40,000, and almost half with incomes below $20,000. So this cut hits those who can’t really afford it. (This idea, along with the means-testing, was in President Obama’s budget, incidentally.)
The proper term for this is cost-shifting, pushing funding for a public program onto those who get the benefits. Medigap was created to deal with cost-shifting in Medicare, and now Congress may look to shift costs within it as well. And like means-testing, cost-shifting is prime terrain for double-dipping over time.
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All of this is being done to protect doctor salaries, which are among the highest in the industrialized world. Maybe Medicare doctors shouldn’t endure a 20 percent pay cut, but the idea that they wouldn’t see patients if the cut were 5 or 7 percent doesn’t pencil out. Plus, doctor payment rates are tied to Medicare premiums, as the Congressional Budget Office has explained: “Beneficiaries enrolled in Part B of Medicare pay premiums that offset about 25 percent of the costs of those benefits.” This means that any permanent change to a new doctor payment formula will likely result in a hike to Part B premiums.
Clearly everyone in Congress hates the messy process of annual “doc fix” patches, and the uproar from the hospital lobby that accompanies it. But nobody in Washington has raised the point that higher costs for ordinary patients might not be a great solution to the supposed problem of lower cash flow for doctors.
President Obama wants you to believe that the political map of the United States would be transformed – “completely changed,” he says – if citizens were required by law to vote. Obama told a town hall meeting in Cleveland that mandatory voting would “counteract” the influence of money in the U.S. electoral process. That’s a hell of a statement from the guy who wrecked the public campaign finance system by opting out of it in 2008, and outspent his Republican opponents in both of his runs for the presidency. Obama ought to have his picture on a million dollar bill.
But, why does the United States have the lowest voter turnout in the industrialized world, including Russia? It’s not because Americans are happier with the way they’re living than the rest of humanity. The U.S. ranks 17th on the global Happiness index and 23rd on the Satisfaction with Life scale. And, although racial exclusion in voting is very important when comparing Black voter turnout with whites, white Americans also vote in numbers far below almost all of the rest of the developed world.
Americans don’t vote because both major political parties are answerable to the same people: the moneyed classes, the power structures that determine the issues that will be on the political agenda long before the party primaries begin. This is called the hegemony of the bourgeoisie, the rule of the rich.
The corporations and bankers choose the menu; the only option citizens have is whether to select from the pre-packaged list of candidates, or stay home. Almost two out of three chose not to vote in 2014. They were not behaving irrationally. Since both major parties are controlled by the rich, only the most minor tinkering with the way the country is actually run, is tolerated. No matter how many people vote, very little changes, because the U.S. offers the narrowest spectrum of electoral choices in the industrial world – which is why it has the lowest voter turnout.
The Democrats want to keep their lock on the Black vote, but they have no interest in Black people voting their own political agenda, for the simple reason that Blacks are the most left-wing constituency in the country and must, therefore, be kept in check by the Democratic Party machinery. It is the Democrats who have for decades sought to break up concentrations of Black voters, spreading them out across a number of districts. This gives the Democratic Party a better chance to win seats in more districts, but it means that only those Black candidates that can appeal to a substantial segment of white voters can win election. The Black political conversation is left in a state of arrested development. Ultimately, even the Black political landscape turns into a desert, and rational Black people choose not to vote.
What’s so hard to understand about why Congressional approval, indeed our satisfaction with all elected officials from President to Dog Catcher, is in the toilet?
It’s because they toady to the wealthy and not to the voters.
Congress’s efforts to extend the law so far have proved fruitless, and congressional aides said that little work on the issue was being done on Capitol Hill.
There are deeply divergent views among the Republicans who control Congress. Some object to bulk data collection as violating individual freedoms, while others consider it a vital tool for preventing terrorist attacks against America.
Ned Price, a national security council spokesman, told Reuters the administration had decided to stop bulk collection of domestic telephone call metadata unless Congress explicitly reauthorises it.
Some legal experts have suggested that even if Congress does not extend the law, the administration might be able to convince the secretive foreign intelligence surveillance court to authorise collection under other legal authorities.
But Price made clear the administration now has no intention of doing so and that the future of metadata collection after 1 June was up to Congress.
Price said the administration was encouraging Congress to enact legislation in the coming weeks that would allow the collection to continue.
But Price said: “If Section 215 [of the law which covers the collection] sunsets, we will not continue the bulk telephony metadata program.”
“Allowing Section 215 to sunset would result in the loss, going forward, of a critical national security tool that is used in a variety of additional contexts that do not involve the collection of bulk data,” he said.
Last year the administration proposed that if collection does continue, the data should be stored by telephone companies rather than NSA itself, but that approach was rejected by the phone companies.
US officials have said metadata collection had helped important counter-terrorism investigations.
However, a review panel appointed by Obama to examine the effectiveness of surveillance techniques Snowden revealed found that not a single counter-terrorism breakthrough could be attributed to the practice.
The evacuation of 125 United States Special Operations advisers from Yemen in the past two days is the latest blow to the Obama administration’s counterterrorism campaign, which is already struggling with significant setbacks in Syria, Libya and elsewhere in the volatile region, American officials said Sunday.
The loss of Yemen as a base for American counterterrorism training, advising and intelligence-gathering carries major implications not just there, but throughout a region that officials say poses the most grievous threat to United States global interests and to the country itself.
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Even after the withdrawal of American troops, the Central Intelligence Agency will still maintain some covert Yemeni agents in the country. Armed drones will carry out some airstrikes from bases in nearby Saudi Arabia or Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, as was done most recently on Feb. 20. Spy satellites will still lurk overhead and eavesdropping planes will try to suck up electronic communications.
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About 2,000 of the approximately 10,000 troops that the United States is likely to carry over into 2016 – more than originally planned – are assigned to counterterrorism missions, mainly along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The C.I.A. relies on the American troops to provide security for its covert counterterrorism operations, including drone strikes in Pakistan.
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The Islamic State began attracting pledges of allegiance from groups and individual fighters after it declared the formation of a caliphate, or religious state, in June 2014. Counterterrorism analysts say it is using Al Qaeda’s franchise structure to expand its geographic reach, but without Al Qaeda’s rigorous, multiyear application process. This could allow its franchises to grow faster, easier and farther.
It is a trend that American counterterrorism officials say they are struggling to understand and defeat. Indeed, John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, voiced deep concerns this month over “the emergence of a terrorist threat that is increasingly decentralized, difficult to track and even more difficult to thwart.”
With the Islamic State and its supporters producing as many as 90,000 Twitter posts and other social media responses every day, American officials also acknowledge the difficulty of blunting the group’s digital momentum in the same way a United States-led air campaign has slowed its advances on the battlefield in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Syria.
“We have an effective counternarrative, but the volume, the sheer volume, we are losing the battle today,” Michael B. Steinbach, the F.B.I.’s top counterterrorism official, told a House panel last month. “The amount of use of social media and other Internet-based activities eclipses our effort.”
What? You mean a group of people who live there has become revolutionary and is kicking the ass of the best military in the world and its paid mercenaries?
It’s little wonder, then, that Emanuel has earned the moniker “Mayor 1%.” So we should be little surprised when we read in the Chicago Sun-Times that Kenneth C. Griffin, the billionaire CEO of the hedge fund Citadel, has just infused the pro-Emanuel PAC Chicago Forward with a cool half million in cash – on top of the $250,000 he contributed to Emanuel’s campaign shortly after Garcia forced him into the runoff?
A primer on Griffin: With an estimated net worth of $6.6 billion, the 46-year-old is one of the Republican Party’s most generous megadonors. During the 2014 election cycle, Griffin and his wife Anne contributed $3.6 million to GOP candidates and outside groups for federal elections and precisely zero (0) to Democratic candidates and groups, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. (The hedge funder does not hedge.) Additionally, Griffin lavished $8 million on Rauner’s campaign fund after he ousted Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn, in what the Sun-Times reports was a bid to boost Rauner ahead of his battles with the Democratic state legislature.
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“One thing Rahm, Rauner and Griffin have in common is that they understand that money doesn’t just talk, it shouts,” Kristen Crowell, the executive director of United Working Families, said in a statement to Salon. “You see it in the disinvestment in our schools, parks and core services, as public dollars get funneled to politically connected downtown developers and education profiteers.” United Working Families is the Chicago-based sister organization of the national Working Families Party.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s housing agency has been pulling hundreds of millions of dollars from a fund earmarked for its affordable housing program and using the money instead to boost its pension, purchase government debt and build up a staggering cash reserve.
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The decision to hoard cash while tens of thousands of families are in need of housing appears to be a strange one only if the goal is to find housing for the people the agency is supposed to serve. Yet developers, bar and restaurant owners and other interests who want to see the city of Chicago continue to gentrify have little interest in assisting the poor, black and brown single moms who populate the waitlist. Instead, they’d prefer the women and their children leave the city and find housing somewhere in the distant suburbs or beyond. The trend was underway before Emanuel took office, with the 2010 census finding 182,000 fewer African-Americans living in the city than a decade before, when Chicago began demolishing its public housing.
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The CHA gets tens of millions each year for apartments it controls but leaves vacant. One of the CHA’s larger sites, Lathrop Homes, has a staggering vacancy rate despite the fact that the most recent November 2014 housing lottery saw more than 282,000 applicants. Lathrop Homes has 925 units, but according to longtime resident and co-chairman of the Lathrop Leadership Group, Miguel Suarez, only about 150 of them are occupied today.
“In 2000, CHA froze all leasing in Lathrop with the promise that in 2001, they would start rehabbing,” Suarez told HuffPost. “And of course, that never happened.”
Suarez said that by 2007, developers still hadn’t made improvements, though roughly 45 families were still living on the north end of the site. Shortly after, those remaining families were moved to the south end of the site and CHA “went in and boarded all of the north end up.”
Suarez, who has lived in Lathrop Homes for 25 years and is a chairman for the residents’ leadership team, said some families left after years of what he characterized as neglect by CHA.
“There are apartments that have mold issues, leakage from the outside, and things of that nature,” Suarez said. “When I first moved in, it was totally different: [Lathrop Homes] was fully occupied. Along [North Hoyne Avenue] had a canopy of trees. It was beautiful. Somewhere along the line they got rid of it. Ladies had their flower gardens up front, vegetables in the back. People would even hang their laundry.”
“It was a very different thing — it was a true community,” Suarez noted.
But as the surrounding neighborhoods of Bucktown, Lincoln Park and Roscoe Village hit new levels of prosperity, Suarez called the situation with Lathrop Homes “gentrification at its worst.”
“It’s no secret that today, Lathrop Homes is on some of the most valuable property in the city,” Suarez said. “For developers to come in and say, ‘We want to make this a revitalized community,” well, it already is. They want to move the current residents out to give this property to people with greater means.”
Suarez said that knowing the agency is sitting on hundreds of millions of unspent dollars while Lathrop deteriorates is a clear sign of the city’s priorities. “Knowing very well that CHA has $400-some-odd million stashed, knowing that money is there, and seeing that Lathrop Homes has had no major rehab done to it, it’s evident that the CHA as a whole is not willing to make these units [livable] that could be made available,” he said.
The city of Chicago and its public school system could recoup potentially billions of dollars in overpayments from complicated, unjust deals inked with Wall Street banks, if they pursued legal action or demanded enforcement from federal regulators. But Rahm Emanuel, the current mayor, has refused to chase this opportunity, despite the city’s drastic fiscal outlook and the effect on citizens. By contrast, his opponent in the April 7 mayoral run-off election, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, appears far more likely to take action against a powerful financial sector Emanuel has relied on for campaign contributions.
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A growing group of public interest activists, lawyers and experts believe that Wall Street violated securities laws by failing to disclose risks on these instruments. “The banks made a fundamental representation, that it was a cheaper way to borrow,” said Brad Miller, a former Congressman and Of Counsel at Grais and Ellsworth, who has focused on these deals. “That was not true and they knew it.”
Chicago was a serial user of this type of exotic borrowing. The Chicago Tribunefound that between 2003 and 2007, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) issued $1 billion in auction-rate securities, more than the entire state of California. Goldman Sachs wrote in a letter to CPS that the deals had “no downside.” But over the life of the auction-rate securities, CPS will pay $100 million more than they would have on fixed-rate bonds.
That’s just a sliver of what Chicago financed with Wall Street. “The Tribune investigation was on auction-rate securities,” said Saqib Bhatti, director of the Roosevelt Institute’s ReFund America Project. “There are only four of those. CPS has 10 or 12 other swaps, and the city of Chicago has 25 more.” Banks like JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Deutsche Bank made the deals with the city.
ReFund America estimates that the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools have already paid $1.2 billion on swaps, and roughly $106 million annually since 2008. For context, last year Chicago closed nearly 50 schools in underserved areas, for a total savings of only $25 million a year.
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Emanuel has publicly stated that it’s simply too late to recoup any money from bad swap deals, because “there’s a thing called a contract.” Of course, Bhatti and his colleagues allege there was a breach of contract, which can trigger legal remedies. In addition, “the same administration so quick to say a contract’s a contract was quick to throw the teachers’ contract out the window when they had a chance,” Bhatti said, referring to a bruising 2012 city teacher’s strike and Emanuel’s proposal to cut retirement benefits. “To them, a deal’s a deal except when it’s not.”
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And then there’s the issue of Emanuel’s ties to Wall Street. Investment bankers, including those managing city pension funds, have delivered millions of dollars to Emanuel’s re-election campaign. While the Mayor’s office insisted Emanuel would pursue any opportunities to save taxpayers money, highlighting an ordinance to protect tenants in bank-owned foreclosed properties, advocates frustrated by the inaction on swaps remain skeptical. “This requires taking on the most powerful interest group in the country, which has been an enormous support for Rahm,” Brad Miller said.
Over a week ago, on March 5, families of loved ones killed by Chicago police officers held a press conference and demanded a meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel. They requested that he address the issue of police violence. His office scheduled a meeting for March 16 in the early afternoon. However, when multiple families impacted by police violence came to his office for the meeting, they found out he was going to be a no show.
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“He couldn’t take out a mere hour out of his day to come talk to us. That’s unexcusable,” community activist and director of Christianaire, William Calloway, said. “Rahm Emanuel does not have our vote in the African American community and we’re going to stand together. We’re going to band together. And we’re going to make sure that man does not get re-elected come April 7.”
“I came here today to see Rahm Emanuel and he coward out and didn’t show up.,” Dorothy Holmes, mother of Ron Johnson, who was killed by police on October 12, 2014. “How do you figure he’s here for the people? He can’t even face us. And I’m not the only one feeling like he backed out on us. So, if he can’t face us, why should we vote him in office?”
As a leader you sometimes pursue policies that you know are not going to work to persuade those who advocate them of their ineffectiveness.
I think many of the leaders of SYRIZA, especially Yanis Varoufakis who has been writing about it for years, are ready to leave the Euro-Zone tomorrow (not at all the same as leaving the EU, sorry Andrea) but there is still a bare plurality in Greece that think some kind of reconciliation can happen.
They are misguided of course, but they need to be convinced of that and this is the convincing period.
The New York Police Department has anonymously edited and tried to delete Wikipedia pages about police brutality victims, Capital New York has discovered. Edits coming from 1 Police Plaza headquarters targeted pages for Eric Garner, Sean Bell, and Amadou Diallo.
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Someone at the NYPD also tried to delete the article on Sean Bell, an unarmed man who was gunned down by officers firing 50 bullets in 2006, arguing that “no one except Al Sharpton cares anymore.” The user wrote, “The police shoot people every day, and times with a lot more than 50 bullets. This incident is more news than notable.”
The NYPD even cracked down on an artistic mural calling the police force “murderers,” even though the property owner had approved it. When the artist declined police requests to remove the mural, NYPD officers painted over it themselves.
Actually, it’s not so much the Beat Cops (who while technically ‘Officers’ aren’t really in charge) as it is the ‘White Shirts’ at 1 Police Plaza and the unrepresentative Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association that ceased paying attention to its blue shirted Patrolmen members a long time ago.
