Dave Lindorff

For months, the various government departments dealing with things economic--Treasury, Commerce, Labor and of course the Council of Economic Advisers and the Federal Reserve, have been issuing soothing words that the nation’s economy is headed back up from the Great Recession that allegedly began in December 2007.

But now comes word from the Department of Labor that, whoops, we minsunderestimated, as former President George W. Bush would say, the number of jobs lost.  The Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that because of a “modeling error,” it misstated the number of jobs lost between March 2008 and March 2009 by 17%. In hard numbers, that is to say, the BLS was reporting that a record 4.8 million jobs were lost during those 12 months of economic collapse, when in fact the job loss total was actually 5.6 million.

They missed 824,000 lost jobs! Just to give you an idea of how many people that is, we’re talking about 10% of the population of the city of New York, and more people than the entire population of San Francisco.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff 
 
       You had to love the headline the Philadelphia Inquirer put on the jump page of columnist Trudy Rubin’s Sunday commentary about word that the Obama administration is hoping to talk with at least some mid-level Taliban leaders about giving up the fight and “coming over” to the “government” side.       

   &n

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

        Flash! The Supreme Court’s latest 5-4 decision overturning the over 60-year-old ban on corporations giving money to political campaigns is not the end of democracy as we know it, or the onset of fascism in America, as some of hyperventilating progressives have been claiming.

          Sure it’s an outrage to say, as the court majority did, that corporations have the same rights as people.

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BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

By Dave Lindorff

       The Democratic Party’s embarrassing electoral disaster in Massachusetts, losing a seat held for 46 years by the late Sen.

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The media punditry, corn-fed on conventional wisdom, are all atwitter about the looming Democratic debacle in Massachusetts, saying that win or lose, the poor showing by the Democratic candidate for the late Sen. Edward Kennedy's seat, state Attorney General Martha Coakley, means Democrats in Congress should abandon plans to push through a House-Senate compromise health bill, and instead just go with the Senate's version of health "reform" legislation, thus circumventing a certain Republican filibuster attempt.

The Senate bill, remember, is the dreadful health bill version that outlaws abortion coverage for anyone getting subsidized insurance, and that taxes the hell out of health insurance benefits that are the mainstay of many middle-income and working-class families, not to mention mandating that people with low incomes spend significant assets they don't have to buy lousy insurance they may not want or need. As bad as the House bill is, the Senate bill is even worse.

It is a crummy bill, cobbled together from bits and pieces of self-serving elements submitted by health industry lobbyists, who have spent the last year swarming over the Senate like ants and maggots over a fetid, unrecognizable lump of roadkill.

The call for the House to adopt the Senate plan, so as to avoid a filibuster, is advice that would doom the Democrats in 2010. While that might be a good thing, given the sorry excuse for an alternative to the Republicans that the Democrats have become, I would argue that the time is right for the small rump of Democrats who are still progressives to take a stand.

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There are only two U.S. media outlets that have reported on Cuba's response to the deadly 7.0 earthquake that hit Haiti. One was Fox News, which claimed, wrongly, that the Cubans were absent from the list of neighboring Caribbean countries providing aid. The other was the Christian Science Monitor (a respected news organization that recently shut down its print edition), which reported correctly that Cuba had dispatched 30 doctors to the stricken nation.

The Christian Science Monitor, in a second article, quoted Laurence Korb, former assistant secretary of defense and now based at the Center for American Progress, as saying that the U.S., which is leading the relief efforts in Haiti, should "consider tapping the expertise of neighboring Cuba," which he noted, "has some of the best doctors in the world -- we should see about flying them in."

As for the rest of the U.S. media, they have simply ignored Cuba.

In fact, left unmentioned is the reality that Cuba already had over 400 doctors posted to Haiti to help with the day-to-day health needs of this poorest nation in the Americas, and those doctors were the first to respond to the disaster, setting up a hospital right next to the main hospital in Port-au-Prince that collapsed in the earthquake.

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If you want to see the unvarnished, true nature of our latest president, you need look no farther than two issues: whether to tax health plans that are deemed "too generous" and whether or how to tax the banks that brought about the financial crisis.

In the case of the health insurance tax, President Obama, after opposing the idea as a candidate when it was proposed by Republican candidate John McCain, is endorsing the Senate bill's approach, which would levy a 40% tax on all insurance plans that cost more than $8,500 for an individual or $23,000 for a family. According to the union movement, such a tax would hit one in four union members, who over years of struggle have negotiated decent medical benefits, often foregoing pay increases in order to provide members with health coverage. It would also hit employers with older workforces, smaller employers, who have to pay more for insurance, and also employers in parts of the country where the overall pay scales and cost of living are higher, such as the Northeast and the West Coast.

Obama says he thinks taxing such plans (which are hardly "Cadillac" in today's health marketplace), would help restrain health inflation. More important, he and the Senate backers of the measure, like that it is estimated by the Congressional Budget Office to bring in $149 billion in revenue over 10 years. (Note that we're talking about just $14.9 billion per year -- a rather minor sum compared to the total U.S. healthcare bill of $2.5 trillion a year, or the taxpayer share of that bill -- $1.2 trillion.)

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In the ironically named Liberty County Jail since December 11 sits Army Specialist and Iraq War veteran Marc Hall, a rap musician who had the audacity to write a song attacking the Pentagon for subjecting him to a so-called stop-loss order after he had finished his Army tour and had returned from a posting in Iraq.

Hall, whose hip-hop alias is Marc Watercus, wrote the song and sent it to the Pentagon as a protest. His commander at Ft. Stewart initially had him arrested after he went to his base commander to protest his stop-loss order. He had planned to leave the service when his contract was up on Feb. 27. The Pentagon then upped the charges, claiming that in sending his song to the Pentagon, he had "communicated a threat" to he military. In the song lyrics, Hall says he will shoot officers if he is stop-lossed.

The Pentagon reports that since 2001, it has prevented 120,000 soldiers from leaving the service using the stop-loss policy, which critics say is being grossly misused.

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So much for economic "green shoots."

The Obama Administration and the Federal Reserve, along with the servile corporate media, have been quick to grasp at and trumpet every little suggestion that things might be improving, as they did when the Labor Dept. announced last week that new unemployment claims had dropped to "just" 434,000, from a high of 684,000 in the week ended March 28 or last year.

Or when the Commerce Dept. reported last month that November housing starts had risen by 8.9% compared to the prior month.

Of course, what none of the rosy analysts and politicians mention is that the number of new unemployment claims would be bound to fall even if the economy were getting worse, because so many of the people who are covered by unemployment insurance have been laid off already for months, or even for more than a year already, and so the total pool of those eligible to file claims is much smaller.

Look at it this way. The labor force totaled about 150 million at the end of 2008, when official unemployment was then about 5%. Now official unemployment is at 10 percent, which means 7.5 million people have become unemployed since that time, reducing the number of working people to only 142.5 million. Actually, of course, the job losses are almost double that, when people who have quit looking for jobs, gone without a job for a year or more or work part time involuntarily are added, so really the total number of people actually still working today is closer to 135 million.

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When it comes to justice in America, the scales definitely badly need a visit by an inspector from the Department of Weights and Standards.

Consider the recent decision by Federal Judge Ricardo Urbina tossing out the federal indictment of five Blackwater (Now Xe) mercenaries for the 2007 slaughter of 14 innocent Iraqis in Baghdad.

The judge found that federal prosecutors had improperly used incriminating statements that he said had been "compelled" from the Blackwater personnel under "threat of job loss."

Let's compare that to how the courts have handled other cases. We might start with John Walker Lindh, the young American captured in the first days of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Indicted on charges of conspiring to kill Americans, Lindh, currently serving a 20-year sentence after a plea agreement reached with the government, never had his case thrown out, though the government's main evidence was a statement allegedly made by him (this on the word of an FBI agent) that he had been a member of the Taliban and Al Qaeda -- a statement that even if actually made, had come at a time that Lindh was being kept duct-taped to a gurney and held in an unheated, unlit metal shipping container with an untreated bullet wound in his leg and denied access to an attorney. Surely the coercion behind this "confession" -- Lindh's military captors allegedly were threatening him that he would die in Afghanistan -- was at least as severe as the threat to Blackwater guards that they could lose their jobs if they didn't tell what had happened at the bloody shooting in Baghdad. Yet Lindh's charges were allowed to stand.

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