The problem with deregulation: Where do we go from here?

In case you wonder if deregulation is the pivotal policy that led to the collapse on Wall Street, here's a quick, easily-grasped explanation that should help you grasp why that lofty "ideal" has failed in our never-quite-ideal real world. Are you surprised that some have tried to use the crisis for their own political or financial gain?

In what other industry would you have confidence enough to let the people with the most to gain act without regulation? Would car companies be so concerned with passenger safety without regulation? Would you want doctors to practice unregulated- no assurance they’d act with YOUR best interest in mind? Lawyers? Accountants? Toy Manufacturers? Food processors? I’m not suggesting there’s nothing good about a free-market economy, nor am I suggesting every insurance company or investment firm is run by greedy executives, but there have been snake-oil salesmen preying upon the unwary since before the dawn of history as nearly as I can determine.

We left foxes guarding the chicken coop. It's time for a carefully considered change.

• END Golden Parachutes -- Taxpayer dollars should not be used to reward the irresponsible, greedy Wall Street executives who lobbied for deregulation and engineered this disaster. Those who have earned millions must return their salaries as a starting point... imagine if that money might be used to PAY those loans down.

• TAXPAYERS, Not Just Wall Street -- Any bailout plan must include a payback strategy for taxpayers who are footing the bill and aid to innocent homeowners who are facing foreclosure.

• Bipartisan Oversight -- $700,000,000,000 is a staggering amount of money involved, and since it's coming from taxes the source MANDATES bipartisan expert oversight to ensure accountability.

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Richard Cabrera Files Fraudulent Report: Chevron Claim

The "Richard Cabrera Report" is the basis for the much-used number "$16 billion" as the cost of Ecuador's lawsuit against Chevron. Now, Chevron representatives hammered this claim for the following reasons:

1. Cabrera manipulated and altered findings to justify false conclusions, including backdating photos;

2. He presented no evidence of pollution by Texaco Petroleum, erroneously assigning $1.4 billion in remediation costs to pits he did not visit and do not exist;

3. He presented no evidence to support cancer claims - neither identifying a single individual nor including a single medical report;

4. He did not take a single drinking water sample to establish contamination, yet he assigned $428 million in damages to be paid to improve Ecuador's potable water system;

5. Plaintiffs helped Cabrera compile the report, accompanying and assisting him on field trips, influencing the content of his report by providing him methodological tools such as questionable surveys and pre-written reports to use as report exhibits;

Item number 5 is key, because it's another example of how the government of Ecuador has been assisting the lawsuit against Chevron. Finding evidence to support this claim has been hard but this is one more item.

Ecuador Lawyer Pablo Fajardo Says Chevron Ecuador Case Could End In 2011

This is new and extraordinary news, considering that both sides expected a ruling this year. Well, someone's going to have to finance Steve Donziger for another three years!

By Mercedes Alvaro - Dow Jones Newswires, September 16, 2008: 5:47 PM

QUITO - (Dow Jones)- A five-year-old environmental-damage trial in Ecuador against U.S. oil company Chevron Corp. (CVX) could take at least two or three more years, lawyers said Tuesday.

The delay is expected after objections to an April report from a court- appointed expert were received by a court in Lago Agrio.

The report prepared by Richard Cabrera, a geologist and environmental consultant, recommended that Chevron pay at least $8.3 billion, and maybe as much as $16 billion, in compensation for environmental damage in Ecuador.

Chevron is facing the lawsuit in Ecuador for alleged contamination by its Texaco unit in the Amazon region of Lago Agrio. The company is accused of having used out-of-date technology that led to environmental damage.

The complaint was launched in 1993 in a lawsuit in New York courts, which ruled that the case should be tried in Ecuador. In May 2003, several indigenous groups filed a lawsuit against the company in Lago Agrio (Nueva Loja).

The judge is expected to give Cabrera a reasonable timeframe to answer the objections from both Chevron and the plaintiffs.

Pablo Fajardo, one of the plaintiffs lawyers, told Dow Jones Newswires that he expects a final decision in 2011.

Chevron on Monday submitted its objections to Cabrera's report, saying that it contains "fabricated and erroneous evidence," exaggerated claims for damages and "was developed in collusion with the plaintiffs and their attorneys."

The company urged the court to reject Cabrera's report and accused him of manipulating and altering findings to justify false conclusions, including backdating photos.

The aim, said the company, is to make Chevron liable for all the environmental impact caused solely by Ecuadorian state oil company Petroecuador during 18-plus years of operation of the concession.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs submitted their objections on Tuesday.

Fajardo said the plaintiffs are asking Cabrera to calculate the amount of damage to water supplies, and other damages.

Chevron has said several times that it has met all the requirements for environmental cleanup that were agreed upon with Petroecuador.

Chevron also has said that in 1998 Petroecuador released the U.S.-based company from any liabilities regarding cleanup efforts.

The plaintiffs said that this release isn't from individual claims and that the so-called "cleaned up" pits remain contaminated.

Ecuador Lawyer Pablo Fajardo Says Chevron Ecuador Case Could End In 2011

This is new and extraordinary news, considering that both sides expected a ruling this year. Well, someone's going to have to finance Steve Donziger for another three years!

By Mercedes Alvaro - Dow Jones Newswires, September 16, 2008: 5:47 PM

QUITO - (Dow Jones)- A five-year-old environmental-damage trial in Ecuador against U.S. oil company Chevron Corp. (CVX) could take at least two or three more years, lawyers said Tuesday.

The delay is expected after objections to an April report from a court- appointed expert were received by a court in Lago Agrio.

The report prepared by Richard Cabrera, a geologist and environmental consultant, recommended that Chevron pay at least $8.3 billion, and maybe as much as $16 billion, in compensation for environmental damage in Ecuador.

Chevron is facing the lawsuit in Ecuador for alleged contamination by its Texaco unit in the Amazon region of Lago Agrio. The company is accused of having used out-of-date technology that led to environmental damage.

The complaint was launched in 1993 in a lawsuit in New York courts, which ruled that the case should be tried in Ecuador. In May 2003, several indigenous groups filed a lawsuit against the company in Lago Agrio (Nueva Loja).

The judge is expected to give Cabrera a reasonable timeframe to answer the objections from both Chevron and the plaintiffs.

Pablo Fajardo, one of the plaintiffs lawyers, told Dow Jones Newswires that he expects a final decision in 2011.

Chevron on Monday submitted its objections to Cabrera's report, saying that it contains "fabricated and erroneous evidence," exaggerated claims for damages and "was developed in collusion with the plaintiffs and their attorneys."

The company urged the court to reject Cabrera's report and accused him of manipulating and altering findings to justify false conclusions, including backdating photos.

The aim, said the company, is to make Chevron liable for all the environmental impact caused solely by Ecuadorian state oil company Petroecuador during 18-plus years of operation of the concession.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs submitted their objections on Tuesday.

Fajardo said the plaintiffs are asking Cabrera to calculate the amount of damage to water supplies, and other damages.

Chevron has said several times that it has met all the requirements for environmental cleanup that were agreed upon with Petroecuador.

Chevron also has said that in 1998 Petroecuador released the U.S.-based company from any liabilities regarding cleanup efforts.

The plaintiffs said that this release isn't from individual claims and that the so-called "cleaned up" pits remain contaminated.

Omhari Sengstacke Charged WIth Bringing A Gun To Obama's Home

What's stunning about this election is the degree to wish there are people who seem invested in maintaing a kind of racial status quo where someone in America has to be on "top" if their White, and on the "bottom" if they're Black. It reminds me of what my Mom told me when I tried to bring the 2005 Super Bowl to Oakland:

Between Black's who are jealous and Whites who think someone White should be doing what you're doing, you've got a problem.

Some of those people want you killed. People like Omhari Sengstacke for example. This guy came to the security perimeter of Barack's home, was told to leave, then came back and had a gun in his car. Plus, he's a convicted felon.

Yikes.

Here's the rest of the story...

McCain Accused of Covering Up Vietnam POW Information

I just received an email which points to a website page article accusing -- in a ton of detail -- Senator John McCain of covering up information on Vietnam POW's still in that country. I personally remember the clamor for information on what happened to POWs who never made it out of Vietnam.

But here's the text of what I was sent:

Senator McCain and the Vietnam War Prisoner of War Cover Up

Sydney H. Schanberg

September 18, 2008 - John McCain, who has risen to political prominence on his image as a Vietnam POW war hero, has, inexplicably, worked very hard to hide from the public stunning information about American prisoners in Vietnam who, unlike him, didn't return home. Throughout his Senate career, McCain has quietly sponsored and pushed into federal law a set of prohibitions that keep the most revealing information about these men buried as classified documents. Thus the war hero who people would logically imagine as a determined crusader for the interests of POWs and their families became instead the strange champion of hiding the evidence and closing the books.

Almost as striking is the manner in which the mainstream press has shied from reporting the POW story and McCain's role in it, even as the Republican Party has made McCain's military service the focus of his presidential campaign. Reporters who had covered the Vietnam War turned their heads and walked in other directions. McCain doesn't talk about the missing men, and the press never asks him about them.

The sum of the secrets McCain has sought to hide is not small. There exists a telling mass of official documents, radio intercepts, witness depositions, satellite photos of rescue symbols that pilots were trained to use, electronic messages from the ground containing the individual code numbers given to airmen, a rescue mission by a special forces unit that was aborted twice by Washington—and even sworn testimony by two Defense secretaries that "men were left behind." This imposing body of evidence suggests that a large number—the documents indicate probably hundreds—of the US prisoners held by Vietnam were not returned when the peace treaty was signed in January 1973 and Hanoi released 591 men, among them Navy combat pilot John S. McCain.

Mass of Evidence

The Pentagon had been withholding significant information from POW families for years. What's more, the Pentagon's POW/MIA operation had been publicly shamed by internal whistleblowers and POW families for holding back documents as part of a policy of "debunking" POW intelligence even when the information was obviously credible.

The pressure from the families and Vietnam veterans finally forced the creation, in late 1991, of a Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. The chairman was John Kerry. McCain, as a former POW, was its most pivotal member. In the end, the committee became part of the debunking machine.

One of the sharpest critics of the Pentagon's performance was an insider, Air Force Lieut. Gen. Eugene Tighe, who headed the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) during the 1970s. He openly challenged the Pentagon's position that no live prisoners existed, saying that the evidence proved otherwise. McCain was a bitter opponent of Tighe, who was eventually pushed into retirement.

Included in the evidence that McCain and his government allies suppressed or sought to discredit is a transcript of a senior North Vietnamese general's briefing of the Hanoi politburo, discovered in Soviet archives by an American scholar in 1993. The briefing took place only four months before the 1973 peace accords. The general, Tran Van Quang, told the politburo members that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war's end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington.

Throughout the Paris negotiations, the North Vietnamese tied the prisoner issue tightly to the issue of reparations. They were adamant in refusing to deal with them separately. Finally, in a February 2, 1973, formal letter to Hanoi's premier, Pham Van Dong, Nixon pledged $3.25 billion in "postwar reconstruction" aid "without any political conditions." But he also attached to the letter a codicil that said the aid would be implemented by each party "in accordance with its own constitutional provisions." That meant Congress would have to approve the appropriation, and Nixon and Kissinger knew well that Congress was in no mood to do so. The North Vietnamese, whether or not they immediately understood the double-talk in the letter, remained skeptical about the reparations promise being honored - and it never was. Hanoi thus appears to have held back prisoners—just as it had done when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and withdrew their forces from Vietnam. In that case, France paid ransoms for prisoners and brought them home.

In a private briefing in 1992, high-level CIA officials told me that as the years passed and the ransom never came, it became more and more difficult for either government to admit that it knew from the start about the unacknowledged prisoners. Those prisoners had not only become useless as bargaining chips but also posed a risk to Hanoi's desire to be accepted into the international community. The CIA officials said their intelligence indicated strongly that the remaining men—those who had not died from illness or hard labor or torture—were eventually executed.

My own research, detailed below, has convinced me that it is not likely that more than a few—if any—are alive in captivity today. (That CIA briefing at the agency's Langley, Virginia, headquarters was conducted "off the record," but because the evidence from my own reporting since then has brought me to the same conclusion, I felt there was no longer any point in not writing about the meeting.)

For many reasons, including the absence of a political constituency for the missing men other than their families and some veterans' groups, very few Americans are aware of the POW story and of McCain's role in keeping it out of public view and denying the existence of abandoned POWs. That is because McCain has hardly been alone in his campaign to hide the scandal.

The Arizona Senator, now the Republican candidate for President, has actually been following the lead of every White House since Richard Nixon's and thus of every CIA director, Pentagon chief and national security advisor, not to mention Dick Cheney, who was George H. W. Bush's defense secretary. Their biggest accomplice has been an indolent press, particularly in Washington.

McCain's Role

Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon (and thus McCain), the bill went nowhere. Reintroduced the following year, it again disappeared. But a few months later, a new measure, known as "the McCain Bill," suddenly appeared. By creating a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the documents could emerge—only records that revealed no POW secrets—it turned the Truth Bill on its head. (See one example, at left, when the Pentagon cited McCain's bill in rejecting a FOIA request.) The McCain bill became law in 1991 and remains so today. So crushing to transparency are its provisions that it actually spells out for the Pentagon and other agencies several rationales, scenarios and justifications for not releasing any information at all—even about prisoners discovered alive in captivity. Later that year, the Senate Select Committee was created, where Kerry and McCain ultimately worked together to bury evidence...more here

McCain's Camp Whines and Complains about Media

McCain adviser Steve Schmidt in the midst of a whiny, irritating temper tantrum during a conference call with the Media.

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