The Kingdom 'braces for nuclear war'

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Saudi Arabia is reportedly preparing to counter any 'radioactive hazards' which may result from a US strike on Iran's nuclear plants.

Popular government-guided Saudi newspaper Okaz recently reported that the Saudi Shura Council approved of nuclear fallout preparation plans only a day after US Vice President Dick Cheney met with the Kingdom's high ranking officials, including King Abdullah.

As a result of the Shura ruling, the Saudi government will start the implementation of 'national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the Kingdom following expert warnings of possible attacks on Iran's Bushehr nuclear reactors'.

As the details of Cheney's recent discussions with his Arab allies remain unclear, pundits have begun to question the timing of the drastic measure by the Shura.

Analysts claim the Bush administration had long rattled sabers with Iran over its nuclear program and is now informing its Arab allies of a potential war, in turn, allowing them to take precautionary measures.

With the sudden resignation of Admiral William Fallon, a high-ranking US military official who was a fierce critic of White House war rhetoric against Iran, and reports of the recent deployment of a US nuclear submarine in the Persian Gulf; there is speculation that Washington is moving forward with yet another war plan in the oil-rich Middle East.

Setting the Record Straight on Marijuana and Addiction

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By Paul Armentano

The U.S. government believes that America is going to pot – literally.

Earlier this month, the U.S. National Institute on Drug Abuse announced plans to spend $4 million to establish the nation’s first-ever "Center on Cannabis Addiction," which will be based in La Jolla, Calif. The goal of the center, according to NIDA’s press release, is to "develop novel approaches to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of marijuana addiction."

Not familiar with the notion of "marijuana addiction"? You’re not alone. In fact, aside from the handful of researchers who have discovered that there are gobs of federal grant money to be had hunting for the government’s latest pot boogeyman, there’s little consensus that such a syndrome is clinically relevant – if it even exists at all.

But don’t try telling that to the mainstream press – which recently published headlines worldwide alleging, "Marijuana withdrawal rivals that of nicotine." The alleged "study" behind the headlines involved all of 12 participants, each of whom were longtime users of pot and tobacco, and assessed the self-reported moods of folks after they were randomly chosen to abstain from both substances. Big surprise: they weren’t happy.

And don’t try telling Big Pharma – which hopes to cash in on the much-hyped "pot and addiction" craze by touting psychoactive prescription drugs like Lithium to help hardcore smokers kick the marijuana habit.

And certainly don’t try telling the drug "treatment" industry, whose spokespeople are quick to warn that marijuana "treatment" admissions have risen dramatically in recent years, but neglect to explain that this increase is due entirely to the advent of drug courts sentencing minor pot offenders to rehab in lieu of jail. According to state and national statistics, up to 70 percent of all individuals in drug treatment for marijuana are placed there by the criminal justice system. Of those in treatment, some 36 percent had not even used marijuana in the 30 days prior to their admission. These are the "addicts"?

Indeed, the concept of pot addiction is big business – even if the evidence in support of the pseudosyndrome is flimsy at best.

And what does the science say? Well, according to the nonpartisan National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine – which published a multiyear, million-dollar federal study assessing marijuana and health in 1999 – "millions of Americans have tried marijuana, but most are not regular users [and] few marijuana users become dependent on it." The investigator added, "[A]though [some] marijuana users develop dependence, they appear to be less likely to do so than users of other drugs (including alcohol and nicotine), and marijuana dependence appears to be less severe than dependence on other drugs."

Just how less likely? According to the Institute of Medicine’s 267-page report, fewer than 10 percent of those who try cannabis ever meet the clinical criteria for a diagnosis of "drug dependence" (based on DSM-III-R criteria). By contrast, the IOM reported that 32 percent of tobacco users, 23 percent of heroin users, 17 percent of cocaine users and 15 percent of alcohol users meet the criteria for "drug dependence."

In short, it’s the legal drugs that have Americans hooked – not pot.

But what about the claims that ceasing marijuana smoking can trigger withdrawal symptoms similar to those associated with quitting tobacco? Once again, it’s a matter of degree. According to the Institute of Medicine, pot’s withdrawal symptoms, when identified, are "mild and subtle" compared with the profound physical syndromes associated with ceasing chronic alcohol use – which can be fatal – or those abstinence symptoms associated with daily tobacco use, which are typically severe enough to persuade individuals to reinitiate their drug-taking behavior.

The IOM report further explained, "[U]nder normal cannabis use, the long half-life and slow elimination from the body of THC prevent[s] substantial abstinence symptoms" from occurring. As a result, cannabis’ withdrawal symptoms are typically limited to feelings of mild anxiety, irritability, agitation and insomnia.

Most importantly, unlike the withdrawal symptoms associated with the cessation of most other intoxicants, pot’s mild after-effects do not appear to be either severe or long-lasting enough to perpetuate marijuana use in individuals who have decided to quit. This is why most marijuana smokers report voluntarily ceasing their cannabis use by age 30 with little physical or psychological difficulty. By comparison, many cigarette smokers who pick up the habit early in life continue to smoke for the rest of their lives, despite making numerous efforts to quit.

So let’s review.

Marijuana is widely accepted by the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, the British Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and others to lack the severe physical and psychological dependence liability associated with most other intoxicants, including alcohol and tobacco. Further, pot lacks the profound abstinence symptoms associated with most legal intoxicants, including caffeine.

That’s not to say that some marijuana smokers don’t find quitting difficult. Naturally, a handful of folks do, though this subpopulation is hardly large enough to warrant pot’s legal classification (along with heroin) as an illicit substance with a "high potential for abuse." Nor does this fact justify the continued arrest of more than 800,000 Americans annually for pot violations any more than such concerns would warrant the criminalization of booze or nicotine.

Now if I can only get NIDA to fork me over that $4 million check.

The Ravaging Effects of Capitalism on My Hometowns

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By Mark Klempner

What will become of Costa Rica? That’s the question on my mind, now that my adopted country has narrowly accepted CAFTA. Our national slogan is "Pura vida!" meaning "pure life," and it’s commonly used as an affirmation that life is good. It’s easy to understand how such an expression could catch on here: Costa Rica has virtually no enemies, a temperate climate, and a hell of a lot of good beaches. However, as an expatriate whose previous hometowns have been despoiled by global capitalism, I find it difficult to imagine that life will be as pure or as good once the effects of CAFTA begin to kick in. At the very least, the treaty will accelerate trends already evident in Costa Rica, such as more corporations like Intel and Procter & Gamble setting up operations. Indeed, CAFTA promises an improved "business climate" and "regulatory environment" for foreign firms and investors, but I wonder what that will mean for Costa Rica’s actual landscape, and the people who inhabit it.

I first witnessed the negative effects of global capitalism from the North American side, being from Schenectady, N.Y., the original "home of General Electric," a phrase that resounded through my childhood. Known also as "the city that lights and hauls the world" in its heyday, Schenectady and General Electric grew together during the first half of the 20th century. They remained interdependent, both economically and socially, and when I was growing up in the early 1970s, G.E. was still the biggest employer in town, with about 27,000 workers. It was also the biggest polluter: the more than 1 million pounds of toxic PCBs that it dumped into the Hudson River caused various health problems for local residents, ranging from skin diseases to birth defects -- and probably cancer. In the 1980s, G.E.’s famed CEO Jack Welch initiated an aggressive strategy of eliminating and outsourcing jobs with the result that the company now employs fewer than 4,000 workers in Schenectady.

And where did the outsourced jobs go? Mexico, Malaysia, China, India, you name it. It might appear that Costa Rica will gain only from being among the nations that are insourced, but it has yet to have an industrial force that big move in and seriously befoul its environment. Nor has Costa Rica had the experience of being abandoned by such a transnational when it moves its operations to yet another country that can offer still greater savings.

For more than a decade now, tourism has been Costa Rica’s main source of income, currently accounting for 60.4 percent of its GDP. One would think that Costa Rica’s president Óscar Arias would do all he can to safeguard the beautiful environment that generates Costa Rica’s wealth, but, considering that his administration recently rescinded the moratorium on offshore oil drilling, that does not seem to be the case. Though Costa Rica has protected about 25 percent of its nature areas, and plenty of environmental laws are in place, many of them are either partially enforced or not enforced at all. Furthermore, some of these laws can potentially be challenged under CAFTA, one reason that environmentalists have been united in their opposition to the treaty.

But equally pernicious is the possibility that CAFTA will bring about the demise of the small farms that grow some of our best coffee and produce. That this will be an incalculable cultural loss might be hard for outsiders to understand unless you are one of those tourists who came to Costa Rica for its pristine forests or beaches and fell in love with the people here. I believe that their boundless hospitality has its roots in the strong agricultural tradition whereby, as in bygone years in the United States, neighbors would help each other to bring in the harvest or to raise a barn.

My wife and I live in a coffee-growing region where our town monument depicts a farmer with two oxen pulling a cart full of coffee beans to market. Nearly every day someone does something to reflect this campesino spirit, like yesterday when the grandmother of my son’s playmate sent him home with a bag of oranges from the tree in their backyard. A less trifling example is the playground cleanup and repair project initiated by one of our neighbors in which nearly everyone on our block participated. That scene of the adults working together to make things better for the children, while the children frolicked in the grass, helping where they could, is one I’ll never forget. The point is that this tight-knit, highly cooperative community will not remain that way for long if it loses its agricultural base.

At present you can buy a mango in Costa Rica for about 50 cents. An apple from the United States, however, costs about 75 cents. The reason is that a tariff equal to the price of the imported fruit is applied, so that it sells here for twice as much as in the United States. CAFTA will eliminate such tariffs and thus cut the prices for imported grains and produce in half. It’s unlikely that Costa Rican farmers will be able to compete with U.S. agribusiness, which has not only the advantage of economies of scale, but of massive government subsidies as well.

Bring it on, say the turbo capitalists: If these Costa Rican agricultural workers can’t compete in the global marketplace, they should enter another line of work. No matter that Costa Rica’s agrarian tradition is a major repository of its folklore, culture and history. No matter that the land means so much to these people. No matter that tens of thousands of visitors tour coffee plantations and other such places each year who won’t want to see factories and industrial parks. For the champions of free trade, the invisible hand of the market knows best, and it’s just fine if all those farm workers eventually go to work in factories owned by foreigners.

To refute this type of thinking, one need only look at the effects of NAFTA, the earlier free trade agreement with Mexico on which CAFTA is based. Activists warned that NAFTA would displace small farmers and farm workers from the rural life that they had lived for generations and drive them into the cities, where the only way they would be able to survive would be to sell their labor to foreign employers. Organized labor in the United States predicted "a giant sucking sound" as a huge number of U.S. jobs were transferred to a labor force that would not expect the same benefits, rights or protections, and would be willing to work for one-tenth the pay. Environmentalists argued that U.S. corporations would likewise take advantage of Mexico’s laxer environmental laws and the lack of enforcement of those laws.

Unfortunately, all these predictions came to pass. A large percentage of farmworkers were displaced from the land, and many of them began working at factories in the cities. Others left Mexico altogether, swelling the ranks of illegal alien workers in the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. jobs were indeed exported to Mexico: the number was between 750,000 and 3,200,000, depending on who is interpreting the statistics. And greater environmental damage occurred than would have been the case had those factories remained in the United States. We not only outsourced jobs, we outsourced environmental destruction, inflicting on Mexico what our laws would not have permitted us to do to our own land, air and water.

But didn’t U.S. farmers, at least, benefit from NAFTA? Not farmers with faces and families, according to Kathy Ozer of the National Family Farm Coalition. She cites some telling statistics: "Under NAFTA, we lost 100,000 family farmers between 1996 and 2001. Commodity prices for corn, wheat, and cotton all fell by 20 to 30 percent. But the profits of Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), one of the largest U.S. exporters of corn -- much of it genetically modified, of course, and grown using massive amounts of pesticides -- more than tripled from $110 million in 1994 to $301 million in 2000 to $451 million in 2003. The story is the same for ConAgra and Cargill. Clearly, the big winners are the large processors and grain traders."

And what kind of life awaits those Costa Ricans who would enter the growing industrial sector? Probably not one they would have chosen in the absence of financial exigencies. Even the most prestigious firms exact an undeniable price on the cultural identity of their workers. For example, in our capital city of San Jose, Hewlett-Packard employs thousands of phone agents who sit in cubicles and answer service calls in an environment that might just as well be San Jose, California. You don’t have to study the research of Brazilian sociologist Ruy Braga to realize how demoralizing it can be for employees to spend all day in a workplace that subtly or overtly invalidates their collective frame of reference. Along with this comes the calculated imposition of corporate norms that are in certain respects antithetical to the personal values held by most Costa Ricans.

I’ve never seen an HP personnel manual, but I doubt it bears much resemblance to the social contract here. The smiles of the Costa Rican people arise from a mixture of family values in the best sense of the term and a society that prefers friendly cooperation to aggressive competition. Their graciousness and warmth will prove highly perishable if they have to adhere to such written and unwritten precepts of corporate America as "time is money," "watch your back," and "work comes first."

But the effects of "free trade" will extend far beyond the realm of work. Since I moved here in 2001, the same fast food franchises that have aggravated the health and weight problems of millions in the United States have appeared on streets that previously contained only little lunch places serving rice, beans and tortillas. In another development, the first big malls have been erected. I wonder what family-run stores they will put out of business, as Costa Ricans flock to Nike and Tommy Hilfiger. On yet another front, Wal-Mart, in what is no doubt the beginning of a marketing plan to conquer Costa Rica, recently acquired two of our most popular supermarket chains.

I have a sinking fear that Wal-Marts will one day be seen in close proximity to some of Costa Rica’s most prized nature reserves, for I have already witnessed this same cycle play out in the United States: malls and box stores where local businesses used to be, or even where nature used to be. When I lived in Ithaca, N.Y., Wal-Mart wanted to build across from Buttermilk Falls State Park. This was a place I often went swimming in the summer; the frothy water plunges down from 600 feet into a natural basin with a surrounding patio of shale on which I would soak up the sun. Buttermilk was one of those places you’d go to clear your mind and forget about the world -- until suddenly the world’s most powerful retailer wanted to mess with it.

If the city refused Wal-Mart the choice spot, the corporation threatened to build outside the city limits, as several malls had already done, thus further eroding the municipal tax base. Yet, who would want to hike up the scenic trail at Buttermilk Falls to be rewarded with a view of Wal-Mart? Some very knowledgeable citizens scrutinized the environmental impact report and pointed out numerous unresolved problems during countless meetings at city hall and elsewhere. In the end, Wal-Mart abandoned plans for the site -- though not before unsuccessfully suing the city.

But then Ithaca elected a new mayor who quietly entered into negotiations to construct what turned out to be a Home Depot in the very same spot. Ithaca’s citizens were not informed until after building preparations had begun, and those who protested were simply ignored. Never mind that the environmental impact report raised serious concerns. The mayor had already moved on to Wal-Mart, and soon announced that the megacorporation would be constructing a store in a nearby wooded area.

What happened in Ithaca is but one small example of the way that Big Business and its representatives in government often get things done these days -- all around the world. In Costa Rica, it came as no surprise that all the large firms were solidly behind CAFTA and didn’t hesitate to pressure their employees to vote for it. Those same firms also provided enormous political and economic backing for Óscar Arias, who ran on a pro-CAFTA platform in 2006. Arias was elected by a margin almost as slight as Bush vs. Gore in 2000; after taking power he nevertheless asserted, as Bush did, that he now had a mandate. He appointed a staunchly pro-CAFTA staff, and, like that mayor of Ithaca, expressed no interest in engaging in open debate about an issue that had divided the public like no other in recent decades.

The Arias administration’s true colors were further revealed shortly before the CAFTA referendum vote when a confidential memo to the president was leaked to the University of Costa Rica newspaper. In it, Second Vice President Kevin Casas and Fernando Sánchez, a powerful legislator, wrote: "The coalition against us is formidable: universities, the church, environmental groups, etc. And on the other side, there is only the government and some of the big entrepreneurs." To win over the people, they detailed a profoundly unethical pro-CAFTA strategy that included a proposal to threaten Costa Rica’s mayors with a funding freeze if CAFTA was voted down in their districts, and a Rove-style fear and smear campaign.

Casas was forced to resign completely; Sánchez, who happens to be Óscar Arias’ cousin, remains in the legislature but has been removed from the two committees he chaired: elections and banking. It is disconcerting to think that if these two men had mastered, even in part, the techniques of stealth utilized so successfully by the Bush administration, they would still be at their posts. Actually, all they needed was to heed a bit of advice offered with levity by Dick Cheney when he spoke last September at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library. After making an aside about researchers who dig through the correspondence of key political figures, Cheney said, in regards to himself, "I want to wish them luck, but the files are pretty thin. I learned early on that if you don’t want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just don’t write any."

Cheney’s aversion to public scrutiny is, of course, shared by Bush, and was evident in the CAFTA process. During the negotiations, a coalition of more than sixty nongovernmental organizations -- most of them U.S.-based -- signed an open letter calling for greater transparency and civil society participation. Indeed, a quick glance at the committee advising the president and Congress on environmental issues relating to CAFTA tells the story: only five out of the 29 members were associated with public environmental organizations, six if you want to include the Garden Clubs of America. Facing them off were representatives from such corporations as Agrisystems International, the Carlyle Group, General Motors and Harken Energy, which had recently filed for arbitration against Costa Rica for refusing to allow it to drill along the protected Talamanca Coast. Like Wal-Mart in Ithaca, Harken’s response to failing an environmental impact review was to sue.

It seems as if these and other transnationals have taken over the United States, which is one reason I wouldn’t want to move back. In any event, the hometowns I used to know no longer exist. Once proud Schenectady currently has a hollowed out feeling, and a crime rate that has soared as its economy has plummeted. And in Ithaca, the road that runs alongside Buttermilk Falls as you enter the city is now a congested wasteland of parking lots and big-box stores. By the way, the PCBs that General Electric dumped into the Hudson River have yet to be fully removed, and you still can’t swim in the river or eat the fish. Attempts to legally force G.E. to undertake dredging have met with formidable resistance. Home wrecker!

Meanwhile, back in our little village in Costa Rica, it’s Friday morning -- which means the farmers’ market is in progress over by the elementary school. About 40 farmers show up each week and set up stalls from which they sell a cornucopia of vegetables and fruits, including small sweet bananas that make the commercial varieties seem tasteless, and luscious papayas whose ambrosial flavor contains a hint of honeysuckle. It’s always a busy scene over there: housewives doing their weekly shopping with children in tow, matrons carrying jute bags, schoolgirls giggling in their blue uniforms, town elders sitting on the stone wall talking. There are even a few tourists, delighted to have stumbled upon an authentic slice of Costa Rican life.

A couple of weeks ago, when I went to the market, a strange thing happened. An unusually large truck carrying building materials entered the little street where the farmers were set up, and as it passed a tall tree, something in the bed of the truck got caught on a low-hanging branch and started to pull the branch along with it. A farmer had tied one corner of his awning to a slightly lower branch of the same tree, and now the movement of the truck was beginning to tear the roof off his stall. He watched with tranquil bemusement (sometimes I think Costa Ricans have a pura vida gene) and then snap! -- the branch finally broke free.

That truck should be named CAFTA, I thought: an engine of change built in a foreign land on a scale inappropriate for the Costa Rican economy and infrastructure, an engine that could easily destroy branches of Costa Rican culture without the driver ever noticing. It is important to note, however, that anti-CAFTA legislators have been vigorously attempting to address such concerns.

Before CAFTA can be enacted here, twelve major bills will need to be passed, and these legislators are challenging their constitutionality -- even as they simultaneously strive to reform them so as to mitigate their negative impact should they move forward. The U.S.-imposed March 1 deadline has come and gone with only two of the bills having passed, and it is uncertain whether the additional ten will pass by the October 1 extension granted by the U.S. trade representative.

If CAFTA does, indeed, take effect by the end of this year, let’s hope that the laws will have been finessed to the extent that the average Costa Rica is still left with a roof over his head. Though it’s too early to celebrate such an ascendancy of the common good from the chambers of the legislative and judicial branches, I am heartened that the checks and balances within the Costa Rican government seem to be functioning better than those in Washington. This gives me hope that Costa Rica may ultimately be able to avoid an isolationist stance even while honoring its own proud traditions of providing for and prioritizing the health and well-being of its citizens, and caring for its environment.

Mark Klempner is a folklorist, historian, and author of The Heart Has Reasons: Holocaust Rescuers and Their Stories of Courage. His email is mtk2@cornell.edu. He would like to thank the following people for commenting on, assisting with, or allowing themselves to be interviewed for this article: Judith Blau, Maxwell A. Cameron, Mark Engler, Gillian Gillers, Paul Glover, Ari Hershowitz, Dan Hoffman, Chris Hunter, Andrew Gow, Paul Rogat Loeb, James McConkey, Thomas F. O’Boyle, Kathryn Olney, Kathy Ozer, Dave Sherwood, Margrete Strand, Alice Truax, Joe Wetmore, and the GE Corporate Feedback Team.

Texas Prosecutes Little Old Ladies for Voter Fraud

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By Steven Rosenfeld

Willie Ray was a 69-year-old African-American City Council member from Texarkana who wanted her granddaughter, Jamillah Johnson, to learn about civil rights and voting during the 2004 presidential election. The pair helped homebound seniors citizens get absentee ballots, and once they were filled out, put them in the mail.

Fort Worth’s Gloria Meeks, 69, was a church-going, community activist who proudly ran a phone bank and helped homebound elderly people like Parthenia McDonald, 79, to vote by mail. McDonald, whose mailbox was two blocks away from her home (she recently died), called Meeks "an angel" for helping her, a friend of both women said.

And until he recently moved out of state, Walter Hinojosa, a retired school teacher and labor organizer from Austin, was another Democratic Party volunteer who helped elderly and disabled people vote by getting them absentee ballots and mailing them.

Today, Ray and Johnson have criminal records for breaking Texas election law and faced travel restrictions during a six-month probation. Gloria Meeks is in a nursing home after having a stroke, prompted in part, her friends say, by state police who investigated her -- including spying on Meeks while she bathed -- and then questioned her about helping McDonald and others to vote. Hinojosa, meanwhile, has left Texas.

Their crime: not signing their name, address and signature on the back of the ballots they mailed for their senior neighbors, and carrying envelopes containing those ballots to the mailbox. Since 2005, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been prosecuting Democratic Party activists, almost all African-Americans and Latinos, as part of an effort to eradicate what he said was an "epidemic" of voter fraud in Texas.

"These guilty pleas demonstrate precisely why it is so important to uphold the integrity of our election process in the state," Abbott said, speaking of Ray and Johnson’s conviction in a press release. "We will visit justice upon any who ignore the fact that we have election laws in Texas and they apply to everyone."

But Texas Democrats, such as Lisa Turner of the Lone Star Project, onestarproject.net a political action committee that first exposed Abbott’s prosecutions, issued reports on it and maintains a staff to fight voter suppression in the state, said Abbott’s goal is not merely to prosecute little old ladies. Rather, Turner said it was to send a message to Texas’ minority communities, which lean Democratic, by sowing fears among the elderly about voting by mail.

"It’s the equivalent if when a gang moves into a neighborhood and spray paints their graffiti or their marker; it’s not to deface one building. It is to send a message," Turner said. "You have agents of the attorney general, walking through a neighborhood, walking past three crack houses, to go talk to a voter. Think about that. What does that say their priorities are? It’s about holding onto the levers of power."

Attorney General Abbott and the election laws that he has used to bring the prosecutions have been challenged in federal court under a suit that is slated to go to trial this spring. In September 2006, Gerry Hebert, a former chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Voting Section -- which oversees the nation’s voting rights laws -- and now executive director of the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center, filed a suit challenging the Texas attorney general, secretary of state and a 2003 Texas law that criminalized practices often used to help the elderly to vote by mail.

Abbott’s office would not comment on the suit, but Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, who works for Abbott, issued a statement in September 2006 saying it "has no basis in law" and "the plaintiffs are combination of political operatives and individual criminals who have already pleaded guilty to voter fraud."

Meanwhile, Texas’ attorney general has continued to prosecute middle-aged and elderly political volunteers under a law his office says stops people from impersonating voters and taking advantage of seniors by falsifying ballots. The accused are almost all African-American and Latino and likely Democrats.

In February 2008, Abbott indicted four Duval County residents, Lydia Molina, 70, Maria Soriano, 71, Elva Lazo, 62, Maria Trigo, 55, for allegedly delivering "mail-in ballot applications to numerous residents in Duval County, many of whom were ineligible to vote by mail," his press release said. Under Texas law, only the disabled, people 65 or older, or people expecting to be out of state on Election Day can vote absentee. The accused checked a box saying voters were disabled "when they were not," he said, referring to their actions in the 2006 election.

"The voter registrar’s office then mailed the actual ballots to the residents," Abbott’s release said. "Once the ballots were completed by the residents, the defendants allegedly retrieved these and mailed them to the registrar to be counted without identifying themselves on the carrier envelope." They face six months and a $2,000 fine.

Only likely Democrats prosecuted

Despite Abbott’s repeated declarations nobody is above Texas law, he has prosecuted no Republicans.

"What is especially troubling is that while Greg Abbott’s office has prosecuted minority seniors for simply mailing ballots, he has not prosecuted anyone on the other side of the aisle for what appear to be open and shut cases of real voter fraud," Hebert told Texas House Elections Committee, on January 25, 2008, as the panel held a hearing on a bill making the state’s voter I.D. laws tougher.

Hebert cited a 2005 election in Highland Park, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the country with hundreds of million-dollar homes and where both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney lived before the 2000 election. In 2005, two election judges, both Republicans, and a 10-year-old boy handed out over 100 ballots, Hebert testified, without checking any voter registration cards or IDs. The ballots were filled out and turned in, he said, quoting from several Dallas District Attorney memos that suggested there was a strong basis for prosecuting the judges for not following procedures and counting "over 100 more ballots" that there were "signatures on the roster."

In other words, here was a serious case of apparent ballot box stuffing -- voter fraud -- by Republicans, albeit in a state where the GOP holds all the constitutional offices, most judgeships and controls most county election boards.

"Here we are nearly three years later and Attorney General Abbott’s office has done virtually nothing," Hebert told Texas legislators. "Rather than exercise his discretion to act directly on the [district attorney’s] request and immediately investigate the voting irregularities and potential voter fraud in Highland Park, Mr. Abbott’s office has instead used his office’s resources to prosecute elderly political activists whose only ’crime’ was assisting elderly and disabled voters cast a vote by mail."

The bigger picture, said the Lone Star Project’s Turner, was the Texas Republican Party, assisted by the state’s Republican attorney general, was using the power of the state and public funds to create a climate for partisan gain.

"I don’t believe that the Attorney General or the Governor or the Republicans are really interested in putting old women in jail," she said. "They see what we all see and what everybody has written about, which is Texas is trending majority minority [where the majority of voters is no longer white]. And the Republicans haven’t figured out how to talk to minorities. So, instead of figuring out how to talk to them on an issue basis, they have embarked on a plan to shave two or three percentage points off the electorate and that’s how they stay in power."

The Climate of fear

On the outskirts of Ft. Worth, the Democratic Party has a campaign office for its various local and statewide campaigns. In early March, Jane Hamilton, a young woman who has been working on campaigns in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area since 2000, and Dorothy Dean, 74, who has worked on campaigns for four decades, described the real-life impact of Abbott’s efforts to prosecute people for helping the elderly and disabled to vote.

Hamilton described how the 2003 law passed by the Texas Legislature changed the way the Democrats interacted with older people who wanted help with their absentee ballots.

"We would get phone calls from older ladies who wanted to vote," Hamilton said. "And they would ask, a lot of times, for people that they trusted, their neighbors, to come over to help. I would then say, ’Well, I don’t know her, but how about us helping you over the phone?’ And they would say, ’Well, I can’t see. And I can’t hear good. I need somebody to come over here and help me.’"

Before the attorney general’s prosecutions, Hamilton said she would find well-known people in the caller’s community to visit the elderly person’s home to help them with voting -- volunteers like Ray, Meeks or Hinojosa. But after Abbott started prosecuting Democratic volunteers for assisting the seniors, Hamilton said she could only help elderly voters over the phone, which many callers did not understand.

"It was very difficult for me," Hamilton said. "It was very hard to explain why a Mrs. Johnson couldn’t help a Mrs. Brown, or if she did, then she couldn’t help a Mrs. Sue... I think that really started as fear. They (the callers) were afraid, because they also started hearing about the attorney general’s office prosecuting. You had all of these things going on, however no one really understood why. The AG’s office never did a good job on the community level saying what this means, what this means for you."

Abbott may not have been telling the public what was required under the 2003 law, but he did tell the police. In early 2006, he announced "a statewide initiative to work with local law enforcement and prosecutors to combat and prevent the persistent problem of voter fraud," his January 25, 2006 news release said. The project’s initial phase would target "44 key counties that either have a history of voter fraud or the population of which exceeds 100,000," the attorney general’s release said.

"Voter fraud has been epidemic in Texas for years, but it hasn’t been treated like one. It’s time for that to change," Abbott said. Continuing, he announced the formation of a new "Special Investigations Unit [that] will help police departments, sheriff’s offices, and district and county attorneys successfully identify, investigate and prosecute various types of voter fraud offenses." The release said the Texas governor’s office, held by another Republican, was supporting the effort with a $1.5 million grant.

According to the Center’s lawsuit, where Ray, Johnson, Meeks, McDonald, Hinojosa and the Texas Democratic Party are plaintiffs, the PowerPoint presentation used by Abbott’s office to train Texas officials was rife with racial stereotypes associating voter fraud with people of color -- communities in Texas that in recent history have supported Democrats.

"As an introduction to a section of the PowerPoint involving ’Poll Place Violations," a slide depicts a photograph of African-American voters apparently standing in line to vote," the lawsuit’s complaint said. "Notably, the 71-slide presentation contains no similar photographs of white or Anglo voters casting ballots."

"Another slide in the same PowerPoint presentation, in a section involving tactics for investigating purported voter fraud, is entitled ’Examine Documents for Fraud.’ That slide states that investigators should look for ’Unique Stamps’ and shows a prominent picture of a postage stamp known as the ’sickle cell stamp,’ which depicts an African-American woman and infant," the complaint said. "The PowerPoint presentation thus communicates the message that minority voters should be the focus of election fraud investigations and prosecutions, particularly under the new 2003 criminal prohibitions."

The lawsuit continues and describes various investigating tactics used by Abbott’s special investigations unit, including the incident where two state police officers were seen by Meeks "peeping at her through her bathroom window" while she was taking a bath on August 10, 2006. "She later learned that these two persons were investigators with the office of the defendant Attorney General Abbott," the suit said.

Meanwhile, the state office overseeing voting in Texas, the Secretary of State, "fails to make clear that those who assist voters may be subject to criminal prosecution," the complaint said, underscoring the point that Abbott and Texas Secretary of State Roger Williams, also a Republican, were "engaging in a deliberate campaign to suppress the minority vote and discriminate against minority voters."

"That is the whole scheme of the plan," said Dorothy Dean, who has worked on campaigns in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area for four decades. "Get it so complicated that the Democrats will stay at home, so they will be confused... A lot of these older people will be like, ’Oh, I guess I can’t vote this year because I don’t have my neighbor that can help me. She hasn’t been here for two years.’ That is really what is happening."

Dean said she has not been investigated by Abbott, but knows of others who have.

"There is one lady who used to be a precinct chair," she said. "I refuse to give her name because she almost had a nervous breakdown. She couldn’t believe that all of her hard work as a precinct chair, and devoted to the party, that something like this would happen to her. She still to this day cannot get over it. She wants to be her precinct chair again. But because of the law, she can’t get it back."

The fallout for 2008

Dorothy Dean said the impact of the attorney general’s campaign is much larger than the dozen people charged with voter fraud and the dozens more that have been investigated.

"You have to understand that this would be 20 to 30 percent of the voting ballots from the Democratic Party because senior citizens cherish the right to vote," she said. "They remember the poll tax, having to pay it. And they want to vote."

Hamilton said the 2003 law and Abbott’s prosecutions have prompted the Democratic Party in Dallas County to suspend its field program for absentee ballots, where it once sent volunteers to voter’s homes to help them apply for ballots so they could vote by mail.

"It is absolutely fair to say there is no field program for mail ballots," she said. "What happens now is everything is by phone. They call up and request one. And then you call them back and say, ’Did you get it?’ And they say, ’Well, I know I got something, but I wasn’t sure what it was, so I threw it in the trash. Can you send me another one?’ And then you send them another one, and then you call them back, and they say, ’Well, I got that one but I can’t see it. What is the line I sign on?’

"So, do you see what I am saying? You are on the phone with a process with no field component to it. Not anymore."

While the Center’s lawsuit against attorney general goes to court later this spring, some of Abbott’s recent prosecutions have been thrown out in court. In early March, criminal charges against two politiqueras accused of unlawfully assisting elderly voters were dismissed by Hidalgo County Court-at-law Judge Jaime Palacios, according to the Rio Grande Valley website, TheMonitor.com.

"In 2006, Attorney General Greg Abbott held up the Hidalgo County voter fraud case as an example of a successful voter fraud investigation that produced results," the website reported on March 11. "His office did not return calls for comment."

Steven Rosenfeld is a senior fellow at Alternet.org and co-author of "What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election," with Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman (The New Press, 2006).

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Iranians help reach Iraq cease-fire

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By Charles Levinson

BAGHDAD — Iranian officials helped broker a cease-fire agreement Sunday between Iraq's government and radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, according to Iraqi lawmakers.
The deal could help defuse a wave of violence that had threatened recent security progress in Iraq. It also may signal the growing regional influence of Iran, a country the Bush administration accuses of providing support to terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere.

Al-Sadr ordered his forces off the streets of Iraq on Sunday. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki hailed al-Sadr's action as "a step in the right direction." It was unclear whether the deal would completely end six days of clashes between U.S.-backed Iraqi forces and Shiite militias, including al-Sadr's.

Osama al-Nujaifi, a Sunni lawmaker who oversaw mediation in Baghdad, said representatives from al-Maliki's Dawa Party and another Shiite party traveled to Iran to finalize talks with al-Sadr.

Iran has close ties with both al-Sadr's movement and al-Maliki, who spent several years in exile there. Al-Nujaifi said the agreement was brokered by the commander of Iran's al-Quds Brigade, which is considered a terrorist organization by Washington.

Haidar al-Abadi, a Dawa legislator who is close to al-Maliki, confirmed that Iranians played a role in the negotiations. Sadiq al-Rikabi, a senior adviser to al-Maliki, said he could not confirm or deny Iranian involvement in the deal.

"The government proved once again that Iran is a central player in Iraq," said Iraqi political analyst and former intelligence officer Ibrahim Sumydai.

The nine-point deal was released by al-Sadr's office and read aloud from the minarets of Shiite mosques across southern Iraq. Al-Sadr called for the government to stop arresting his followers and release prisoners who have not been charged with a crime.

Hours later, rockets continued to shake Baghdad. According to the U.S. military, elements of al-Sadr's militia no longer answer to him.

Al-Rikabi vowed Iraqi forces will continue a broad offensive against "criminal elements" in the southern city of Basra and elsewhere.

Vali Nasr, an Iraq expert at the Council of Foreign Relations, said al-Sadr had emerged stronger from the battle, which killed more than 300 people. "He let the Americans and the Iraqis know that taking him down is going to be difficult."

Al-Sadr's militia stood strong, forcing the government to extend a deadline for them to disarm.

"Everything we heard indicates the Sadrists had control of more ground in Basra at the end of the fighting than they did at the beginning," said al-Nujaifi, the Sunni mediator. "The government realized things were not going in the right direction."

Piercing This Bubble For Good

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By Roger C. Altman

In the past two weeks, the Federal Reserve has lent or guaranteed at least $57 billion to investment banks. This sudden infusion, the first to Wall Street firms since the 1930s, underscores the financial emergency facing the nation. Yet just last June, the markets were euphoric. How, within nine months, could a lending bubble inflate to gargantuan proportions and then burst into this credit market disaster?

Two points are fundamental as we piece together what happened. First, this is only the latest in a series of modern financial bubbles that have collapsed. Second, while we cannot prevent bubbles, we can prevent a recurrence of this one.

Financial bubbles occur regularly on both the debt and equity sides of investing. Recent ones include the conglomerate stock craze in the 1960s, the junk bond and Japanese excesses of the 1980s, and the dot-com speculation of the late 1990s. The interaction of crowd psychology and the betting nature of markets cause these episodes: After a certain upward point, market momentum can become self-perpetuating -- until it reaches such a peak as to collapse onto itself. Much like putting too much air into a balloon.

Over 2004-05, there developed an unusual combination of low interest rates and low inflation, reasonable growth, and a surplus of global savings recycling into the United States. This meant that all types of lenders were highly liquid but faced low yields from traditional lending practices. Seeking better returns, they lowered credit standards and lent to weaker parties, i.e., subprime mortgage borrowers and over-leveraged firms.

The headlines have been reporting what happened next, but the amount of credit that was extended to these weaker borrowers is amazing. Historically, C-rated borrowers have been unable to borrow much from public-debt markets because over decades more than 30 percent of such low-rated debt has defaulted before maturity. In 2006, more than $25 billion of these securities were sold; the previous 10 years, the average was $2 billion.

The music stopped when home prices, which had soared for five years, finally plateaued and then began to fall last year. This reversal spread nationwide and weakened the entire economy. Unable to refinance, countless overstretched homeowners could not make their mortgage payments. Suddenly, defaults loomed, and every lender changed his stance overnight. Deleveraging became the goal, and the credit spigot was shut.

It was, as always, too late. The Fed has poured emergency liquidity into the financial system to avert a collapse, but foreclosures have already skyrocketed, and hundreds of billions in credit losses have been realized. Our country is headed into a recession.

Several lessons are apparent:

First, too much credit was extended by entities that were not regulated, such as the special-purpose, off-balance-sheet vehicles created for leveraging up pools of mortgages. No minimum capital requirements applied to these, nor were they required to disclose their results. In the future, most of these vehicles should be regulated and subject to both sets of controls.

In addition, the largest investment banks have been made eligible to borrow directly from the Federal Reserve. In exchange, they should be subject to Federal Reserve or equally strong oversight. Requiring J.P. Morgan Chase to bear more of the cost of the Fed's guarantee for its acquisition of Bear Stearns is a small start, though the Fed is still on the hook for the lion's share.

Second, the exotic character of so many new financial investments is an issue unto itself. Many, such as collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps, carried greater risk and generated more leverage than market participants understood. The world financial system would be better protected if certain buyers of such instruments were subject to enforceable margin requirements, and issuers of them were regulated and subject to capital requirements.

Third, the books of our largest financial institutions are not sufficiently transparent. The retained risks on their off-balance-sheet financings, for example, were not known to their shareholders. This is inappropriate. The Financial Accounting Standards Board, working with the Securities and Exchange Commission, should expand public disclosure requirements applying to these transactions.

Fourth, the credit rating agencies performed poorly. They assisted in creating some of the least transparent and shakiest financing structures. The SEC should require their boards of directors to annually certify, with corresponding liability, to the independence of the ratings process from borrower influence.

Fifth, mortgage brokers created countless inappropriate or fraudulent mortgages. This isn't surprising because they are paid to originate. Whatever happens later to the homeowners or lenders is immaterial. Going forward, there should be national licensing for mortgage brokers that embodies the know-your-customer rule for securities brokers. Non-bank mortgage lenders should also be governed by the same capital requirements and regulation that apply to bank-owned lenders.

Borrowing conditions may not return to normal (pre-2006) levels for at least two years. And we may not see speculative excess for a much longer period. It will return in another form, as bubbles always do. Let's not, however, have a repeat of this one.

U.S. Unsure About the Future of Iraq's 'Sons'

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By Walter Pincus

While public attention has been focused on Shiite-vs.-Shiite fighting in Basra and Baghdad, U.S. military leaders are taking a cold second look at the future intentions of the roughly 90,000 "Sons of Iraq" -- the locally recruited and primarily Sunni security forces that are armed and supported by the United States at $300 per person each month.

At a Pentagon briefing last Wednesday, the commander of the 4th Stryker Brigade Combat Team in Diyala province, Col. Jon Lehr, told reporters via videoconference that the Sons of Iraq "are not a permanent security solution," although, he added, "they have been an integral part of our strategy."

That strategy, Lehr said, was "getting people to stand up and assume security of their own given area." Starting in Anbar province, and with U.S. money and American-supplied arms, they were happy to turn on their former allies and fight alongside U.S. Marines, their former enemies. Together they chased al-Qaeda elements out of Anbar. That same idea -- buying off the Sunnis and renegade Shiites with money and arms, and empowering them to provide security in their tribal areas -- began to be applied in other parts of Iraq, including Baghdad.

However, as Lehr put it last week, "not all Sons of Iraq are created equally." In Diyala, the local Sons of Iraq groups have split in two. "One is a tribally based," he said. "They tend to be associated with rural areas . . . [and] are there to protect their villages. " The other half, which he described as "the politically based ones," are in Baqubah, the province's main city of about 300,000, which less than a year ago was considered an al-Qaeda-driven battleground.

Baqubah's Sons of Iraq came from the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade, which earlier had been responsible not only for killing American soldiers but also for kidnapping a U.S. Marine. Others are from Hamas in Iraq, a Sunni insurgent faction that had broken away from the 1920s Brigade. And there are also some from mujaheddin made up of former Saddam Hussein loyalists.

Thanks to what Lehr called "good detective work . . . we have culled a lot of the bad apples" from the Sons of Iraq recruits. He said that dozens of infiltrators, including al-Qaeda elements, have been caught. "I bet since November, we've probably taken -- my guess is 60 to 80 high-value targets out of the program," he said.

The groups are "loosely confederated themselves," according to Lehr, and their leaders "sense an election coming around within the province and they want to be part of the solution." Lehr said he sees "foreign influence" within the groups, but "at this point in time, I don't think it's negative; it's more politically motivated. But yes, it could easily become negative."

The question now is what happens to the Sons of Iraq in the long run. "They were a means to an end," Lehr said. "So what we're attempting to do right now is find employment for the men." He said some could be absorbed into Iraqi security forces -- primarily the police and some in the army.

But Gen. David H. Petraeus, interviewed on National Public Radio on March 19, the fifth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion, was more cautious. "There are understandable concerns on the part of a government that is majority Shiite that, what they [would be] doing was hiring former Sunni insurgents, giving them a new lease on life, and that when this is all said and done they may turn against the government or the Shiite population," he said.

Col. Michael Fuller, chief of staff of the Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq, gave a different view during a Pentagon news conference Thursday. "Many of them are not qualified physically to join the Iraqi security forces because they're old, they're infirmed -- whatever the case may be." Nonetheless, he said he expects the Baghdad government to incorporate about 20 percent of them into the Iraqi security forces over time.

For the rest, said Fuller, whose job is to help the Iraq Defense and Interior ministries develop their forces, the government is "looking at programs much like our vo-tech schools, to get them trained . . . [so] they have a viable employment alternative that will keep them off the streets and out of criminal activities, if that's all they feel like they've got to fall back on."

"Conceptually," he added, the government of Iraq has agreed to begin picking up the costs associated with the Sons of Iraq. "We've just got to make sure that we have the conditions set to make sure they do it successfully and it doesn't become something that causes the Sons of Iraq to quit what they're doing," he said.

Petraeus, however, had the final word. In the end, he said, the Sons of Iraq would stay loyal to the course the United States has set "as long as it is in their interests."

The Energy Non-Crisis

Lindsey Williams talks about his first hand knowledge of Alaskan oil reserves larger than any on earth. And he talks about how the oil ... all » companies and U.S. government won't send it through the pipeline for U.S. citizens to use.

Barak authorizes nationwide emergency drill

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Defense establishment, government and cabinet all to participate in exercise simulating crisis situation as part of upcoming national emergency drill to be held in April. Drill part of implementation of lessons from Second Lebanon War
Defense Minister Ehud Barak authorized on Sunday evening the plans for a national emergency drill, which is scheduled to take place in two weeks time.

The exercise, which will be led by Barak's deputy Matan Vilnai, was conceived as part of the lessons learned following the Second Lebanon War in 2006 and will incorporate all government offices and public bodies.

The drill will simulate a series of emergency situations and require those participating – ranging from local municipalities, schools, firefighters and paramedics, the IDF Home Front Command and even the cabinet itself – to respond to the developing events.

The Sourasky Medical Center in Tel Aviv took part in a drill simulating a chemical missile attack several days ago.

Both Home Front Command and Health Ministry officials stressed the importance of preparing for any possible scenario.

Fed Eyes Nationalization Of US Banks

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By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The US Federal Reserve is examining the Nordic bank nationalisations of the 1990s as a possible interim solution to the US financial crisis.

The Fed has been criticised for its rescue of Bear Stearns, which critics say has degenerated into a taxpayer gift to rich bankers

The Fed has been criticised for its rescue of Bear Stearns, which critics say has degenerated into a taxpayer gift to rich bankers.

A senior official at one of the Scandinavian central banks told The Daily Telegraph that Fed strategists had stepped up contacts to learn how Norway, Sweden and Finland managed their traumatic crisis from 1991 to 1993, which brought the region’s economy to its knees.

It is understood that Fed vice-chairman Don Kohn remains very concerned by the depth of the US crisis and is eyeing the Nordic approach for contingency options.

Scandinavia’s bank rescue proved successful and is now a model for central bankers, unlike Japan’s drawn-out response, where ailing banks were propped up in a half-public limbo for years.

While the responses varied in each Nordic country, there a was major effort to avoid the sort of "moral hazard" that has bedevilled efforts by the Fed and the Bank of England in trying to stabilise their banking systems.

Norway ensured that shareholders of insolvent lenders received nothing and the senior management was entirely purged. Two of the country’s top four banks - Christiania Bank and Fokus - were seized by force majeure.

"We were determined not to get caught in the game we’ve seen with Bear Stearns where shareholders make money out of the rescue," said one Norwegian adviser.

"The law was amended so that we could take 100pc control of any bank where its equity had fallen below zero. Shareholders were left with nothing. It was very controversial," he said.

Stefan Ingves, governor of Sweden’s Riksbank, said his country passed an act so it could seize banks where the capital adequacy ratio had fallen below 2pc. Efforts were also made to protect against "blackmail" by shareholders.

Mr Ingves said there were parallels with the US crisis, citing the use of off-balance sheet vehicles to speculate on property. All the Nordic banks were nursed back to health and refloated or merged.

The tough policies contrast with the Fed’s bail-out of Bear Stearns, where shareholders forced JP Morgan to increase its Fed-led rescue offer from $2 to $10 a share. Christopher Wood, chief strategist at brokers CLSA, says the Fed’s piecemeal approach has led to "appalling moral hazard".

"Shareholders have been able to lobby for a higher share price only because the Fed took over the credit risk on $30bn of the investment bank’s dubious paper. The whole affair also amounts to a colossal subsidy for JP Morgan," he said.

Subprime crisis hits governments

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THE SUBPRIME mortgage crisis that pushed homeowners into foreclosure and forced the Federal Reserve to bail out investment banker Bear Stearns has also sent state and local governments across the country scrambling to refinance municipal bonds before they are hit with exorbitant interest rates.
At the center of the storm are long-term variable-interest bonds known as "auction-rate securities." Unlike traditional fixed-rate bonds, the interest rates on these securities are reset every 7, 28 or 35 days through an auction process.

Historically, the rate paid has been less than on traditional bonds, making the national $160-billion auction-rate market a reliable source of cheap financing.

But that market has collapsed in the past two months, sending interest rates climbing. As a result, California, Richmond, the Bay Area Toll Authority, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and Sacramento County are among countless government agencies forced to restructure their bond debts.

For some agencies, the transition will be exceptionally painful if they can't move quickly. For many, the collapse of the auction-rate securities market cost millions of dollars more in interest payments. The public will feel the squeeze through tax increases down the line or less money for much-needed public services and facilities.

That's not to say that issuing auction-rate securities was a bad move by state and local governments. In fact, they have proven very beneficial to

taxpayers over many years. And the government agencies did nothing to cause the market collapse. But the days of cheap money are over for many local governments already strapped for dollars.
After refinancing, Richmond, for example, will be forced to pay about $5 million more during the next two years for interest on about $167 million in bonds issued to fund redevelopment projects and renovate the city center.

The state of California is about to refinance about $400 million in auction-rate securities because rising interest rates have cost taxpayers about $1.5 million extra in the past six weeks. For similar reasons, the state earlier this month refinanced about $500 million in securities that were originally issued to purchase electricity during the energy crisis.

The auction-rate market collapse stems in part from the travails of the insurance companies that promised investors they would cover the principal and interest on the bonds if the government agencies failed to pay. Those insurers are some of the same companies that guaranteed subprime mortgages. When the subprime market imploded, rating agencies downgraded the insurers. That had never happened before. The downgrade, in turn, spooked auction-rate bond buyers because their investments were no longer protected by top-rated insurers.

That sent interest levels on auction-rate securities rising. What had been a cheap alternative to traditional bonds turned into a more-expensive option. In many cases, the auctions "failed," meaning there weren't sufficient bidders to cover the outstanding bonds. Under the terms of the bonds, that triggered a rate increase, which in California could be as high as 15 percent. Elsewhere in the country, the rates can go even higher.

Of the $160 billion auction-rate securities market, there have been about $80 billion of failed auctions over the past month, according to James Goins, Richmond finance director. That city has not had a failed market. But, Goins told the City Council in a March 18 report, the market "has been devastated due to insurer downgrades and lack of liquidity to the point that this market may never come back."

At his urging, city leaders have decided to bail out of auction-rate securities. They expect to refinance their debt by May.

For smaller cities, California Communities, a joint powers authority based in Walnut Creek, is putting together a program to exchange auction-rate bonds for fixed-rate notes. The plan, says program manager James Hamill, is attracting cities, mostly from southern and central California. It will involve the refinancing of an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.

The program will allow cities to join a pool to convert their bonds to one-year obligations. After that time, they will have to restructure again. The bet is that the market will calm down in the meantime. Hamill doesn't expect the cities to return to auction-rate securities.

The Bay Area Toll Authority also has been hard hit by the auction-rate collapse. The agency issues bonds for bridge construction and uses toll revenues to pay them off. The agency has nearly $800 million in outstanding auction-rate securities that it plans to refinance by the end of May.

In the meantime, the authority is paying about $600,000 to $1 million extra interest each month because of the market collapse.

To be sure, some public agencies have emerged almost unscathed. Consider the case of the East Bay Municipal Utility District. The water and sewer agency had about $542 million in outstanding auction-rate bonds at the start of the year, on which it was paying about 3 percent annual interest.

When the market collapsed, the bond rates soared to 9 percent. That cost the district about $3 million in additional interest payments over about two months, according to Finance Director Gary Breaux.

But when the district refinanced its auction-rate debt, it opted for another type of variable rate financing -- one that did not require the agency to carry bond insurance. That was possible because of the district's strong bond rating.

The new bonds are only costing the district about 1.5 percent to 1.8 percent. If those rates stay low, the district might recoup its losses by the end of the year, Breaux says.

The agency benefited by moving fast. To cities and districts facing rapidly rising auction rates, Breaux says, "my advice would be to get out from under it as quickly as you can."

Katrina Victims May Have to Repay Money

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By John Moreno Gonzales

New Orleans - Imagine that your home was reduced to mold and wood framing by Hurricane Katrina. Desperate for money to rebuild, you engage in a frustrating bureaucratic process, and after months of living in a government-provided trailer tainted with formaldehyde you finally win a federal grant.

Then a collector calls with the staggering news that you have to pay back thousands of dollars.

Thousands of Katrina victims may be in that situation.

A private contractor under investigation for the compensation it received to run the Road Home grant program for Katrina victims says that in the rush to deliver aid to homeowners in need some people got too much. Now it wants to hire a separate company to collect millions in grant overpayments.

The contractor, ICF International of Fairfax, Va., revealed the extent of the overpayments when it issued a March 11 request for bids from companies willing to handle "approximately 1,000 to 5,000 cases that will necessitate collection effort."

The bid invitation said: "The average amount to be collected is estimated to be approximately $35,000, but in some cases may be as high as $100,000 to $150,000."

The biggest grant amount allowed by the Road Home program is $150,000, so ICF believes it paid some recipients the maximum when they should not have received a penny. If ICF's highest estimate of 5,000 collection cases - overpaid by an average of $35,000 - proves to be true, that means applicants will have to pay back a total of $175 million.

One-third of qualified applicants for Road Home help had yet to receive any rebuilding check as of this past week. The program, which has come to symbolize the lurching Katrina recovery effort, is financed by $11 billion in federal funds.

ICF spokeswoman Gentry Brann said in an e-mail Friday that the overpayments are the inevitable result of the Road Home grant being recalculated to account for insurance money and government aid given to Katrina victims.

Brann said there was a sense of urgency in paying Road Home applicants, and ICF and the state knew applicants would have to return some money.

"The choice was either to process grants immediately or wait until the March 2008 deadline (for submitting Road Home applications) before disbursing any funds," Brann said in her e-mail.

Brann pointed out that 5,000 collections cases would represent a 4-percent error rate for the Road Home that is "quite good for large federal programs."

Frank Silvestri, co-chair of the Citizen's Road Home Action Team, a group that formed out of frustrations with ICF, sees it far differently.

"They want people to pay for their incompetence and their mistakes. What they need to be is aggressive about finding the underpayments," he said. "People relied, to their detriment, on their (ICFs) expertise and rebuilt their houses and now they want to squeeze this money back out of them."

The prospect of Road Home grant collections comes less than two weeks after the Louisiana inspector general and the legislative auditor said they were investigating why former Gov. Kathleen Blanco paid ICF an extra $156 million in her waning days in office to administer the program. With the increase, ICF stands to earn $912 million to run Road Home, a contract that also sweetened its initial public stock offering, and helped it buy out four other companies. It now reaches into government contracting sectors that include national defense and the environment.

Paul Rainwater, executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the state body that asked for the Blanco-ICF investigations, acknowledged the collections could be painful for applicants, many of whom have used up their nest eggs to rebuild.

"The state must walk a fine line of treating homeowners who have been overpaid with fairness and compassion and ensuring that all federal funds are used for their intended purpose," said Rainwater, an appointee of new Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Upon receiving money from Road Home, grantees sign a batch of forms, including one that says they must refund any overpayments.

Melanie Ehrlich, co-chair of Citizen's Road Home Action Team, which has documented Road Home cases that appear littered with mistakes, said she had no confidence that ICF had correctly calculated overpayments. She charged that the company was more likely using collections as retribution against people who had appealed their award amounts in effort to get the aid they deserved.

"I think they are looking for ways to decrease awards and that's part of dissuading people," she said.

Brann said applicants are told an appeal could boost or diminish their award. She called Ehrlich's charge "a totally unfounded assertion."

Weaponizing the Pentagon's Cyborg Insects

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By Nick Turse

A Futuristic Nightmare That Just Might Come True

Biological weapons delivered by cyborg insects. It sounds like a nightmare scenario straight out of the wilder realms of science fiction, but it could be a reality, if a current Pentagon project comes to fruition.

Right now, researchers are already growing insects with electronics inside them. They’re creating cyborg moths and flying beetles that can be remotely controlled. One day, the U.S. military may field squadrons of winged insect/machine hybrids with on-board audio, video or chemical sensors. These cyborg insects could conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions on distant battlefields, in far-off caves, or maybe even in cities closer to home, and transmit detailed data back to their handlers at U.S. military bases.

Today, many people fear U.S. government surveillance of email and cell phone communications. With this program, the Pentagon aims to exponentially increase the paranoia. Imagine a world in which any insect fluttering past your window may be a remote-controlled spy, packed with surveillance equipment. Even more frightening is the prospect that such creatures could be weaponized, and the possibility, according to one scientist intimately familiar with the project, that these cyborg insects might be armed with "bio weapons."

For the past 50 years, work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) -- the Pentagon’s blue skies research outfit -- has led to some of the most lethal weaponry in the U.S. arsenal: from Hellfire-missile-equipped Predator drones and stealth fighters and bombers to Tomahawk cruise missiles and Javelin portable "fire and forget" guided missiles. For the last several years, DARPA has funneled significant sums of money into a very different kind of guided missile project, its Hybrid Insect MEMS (HI-MEMS) program. This project is, according to DARPA, "aimed at developing tightly coupled machine-insect interfaces by placing micro-mechanical systems [MEMS] inside the insects during the early stages of metamorphosis." Put simply, the creation of cyborg insects: part bug, part bot.

Bugs, Bots, Borgs and Bio-Weapons

This past August, at DARPA’s annual symposium -- DARPATech -- HI-MEMS program manager Amit Lal, an associate professor on leave from Cornell University, explained that his project aims to transform "insects into unmanned air-vehicles." He described the research this way: "[T]he HI-MEMS program seeks to grow MEMS and electronics inside the insect pupae. The new tissue forms around the insertions, making the bio-electronic interface long-lasting and reliable." In other words, micro-electronics are inserted at the pupal stage of metamorphosis so that they can be integrated into the insects’ bodies as they develop, creating living robots that can be remotely controlled after the insect emerges from its cocoon.

According to the latest reports, work on this project is progressing at a rapid pace. In a recent phone interview, DARPA spokesperson Jan Walker said, "We’re focused on determining what the best kinds of MEMS systems are; what the best MEMS system would be for embedding; what the best time is for embedding."

This month, Rob Coppinger, writing for the aerospace trade publication Flight International, reported on new advances announced at the "1st US-Asian Assessment and Demonstration of Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology" -- a Pentagon-sponsored conference. "In the latest work," he noted, "a Manduca moth had its thorax truncated to reduce its mass and had a MEMS component added where abdominal segments would have been, during the larval stage." But, as he pointed out, Robert Michelson, a principal research engineer, emeritus at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, laid out "on behalf of DARPA" some of the obstacles that remain. Among them were short insect life-spans and the current inability to create these cyborgs outside specialized labs.

DARPA’s professed long-term goal for the HI-MEMS program is the creation of "insect cyborgs" capable of carrying "one or more sensors, such as a microphone or a gas sensor, to relay back information gathered from the target destination" -- in other words, the creation of military micro-surveillance systems.

In a recent email interview, Michelson -- who has previously worked on numerous military projects, including DARPA’s "effort to develop an ‘Entomopter’ (mechanical insect-like multimode aerial robot)" -- described the types of sensor packages envisioned, but only in a minimalist fashion, as a "[w]ide array of active and passive devices." However in "Insect Cyborgs: A New Frontier in Flight Control Systems," a 2007 article in the academic journal Proceedings of SPIE, Cornell researchers noted that cyborg insects could be used as "autonomous surveillance and reconnaissance vehicles" with on-board "[s]ensory systems such as video and chemical."

Surveillance applications, however, may only be the beginning. Last year, Jonathan Richards, reporting for The Times, raised the specter of the weaponization of cyborg insects in the not-too-distant future. As he pointed out, Rodney Brooks, the director of the computer science and artificial intelligence lab at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, indicated that the Pentagon is striving toward a major expansion in the use of non-traditional air power -- like unmanned aerial vehicles and cyborg insects -- in the years ahead. "There’s no doubt their things will become weaponized," he explained, "so the question [is]: should they [be] given targeting authority?" Brooks went on to assert, according to The Times, that it might be time to consider rewriting international law to take the future weaponization of such "devices" into account.

But how would one weaponize a cyborg insect? On this subject, Robert Michelson was blunt: "Bio weapons."

Cyborg Ethics

Michelson wouldn’t elaborate further, but any program using bio-weapons would immediately raise major legal and ethical questions. The 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention outlawed the manufacture and possession of bio-weapons, of "[m]icrobial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin… that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes" and of "[w]eapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict." In fact, not only did President George W. Bush claim that Iraq’s supposed production and possession of biological weapons was a justification for an invasion of that nation, but he had previously stated, "All civilized nations reject as intolerable the use of disease and biological weapons as instruments of war and terror."

Reached for comment, however, DARPA’s Jan Walker insisted that her agency’s focus was only on "fundamental research" when it came to cyborg insects. Although the focus of her agency is, in fact, distinctly on the future -- the technology of tomorrow -- she refused to look down the road when it came to weaponizing insect cyborgs or arming them with bio-weapons. "I can’t speculate on the future," was all she would say.

Michelson is perfectly willing to look into future, especially on matters of cyborg insect surveillance, but on the horizon for him are technical issues when it comes to the military use of bug bots. "Surveillance goes on anyway by other means," he explained, "so a new method is not the issue. If there are ethical or legal issues, they are ones of ’surveillance,’ not of the ’surveillance platform.’"

Peter Eckersley, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights and civil liberties group, sees that same future in a different light. Cyborg insects, he says, are an order of magnitude away from today’s more standard surveillance technologies like closed circuit television. "CCTV is mostly deployed in public and in privately owned public spaces. An insect could easily fly into your garden or sit outside your bedroom window," he explained. "To make matters worse, you’d have no idea these devices were there. A CCTV camera is usually an easily recognizable device. Robotic surveillance insects might be harder to spot. And having to spot them wouldn’t necessarily be good for our mental health."

Does Michelson see any ethical or legal dilemmas resulting from the future use of weaponized cyborg insects? "No, not unless they could breed new cyborg insects, which is not possible," he explained. "Genetic engineering will be the ethical and legal battleground, not cybernetics."

Battle Beetles and Hawkish Hawkmoths

Weaponized or not, moths are hardly the only cyborg insects that may fly, creep, or crawl into the military’s future arsenal. Scientists from Arizona State University and elsewhere, working under a grant from the Office of Naval Research and DARPA, "are rearing beetle species at various oxygen levels to attempt to produce beetles with greater-than-normal size and payload capacity." Earlier this year, some of the same scientists published an article on their DARPA-funded research titled "A Cyborg Beetle: Insect Flight Control Through an Implantable, Tetherless Microsystem." They explained that, by implanting "multiple inserted neural and muscular stimulators, a visual stimulator, a polyimide assembly and a microcontroller" in a 2 centimeter long, 1-2 gram green June beetle, they were "capable of modulating [the insect’s] flight starts, stops, throttle/lift, and turning." They could, that is, drive an actual beetle. However, unlike the June bug you might find on a porch screen or in a garden, these sported on-board electronics powered by cochlear implant batteries.

DARPA-funded HI-MEMS research has also been undertaken at other institutions across the country and around the world. For example, in 2006, researchers at Cornell, in conjunction with scientists at Pennsylvania State University and the Universidad de Valparaiso, Chile, received an $8.4 million DARPA grant for work on "Insect Cyborg Sentinels." According to a recent article in New Scientist, a team led by one of the primary investigators on that grant, David Stern, screened a series of video clips at a recent conference in Tucson, Arizona demonstrating their ability to control tethered tobacco hawkmoths through "flexible plastic probes" implanted during the pupae stage. Simply stated, the researchers were able to remotely control the moths-on-a-leash, manipulating the cyborg creatures’ wing speed and direction.

Robo-Bugs

Cyborg insects are only the latest additions to the U.S. military’s menagerie. As defense tech-expert Noah Shachtman of Wired magazine’s Danger Room blog has reported, DARPA projects have equipped rats with electronic equipment and remotely controlled sharks, while the military has utilized all sorts of animals, from bomb-detecting honeybees and "chickens used as early-warning sensors for chemical attacks" to guard dogs and dolphins trained to hunt mines. Additionally, he notes, the DoD’s emphasis on the natural world has led to robots that resemble dogs, monkeys that control robotic limbs with their minds, and numerous other projects inspired by nature.

But whatever other creatures they favor, insects never seem far from the Pentagon’s dreams of the future. In fact, Shachtman reported earlier this year that "Air Force scientists are looking for robotic bombs that look -- and act -- like swarms of bugs and birds." He went on to quote Colonel Kirk Kloeppel, head of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s munitions directorate, who announced the Lab’s interest in "bio-inspired munitions," in "small, autonomous" machines that would "provide close-in [surveillance] information, in addition to killing intended targets."

This month, researcher Robert Wood wrote in IEEE Spectrum about what he believes was "the first flight of an insect-size robot." After almost a decade of research, Wood and his colleagues at the Harvard Microrobotics Laboratory are now creating small insect-like robots that will eventually be outfitted "with onboard sensors, flight controls, and batteries… to nimbly flit around obstacles and into places beyond human reach." Like cyborg insect researchers, Wood is DARPA-funded. Last year, in fact, the agency selected him as one of 24 "rising stars" for a "young faculty awards" grant.

Asked about the relative advantages of cyborg insects compared to mechanical bugs, Robert Michelson noted that "robotic insects obey without innate or external influences" and "they can be mass produced rapidly." He cautioned, however, that they are extremely limited power-wise. Insect cyborgs, on the other hand, "can harvest energy and continue missions of longer duration." However, they "may be diverted from their task by stronger influences"; must be grown to maturity and so may not be available when needed; and, of course, are mortal and run the risk of dying before they can be employed as needed.

The Future is Now

There is plenty of technical information about the HI-MEMS program available in the scientific literature. And if you make inquiries, DARPA will even direct you to some of the relevant citations. But while it’s relatively easy to learn about the optimal spots to insert a neural stimulator in a green June beetle ("behind the eye, in the flight control area of the insect brain") or an electronic implant in a tobacco hawkmoth ("the main flight powering muscles… in the dorsal-thorax"), it’s much harder to discover the likely future implications of this sci-fi sounding research.

The "final demonstration goal" -- the immediate aim -- of DARPA’s HI-MEMS program "is the delivery of an insect within five meters of a specific target located at hundred meters away, using electronic remote control, and/or global positioning system (GPS)." Right now, DARPA doesn’t know when that might happen. "We basically operate phase to phase," says Walker. "So, it kind of depends on how they do in the current phase and we’ll make decisions on future phases."

DARPA refuses to examine anything but research-oriented issues. As a result, its Pentagon-funded scientists churn out inventions with potentially dangerous, if not deadly, implications without ever fully considering -- let alone seeking public or expert comment on -- the future ramifications of new technologies under production.

"The people who build this equipment are always going to say that they’re just building tools, that there are legitimate uses for them, and that it isn’t their fault if the tools are abused," says the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eckersley. "Unfortunately, we’ve seen that governments are more than willing to play fast-and-loose with the legal bounds on surveillance. Unless and until that changes, we’d urge researchers to find other projects to work on."