(damn)

[sirfun]

October 30, 2010
The Grand Old Plot Against the Tea PartyBy FRANK RICH
ONE dirty little secret of the 2010 election is that it won’t be a political tragedy for Democrats if a Tea Party icon like Sharron Angle or Joe Miller ends up in the United States Senate. Angle, now synonymous with racist ads sliming Hispanics, and Miller, already on record threatening a government shutdown, are fired up and ready to go as symbols of G.O.P. extremism for 2012 and beyond.

What’s not so secret is that some Republicans will be just as happy if some of these characters lose, and for the same reason.

But whatever Tuesday’s results, this much is certain: The Tea Party’s hopes for actually effecting change in Washington will start being dashed the morning after. The ordinary Americans in this movement lack the numbers and financial clout to muscle their way into the back rooms of Republican power no matter how well their candidates perform.

Trent Lott, the former Senate leader and current top-dog lobbyist, gave away the game in July. “We don’t need a lot of Jim DeMint disciples,” he said, referring to the South Carolina senator who is the Tea Party’s Capitol Hill patron saint. “As soon as they get here, we need to co-opt them.” It’s the players who wrote the checks for the G.O.P. surge, not those earnest folk in tri-corner hats, who plan to run the table in the next corporate takeover of Washington. Though Tom DeLay may now be on trial for corruption in Texas, the spirit of his K Street lives on in a Lott client list that includes Northrop Grumman and Goldman Sachs.

Karl Rove outed the Republican elites’ contempt for Tea Partiers in the campaign’s final stretch. Much as Barack Obama thought he was safe soliloquizing about angry white Middle Americans clinging to “guns or religion” at a San Francisco fund-raiser in 2008, so Rove now parades his disdain for the same constituency when speaking to the European press. This month he told Der Spiegel that Tea Partiers are “not sophisticated,” and then scoffed, “It’s not like these people have read the economist Friedrich August von Hayek.” Given that Glenn Beck has made a cause of putting Hayek’s dense 1944 antigovernment treatise “The Road to Serfdom” on the best-seller list and Tea Partiers widely claim to have read it, Rove could hardly have been more condescending to “these people.” Last week, for added insult, he mocked Sarah Palin’s imminent Discovery Channel reality show to London’s Daily Telegraph.

This animus has not gone unnoticed among those supposedly less sophisticated conservatives back home. Mike Huckabee, still steamed about Rove’s previous put-down of Christine O’Donnell, publicly lamented the Republican establishment’s “elitism” and “country club attitude.” This country club elite, he said, is happy for Tea Partiers to put up signs, work the phones and make “those pesky little trips” door-to-door that it finds a frightful inconvenience. But the members won’t let the hoi polloi dine with them in the club’s “main dining room” — any more than David H. Koch, the billionaire sugar daddy of the Republican right, will invite O’Donnell into his box at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center to take in “The Nutcracker.”

The main dining room remains reserved for Koch’s fellow oil barons, Lott’s clients, the corporate contributors (known and anonymous) to groups like Rove’s American Crossroads, and, of course, the large coterie of special interests underwriting John Boehner, the presumptive next speaker of the House. Boehner is the largest House recipient of Wall Street money this year — much of it from financial institutions bailed out by TARP.

His Senate counterpart, Mitch McConnell, will be certain to stop any Tea Party hillbillies from disrupting his chapter of the club (as he tried to stop Rand Paul in his own state’s G.O.P. primary). McConnell’s pets in his chamber’s freshman G.O.P. class will instead be old-school conservatives like Dan Coats (of Indiana), Rob Portman (of Ohio) and, if he squeaks in, Pat Toomey (of Pennsylvania). The first two are former lobbyists; Toomey ran the corporate interest group, the Club for Growth. They can be counted on to execute an efficient distribution of corporate favors and pork after they make their latest swing through Capitol Hill’s revolving door.

What the Tea Party ostensibly wants most — less government spending and smaller federal deficits — is not remotely happening on the country club G.O.P.’s watch. The elites have no serious plans to cut anything except taxes and regulation of their favored industries. The party’s principal 2010 campaign document, its “Pledge to America,” doesn’t vow to cut even earmarks — which barely amount to a rounding error in the federal budget anyway. Boehner has also proposed a return to pre-crash 2008 levels in “nonsecurity” discretionary spending — another mere bagatelle ($105 billion) next to the current $1.3 trillion deficit. And that won’t be happening either, once the actual cuts in departments like Education, Transportation and Interior are specified to their constituencies.

Perhaps the campaign’s most telling exchange took place on Fox News two weeks ago, when the Tea Party-embracing Senate candidate in California, Carly Fiorina, was asked seven times by Chris Wallace to name “one single entitlement expenditure you’re willing to cut” in order “to extend all the Bush tax cuts, which would add 4 trillion to the deficit.” She never did. At least Angle and Paul have been honest about what they’d slash if in power — respectively Social Security and defense, where the big government spending actually resides.

That’s not happening either. McConnell has explained his only real priority for the new Congress with admirable candor. “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” he said, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Any assault on Social Security would defeat that goal, and a serious shake-up of the Pentagon budget would alienate the neoconservative ideologues and military contractors who are far more important to the G.O.P. establishment than the “don’t tread on me” crowd.

For sure, the Republican elites found the Tea Party invaluable on the way to this Election Day. And not merely, as Huckabee has it, because they wanted its foot soldiers. What made the Tea Party most useful was that its loud populist message gave the G.O.P. just the cover it needed both to camouflage its corporate patrons and to rebrand itself as a party miraculously antithetical to the despised G.O.P. that gave us George W. Bush and record deficits only yesterday.

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Wall Street Journal have been arduous in promoting and inflating Tea Party events and celebrities to this propagandistic end. The more the Tea Party looks as if it’s calling the shots in the G.O.P., the easier it is to distract attention from those who are actually calling them — namely, those who’ve cashed in and cashed out as ordinary Americans lost their jobs, homes and 401(k)’s. Typical of this smokescreen is a new book titled “Mad as Hell,” published this fall by a Murdoch imprint. In it, the pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen make the case, as they recently put it in Politico, that the Tea Party is “the most powerful and potent force in America.”

They are expert at producing poll numbers to bear that out. By counting those with friends and family in the movement, Rasmussen has calculated that 29 percent of Americans are “tied to” the Tea Party. (If you factor in six degrees of Kevin Bacon, the number would surely double.) But cooler empirical data reveal the truth known by the G.O.P. establishment: An August CNN poll found that 2 percent of Americans consider themselves active members of the Tea Party.

That result was confirmed last weekend by The Washington Post, which published the fruits of its months-long effort to contact every Tea Party group in the country. To this end, it enlisted the help of Tea Party Patriots, the only Tea Party umbrella group that actually can claim to be a spontaneous, bottom-up, grass roots organization rather than a front for the same old fat cats of the Republican right, from the Koch brothers to Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks. Tea Party Patriots has claimed anywhere from 2,300 to nearly 3,000 local affiliates, but even with its assistance, The Post could verify a total of only 647 Tea Party groups nationwide. Most had fewer than 50 members. The median amount of money each group had raised in 2010 was $800, nowhere near the entry fee for the country club.

But those Americans, like all the others on the short end of the 2008 crash, have reason to be mad as hell. And their numbers will surely grow once the Republican establishment’s panacea of tax cuts proves as ineffectual at creating jobs, saving homes and cutting deficits as the half-measures of the Obama White House and the Democratic Congress. The tempest, however, will not be contained within the tiny Tea Party but will instead overrun the Republican Party itself, where Palin, with Murdoch and Beck at her back, waits in the wings to “take back America” not just from Obama but from the G.O.P. country club elites now mocking her. By then — after another two years of political gridlock and economic sclerosis — the equally disillusioned right and left may have a showdown that makes this election year look as benign as Woodstock.

 

[sirfun]

Get out and vote! <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/jam_on.gif" alt="" />

Good Luck America!!!!!!!!

 

[sirfun]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-29...n-hathaway.html

http://www.bnet.com/blog/advertising-business/6-terrorists-inspired-by-fox-news-and-glenn-beck/6399

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/beth-weissenberger/owning-your-negative-trai_b_775662.html
couldn't help thinkin' of CharmSoph and his"feel 37% better" on that last one

 

[Ifallalot]

just shows how retarded we are as Americans. People wanted change and thought 2 years could fix 8 years of a mess

lets see if anything happens besides the rich getting richer in the next 2 years

 

[sirfun]

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131194364

A small environmental miracle has occurred in Beatty, Nev., a former mining town that sits on the eastern edge of Death Valley between Jackass Flats and Sober Up Gulch. The people of Beatty have helped revive the Amargosa toad, a warty, speckled, palm-sized creature that's unique to the area and, just a few years ago, seemed headed for extinction.

But this is not your typical story of environmental action — the toad owes its comeback to an unlikely coalition that includes ranchers, miners, off-road racers, opponents of big government and the local brothel.

The toads come out at night, and twice a year around June, so does a team of volunteers assembled by the Nevada Department of Wildlife to count them. Shuffling through a cattle pasture armed with buckets and flashlights, Brian Hobbs, an amphibian biologist with the state, leads a group in gathering the toads. They live anywhere there is water.

Even though the area around Beatty is desert, there's quite a bit of water, thanks to natural hot springs and a fitful creek known as the Amargosa River.

The volunteers place an electronic tag under the skin of any toad that doesn't already have one. It's quiet work — female toads are silent and so are the males, unless they're being mounted by another male or squeezed by a scientist.

One toad receiving a tag gives his "release call," then urinates copiously on the tagger. That gets a big laugh from the other volunteers.

After more than an hour in the pasture, though, the team has found only nine toads. So they head down to the house where David Spicer, a rancher, lives with his family. Spicer comes out to greet them and announces that his yard is packed with toads.

"When we go over by this light, we're going to really all need every one of us," Spicer says as he takes the group toward one of his outbuildings. "There's like 50 to 60 that'll be over there. An enormous amount of them. We're like toad farmers around here."

Spicer's right. The volunteers have hit the toad mother lode. Pretty soon their buckets are full and release calls fill the air.

Protecting Toads To Keep Private Land Private

"What you're seeing tonight are the results of active land management, active habitat management," Spicer says

He has run miles of underground pipe around his property to create breeding pools and wet habitat for the toads. Spicer grew up with the toads and wants to preserve them, he says.

But here's the surprising thing: Another reason, and perhaps the major reason Spicer has gone to such lengths is because he really, really does not like the Endangered Species Act.

"Nobody trusts the government anymore," Spicer says. "Nobody wants to work with the government. The government always wants to take something from you."

So Spicer got worried more than a decade ago when some scientists declared that there were only a few dozen Amargosa toads left. Soon after that, when a group petitioned the federal government to add the toad to the endangered species list, Spicer came up with a plan.

"You need to defend yourself against such actions like that because that's not a good thing to have happen," he says.

Spicer feared the government would try to protect the toads by telling him he couldn't raise cattle or ride off-road vehicles on his own property. So he helped start a group called STORM-OV, which stands for Saving Toads thru Off-Road Racing, Mining and Ranching in Oasis Valley.

STORM-OV has worked with the government, groups like the Nature Conservancy and with locals who just want to save the toad.

"We want to keep it in our hands, where it's at a local level, where we can do things and be nimble," Spicer says. "You get restricted by bureaucracy, the monstrous, litigious things that go on in the Endangered Species Act, and we're definitely not going to have any fun on our own ranches anymore."

The group has persuaded land owners to make their properties toad-friendly. They've also worked to get rid of non-native animals like bullfrogs and crawdads, which eat toad eggs and tadpoles, and invasive plants like tamarisk and cattail that clog the springs where toads live.

Toad Tourism?

Other people in Beatty see toad preservation as a way to revive their town.

Kay Tarr is a retired schoolteacher who sits on the Beatty Habitat Committee. To the flock of kids who always seem to be scampering through her doublewide, she's known as Grandma Kay. Tarr likes to give tours of Beatty in her golf cart — a spinal tumor left her unable to work the brake and accelerator pedals with her feet, so she uses the tip of a cane.

"That used to be the casino over there, and oh it was a fun place, before our town died," she says, driving down the main street toward Beatty's only stoplight.

"We used to have street dances out here in the parking lot," she says. "Bands up on the trucks. Everybody dancing in the street. They even made me get out there and dance in my wheelchair."

Beatty was home to more than 2,000 people when the Bullfrog gold mine was still operating a few miles away. Now there might be half that many.

But Tarr and other members of the Habitat Committee think the Amargosa toad could revive Beatty. Their plan is to create a nature trail along the stretch of Amargosa River that runs through town.

"See those benches and the trash cans," she says bumping along a dirt path next to the river. "We'd like to put those all along the riverbed. And this right here is where we'd like to start our trail."

The idea is that an attraction featuring the Amargosa toad would encourage visitors to stay just a little longer. And that idea has gained some traction among residents.

"It's been slow and it's been tedious and it's been frustrating," says Shirley Harlan, who lives outside Beatty and is president of Friends of the Amargosa Toad. "But within the past, I'd say, three years, have we gotten the public educated sufficiently to realize that [the toad] is an asset?"

A Toad-Friendly Brothel

That message has clearly reached Angel's Ladies, a licensed brothel just up the road. The brothel is run by a couple who used to be in the funeral home business. It even has its own airstrip, complete with the carcass of a twin-engine plane that crashed while landing there more than 30 years ago.

"Here, I'll show you one of the bungalows," says Tom Arillaga, who helps maintain the collection of small buildings that comprise Angel's Ladies.

"We have two of these bungalows, plus every girl has their own room decorated, you know, for customers," he says

The brothel is toad-friendly, right down to the clothing-optional swimming pool out back, Arillaga says.

"We don't bother them or anything like that," he says "The pool is not chemically treated, so they go in the pool and their eggs wash down the creek here, and then they hatch along the creek.

Arillaga adds that most swimmers seem to like the toads.

"There's are a few of them up there I've named," he says. "Big fat ones that come out when I come up here at nighttime and swim, and they'll just come right up to me, and I sit there and I talk to them, and they look at me like I'm their friend, you know. They're kinda cute."

It's a quirky kind of environmentalism. But it seems to be working. This year's toad counts show that their numbers remain in the thousands. And earlier this year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rejected the latest petition to place the Amargosa toad on the endangered species list.

 

[sirfun]

copied and pasted from a deleted thread on a "no politics" forum
----------------------------------------------------------

What happened in 2008 can be traced back to the Depression...

1933: After the Crash of 1929, Congress investigates and the result is the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, of which the most important provisions prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies, and forced the separation of Wall Street investment banks and depository banks.

1999: A Republican Congress passes and a Democratic President (Clinton) signs into law "the Banking Modernization Act", REVERSING the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that had prevented a repeat of 1929... for 66 years....

1999 - 2008: As a result of banking deregulation, banks and mortgage institutions create mortgage vehicles and in collusion with credit scoring agencies lower lending standards. This allows them to greatly accelerate the mortgage origination business, and reap huge profits, preying on consumers "American Dreams", even though those individuals would have most likely not qualified for those homes had lending standards not been lowered.

2008 - As a result of toxic loans being repackaged and resold on Wall Street, confidence in those securities plummets and large investment banks are at risk due to their over leveraged condition... Lehman fails... As a result:

* Banks pull HALF of all available consumer credit lines...
* Lending grinds to a near halt and small business begin to fail
* 8 Million people are laid off as a result of the economic slowdown.


The real irony is that had Glass-Steagal been left in place.. most likely we would not have had the 2008 crash... and even MORE ironic is that after Lehmans failure a bipartisan effort was made by Congress to RE-INSTATE Glass-Steagal... but they couldn't get it done..

And even more ironic... the recently passed "Financial Regulatory Reform Act"... AS PASSED... would not have prevented Lehmans failure... and WILL NOT prevent another round of 2008 failures...

There are demographic and economic forces in play here that are "once in a lifetime" in nature... and only just now are we getting the "rude awakening"...

 

[Lance Mannion]

copied and pasted from a deleted thread on a "no politics" forum
----------------------------------------------------------

What happened in 2008 can be traced back to the Depression...

1933: After the Crash of 1929, Congress investigates and the result is the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, of which the most important provisions prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies, and forced the separation of Wall Street investment banks and depository banks.

1999: A Republican Congress passes and a Democratic President (Clinton) signs into law "the Banking Modernization Act", REVERSING the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that had prevented a repeat of 1929... for 66 years....

1999 - 2008: As a result of banking deregulation, banks and mortgage institutions create mortgage vehicles and in collusion with credit scoring agencies lower lending standards. This allows them to greatly accelerate the mortgage origination business, and reap huge profits, preying on consumers "American Dreams", even though those individuals would have most likely not qualified for those homes had lending standards not been lowered.

2008 - As a result of toxic loans being repackaged and resold on Wall Street, confidence in those securities plummets and large investment banks are at risk due to their over leveraged condition... Lehman fails... As a result:

* Banks pull HALF of all available consumer credit lines...
* Lending grinds to a near halt and small business begin to fail
* 8 Million people are laid off as a result of the economic slowdown.


The real irony is that had Glass-Steagal been left in place.. most likely we would not have had the 2008 crash... and even MORE ironic is that after Lehmans failure a bipartisan effort was made by Congress to RE-INSTATE Glass-Steagal... but they couldn't get it done..

And even more ironic... the recently passed "Financial Regulatory Reform Act"... AS PASSED... would not have prevented Lehmans failure... and WILL NOT prevent another round of 2008 failures...

There are demographic and economic forces in play here that are "once in a lifetime" in nature... and only just now are we getting the "rude awakening"...

Bullshit

 

[sirfun]

Oh yes I did copy and paste this;

copied and pasted from a deleted thread on a "no politics" forum
----------------------------------------------------------

What happened in 2008 can be traced back to the Depression...

1933: After the Crash of 1929, Congress investigates and the result is the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, of which the most important provisions prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies, and forced the separation of Wall Street investment banks and depository banks.

1999: A Republican Congress passes and a Democratic President (Clinton) signs into law "the Banking Modernization Act", REVERSING the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that had prevented a repeat of 1929... for 66 years....

1999 - 2008: As a result of banking deregulation, banks and mortgage institutions create mortgage vehicles and in collusion with credit scoring agencies lower lending standards. This allows them to greatly accelerate the mortgage origination business, and reap huge profits, preying on consumers "American Dreams", even though those individuals would have most likely not qualified for those homes had lending standards not been lowered.

2008 - As a result of toxic loans being repackaged and resold on Wall Street, confidence in those securities plummets and large investment banks are at risk due to their over leveraged condition... Lehman fails... As a result:

* Banks pull HALF of all available consumer credit lines...
* Lending grinds to a near halt and small business begin to fail
* 8 Million people are laid off as a result of the economic slowdown.


The real irony is that had Glass-Steagal been left in place.. most likely we would not have had the 2008 crash... and even MORE ironic is that after Lehmans failure a bipartisan effort was made by Congress to RE-INSTATE Glass-Steagal... but they couldn't get it done..

And even more ironic... the recently passed "Financial Regulatory Reform Act"... AS PASSED... would not have prevented Lehmans failure... and WILL NOT prevent another round of 2008 failures...

There are demographic and economic forces in play here that are "once in a lifetime" in nature... and only just now are we getting the "rude awakening"...

Bullshit

anything a little more specific?



America - He's Your President for Goodness Sake!
By William Thomas
Posted: Friday, October 1st, 2010

There was a time not so long ago when Americans, regardless of their political stripes, rallied round their president. Once elected, the man who won the White House was no longer viewed as a republican or democrat, but the President of the United States. The oath of office was taken, the wagons were circled around the country’s borders and it was America versus the rest of the world with the president of all the people at the helm.
Suddenly President Barack Obama, with the potential to become an exceptional president has become the glaring exception to that unwritten, patriotic rule.
Four days before President Obama’s inauguration, before he officially took charge of the American government, Rush Limbaugh boasted publicly that he hoped the president would fail. Of course, when the president fails the country flounders. Wishing harm upon your country in order to further your own narrow political views is selfish, sinister and a tad treasonous as well.
Subsequently, during his State of the
Union address, which is pretty much a pep rally for America, an unknown congressional representative from South Carolina, later identified as Joe Wilson, stopped the show when he called the President of the United States a liar. The president showed great restraint in ignoring this unprecedented insult and carried on with his speech. Speaker Nancy Pelosi was so stunned by the slur, she forgot to jump to her feet while clapping wildly, 30 or 40 times after that.
Last spring, President Obama took his wife Michelle to see a play in New York City and republicans attacked him over the cost of security for the excursion. The president can’t take his wife out to dinner and a show without being scrutinized by the political opposition? As history has proven, a president in a theatre without adequate security is a tragically bad idea.
Remember: “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?”
At some point, the treatment of President Obama went from offensive to ugly and then to downright dangerous.
The health-care debate, which looked more like extreme fighting in a mud pit than a national dialogue, revealed a very vulgar side of America. President Obama’s face appeared on protest signs white-faced and blood-mouthed in a satanic clown image. In other tasteless portrayals, people who disagreed with his position distorted his face to look like Hitler complete with mustache and swastika.
Odd, that burning the flag makes Americans crazy, but depicting the president as a clown and a maniacal fascist is accepted as part of the new rude America.
Maligning the image of the leader of the free world is one thing, putting the president’s life in peril is quite another. More than once, men with guns were videotaped at the health-care rallies where the president spoke. Again, history shows that letting men with guns get within range of a president has not served America well in the past.
And still the “birthers” are out there claiming Barack Obama was not born in the United States, although public documentation proves otherwise. Hawaii is definitely part of the United States, but the Panama Canal Zone where his electoral opponent Senator John McCain was born? Nobody’s sure.
Last month, a 44-year-old woman in Buffalo was quite taken by President Obama when she met him in a chicken wing restaurant called Duff’s. Did she say something about a pleasure and an honour to meet the man or utter encouraging words for the difficult job he is doing? No. Quote: “You’re a hottie with a smokin’ little body.”
Lady, that was the President of the United States you were addressing, not one of the Jonas Brothers! He’s your president for goodness sakes, not the guy driving the Zamboni at “Monster Trucks On Ice.” Maybe next it’ll be, “Take Your President To A Topless Bar Day.”
In President Barack Obama, Americans have a charismatic leader with a good and honest heart. Unlike his predecessor, he’s a very intelligent leader. And unlike that president’s predecessor, he’s a highly moral man.
In President Obama, Americans have the real deal, the whole package and a leader that citizens of almost every country around the world look to with great envy. Given the opportunity, Canadians would trade our leader, hell, most of our leaders for Obama in a heartbeat.
What America has in Obama is a head of state with vitality and insight and youth. Think about it, Barack Obama is a young Nelson Mandela. Mandela was the face of change and charity for all of Africa but he was too old to make it happen. The great things Obama might do for America and the world could go on for decades after he’s out of office.
America, you know not what you have.
The man is being challenged unfairly, characterized with vulgarity and treated with the kind of deep disrespect to which no previous president was subjected. It’s like the day after electing the first black man to be president, thereby electrifying the world with hope and joy, Americans sobered up and decided the bad old days were better.
President Obama may fail but it will not be a Richard Nixon default fraught with larceny and lies. President Obama, given a fair chance, will surely succeed but his triumph will never come with a Bill Clinton caveat – “if only he’d got control of that zipper.”
Please. Give the man a fair, fighting chance. This incivility toward the leader who won over Americans and gave hope to billions of people around the world that their lives could be enhanced by his example, just naturally has to stop.
Believe me, when Americans drive by the White House and see a sign on the lawn that reads: “No shirt. No shoes. No service,” they’ll realize this new national rudeness has gone way, way too far.

OCTOBER 2010 SENIOR LIVING MAGAZINE VANCOUVER &amp; LOWER MAINLAND

 

[sirfun]

damn

 

[Lance Mannion]

Oh yes I did copy and paste this;

copied and pasted from a deleted thread on a "no politics" forum
----------------------------------------------------------

What happened in 2008 can be traced back to the Depression...

1933: After the Crash of 1929, Congress investigates and the result is the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, of which the most important provisions prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies, and forced the separation of Wall Street investment banks and depository banks.

1999: A Republican Congress passes and a Democratic President (Clinton) signs into law "the Banking Modernization Act", REVERSING the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that had prevented a repeat of 1929... for 66 years....

1999 - 2008: As a result of banking deregulation, banks and mortgage institutions create mortgage vehicles and in collusion with credit scoring agencies lower lending standards. This allows them to greatly accelerate the mortgage origination business, and reap huge profits, preying on consumers "American Dreams", even though those individuals would have most likely not qualified for those homes had lending standards not been lowered.

2008 - As a result of toxic loans being repackaged and resold on Wall Street, confidence in those securities plummets and large investment banks are at risk due to their over leveraged condition... Lehman fails... As a result:

* Banks pull HALF of all available consumer credit lines...
* Lending grinds to a near halt and small business begin to fail
* 8 Million people are laid off as a result of the economic slowdown.


The real irony is that had Glass-Steagal been left in place.. most likely we would not have had the 2008 crash... and even MORE ironic is that after Lehmans failure a bipartisan effort was made by Congress to RE-INSTATE Glass-Steagal... but they couldn't get it done..

And even more ironic... the recently passed "Financial Regulatory Reform Act"... AS PASSED... would not have prevented Lehmans failure... and WILL NOT prevent another round of 2008 failures...

There are demographic and economic forces in play here that are "once in a lifetime" in nature... and only just now are we getting the "rude awakening"...

Bullshit

anything a little more specific?

Use The Google.

Take a look at the unemployment numbers 6 months post the 1929 market crash.

Then, take a look at the unemployment numbers for the 10 years after government intervention in the economy.

Stark fcuking difference.

If Congress at the time would have done nothing there would be no such event as The Great Depression.

 

[sirfun]

November 20, 2010
Could She Reach the Top in 2012? You BetchaBy FRANK RICH
“THE perception I had, anyway, was that we were on top of the world,” Sarah Palin said at the climax of last Sunday’s premiere of her new television series, “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” At that point our fearless heroine had just completed a perilous rock climb, and if she looked as if she’d just stepped out of a spa instead, don’t expect her fans to question the reality. For them, Palin’s perception is the only reality that counts.

Palin is on the top of her worlds — both the Republican Party and the media universe. “Sarah Palin’s Alaska” set a ratings record for a premiere on TLC, attracting nearly five million viewers — twice the audience of last month’s season finale of the blue-state cable favorite, “Mad Men.” The next night Palin and her husband Todd were enshrined as proud parents in touchy-feely interviews on “Dancing With the Stars,” the network sensation (21 million viewers) where their daughter Bristol has miraculously escaped elimination all season despite being neither a star nor a dancer. This week Sarah Palin will most likely vanquish George W. Bush and Keith Richards on the best-seller list with her new book.

If logic applied to Palin’s career trajectory, this month might have been judged dreadful for her. In an otherwise great year for Republicans she endorsed a “Star Wars” bar gaggle of anomalous and wacky losers — the former witch, Christine O’Donnell; the raging nativist, Tom Tancredo; and at least two candidates who called for armed insurrection against the government, Sharron Angle and a would-be Texas congressman, Stephen Broden, who lost by over 50 percentage points. Last week voters in Palin’s home state humiliatingly “refudiated” her protégé, Joe Miller, overturning his victory in the G.O.P. Senate primary with a write-in campaign.

But logic doesn’t apply to Palin. What might bring down other politicians only seems to make her stronger: the malapropisms and gaffes, the cut-and-run half-term governorship, family scandals, shameless lying and rapacious self-merchandising. In an angry time when America’s experts and elites all seem to have failed, her amateurism and liabilities are badges of honor. She has turned fallibility into a formula for success.

Republican leaders who want to stop her, and they are legion, are utterly baffled about how to do so. Democrats, who gloat that she’s the Republicans’ problem, may be humoring themselves. When Palin told Barbara Walters last week that she believed she could beat Barack Obama in 2012, it wasn’t an idle boast. Should Michael Bloomberg decide to spend billions on a quixotic run as a third-party spoiler, all bets on Obama are off.

Of course Palin hasn’t decided to run yet. Why rush? In the post-midterms Gallup poll she hit her all-time high unfavorable rating (52 percent), but in the G.O.P. her favorable rating is an awesome 80 percent, virtually unchanged from her standing at the end of 2008 (83 percent). She can keep floating above the pack indefinitely as the celebrity star of a full-time reality show where she gets to call all the shots. The Perils of Palin maintains its soap-operatic drive not just because of the tabloid antics of Bristol, Levi, et al., but because you are kept guessing about where the pop culture ends and the politics begins.

The producer of “Sarah Palin’s Alaska,” Mark Burnett (whose past hits appropriately include both “Survivor” and “The Apprentice”), has declared that the series is “completely nonpolitical.” It is in fact completely political — an eight-week infomercial that, miraculously enough, is paying the personality it promotes (a reported $250,000 a week) rather than charging her. The show’s sole political mission is to maintain the fervor and loyalty of the G.O.P. base, not to win over Palin’s detractors. In the debut episode, the breathtaking Alaskan landscapes were cannily intermixed with vignettes showcasing the star’s ostensibly model kids and husband, her charming dad, the villainous lamestream media (represented by Palin’s unwanted neighbor, the journalist Joe McGinniss), and the heroic Rupert Murdoch media (represented by an off-screen Bill O’Reilly).

Palin fires a couple of Annie Oakley-style shots before we’re even out of the opening credits. The whole package is a calculated paean to her down-home, self-reliant frontiersiness — an extravagant high-def remake of Bush’s photo ops clearing brush at his “ranch” in Crawford, which in turn were an homage to Ronald Reagan’s old horseback photo ops in his lush cowpoke digs in Santa Barbara. With a showbiz-fueled net worth widely estimated in the double-digit millions, Palin is as Hollywood in her way as Reagan was, but you won’t see any bling or factotums in “Sarah Palin’s Alaska.” She tells the audience that she doesn’t have “much of a staff” to tend to her sprawling family and career. “We do most everything ourselves,” she says, and not with a wink.

Thanks to the in-kind contribution of this “nonpolitical” series, Palin needn’t join standard-issue rivals like Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour and Tim Pawlenty in groveling before donors and primary-state operatives to dutifully check all the boxes of a traditional Republican campaign. Palin not only has TLC in her camp but, better still, Murdoch. Other potential 2012 candidates are also on the Fox News payroll, but Palin is the only one, as Alessandra Stanley wrote in The Times, whose every appearance is “announced with the kind of advance teasing and clip montages that talk shows use to introduce major movie stars.” Pity poor Mike Huckabee, relegated to a graveyard time slot, with the ratings to match.

The Fox spotlight is only part of Murdoch’s largess. As her publisher, he will foot the bill for the coming “book tour” whose itinerary disproportionately dotes on the primary states of Iowa and South Carolina. The editorial page of Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is also on board, recently praising Palin for her transparently ghost-written critique of the Federal Reserve’s use of quantitative easing. “Mrs. Palin is way ahead of her potential presidential competitors on this policy point,” The Journal wrote, and “shows a talent for putting a technical subject in language that average Americans can understand.”

With Murdoch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity on her side, Palin hardly needs the grandees of the so-called Republican establishment. They know it and flail at her constantly. Politico reported just before Election Day that unnamed “party elders” were nearly united in wanting to stop her, out of fear that she’d win the nomination and then be crushed by Obama. Their complaints are seconded daily by Bush White House alumni like Karl Rove, Michael Gerson, and Mark McKinnon, who said recently that Palin’s “stock is falling and pretty rapidly now” and that “if she’s smart, she does not run.”

This is either denial or wishful thinking. The same criticisms that the Bushies fling at Palin were those once aimed at Bush: a slender résumé, a lack of intellectual curiosity and foreign travel, a lazy inclination to favor from-the-gut improvisation over cracking the briefing books. These spitballs are no more likely to derail Palin within the G.O.P. than they did him.

As Palin has refused to heed these patrician Republicans, some of them have gotten so testy they sound like Democrats. Peggy Noonan called her a “nincompoop” last month, and Susan Collins, the senator from Maine, dismissed her as a “celebrity commentator.” Rove tut-tutted Palin’s TLC show for undermining her aspirations to “gravitas.” These insults just play into Palin’s hands, burnishing her image as an exemplar of the “real America” battling the snooty powers-that-be. To serve as an Andrew Jackson or perhaps George Wallace for the 21st century, the last thing she wants or needs is gravitas.

It’s anti-elitism that most defines angry populism in this moment, and, as David Frum, another Bush alumnus (and Palin critic), has pointed out, populist rage on the right is aimed at the educated, not the wealthy. The Bushies and Noonans and dwindling retro-moderate Republicans are no less loathed by Palinistas and their Tea Party fellow travelers than is Obama’s Ivy League White House. When Palin mocks her G.O.P. establishment critics as tortured, paranoid, sleazy and a “good-old-boys club,” she pays no penalty for doing so. The more condescending the attacks on her, the more she thrives. This same dynamic is also working for her daughter Bristol, who week after week has received low scores and patronizing dismissals from the professional judges on “Dancing with the Stars” only to be rescued by populist masses voting at home.

Revealingly, Sarah Palin’s potential rivals for the 2012 nomination have not joined the party establishment in publicly criticizing her. They are afraid of crossing Palin and the 80 percent of the party that admires her. So how do they stop her? Not by feeding their contempt in blind quotes to the press — as a Romney aide did by telling Time’s Mark Halperin she isn’t “a serious human being.” Not by hoping against hope that Murdoch might turn off the media oxygen that feeds both Palin’s viability and News Corporation’s bottom line. Sooner or later Palin’s opponents will instead have to man up — as Palin might say — and actually summon the courage to take her on mano-a-maverick in broad daylight.

Short of that, there’s little reason to believe now that she cannot dance to the top of the Republican ticket when and if she wants to.

 

[sirfun]

Oh yes I did copy and paste this;

copied and pasted from a deleted thread on a "no politics" forum
----------------------------------------------------------

What happened in 2008 can be traced back to the Depression...

1933: After the Crash of 1929, Congress investigates and the result is the passage of the Glass-Steagal Act, of which the most important provisions prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies, and forced the separation of Wall Street investment banks and depository banks.

1999: A Republican Congress passes and a Democratic President (Clinton) signs into law "the Banking Modernization Act", REVERSING the provisions of the 1933 Glass-Steagal Act that had prevented a repeat of 1929... for 66 years....

1999 - 2008: As a result of banking deregulation, banks and mortgage institutions create mortgage vehicles and in collusion with credit scoring agencies lower lending standards. This allows them to greatly accelerate the mortgage origination business, and reap huge profits, preying on consumers "American Dreams", even though those individuals would have most likely not qualified for those homes had lending standards not been lowered.

2008 - As a result of toxic loans being repackaged and resold on Wall Street, confidence in those securities plummets and large investment banks are at risk due to their over leveraged condition... Lehman fails... As a result:

* Banks pull HALF of all available consumer credit lines...
* Lending grinds to a near halt and small business begin to fail
* 8 Million people are laid off as a result of the economic slowdown.


The real irony is that had Glass-Steagal been left in place.. most likely we would not have had the 2008 crash... and even MORE ironic is that after Lehmans failure a bipartisan effort was made by Congress to RE-INSTATE Glass-Steagal... but they couldn't get it done..

And even more ironic... the recently passed "Financial Regulatory Reform Act"... AS PASSED... would not have prevented Lehmans failure... and WILL NOT prevent another round of 2008 failures...

There are demographic and economic forces in play here that are "once in a lifetime" in nature... and only just now are we getting the "rude awakening"...

Bullshit

anything a little more specific?

Use The Google.

Take a look at the unemployment numbers 6 months post the 1929 market crash.

Then, take a look at the unemployment numbers for the 10 years after government intervention in the economy.

Stark fcuking difference.

If Congress at the time would have done nothing there would be no such event as The Great Depression.

http://gizmodo.com/5699159/how-ma-bell-shelved-the-future-for-60-years

 

[sirfun]

A Bully Finds a Pulpit on the WebBy DAVID SEGAL
SHOPPING online in late July, Clarabelle Rodriguez typed the name of her favorite eyeglass brand into Google’s search bar.

In moments, she found the perfect frames — made by a French company called Lafont — on a Web site that looked snazzy and stood at the top of the search results. Not the tippy-top, where the paid ads are found, but under those, on Google’s version of the gold-medal podium, where the most relevant and popular site is displayed.

Ms. Rodriguez placed an order for both the Lafonts and a set of doctor-prescribed Ciba Vision contact lenses on that site, DecorMyEyes.com. The total cost was $361.97.

It was the start of what Ms. Rodriguez would later describe as one of the most maddening and miserable experiences of her life.

The next day, a man named Tony Russo called to say that DecorMyEyes had run out of the Ciba Visions. Pick another brand, he advised a little brusquely.

“I told him that I didn’t want another brand,” recalls Ms. Rodriguez, who lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. “And I asked for a refund. He got rude, really obnoxious. ‘What’s the big deal? Choose another brand!’ ”

With the contacts issue unresolved, her eyeglasses arrived two days later. But the frames appeared to be counterfeits and Ms. Rodriguez, a lifelong fan of Lafont, remembers that even the case seemed fake.

Soon after, she discovered that DecorMyEyes had charged her $487 — or an extra $125. When she and Mr. Russo spoke again, she asked about the overcharge and said she would return the frames.

“What the hell am I supposed to do with these glasses?” she recalls Mr. Russo shouting. “I ordered them from France specifically for you!”

“I’m going to contact my credit card company,” she told him, “and dispute the charge.”

Until that moment, Mr. Russo was merely ornery. Now he erupted.

“Listen, bitch,” he fumed, according to Ms. Rodriguez. “I know your address. I’m one bridge over” — a reference, it turned out, to the company’s office in Brooklyn. Then, she said, he threatened to find her and commit an act of sexual violence too graphic to describe in a newspaper.

Ms. Rodriguez was shaken but undaunted. That day she called Citibank, which administers her MasterCard account, and after submitting some paperwork, she won a provisional victory. Her $487 would be refunded as the bank looked into the charge and discussed it with the owner of DecorMyEyes. A final determination, she was told, would take 60 days.

As that two-month deadline approached, Mr. Russo had dropped his claim for the contact lenses he’d never sent. But, she said, he began an increasingly nasty campaign to persuade her to contact Citibank and withdraw her dispute.

“Call me back or I’m going to drag you to small-claims court,” he wrote in an e-mail on Sept. 27. “You have one hour to call me back or I’m filing online.”

A few hours later, Mr. Russo sent details of what appeared to be a lawsuit filed in Brooklyn. It included a hearing date and time, the address of the court, a docket number and a demand for $1,500, which, the e-mail said, “includes my legal fees.”

Ms. Rodriguez did not respond. A few hours later, Mr. Russo raised the stakes sharply by sending another e-mail, this one with a photograph of the front of the apartment building where she and her fiancé lived.

Then her cellphone started ringing. And ringing. Ms. Rodriguez and her fiancé went to the police station at 1 a.m. to file a complaint.

“At that point,” she says, “I was scared.”

An officer assured her that the police would take the issue seriously. Two days later, she received another e-mail from Mr. Russo. “Close the dispute with the credit card company if you know whats good for you,” he wrote. “Do the right thing and everyone goes away. I AM WATCHING YOU!”

That same day an e-mail from Citi arrived.

“Thank you for contacting Citi Cards,” it read. “We have closed our investigation since you have indicated that you accept responsibility for this charge.” And there was this: “we have rebilled your account for this charge along with any related fees and interest charges.”

Someone posing as Ms. Rodriguez, she says, had called the bank and said she had changed her mind and no longer wanted a refund.

“I called the bank right away and said: ‘This is nonsense. I never called you and told you I’m withdrawing my dispute,’ ” she says. “I was on the phone with a woman from the fraud department, and it was amazing — she just didn’t care. I asked if they had a recording of the call I’d supposedly made. She said no. When I explained the whole story, she said: ‘Listen, this isn’t our problem. This has nothing to do with us.’ ”

By then, Ms. Rodriguez had learned a lot more about DecorMyEyes on Get Satisfaction, an advocacy Web site where consumers vent en masse.

Dozens of people over the last three years, she found, had nearly identical tales about DecorMyEyes: a purchase gone wrong, followed by phone calls, e-mails and threats, sometimes lasting for months or years.

Occasionally, the owner of DecorMyEyes gave his name to these customers as Stanley Bolds, but the consensus at Get Satisfaction was that he and Tony Russo were the same person. Others dug around a little deeper and decided that both names were fictitious and that the company was actually owned and run by a man named Vitaly Borker.

Today, when reading the dozens of comments about DecorMyEyes, it is hard to decide which one conveys the most outrage. It is easy, though, to choose the most outrageous. It was written by Mr. Russo/Bolds/Borker himself.

“Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,” the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

It’s all part of a sales strategy, he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: “I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.”

That would sound like schoolyard taunting but for this fact: The post is two years old. Between then and now, hundreds of additional tirades have been tacked to Get Satisfaction, ComplaintsBoard.com, ConsumerAffairs.com and sites like them.

Not only has this heap of grievances failed to deter DecorMyEyes, but as Ms. Rodriguez’s all-too-cursory Google search demonstrated, the company can show up in the most coveted place on the Internet’s most powerful site.

Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

Nice? No.

Profitable?

“Very,” says Vitaly Borker, the founder and owner of DecorMyEyes, during the first of several surprisingly unguarded conversations.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works. No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

THE World Wide Web handed shoppers a few rounds of new ammo, like a way to compare prices and a big podium for ranting about transactions gone wrong. But it gave retailers some weapons, too, and for years consumers have howled that unscrupulous sellers have used the Internet the way bank robbers use ski masks.

The Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, a partnership between the F.B.I. and the National White Collar Crime Center, announced two weeks ago that it had received its two millionth complaint since it began in 2000. Consumer losses are estimated at $1.7 billion.

The story of DecorMyEyes suggests that 15 years after the birth of online commerce, the Internet is still strewn with trap doors, and that when consumers take a tumble, they are pretty much on their own. Mr. Borker is skilled at tunneling under the few obstacles in his way, but he has hardly been hiding. With a few tweaks and added vigilance from an array of companies and public institutions that are supposed to monitor e-commerce thuggery, Mr. Borker’s approach to retail might be impossible to sustain.

But here’s the first question: Is Mr. Borker’s enterprise actually viable now? And the most important question: Is it true, as Mr. Borker says, that Google is unable to distinguish between adulatory buzz and scathing critiques when it scours the digital universe and ranks the best and the brightest?

A call to Google was returned by a member of its publicity team, who agreed to speak only if his ideas would be paraphrased and not directly quoted. He said that he would send a follow-up e-mail that could be quoted, but that e-mail never arrived.

The spokesman initially sounded skeptical that a company could leverage online criticism against it for a better position in search results. Any search of “DecorMyEyes” — the name of the company alone — yields plenty of alarms.

True, but what about people, like Ms. Rodriguez, who search by using brand names, like “Lafont” and “Ciba Vision”?

A crucial factor in Google search results, the spokesman explained, is the number of links from respected and substantial Web sites. The more links that a site has from big and well-regarded sites, the better its chances of turning up high in a search

Web advocacy sites like Get Satisfaction are vast and score high on Google’s augustness scale. The spokesman surfed the Web as he spoke and said he could see scads of links between RipoffReport.com and DecorMyEyes. But nearly all of those links, as well as those from other consumer sites, were tales of woe and obscenities.

So, again: Can’t Google separate catcalls from huzzahs?

For competitive reasons, Google won’t disclose whether its algorithm includes “sentiment analysis,” which would give points for praise and subtract for denunciations.

Ultimately, the spokesman sidestepped the question of whether utterly noxious retail could yield profits. The best he could do was decline to call Mr. Borker a liar for saying that it did. Then he recommended talking to Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the blog Search Engine Land.

“Google is just cagey about everything,” Mr. Sullivan explains. That, he said, is because the company is perpetually worried that the more it reveals about the vaunted mathematical formula it uses to drive search results, the more people will try to game it. Mr. Sullivan says he does not believe that Google uses sentiment analysis, and he sees potential pitfalls if it were to start.

“If you have a lot of people who hate Obama, for instance, and you decided to rank on love or hate, you might not be able to find the White House and that would be terrible,” he says.

But Google, he adds, doesn’t need sentiment analysis to help people like Clarabelle Rodriguez. It could simply become better at incorporating consumer reviews on the main page of its search results.

The company has already started doing that in other realms of commerce. Today, after you tell Google your ZIP code, a search for “pizza” yields a bunch of links in the middle of the page for pizza joints near you, along with a rating of one through five stars and a link to review sites, like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

But this feature hasn’t yet been rolled out to online commerce.

“They tend to focus on the squeaky wheel,” Mr. Sullivan said, and apparently the local business wheel was squeaking louder than the online commerce wheel.

The strange part is that Google is intimately familiar with the rage inspired by DecorMyEyes. If you type the company’s name in a Google Shopping search, you’ll see a collection of more than 300 reviews, many of them arias sung in the key of livid.

“Robbery!” wrote one reviewer. Another wonders if primates are running the place. Another quotes a DecorMyEyes e-mail to a disgruntled customer which included this pungent adieu: “do you think I would think twice about urinating all over your frame and then returning it? Common.”

In short, a Google side stage — Google Shopping — is now hosting a marathon reading of DecorMyEyes horror stories. But those tales aren’t even hinted at in the company’s premier arena, its main search page.

“It’s fair to say,” Mr. Sullivan concludes, “that this is a failure on Google’s part.”

Google is not the only digital enterprise that inadvertently enables Mr. Borker. EBay does, too — by giving Mr. Borker a large and easily available inventory.

DecorMyEyes doesn’t stock the merchandise it sells; it simply takes orders, then buys from an assortment of merchandisers, including several on eBay. Then Mr. Borker instructs those sellers to send products to his customers.

The problem, several sellers on eBay say, is that Mr. Borker often wants glasses sent to customer addresses that have not been “confirmed” by PayPal, eBay’s online payments system. (Only items sent to confirmed addresses are covered by PayPal’s refund system, which assures sellers that they will get their money back if a transaction goes south.)

When sellers decline to ship to one of Mr. Borker’s unconfirmed addresses, they say, he has exacted revenge by leaving negative feedback, which can be reputational poison to an eBay business.

“EBay allows you to block certain people from bidding on your merchandise, but when I did that he would just register under a different name,” says one seller, who requested anonymity because, as he put it, “I hear the guy is dangerous.”

This seller says he spent countless hours on the phone with eBay reps, persuading them to scrub negative feedback left by Mr. Borker, and then urging the site to banish whatever user name Mr. Borker operated under at the time. But this seller wonders why eBay has never bounced Mr. Borker off the site for good.

“I still live in fear that I’ll sell a pair of glasses and it will be him,” says the seller, “and I won’t know until after the fact.”

VITALY BORKER lives in the Sheepshead Bay neighborhood of Brooklyn, in a large brick house. His welcome mat is emblazoned with a Russian phrase that roughly translates to “go away.”

I am standing on that mat a day after my first conversation with Mr. Borker, a chat that ended abruptly after a few minutes when, as he later told me, his phone died. He didn’t return a follow-up call. But he was easy to find because his address is posted on DecorMyEyes.

A young woman, an assistant with a Russian accent, answers the door. She fetches Mr. Borker, who emerges a minute later — a lean, 30ish man with light hair, about 6 feet 3 inches tall and wearing a T-shirt, sweatpants and a white baseball cap turned backward. Although it’s noon, he rubs his head as if he’s just woken up. With a day’s worth of stubble, he could be an N.B.A. point guard recuperating from a bender.

“I slept in for the first time in a while,” he says. He looks wary and begs off a request to continue our interview, saying he’s too busy. But as we discuss setting up another time to talk, he invites me in.

“What do you want to know?” he asks.

We sit on a leather sofa on the first floor of the large brick house and home office where he lives with his wife and 2-year-old child. Toys are all over the floor. Workers are noisily drilling nearby, renovating the garage.

Mr. Borker perks up, explaining his business philosophy like a professor unveiling new research, talking at a frenetic pace, tossing in plenty of profanity and ending sentences with “do you understand?” to make sure I’m keeping up. His accent carries a hint of Brooklyn and only the faintest trace of Russia.

“When I fly to Las Vegas I look down and see all these houses,” he starts. “If someone in one of those houses buys from DecorMyEyes and ends up hating the company, it doesn’t matter. All those other houses are filled with people, too, and they will come knocking.”

Selling on the Internet, Mr. Borker says, attracts a new horde of potential customers every day. For the most part, they don’t know anything about DecorMyEyes, and the ones who bother to research the company — well, he doesn’t want their money. If you’re the type of person who reads consumer reviews, Mr. Borker would rather you shop elsewhere.

“I’m not a salesgirl at Macy’s,” is the way he puts it, “following a customer around the store to make sure you’re happy.”

It’s almost painful to say, but Mr. Borker is amusing company. He is sharp and entertaining, although much of the entertainment comes from the way he flouts the conventions of courtesy, which he does with such a perverse flair that it can seem like a kind of performance art.

When he first heard about Get Satisfaction, it was by e-mail from one of the site’s employees, who was trying to mediate on behalf of unhappy customers.

“They wrote to me, ‘We’d like to talk to you; we should take a proactive approach.’ ” Mr. Borker sneers and rolls his eyes. “I sent him a photograph of this,” he says, raising his middle finger.

He was born in Russia, he reveals, and moved to the United States as a child, although pinning down how old he was when he emigrated proves difficult. His professional career has been varied, to put it mildly.

He attended John Jay College, graduating in 1997, according to the registrar’s office. Afterward, he decided to become a cop and says he walked a foot patrol assigned to public housing on Sutter Avenue in Brooklyn. A woman in the verification department for the area where Mr. Borker says he worked had a different story. She says records show that he was a cadet, which means he worked in an office, not in the field.

Regardless, a career with the police wasn’t for him, he decided. So he spent six months at a rather unusual computer programming school. The courses were in English, but all the teachers and students were Russian immigrants, he says. You would learn the bare minimum to land a job, and the school would help you fake a résumé filled with previous experience.

“There were a lot of schools like this,” he says. “They’ve all been shut down.”

He gravitated to Wall Street and found work at a variety of firms, he says, including Lehman Brothers, where he handled the back end of computer systems for the company’s mutual fund shareholders. But the pay wasn’t great, and a friend with a brick-and-mortar eyeglass store invited him to create and run an online version of the place.

In 2006, court documents show, he was sued by several luxury manufacturers, including Chanel, that accused him of peddling counterfeits. In one case, filed by Chloé and Montblanc, the plaintiffs won a $300,000 settlement against Mr. Borker and two other defendants.

But litigation did little to impede his day job or his online ventures, and for years he worked on Wall Street and ran DecorMyEyes and other sites — which he wouldn’t name — at the same time. A few months before Lehman imploded, he says, he quit to focus on Internet sales.

He stumbled upon the upside of rudeness by accident.

“I stopped caring,” he says, and for that he blames customers. They lied and changed their minds in ways that cost him money, he says, and at some point he started telling them off in the bluntest of terms. To his amazement, this seemed to better his standing in certain Google searches, which brought in more sales.

Before this discovery, he’d hired a search optimization company to burnish his site’s reputation by writing positive things about DecorMyEyes online. Odious behavior, he realized, worked much better, and it didn’t cost him a penny.

“Look,” he says, grabbing an iPad off a small table. He types “Christian Audigier,” the name of a French designer, and “glasses” into Google. DecorMyEyes pops up high on the first page.

“Why am I there?” he asks, sounding both peeved and amazed. “I don’t belong there. I actually outrank the designer’s own Web site.”

The only explanation, he figures, is online chatter about his appalling ways. He swears that a vast majority of his transactions are amicable, and he is adamant that all of the customers he verbally attacks deserve it.

“Psychos” is his favorite term for these unhappy shoppers, and when they grumble about reporting him to the Better Business Bureau — nearly 300 have done so in the last three years — he urges them to grumble to Get Satisfaction as well.

When online fury about DecorMyEyes drops off, he dreams up new ways to stoke it. He briefly considered fabricating a story that Tony Russo had committed a murder — where he would have posted this story he doesn’t say — which he then planned to link anonymously to Get Satisfaction.

Nah, he ultimately decided. Too far.

The only real limit on his antics is imposed by Visa and MasterCard. If too many customers successfully dispute charges in a given month, he can be tossed out of their networks, he says. Precisely how many of these charge-backs is too many is one of the few business subjects that Mr. Borker deems off the record, but suffice it to say he tracks that figure carefully and dials down the animus if he’s nearing his limit. Until the next month arrives, when he dials it back up again.

In other words, Mr. Borker is perfectly capable of minding his manners. And he does so, right now, with every order that comes through a store he runs through Amazon.com’s affiliate program. (He declines to provide that store’s name.) He handles those transactions like a Boy Scout because Amazon doesn’t mess around, he says — the company just kicks you off its site if you infuriate customers.

MasterCard does not inspire such fear, and for good reason. Executives there say Mr. Borker was bounced from its system last year for excessive charge-backs, but he simply signed up through a different acquirer, as the banks used by merchants are known.

How Mr. Borker eluded the many safeguards that MasterCard has in place to prevent exactly such a round trip is a mystery, says Noah J. Hanft, the company’s general counsel.

“No system is perfect,” he says. “But there are checks and balances to weed out bad apples. Keep in mind, millions of transactions are conducted on our system every day, with 30 million merchants. But if even one of those transactions is unhappy we want to know about it.”

MasterCard will look into DecorMyEyes, he adds, which might lead to additional safeguards.

Good luck, says Mr. Borker.

“There is no such thing as shutting someone down on the Internet,” he said during our initial telephone interview. “It isn’t possible. If Visa and MasterCard ever shut me down, I’d use the name of a friend of mine. Give him 1 percent.”

CLARABELLE RODRIGUEZ is a petite woman with the lean physique that comes from running marathons. She was raised in Spain but has lived in New York for a decade and has worked as a speech therapist, among other jobs. She is sitting in her apartment with her fiancé and their French bulldog, which has had surgery and is recuperating in a red Radio Flyer wagon.

Ms. Rodriguez has a meticulous record of all things Russo. Sitting at a table with a laptop, she reads some of his e-mails and plays several saved messages left by him on her phone. It is unmistakably Mr. Borker.

“I’m stubborn,” she says when asked about her persistence in the last few months. “I wasn’t going to let this guy push me around.”

She recounted the days leading up to and immediately after the unhappy resolution of her Citibank dispute, when her cellphone would ring several times a night, often as late as 3 a.m. Whoever was calling would just hang up, and if she didn’t answer, no message was left.

“I contacted T-Mobile to let them know I was being harassed,” she says, “but they said there was nothing they could do because it was coming from a blocked number.”

Soon after, she posted a message on Get Satisfaction urging anyone who’d been scammed by DecorMyEyes to get in touch via e-mail. Her goal was to buttress her case against the company by forwarding complaints of other consumers to the authorities.

“You must be prepared to sign an affidavit if contacted by a detective,” she wrote on the site.

This angered Mr. Russo, and he let Ms. Rodriguez know it. She received an e-mail from him that promised, in a vague but creepy way, that she would end up on the evening news. Another read, in part, “you put your hand in fire. Now it’s time to get burned.”

Those e-mails left her trembling.

“This might sound like exaggeration, but I feared for my life,” she says. “I was actually looking over my shoulder when I left my apartment. Because I had no idea what he was capable of. Psychologically, he had gotten to me.”

Back she went to the police. Again, they were empathetic, but, she says, they told her that they were still trying to build a case.

“I wanted them to know,” she says, “that if anything were to happen to me, they were responsible.”

FOR months, Mr. Borker and Ms. Rodriguez were essentially working opposite sides of the Internet. He operated in the seams and cracks of the Web’s underbelly, while she was pleading for help with what is supposed to be the Web’s protective layer: a variety of corporations and law enforcement entities that could have intervened.

None did. Not Hostek.com, which provides DecorMyEyes’ Web hosting service. She wrote to the company and asked why it would associate with an online seller that has mistreated so many consumers.

She never heard back. More recently, Brian Anderson, the Hostek chief executive, replied to an e-mail request for an interview. He wrote that his company was recently made aware of some of Mr. Borker’s business practices and had already told him that it planned to sever ties. On Wednesday, Mr. Anderson wrote to confirm that those ties had been severed.

When contacted by a reporter, a Citigroup spokeswoman, Janis Tarter, sounded mortified by the treatment that Ms. Rodriguez says she received from the bank. Ms. Tarter said a representative would get in touch with her.

“Naturally, our customers are not responsible for any charges that they have not made or that were not authorized by them,” Ms. Tarter wrote in an e-mail.

Two weeks ago, a Citibank representative called Ms. Rodriguez and said that her refund would be restored. Ms. Rodriguez said no apology was offered.

After looking into DecorMyEyes, MasterCard said that Mr. Borker has once again been ejected from its system and this time has been placed on a special list that will make it harder for him to get back in. The company is now investigating why Mr. Borker wasn’t placed on that list last year.

EBay has conducted its own review and decided to bar Mr. Borker permanently from the site, having found what it called violations of its policies for buyers as well as accounts that were linked to previously suspended accounts.

A company spokesman, John Pluhowski, said eBay had recently started new systems that would make it easier to track abusive buyers.

“We think the tools we put in place in October will facilitate more aggressive monitoring,” Mr. Pluhowski said. He went on: “We are taking aggressive action against Mr. Borker and have taken steps to ensure that manufacturers and law enforcement authorities are aware of his practices.”

The New York City detective assigned to Ms. Rodriguez’s case, whose name — seriously — is Geraldo Rivera, told a reporter last week that he was still building a case and told Ms. Rodriguez that he couldn’t arrest Mr. Borker until he had more evidence.

Ms. Rodriguez says she made a handful of calls to the New York State attorney general’s office, and she also contacted IC3. She says that she never heard back from IC3, and that New York authorities got in touch only after she left a message that recounted some of the most graphic threats she’d received. Eventually, she said, she was asked by a lawyer at the attorney general’s office to fill out an affidavit.

When a reporter called the attorney general’s office last month, a lawyer there declined to comment. Yet the office has apparently been on the case. New York state criminal court records show that Mr. Borker was arrested on Oct. 27, accused of “aggravated harassment” and “stalking” involving Ms. Rodriguez. While Mr. Borker confirmed that he’d been arrested, he played down the charges, contending that the matter had already been dismissed. But a court document sets an arraignment for next month. When asked last week about the arrest, a spokesman for the attorney general’s office said he was unaware of it and was unable to verify that it had occurred.

This will not be Mr. Borker’s first encounter with the law. About 18 months ago, he says, a detective showed up at his door and arrested him on an accusation of physically threatening a woman who was a customer.

“She must have known somebody who knew somebody,” he says, meaning that this is the sort of trouble you encounter only when you cross well-connected people. He says the case was dismissed but contends that since then, he’s been careful not to make physical threats against customers — Ms. Rodriguez included.

I mention that sending that photo of her apartment building sounds kind of threatening.

Nothing but an image he copied off of the Web, from Google Earth, Mr. Borker says. He says he sent it to her only to underscore that when it came time to hire a process server to commence litigation, he’d find her. The “hand in fire” threat? Metaphorical, he says. Then again, he acknowledges with a sly grin, if Ms. Rodriguez thought that Tony Russo seemed a little scary, that was fine.

But in his telling of events, he is her victim, not the other way around.

“She’s a psycho,” he says, adding that she still has the glasses he sent her.

(Untrue, Ms. Rodriguez says.)

Despite the fear he has inspired, Mr. Borker doesn’t regard himself as a terror. He prefers to think of himself as the Howard Stern of online commerce — an outsize character prone to shocking utterances.

Except that Howard Stern doesn’t issue threats, I say.

“People overreact,” he pshaws, often because they’re unaccustomed to plain speaking, New York-style. Anyway, he adds, if somebody messes with you, and you mess back, “how is that a threat?”

DURING our initial phone conversation, Mr. Borker described his business as fantastically profitable. At his home, that seems unlikely. He won’t get specific about his annual income, but he tallies the business from the day before: 120 orders, gross revenue of roughly $20,000, which yielded perhaps $3,000 in profit, out of which he had to pay his employees — mostly women who answer phones and e-mail, off-site — and advertising.

“I’m doing fine,” he says.

We had moved upstairs by then, to his office, a small room with a computer and walls lined with hundreds of eyeglasses in their cases. These are all returns, he says wearily. Prada, Oliver Peoples, Cartier, Tiffany. Maybe $500,000 in inventory, he guesses. Each set of eyeglasses represents lost revenue and a brawl. He looks around the room with fatigue and disgust.

Which gets to the real impediment to capitalism, Borker-style, and the reason it is unlikely to catch on: it is physically exhausting. Mr. Borker typically works from about 10 a.m. until 5 the next morning, spending much of that time feuding with unhappy customers. He describes this grueling regimen of confrontation with a heaviness that is enough to make you want to give him a hug.

“I’m sure this is taking a toll on my health,” he complains. “I probably won’t live as long as you.”

Maybe he should find a more mellow job, I suggest — become a shepherd or something.

“I love this,” he counters, brightening. “I like the craziness. This works for me.”

The craziness is essentially a niche that would be impossible without the Internet. Surely nobody, even a guy nourished by antagonism, could handle DecorMyEyes’ steady flow of incensed consumers face to face. In addition, his overhead costs are tiny because, aside from returns, he doesn’t carry inventory. And thanks to Google Earth, he can faux-stalk his customers without leaving his house.

Mr. Borker’s phone rings as we head downstairs.

“Eyewear,” he answers.

It is a friend. Mr. Borker tells the caller that he is busy today and has to go to court in the evening. He hangs up, then mutters something about a tussle over $12,000. He shakes his head in aggravation.

“The customer is always right — not here, you understand?” he says, raising his voice. “I hate that phrase — the customer is always right. Why is the merchant always wrong? Can the customer ever be wrong? Is that not possible?”

We say our goodbyes, and I ask him to sit for a photograph. No, too many psychos out there, he explains. Besides, he doesn’t need his face in the newspaper. What he needs is his company’s name visible for all the world to see — and all the search engines to crawl — in the online version of The New York Times. Along with some keywords, of course.

“Just throw in ‘designer eyeglasses,’ ‘designer eyewear’ and a couple different brand names,” he says, “and I’m all set.”


Toby Lyles contributed research.

 

[sirfun]

Is America on the path to 'permanent war'?
By John Blake, CNN
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Some scholars say U.S. is on an unsustainable path to "permanent war"
Author: "Fixing Detroit should take precedent over fixing Afghanistan"
America's "global occupation force" betrays Founding Father's vision, book says
Afghan war supporters says nation's enemies have declared permanent war on us
CNN -- When the president decided to send more troops to a distant country during an unpopular war, one powerful senator had enough.

He warned that the U.S. military could not create stability in a country "where there is chaos ... democracy where there is no tradition of it, and honest government where corruption is almost a way of life."

"It's unnatural and unhealthy for a nation to be engaged in global crusades for some principle or idea while neglecting the needs of its own people," said Sen. J. William Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in 1966 as the Vietnam War escalated.

Fulbright's warning is being applied by some to Afghanistan today. The U.S. is still fighting dubious wars abroad while ignoring needs at home, says Andrew J. Bacevich, who tells Fulbright's story in his new book, "Washington Rules: America's Path To Permanent War."

As the Afghanistan war enters its ninth year, Bacevich and other commentators are asking: When does it end? They say the nation's national security leaders have put the U.S. on an unsustainable path to perpetual war and that President Obama is doing little to stop them.

Bacevich has become a leading voice among anti-war critics. He is a retired colonel in the U.S. Army, a former West Point instructor and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He's also a Boston University international relations professor who offers a historical perspective with his criticism. He says Obama has been ensnared by the "Washington Rules," a set of assumptions that have guided presidents since Harry Truman.

The rules say that the U.S. should act as a global policeman. "Fixing Iraq or Afghanistan ends up taking precedence over fixing Cleveland or Detroit," Bacevich writes.

His solution: The U.S. should stop deploying a "global occupation force" and focus on nation-building at home.

"The job is too big," he says of the U.S. global military presence. "We don't have enough money. We don't have enough troops. There's a growing recognition that the amount of red ink we're spilling is unsustainable."

Thomas Cushman, author of "A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Argument for War in Iraq," says Bacevich is mimicking isolationists who argued before World War II that the U.S. couldn't afford to get involved in other country's affairs.

"No one wants a permanent war, and nobody would argue that our resources could be better spent at home," Cushman says. "But the people we're fighting against have already declared permanent war against us."

Does Obama buy into the "Washington Rules"?

The questions about the Afghanistan War come at a pivotal moment. The Obama administration plans to review its Afghanistan strategy next month.

The president had pledged to start withdrawing some U.S. troops next July. Obama and NATO allies in Afghanistan recently announced that combat operations will now last until 2014.

Those dates matter little to Bacevich.

"Obama will not make a dent in the American penchant for permanent war," he says. "After he made the 2009 decision to escalate and prolong the war, it indicated quite clearly that he was either unwilling or unable to attempt a large-scale change."

Bacevich says the notion that the U.S. military has to stay in Afghanistan to deny al Qaeda a sanctuary doesn't "pass the laugh test."

"If you could assure me that staying in Afghanistan as long as it takes will deny al Qaeda a sanctuary anywhere in the world, then it might be worth our interests," he says. "Pakistan can provide a sanctuary. Yemen can provide a sanctuary. Hamburg [Germany] can provide a sanctuary. ''

John Cioffi, a political science professor at University of California, Riverside, says the nation's "increasingly unhinged ideological politics" makes it difficult for the country to extract itself from battles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Central Asia.

"The U.S. is not on the path to permanent war; it is in the midst of a permanent war," Cioffi says.

Permanent war is made possible by massive defense spending that has been viewed as untouchable. But that may change with the recent financial crisis and the decline of the nation's industry, Cioffi says.

More ordinary Americans might conclude that they can't have a vibrant domestic economy and unquestioned military spending, Cioffi says.

"All this points to a time in the future when the government will no longer have the resources or popular support to maintain what amounts to an imperial military presence around the world," he says.

Yet leaders in the nation's largest political parties may still ignore popular will, says Michael Boyle, a political science professor at La Salle University in Pennsylvania.

"While the public tends to be much more concerned with domestic issues, both the Democratic and Republican foreign policy establishments tend to be more internationalist and outward-looking," Boyle says. "This makes them far more willing to conclude that nation-building missions in Afghanistan are essential to national security."

Birth of the 'Washington Rules'

The debate over permanent war may sound academic, but it's also personal for Bacevich.

His son, a U.S. Army officer, was killed in Iraq, a war he opposes. And Bacevich has written several other books on the limits of American military power, including "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."

Bacevich says the Washington Rules emerged when America was exceptional -- right after World War II when a newly empowered U.S. deployed a global military presence to contain communism and spread democracy.

Communism's threat has disappeared, but U.S. leaders continue to identify existential threats to justify the nation's global military empire, Bacevich says.

The cost of that military empire is immense: The U.S. now spends $700 billion annually on its military, as much money as the defense budgets of rest of the world combined, he says.

Bacevich says the Founding Fathers would be aghast. They thought that "self-mastery should take precedence over mastering others."

"It's not that the Founding Fathers were isolationists or oblivious to the world beyond our shores," Bacevich says. "Their reading of history led them to believe that empire was incompatible with republican forms of government and a large standing army posed a threat to liberty."

What Bacevich's critics say

William C. Martel, author of "Victory in War," says the U.S. didn't build a global military presence after World War II out of hubris but because of necessity. Much of the world had been destroyed in 1945.

"We had no option but to be engaged as a global leader," he says. "If we did not stand up to totalitarianism, the world would have been a much worse place."

Martel, an associate professor of international security studies at The Fletcher School at Tufts University in Massachusetts, says the U.S. must have a global military presence to confront radical groups that seek weapons of mass destruction.

The U.S. military may fight in Afghanistan "for years." But it's also been in Germany and Japan for decades, Martel says.

"We have a $14 trillion a year economy," Martel says. "We're spending roughly 4 percent of our GDP on defense. That's historically where we've been for decades. I don't see that as unaffordable."

Permanent war can, perversely, boost the nation's economy, says Jerald Podair, a history professor at Lawrence University in Wisconsin.

After World War II, most observers predicted a return to the Depression, Podair says. But Cold War military spending drove the nation's economy to its longest period of sustained economic expansion in history.

Transferring military money to domestic needs will not stimulate the American economy the same way war spending will, Podair says.

"It is sad to say that 'war is the health of the state,' but during the last 70 years, that has generally proved to be true," Podair says. "Unfortunately, the United States may have to 'fight' its way out of recession, just as it did during World War II and the Cold War."

Obama, though, might fight his way to a presidential defeat in the 2012 election if he doesn't find a way to pull the U.S. off the path to permanent war, Bacevich says.

If Obama is still waging war in Afghanistan in 2012, he'll be in trouble, he says.

"That's going to pose difficulty for him in running for re-election because many of the people who voted for him in 2008 did so because they were convinced that he was going to bring about change in Washington," Bacevich says. "But the perpetuation of war wouldn't amount to change."

 

[sirfun]

It's shocking," Jon Stewart says. It certainly is. On the new 'Daily Show' (weeknights, 11PM ET on Comedy Central), Jon welcomes retired general Hugh Shelton as his guest. Shelton is the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he has written a new memoir -- in which he makes startling allegations about U.S. military conduct.

General Shelton alleges that a cabinet member in the Clinton administration was willing to kill a U.S. pilot to provoke war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The general states that in 1997, airmen were flying over Iraq each day, and were facing ground artillery fire from Iraqi forces.

A Clinton aide then came up with this "clever" plan: "Fly one of our [aircraft] low enough so that Saddam could actually shoot it down." Once the plane and the pilot were shot down, the U.S. would have an excuse to attack Iraq.

This was Shelton's response to the suggestion: "My fist clenched; the hair on the back of my neck stood up. ... I gritted my teeth and said [to the aide], 'I'll be willing to do that, as soon as I can get your ass qualified to fly low enough and slow enough to do it.'" The 'Daily Show' audience gave unanimous applause to these remarks. But the general doesn't claim that rushing to invade Iraq was a uniquely Democratic concept -- he says it was a bipartisan error.

Elsewhere in his book, he states that the 2003 Iraq War was begun by the Bush administration based on "a series of lies," plus "the worst style of leadership" that he had ever witnessed. Gen. Shelton considers the Iraq War to be a "fiasco." ... Thus far, the war in Iraq has cost over $740,000,000,000 -- but the cumulative cost could be between two and three trillion dollars. The war has caused the death of over 4,400 American troops, and left more than 31,000 wounded.

 

[sirfun]

WikiLeaks backlash: The first global cyber war has begun, claim hackersAs Julian Assange is held in solitary confinement at Wandsworth prison, the anonymous community of hacktivists takes to the cyber battlefields


Mark Townsend, Paul Harris in New York, Alex Duval Smith in Johannesburg, Dan Sabbagh, Josh Halliday guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 December 2010 21.30 GMT Article history
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Photograph: Lennart Preiss/AP

He is one of the newest recruits to Operation Payback. In a London bedroom, the 24-year-old computer hacker is preparing his weaponry for this week's battles in an evolving cyberwar. He is a self-styled defender of free speech, his weapon a laptop and his enemy the US corporations responsible for attacking the website WikiLeaks.

He had seen the flyers that began springing up on the web in mid-September. In chatrooms, on discussion boards and inboxes from Manchester to New York to Sydney the grinning face of a Guy Fawkes mask had appeared with a call to arms. Across the world a battalion of hackers was being summoned.

"Greetings, fellow anons," it said beneath the headline Operation Payback. Alongside were a series of software programs dubbed "our weapons of choice" and a stark message: people needed to show their "hatred".

Like most international conflicts, last week's internet war began over a relatively modest squabble, escalating in days into a global fight.

Before WikiLeaks, Operation Payback's initial target was America's recording industry, chosen for its prosecutions of music file downloaders. From those humble origins, Payback's anti-censorship, anti-copyright, freedom of speech manifesto would go viral, last week pitting an amorphous army of online hackers against the US government and some of the biggest corporations in the world.

Charles Dodd, a consultant to US government agencies on internet security, said: "[The hackers] attack from the shadows and they have no fear of retaliation. There are no rules of engagement in this kind of emerging warfare."

The battle now centres on Washington's fierce attempts to close down WikiLeaks and shut off the supply of confidential US government cables. By Thursday, the hacktivists were routinely attacking those who had targeted WikiLeaks, among them icons of the corporate world, credit card firms and some of the largest online companies. It seemed to be the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net.

But the clash has cast the spotlight wider, on the net's power to act as a thorn not only in the side of authoritarian regimes but western democracies, on our right to information and the responsibility of holding secrets. It has also asked profound questions over the role of the net itself. One blogger dubbed it the "first world information war".

At the heart of the conflict is the WikiLeaks founder, the enigmatic figure of Julian Assange – lionised by some as the Ned Kelly of the digital age for his continued defiance of a superpower, condemned by his US detractors as a threat to national security.

Calls for Assange to be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage will return this week. The counteroffensive by Operation Payback is likely to escalate.

The targets include the world's biggest online retailer, Amazon – already assaulted once for its decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks-related material – Washington, Scotland Yard and the websites of senior US politicians. There is talk of infecting Facebook, which last week removed a page used by pro-WikiLeaks hackers, with a virus that spreads from profile to profile causing it to crash. No one seems certain where the febrile cyber conflict will lead, only that it has just begun.


London

At 9.15am last Tuesday a thin, white-haired figure left the Frontline Club, the west London establishment dedicated to preserving freedom of speech, and voluntarily surrendered to police. After two weeks of newspaper revelations concerning countries from Korea to Nigeria, and figures such as Silvio Berlusconi and Prince Andrew, a warrant for Assange's arrest had just been received by British police. It was from Swedish prosecutors eager to question him on unrelated allegations of rape.

The response to WikiLeaks' cable release had been savage, particularly in the US. Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, said those who passed the secrets to Assange should be executed. Sarah Palin demanded Assange be hunted in the same way an al-Qaida operative would be pursued. The US attorney general Eric Holder ordered his officials to begin a criminal investigation into Assange with the intention of putting him on trial in the US. News of his arrest, even on unrelated charges, pleased the US authorities. "That sounds like good news to me," said Robert Gates, US secretary of defence.

Yet even as Assange prepared to appear in a London court last week, an unlikely alliance of defenders had begun plotting to turn on the forces circling WikiLeaks. They were beginning to attack Amazon, which had been persuaded to sever links with WikiLeaks by Joe Lieberman, who heads the US Senate's homeland security committee; they also hit every domain name system (DNS) that broke WikiLeaks.org's domain name: Mastercard, Visa and Paypal, which stopped facilitating donations to the site, and the Swiss post office which froze WikiLeaks' bank account.

Operation Payback was hitting back alongside a fledgling offshoot, Operation Avenge Assange, both operating under the Anonymous umbrella. These are a loose alliance of hackers united by a near-obsessive desire for information libertarianism who congregate on the website 4Chan.org.

The cyberwar did not only involve obvious symbols of authority, though. For days, from their darkened chatrooms, the Anonymous ones had been watching a hacker called the Jester who seemed to be co-ordinating a series of attacks on internet service providers hosting WikiLeaks. They had noticed the Jester's pro-censorship credentials, deducing he must be receiving help. Speculation mounted that the Jester was a shadowy conduit working at the behest of the US authorities. "We wondered who was really behind his anti-WikiLeaks agenda," said a source.

Attempts to railroad WikiLeaks off the net quickly failed. Removing its hosting servers has increased WikiLeaks' ability to stay online. More than 1,300 volunteer "mirror" sites, including the French newspaper Libération, have already surfaced to store the classified cables. Within days the WikiLeaks web content had spread across so many enclaves of the internet it was immune to attack by any single legal authority.

In some respects, WikiLeaks has never been safer or as aggressively defended. As Assange was remanded in custody and taken to Wandsworth jail, Anonymous vowed to "punish" the institutions that had axed links with the website under pressure from the US authorities. The websites of Visa, Mastercard and PayPal were brought down; so too the Swedish government's.

One Anonymous hacker said: "I've rambled on and on about the 'oncoming internet war' for years. I'm not saying I know how to win. But I am saying the war is on."


Stockholm

Unsurprisingly, the timing of Assange's arrest and aspects of Sweden's initial handling of the sexual allegations prompted his lawyer Mark Stephens to denounce the moves as politically motivated. A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".

That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.

Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.

In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.

In Sweden, among the country's community of hackers and left-leaning political activists, the timing is viewed as coincidental rather than conspiratorial.

"The Americans are very lucky indeed that Assange screwed around in Sweden, a society which takes rape allegations very seriously,'' said Åsa Linderborg, culture editor of the leftwing Aftonbladet tabloid. Film-maker Bosse Lindquist, whose WikiLeaks investigation will be broadcast on Swedish TV tonight, and who has spent many hours with Assange over the past few months, said Assange's attitude to women did not seem in any way striking.

"If you look at the two prosecutors involved in investigating the rape allegations, they are not types you would imagine bowing to any kind of pressure from, say, the Swedish government or the United States.''

A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, also dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets.''

Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.

"Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats,'' Linderborg said.

Of course, given the nature of the web, the allegations have triggered a series of attacks on both women's characters with lurid claims of "women who cry rape" and "bitches trying to send an innocent man to prison".


Operation Payback

Those monitoring the chatrooms used by Operation Payback say its hackers have set aside the sexual allegations, instead concentrating their efforts on amassing greater potency for the next phase of the WikLeaks fightback. The weapons deployed last week were "denial of service" attacks in which online computers are harnessed to jam target sites with mountains of requests for data, knocking them out of commission.

The initial attacks against the Swiss PostFinance required about 200 computers, according to one Anonymous source. Yet within a day hackers were able to recruit thousands more pro-WikiLeaks footsoldiers. By the time the Visa and Mastercard websites were disrupted last Wednesday, close to 3,000 computers were involved.

Anonymous leaders began distributing software tools to allow anyone with a computer to join Payback. So far more than 9,000 users in the US have downloaded the software; in second place is the UK with 3,000. Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, France, Spain, Poland, Russia and Australia follow with more than 1,000. The 11th country embroiled in the attacks is Sweden, where WikiLeaks's massive underground servers are housed, with 75 downloads.

Sean-Paul Correll, a cyber threat analyst at Panda Security, who has monitored Operation Payback since its conception, said it was impossible to "profile" those involved. "They are anonymous and they are everywhere," he said. "They have day jobs. They are adults and kids. It is just a bunch of people." Middle-class professional members working alongside self-styled anarchists.

Ostensibly, Anonymous is a 24-hour democracy run by whoever happens to be logged on; leaders emerge and disappear depending on the target that is being attacked and the whims of members. Correll said: "This group does not exist with some sort of hierarchy. It exists with a few organisers but these can change at any time. That gives the group great power in that it is impossible to trace and define. At the same time it is also a source of weakness as its actions can be unfocused."

Ideas are floated on internet bulletin boards, whose location moves daily to evade detection. Ultimately a proposal hits a democratic "tipping point" and action is taken.

A major test of Payback's mounting firepower will be Amazon, given the size of its servers. The attempt to attack the site last Thursday was half-hearted, but nevertheless audacious. Now sources estimate they would need between 30,000 and 40,000 computers to hurt Amazon and there is a growing feeling among hacktivists that it could happen. If it does, the retailer could lose millions of dollars during the Christmas season.

So far, though, most of the attacks have been principally designed to register protest rather than destabilise companies financially, opting for their public websites rather than their underlying infrastructure.

Two of the internet's most important social networking sites – Twitter and Facebook – are also becoming targets of elements within Anonymous.

Twitter upset hackers last week by removing the Anonymous account – which had 22,000 followers – amid speculation that it was preventing the term #wikileaks appearing on its trending topics. The Anonymous page on Facebook was removed for violating its conditions, a move that has similarly annoyed a cohort of hackers. Both Facebook and Twitter have won praise in recent years as outlets for free speech, yet both also harbour corporate aspirations that hinge on their ability to serve as advertising platforms for other companies.

Their use by Anonymous to direct people planning attacks has, according to many analysts, placed both in a difficult position. Facebook, which still has sites eulogising murderer Raoul Moat and Holocaust deniers, said it drew the line on groups that attack others, a bold move considering the site's WikiLeaks page boasts more than 1.3 million supporters. Any evidence that both sites yielded to US pressure and the gloves would be off. So too for any organisation that yields to American demands over WikiLeaks.

Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a book which argues the internet has failed to democraticise the world successfully, believes the attacks are already viewed by Washington "as striking at the very heart of the global economy".

Another emerging target in the weeks ahead is the US government itself. For a brief time last Tuesday, senate.gov – the website of every US senator – went down. Cyberguerillas claim it is a possible sign of things to come.


The future

The trajectory of the WikiLeaks controversy is almost impossible to predict. On Tuesday Assange will attend his next bail hearing. Although supporters have stumped up £180,000, it is expected bail will be refused, pending a full hearing of Sweden's extradition request. However his lawyer may also reveal fresh claims of US interference in the saga.

Regardless of the fate of its founder, WikiLeaks will continue releasing declassified cables. At the moment only several hundred of 250,000 cables have been publicised.

Analysts now describe the organisation's structure as a "networked enterprise", a phrase that has been used in the past in relation to al-Qaida.

For all the US attempts, it is clear the attacks on WikiLeaks have made minimal impact and are unlikely to affect the availability of the information that WikiLeaks has already leaked.

Meanwhile, Senator Lieberman has indicated that the New York Times and other news organisations using the WikiLeaks cables may be investigated for breaking US espionage laws. At present, who will win the "world's first information war" remains unclear.

Morozov said: "There will be many more people from the CIA and NSA [National Security Agency] hanging out around them."

But the conflict increasingly seems likely to target the real profits of US corporations. Today a 24-year-old from London will ready his weapons for the battle ahead.

 

[sirfun]

damn

all of surf baked's "palate cleansing" pictures
are gone now

 

[geedee]

damn

all of surf baked's "palate cleansing" pictures
are gone now

Haha. Rey commited erBB hara-kiri with a lovely photo of a naked woman (shee seemed nice) with a tampon string hanging out of her muff cabbage. <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/facelick.gif" alt="" />

Perfectly natural. The admins are prudes. <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/monkey.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/forum/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

 

[sirfun]

damn!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Times
December 16, 2010
Wall Street Whitewash
By PAUL KRUGMAN
When the financial crisis struck, many people — myself included — considered it a teachable moment. Above all, we expected the crisis to remind everyone why banks need to be effectively regulated.

How naïve we were. We should have realized that the modern Republican Party is utterly dedicated to the Reaganite slogan that government is always the problem, never the solution. And, therefore, we should have realized that party loyalists, confronted with facts that don’t fit the slogan, would adjust the facts.

Which brings me to the case of the collapsing crisis commission.

The bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission was established by law to “examine the causes, domestic and global, of the current financial and economic crisis in the United States.” The hope was that it would be a modern version of the Pecora investigation of the 1930s, which documented Wall Street abuses and helped pave the way for financial reform.

Instead, however, the commission has broken down along partisan lines, unable to agree on even the most basic points.

It’s not as if the story of the crisis is particularly obscure. First, there was a widely spread housing bubble, not just in the United States, but in Ireland, Spain, and other countries as well. This bubble was inflated by irresponsible lending, made possible both by bank deregulation and the failure to extend regulation to “shadow banks,” which weren’t covered by traditional regulation but nonetheless engaged in banking activities and created bank-type risks.

Then the bubble burst, with hugely disruptive consequences. It turned out that Wall Street had created a web of interconnection nobody understood, so that the failure of Lehman Brothers, a medium-size investment bank, could threaten to take down the whole world financial system.

It’s a straightforward story, but a story that the Republican members of the commission don’t want told. Literally.

Last week, reports Shahien Nasiripour of The Huffington Post, all four Republicans on the commission voted to exclude the following terms from the report: “deregulation,” “shadow banking,” “interconnection,” and, yes, “Wall Street.”

When Democratic members refused to go along with this insistence that the story of Hamlet be told without the prince, the Republicans went ahead and issued their own report, which did, indeed, avoid using any of the banned terms.

That report is all of nine pages long, with few facts and hardly any numbers. Beyond that, it tells a story that has been widely and repeatedly debunked — without responding at all to the debunkers.

In the world according to the G.O.P. commissioners, it’s all the fault of government do-gooders, who used various levers — especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored loan-guarantee agencies — to promote loans to low-income borrowers. Wall Street — I mean, the private sector — erred only to the extent that it got suckered into going along with this government-created bubble.

It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is. For one thing, as I’ve already noted, the housing bubble was international — and Fannie and Freddie weren’t guaranteeing mortgages in Latvia. Nor were they guaranteeing loans in commercial real estate, which also experienced a huge bubble.

Beyond that, the timing shows that private players weren’t suckered into a government-created bubble. It was the other way around. During the peak years of housing inflation, Fannie and Freddie were pushed to the sidelines; they only got into dubious lending late in the game, as they tried to regain market share.

But the G.O.P. commissioners are just doing their job, which is to sustain the conservative narrative. And a narrative that absolves the banks of any wrongdoing, that places all the blame on meddling politicians, is especially important now that Republicans are about to take over the House.

Last week, Spencer Bachus, the incoming G.O.P. chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told The Birmingham News that “in Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks.”

He later tried to walk the remark back, but there’s no question that he and his colleagues will do everything they can to block effective regulation of the people and institutions responsible for the economic nightmare of recent years. So they need a cover story saying that it was all the government’s fault.

In the end, those of us who expected the crisis to provide a teachable moment were right, but not in the way we expected. Never mind relearning the case for bank regulation; what we learned, instead, is what happens when an ideology backed by vast wealth and immense power confronts inconvenient facts. And the answer is, the facts lose.

 

[Sirfunn]

Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie was surprised to hear the president's voice on the phone. Barack Obama had two things to discuss with Lurie: the redemption of Michael Vick and the alternative-energy plans Lurie unveiled this fall for Lincoln Financial Field. I talked about the Vick story on NBC last night.

"The president wanted to talk about two things, but the first was Michael,'' Lurie told me. "He said, 'So many people who serve time never get a fair second chance. He was ... passionate about it. He said it's never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.''

Lurie said Obama and he talked football. "He's a real football fan,'' Lurie said. "He loves his Bears. He really follows it. He knew how Michael was doing. It was really interesting to hear.''

The Eagles announced last month they would run the first self-sufficient alternative-energy sports stadium in the country. They'll install 80 spiral wind turbines to the stadium and mount 2,500 solar panels. Together, those devices will power about 30 percent of the stadium's energy needs. In addition, a biodiesel plant will be built nearby and that alternative energy source will help power (along with natural gas) the remaining 70 percent of the stadium's power needs. In addition, the project to install all the devices will employ 200 people for a year in, obviously, a down economy.

Over the course of the stadium's life, the team believes it can save $60 million in energy costs. That was big to Lurie, who's aggressively conservation-minded. He told Obama he was happy to put a plan like this in place, but he wouldn't have done it unless it made some financial sense. "It's good business for us, which is the point,'' Lurie said. "We talked about policy and what he hopes can happen with alternative energy, and he raved about us being the first to put a plan like this in place.''



Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/peter_king/12/26/week-16/index.html#ixzz19Kmcl6RB