Undernews For July 2, 2009

THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW
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2 July 2009

WORD

I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired - Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer

I think, therefore Descartes exists. - Saul Steinberg

FLOTSAM & JETSAM: FROM VICTIM TO PERP

Sam Smith

It used to be easy to tell the enemy. All you had to do was to check their uniforms and nationality. But after 9/11 it became a lot more difficult. We started fighting a war against an attitude and a concept instead of a country. How do you invade terror? if the identifying mark of a terrorist is hatred of America how can you tell when you've won? Who signs the surrender papers?

Of course, we did have some experience in this. We had already declared war on all sorts of things: cancer, drugs, pants slung too low on the hips - none of which had borders, a government or tanks.

Our metaphors had already spun out of control.

And few counted the bodies.

For example, prior to the World Trade Center attack, Al Qaeda was reported to have killed something less than 500 people. Another 3,000 were killed on 9/11. To retaliate it has so far cost us about 4,000 dead troops in Iraq and another 700 in Afghanistan.

Of course there have been others involved, such as innocent Iraqis and Afghans. The estimates of Iraqi civilian deaths range from around 100,000 (based only on those deaths reported in the media) to the medical journal Lancet's 2006 estimate of 600,000 and the one million listed by Opinion Research in 2007. The civilian Afghan tally is far more modest - somewhere around 8,000 - but still more than double the number killed in 2001.

Dylan Thomas noted, "After the first death there is no other." But how can we become so incensed at the deaths of 3,000 innocent Americans and yet feel justified in taking the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people who just happened to be in our way as we futilely sought out bin Ladin and his small band of guerillas?

How can we not even question it? Or not mention it in the media?

And now it's gotten worse. Wall Street the victim has turned into Wall Street the perp.

According to the director of the World Health Organization some 200,000-400,000 women and children can be expected to die each year as a result of the fiscal collapse. And UN officials have added another hundred million to the ranks of the global hungry due to the crisis.

In other words, Wall Street will kill a hundred times as many women and children as were killed when it came under attack and it hardly makes the news.

We are infuriated by Bernie Madoff for stealing from the rich, but pay virtually no attention to what is going on to ordinary citizens around the world as a result of conventional fiscal greed of the past few decades.

We may assume that, unlike bin Laden or Richard Cheney, the traders and manipulators acted without malice aforethought. They were, after all, only thinking only of themselves.

But if they had been driving a car instead of trading a derivative, it would be a criminal offense called negligent manslaughter. We don't have such a crime in markets or politics.

And so the president listens to fiscal advisers who are treated as wise men rather than as fiscal terrorists and the media respectfully quotes them with not one sign that they were among those who helped Wall Street do to the world what Bernie Madoff did to his clients and in a far more deadly fashion than even bin Laden.

Meanwhile a malevolent man who thought he could bring America down by attacking Wall Street sits somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, watching as his intended victim do his work for him.

PAGE ONE MUST

BANKS HIKING FEES & INTEREST RATES TO BEAT NEW LEGISLATION

Washington Post - Credit card companies are raising interest rates and fees seven months before new rules go into effect that will limit their ability to do so, much to the irritation of Congress and consumer advocates.

Chase, for instance, will raise the minimum payment required of some of its customers from 2 percent to 5 percent of the statement balance starting in August. Chase and Discover have increased the maximum fee charged for transferring a balance to the card to 5 percent of the amount, up from 3 and 4 percent, respectively. Bank of America last month raised the transaction fee for balance transfers and cash advances from 3 to 4 percent. Card issuers including Bank of America and Citi also continue to cut limits and hike up rates, which they have been doing with more frequency since January. . .

Yesterday, Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) once again requested that the Federal Reserve invoke its emergency powers to place a limit on interest rate hikes.

"This is what many of us feared about a law that didn't take effect right away," Schumer said. "It was never going to take this long for the credit card companies to get ready for the new reforms. Instead, issuers are using the delay in the effective date to wring more dollars out of their customers. It is against the spirit of the law, and it is just plain wrong."

SEC INVESTIGATOR'S CONCERNS ABOUT MADOFF WERE BRUSHED OFF

Washington Post - An investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission warned superiors as far back as 2004 about irregularities at Bernard L. Madoff's financial management firm, but she was told to focus on an unrelated matter, according to agency documents and sources familiar with the investigation. Genevievette Walker-Lightfoot, a lawyer in the SEC's Office of Compliance Inspections and Examinations, sent e-mails to a supervisor, saying information provided by Madoff during her review didn't add up and suggesting a set of questions to ask his firm, documents show.

Several of these questions directly challenged Madoff activities that much later turned out to be elements of his massive fraud. But with the agency under pressure to look for wrongdoing in the mutual fund industry, she wasn't able to continue pursuing Madoff, according to documents and two people familiar with the investigation, and her team soon concluded its work on the probe.

Walker-Lightfoot's supervisors on the case were Mark Donohue, then a branch chief in her department, and his boss, Eric Swanson, an assistant director of the department, said two people familiar with the investigation. Swanson later married Madoff's niece, and their relationship is now under review by the agency's inspector general, who is examining the SEC's handling of the Madoff case.

HEALTH INDICATORS

Center for Disease Control - An estimated 43.8 million Americans had no health insurance in 2008, approximately 2.8 million more than in 1997, according to new data. The report, “Health Insurance Coverage: Early Release of Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey, 2008,” presents the latest insurance estimates for the United States.

The report also contains new estimates of health insurance coverage for the 20 largest states, and shows Massachusetts had the lowest percentage of uninsured individuals under age 65 (3.4 percent) in 2008. In contrast, approximately 1 in 4 persons under age 65 lacked coverage in Florida and Texas, and 1 in 5 lacked coverage in Arizona, California and Georgia. Nationally, 16.7 percent of those under age 65 were uninsured in 2008.

The report also includes data on children under the age of 18 and shows that the percentage of children with no health insurance was 8.9 percent in 2008, the same as in 2007, but down significantly from 13.9 percent in 1997. A total of 34.2 percent of children had public health coverage. Among the states examined in this report, public coverage for children ranged from 22 percent in New Jersey to 41 percent in Georgia and North Carolina.

In a second report also released today, “Health Insurance Coverage Trends, 1959-2007: Estimates from the National Health Interview Survey,” NCHS researchers examined insurance coverage trends during both the pre-and-post-Medicare/Medicaid periods.

Findings in the 1959-2007 report include:

The percentage of people under age 65 with private hospital insurance increased from 69.1 percent at the time of their interview in 1959 to 79.3 percent in 1968.

The percentage of people under age 65 with private insurance coverage remained stable at about 79 percent from 1968 to 1980, and has declined since 1980.

Medicaid coverage for individuals under age 65 remained stable at about 7 percent from 1978 to 1990, and has increased since 1990. Medicaid coverage for those under 65 was 13.9 percent in 2007.

The percentage of people under 65 who lacked health insurance increased between 1978 and 1990 and has remained stable since 1990 at between 16 percent and 18 percent. The report shows that 16.6 percent of those under age 65 had no health insurance in 2007, almost five percentage points higher than in 1978, the first year that comparable estimates of the uninsured are available.

The number of people under 65 without health insurance has increased by more than 20 million people since its lowest point in 1978.

HOW TO KILL ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY

Sam Smith - Washington, DC, which has spent billions on economic development but still has fewer residents employed than in the mid 1980s is demonstrating once again how not to do it. Since the early 19th century, when hack drivers did the best of any free black group in the city, Washington has enjoyed an unusual door to upward mobility: driving a cab. What made it special was that the city put no cap on number of drivers and used zones instead of meters, which meant that large corporations couldn't take over the business since they wouldn't be able to tell how much income a driver made.

As a result, the city had more cabs per capita than any place else in America and new immigrants - whether blacks from the south in the 1950s or Ethiopians and Indians today - had an unusual opportunity to make it in a tough system.

But those in power, including the white liberal elite, have hated the system and in recent years started to change it, first by moving to a meter system. As the Review predicted, however, this was only the first step in moving towards a corporate controlled system, as the story below indicates.

Michael Neibauer, DC Examiner - The District's open, all-are-invited taxicab industry is so saturated with drivers that the entire enterprise is threatened, according to a D.C. Council member who has filed a bill to cap the number of cabs allowed on city streets.

Ward 1 Councilman Jim Graham introduced legislation to limit the number of taxicabs in D.C. through either a medallion system, like ones used in New York City and Chicago, or a certification system.

The soaring number of taxicab operators in D.C. - roughly 8,000, most of whom own their own cars - is a "pressing and urgent problem," Graham said. [Note: this is untrue. There were 8,000 drivers a decade earlier- TPR] There are more licensed drivers in D.C. per capita than any place in the world, he said, and new applicants continue to take the required class, giving them access to the driver's exam administered by the D.C. Taxicab Commission. A glut of drivers could jeopardize the chances of any cabbies making an adequate living, Graham has said.

"Whatever system we use, we need to limit the number of operators or this boat is going to sink by its own weight in terms of the number of taxicab operators that we have," Graham said. "We're going to determine which of these two approaches we should take, but we're going to have one or the other.". . .

New York City's medallion system, established in 1937 during the Great Depression in response to a ballooning number of unregulated taxis, artificially capped the number of cabs on the road, to what is now about 13,000.

The medallion program, however, made it very difficult for the average New Yorker to join the industry as an owner: The May 2009 price for an individual medallion, those held by owner-operators, was $568,000. The cost of a corporate medallion was $744,000.

D.C. Taxicab Commissioner A. Cornelius Baker said during a recent meeting that the city must move "toward a regulated taxi force" and create a system "that sustains our drivers and also creates wealth for them in the long term."

Gary Imhoff, DC Watch - It's an awful burden on council members to have to determine the optimum number of people who should be allowed to practice any profession. Wouldn't it be a relief for politicians if someone could invent an economic system under which the optimum number of workers could be determined automatically, say by the market? Under this magical system, people would enter and leave different job markets on their own accord, depending on their own judgments of how good a living they could make, and politicians wouldn't have to make decisions for everyone else about which occupations they would be allowed to pursue. Has anyone heard of an economic system like that?

Seriously, isn't this the second step in the city government's program to force independent taxicab drivers out of business, and to ensure that a few large cab companies control the market? The first step was to get rid of the zone system and force the installation of meters. Instituting a medallion system that will limit the number of cabs and vastly increase the cost of becoming an independent cabbie should ensure that large companies will dominate and independents disappear over time, as they have in New York.

THE BACK STORY

AMERICAN NUNS AFRAID VATICAN IS GOING TO CLAMP DOWN ON THEM

NY Times - The Vatican is quietly conducting two sweeping investigations of American nuns, a development that has startled and dismayed nuns who fear they are the targets of a doctrinal inquisition. . .

Nuns were the often-unsung workers who helped build the Roman Catholic Church in this country, planting schools and hospitals and keeping parishes humming. But for the last three decades, their numbers have been declining - to 60,000 today from 180,000 in 1965.

While some nuns say they are grateful that the Vatican is finally paying attention to their dwindling communities, many fear that the real motivation is to reel in American nuns who have reinterpreted their calling for the modern world.

In the last four decades since the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, many American nuns stopped wearing religious habits, left convents to live independently and went into new lines of work: academia and other professions, social and political advocacy and grass-roots organizations that serve the poor or promote spirituality. A few nuns have also been active in organizations that advocate changes in the church like ordaining women and married men as priests.

Some sisters surmise that the Vatican and even some American bishops are trying to shift them back into living in convents, wearing habits or at least identifiable religious garb, ordering their schedules around daily prayers and working primarily in Roman Catholic institutions, like schools and hospitals.

ENTROPY UPDATE: WASHINGTON POST EDITION

Mike Allen, Politico - For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few" - Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."

The offer - which essentially turns a news organization into a facilitator for private lobbyist-official encounters - is a new sign of the lengths to which news organizations will go to find revenue at a time when most newspapers are struggling for survival.

And it's a turn of the times that a lobbyist is scolding The Washington Post for its ethical practices.

"Underwriting Opportunity: An evening with the right people can alter the debate," says the one-page flier. "Underwrite and participate in this intimate and exclusive Washington Post Salon, an off-the-record dinner and discussion at the home of CEO and Publisher Katharine Weymouth. ... Bring your organization's CEO or executive director literally to the table. Interact with key Obama administration and congressional leaders …

"Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No. The relaxed setting in the home of Katharine Weymouth assures it. What is guaranteed is a collegial evening, with Obama administration officials, Congress members, business leaders, advocacy leaders and other select minds typically on the guest list of 20 or less. …

"Offered at $25,000 per sponsor, per Salon. Maximum of two sponsors per Salon. Underwriters' CEO or Executive Director participates in the discussion. Underwriters appreciatively acknowledged in printed invitations and at the dinner. Annual series sponsorship of 11 Salons offered at $250,000 … Hosts and Discussion Leaders ... Health-care reporting and editorial staff members of The Washington Post ... An exclusive opportunity to participate in the health-care reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done. . . A Washington Post Salon .. . . July 21, 2009 6:30 p.m.". . .

Sources at the paper say the marketing offer may be getting ahead of what the newsroom is prepared to deliver. The newspaper recently hired someone to organize conferences, and his primary mission is to stage on-the-record events about topical subjects in Washington. Conferences are a trend throughout the news industry.

"Washington Post Salons are extensions of The Washington Post brand of journalistic inquiry into the issues, a unique opportunity for stakeholders to hear and be heard," the flier says. "At the core is a critical topic of our day. Dinner and a volley of ideas unfold in an evening of intelligent, news-driven and off-the-record conversation. . . By bringing together those powerful few in business and policy-making who are forwarding, legislating and reporting on the issues, Washington Post Salons give life to the debate. Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons."

The first "Salon" is titled, "Health-Care Reform: Better or Worse for Americans? The reform and funding debate."

From: Marcus Brauchli
Sent: 07/02/2009 10:33 AM EDT
To: NEWS
Subject: Newsroom Independence

Colleagues,

A flyer was distributed this week offering an "underwriting opportunity" for a dinner on health-care reform, in which the news department had been asked to participate.

The language in the flyer and the description of the event preclude our participation.

We will not participate in events where promises are made that in exchange for money The Post will offer access to newsroom personnel or will refrain from confrontational questioning. Our independence from advertisers or sponsors is inviolable.

There is a long tradition of news organizations hosting conferences and events, and we believe The Post, including the newsroom, can do these things in ways that are consistent with our values.

Marcus

Howard Kurtz, Washington Post - Washington Post Publisher Katharine Weymouth today canceled plans for a series of policy dinners at her home after learning that marketing fliers offered lobbyists access to Obama administration officials, members of Congress and Post journalists in exchange for payments as high as $250,000.

"Absolutely, I'm disappointed," Weymouth, the chief executive of Washington Post Media, said in an interview. "This should never have happened. The fliers got out and weren't vetted. They didn't represent at all what we were attempting to do. We're not going to do any dinners that would impugn the integrity of the newsroom.". . .

Two Post executives familiar with the planning, who declined to be identified discussing internal planning, said the fliers appear to be the product of overzealous marketing executives. The fliers were overseen by Charles Pelton, a Post executive hired this year as a conference organizer. He was not immediately available for comment.

White House communications director Anita Dunn said today that The Post Co. had approached officials at the Health and Human Services Department to participate in a Weymouth dinner later this month. But, she said, "no senior Obama administration officials had accepted any invitation for the 'salon.'"

Weymouth knew of the plans to host small dinners at her home and to charge lobbying and trade organizations for participation. But, one of the executives said, she believed that there would be multiple sponsors, to minimize any appearance of charging for access, and that the newsroom would be in charge of the scope and content of any dinners in which Post reporters and editors participated.

Brauchli said he had been involved in discussions, stretching back to last year, about newsroom participation in conferences of the sort commonly staged by major news organizations.

But he said he made clear to the company's marketing officials that Post journalists would participate only if they could substantially control the nature of any such conference. Brauchli said he was blindsided by the wording of these fliers and that they are an embarrassment to the newspaper.

"We expressed our concerns and are disappointed by this outcome," he said of the previous meetings with Post executives. "I would ascribe it to a lack of effective communication internally." . . .

The aggressively worded pitch gives the impression that The Post is selling access to special interests, not just to administration officials and lawmakers -- which raises a separate set of questions about cozy relationships -- but to the people who produce the newspaper. The Post often raises questions about whether corporations, unions and trade associations receive access or favors in return for campaign contributions to political candidates.

Now the fliers have raised the question of whether the newspaper itself is pursuing such a strategy in exchange for hefty fees from special-interest groups. Access to Weymouth herself, a granddaughter of longtime publisher Katharine Graham who took over as chief executive of Washington Post Media last year, would be deemed valuable by those trying to influence The Post's editorial policies and news coverage.

The Post Co. lost $19.5 million in the first quarter and just completed its fourth round of early-retirement buyouts in several years, prompting Weymouth to look for new sources of revenue.

SHOP TALK

We love Firefox but so far not the new upgrade. Problems include unexpected elimination of a number of our favorite add ons - such as one that copied both text and url at the same time - and an apparent refusal, when you load a group of tabs, to let you view any tab until they're all loaded. This makes you hostage to the slowest loading tab.
SOUTHERN POLS OPPOSE SINGLE PAYER, BUT ALMOST HALF OF THOSE USING MILITARY SINGLE PAYER ARE FROM THE SOUTH
Facing South - In this year's health reform debate, Congressional Democrats quickly took proposals for a single-payer system off the table, claiming it was "unrealistic." But more than 9 million people in the U.S. have already signed on to a single-payer system that's proved both workable and popular: TRICARE, the Department of Defense's program for active-duty military and retirees.

Even more interesting: According to a Facing South analysis, nearly half of TRICARE beneficiaries live in the South -- states where Congressional leadership has been most vocal in opposing public involvement in health care. . .

The high Southern enrollment in government-run TRICARE, where the military pays private doctors in a single-payer system, seems at odds with the vocal opposition of Southern lawmakers to anything smacking of public involvement in health care.

Take South Carolina: The Palmetto State has the 8th-highest TRICARE enrollment in the nation, nearly a quarter-million people. . . Contrast TRICARE's popularity in South Carolina with these words from Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) last week, who has led the Republican party's attempts to torpedo health proposals that involve the government:

"[Democrats] think we're stupid," said DeMint. "They think that you don't know that government does not work well, that the same people who cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina are the ones who can really run our health care system with that personal touch that we all want ... They're talking about a government plan that can do things that no government plan has ever done."

The 233,725 people who chose to use TRICARE in DeMint's home state likely disagree

HOW JOB LOSS AFFECTS YOUR LIFE EXPECTANCY

Alternet - When you lose your job, with no prospect of finding another one quickly, you give up a lot more than income. You are deprived of a sense of security, a source of self-esteem, a certain status in the community. And, according to recent research, you also lose something even more precious: a year or more of your life.

That's the conclusion of two prominent economists, Daniel Sullivan of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and Till von Wachter of Columbia University. Matching death records with employment and earnings data of Pennsylvania workers from the 1970s and '80s, they found mortality rates for high-seniority male workers spike sharply in the year following an involuntary job loss, and they remain surprisingly high two decades later.

If this higher death rate persists into old age, it implies "a loss in life expectancy of 1 to 1.5 years for a worker displaced at age 40," the researchers report. . .
WHAT THE US TROOPS ARE REALLY DOING IN IRAQ

Rep Dennis Kucinich - The withdrawal of some U.S. combat troops from Iraq’s cities is welcome and long overdue news. However, it is important to remember that this is not the same as a withdrawal of U.S. troops and contractors from Iraq.

U.S. troop combat missions throughout Iraq are not scheduled to end until more than a year from now in August of 2010. In addition, U.S. troops are not scheduled for a complete withdrawal for another two and a half years on December 31, 2011. Rather, U.S. troops are leaving Iraqi cities for military bases in Iraq. They are still in Iraq, and they can be summoned back at any time.

This is not a great victory for peace. On May 19, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Iraqi and U.S. military officials virtually redrew the city limits of Baghdad in order to consider the Army's Forward Operating Base Falcon as outside the city, despite every map of Baghdad clearly showing it within city limits. In fact, according to the SOFA, U.S. troops can remain at any agreed upon facility. The reported reason for this decision is to ensure U.S. troops are able to ‘help maintain security in south Baghdad along what were the fault lines in the sectarian war.'

In reality, this is a small step toward Iraqi sovereignty as Iraqi security forces begin assuming greater control over security operations, but it is a long way from independence and a withdrawal of the U.S. military presence.

MORE BMI BS

As reported recently in another study, yes, America is getting fatter and yes, it's a big problem. But it's not helped by a stunningly incorrect system of calculation known as Body Mass Index, that assumes that everyone is built in two dimensions like Flat Stanley. Even the NY Times has finally admitted this but the conventional media continues to perpetuate the myth.

NY Times - A Belgian statistician and astronomer, Adolphe Quetelet, invented the index formula in the 1830s. But it wasn't until the 1980s that public health agencies adopted it as a way of identifying individuals at risk for heart attacks, hypertension, diabetes, stroke and some cancers.

In 1998, two branches of the National Institutes of Health created new guidelines which divided people into categories: You were "normal" if your index rating was between 18.5 and 24.9; "overweight'' if it was 25 to 29.9; and "obese" if it was 30 or higher.

After the change, many doctors and lay people were up in arms. By the revised standards, nearly 55 percent of the American adult population in 1998, was considered overweight or obese, according to the N.I.H. (Today, 66.3 percent of adults are overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The index also didn't distinguish between body fat and muscle mass, so athletes and bodybuilders like Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose rating was 33 when he was Mr. Universe, were technically obese.

That struck some people as odd. Such discrepancies got experts wondering how accurately the index gauges health. Others questioned the reliability of the index because the figure doesn't take fitness into account.

Bryon Hall, Fatal Games - BMI has been criticized widely because it does not take into account body build. Therefore, a fitness trainer may mistakenly tell their client that the client is slightly overweight according to their BMI, when in fact they are fit but merely have an athletic build.

However, when I began extrapolating height and weight proportions to larger and smaller humanoids such as elves or giants, who were still generally meant to have a build at least similar to an average human, I got strange results. . .

The average male has a BMI of 21.58. The nearly 12-foot hypothetical person would have a BMI of 43.16. The hypothetical half-size or child-size person would have a BMI of 10.93. At this point, the problem should be obvious. As a measure, BMI results vary with height.

CUBE BASED WEIGHT CHART

PLAN TO SPY ON EVERY CAR ON AMERICAN ROADS

Kansas City Star - The year is 2020 and the gasoline tax is history. In its place you get a monthly tax bill based on each mile you drove . . tracked by a Global Positioning System device in your car and uploaded to a billing center. What once was science fiction is being field-tested by the University of Iowa to iron out the wrinkles should a by-the-mile road tax ever be enacted. . .

The idea of shifting to a by-the-mile tax has been discussed for years, but it now appears to be getting more serious attention. A federal commission, after a two-year study, concluded earlier this year that the road tax was the "best path forward" to keep revenues flowing to highway and transportation projects, and could be an important new tool to help manage traffic and relieve congestion.

VETERAN JOURNALIST ABUSED BY CUSTOM OFFICIAL

Jeff Stein, CQ - A veteran American journalist returning from Latin America on Saturday was closely questioned by a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent about where he went and whom he talked to. John Dinges, a former NPR managing editor for news and currently professor at Columbia University's School of Journalism, landed at Miami International Airport June 27 after visiting Venezuela and Chile.

After examining his passport, he said, the CBP agent asked him, "What were you doing on this trip?"

Returning Americans are routinely asked such general questions.

"I told him I was a journalist," Dinges said, "conducting journalistic business in Chile and Venezuela.". . .

He said the agent demanded to know "exactly" where he went and whom he met with.

"I told him I was not comfortable answering those kinds of questions," said Dinges, who has written three books on Latin America.

But the agent was adamant. "He said, 'This is the United States, and I can ask you anything I want,'" Dinges recounted.

The agent said, "You have to answer, for me to assess your status."

When Dinges again objected, saying, "I feel protected under the Constitution," the officer told him, "If you don't want to talk, we can go to the back room, and you can discuss this with my supervisor."

Feeling threatened, and having to catch a connecting flight within the hour, Dinges relented, and "started to talk about meetings and where and who I'd talked to."

"I felt I had to keep talking and give him details until he was satisfied," said Dinges, who was also a foreign desk editor for the Washington Post, and reported frequently for the paper from Latin America. He joined the Columbia faculty in the 1990s. . .

As it turns out, Customs and Border Protection officers can indeed ask anyone, including journalists, anything, according to spokesman Michael Friel.

"There are no special procedures for dealing with a journalist," Friel said in an interview.

"The officer's role is to protect the borders" and "determine a person's admissibility to the United States."
ALTERNATING STAIR TREADS

Lloyd Alter, Tree Hugger - Alternating tread stairs. . . are a great way to save space and are surprisingly easy to use. Justin at StairPorn found this elegant one in a surprising place: a house built at the Rural Studio of Auburn University, where four students designed and built a house with $10,000 worth of materials and $10,000 worth of labor.

GOP BLOCKS EFFORT TO CURB OIL PRICE SPECULATION

Senate Republicans have blocked consideration of an amendment by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to require federal regulators to use emergency powers to curb oil price speculation. "What are they afraid of? Who are they trying to protect?" Sanders asked.

"There is mounting evidence that the run-up in oil prices has little to do with the fundamentals of supply and demand and everything to do with excessive speculation by some of the same Wall Street firms that received the largest taxpayer bailout in the history of the world," Sanders said. "They're back," he warned.

"Not having caused enough damage driving our country and much of the world into a deep recession, now they're back into their speculation games jacking-up oil prices which are having an enormously negative impact on consumers all over our country," he added.

The amendment would require the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to use emergency powers to prevent the manipulation of oil prices.

Among the Wall Street firms that stand to benefit by unregulated speculation is Goldman Sachs, the leading trader of oil and gas derivatives in the United States. The Guardian reported on Sunday that "staff at Goldman Sachs can look forward to the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history after a spectacular first half of the year."

Sanders' amendment was cosponsored by Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Mark Begich (D-Alaska). The House of Representatives last July passed an identical bill by a vote of 402 to 19, but it did not become law.

NPR'S OMBUDSMAN, WHO WANTS TO SOFT PEDAL USE OF WORD 'TORTURE,' IS AFRAID TO TALK TO GLEN GREENWALD

Glen Greenwald, Salon - NPR's Ombudsman, Alicia Shepard, wrote a column last week justifying NPR's policy of using euphemisms such as "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- while barring the use of the word "torture" -- to describe the interrogation tactics used by the Bush administration. I wrote a critique of that column which was widely cited, and the comment section to her column was filled with hundreds of angry criticisms -- many times the number of comments her column typically attracts. As a result of all that, last week I extended an invitation to Shepard to discuss her column with me on Salon Radio. .

Yesterday, we received Shepard's response: no. According to the Salon intern who tenaciously pursued Shepard all week and spoke with her yesterday:

||| I just got off the phone with Alicia Shepard. She declined to have an interview, or to go on Salon Radio. To quote, she thought "misleading things" were written about her on Salon, and said "I don't want to get into a shouting match." As for what the "misleading" statements were, she didn't clarify. |||

BREVITAS

GROWING THINGS IN SMALL SPACES

SHIP SEIZED BY ISRAEL UPDATE

Atlanta Journal Constitution - Israeli naval forces blockading Gaza have intercepted a ship whose passengers include former Georgia congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. . . The ship was rerouted to the Israeli port of Ashdod, and its cargo delivered to Gaza by road after a security inspection. The passengers and crew are in Israel and will be flown to their home countries in about a day, the consulate general's office said.

MID EAST

Angry Arab - You would not know this from US media but the month of June was the most violent month in Iraq in 11 months.

OBAMALAND

Chip Reid and Helen Thomas double team White House press secretary on Obama's prepakaged town hall meeting.

INDICATORS

BBC - The number of jobs lost in the US last month came in at 467,000, which was much more than had been expected. The jobless rate rose to 9.5% in June, from 9.4% in May, as the US economy continued to struggle. Since the start of the recession in December 2007, the number of jobless people has risen by 7.2 million, the Department of Labor said. The unemployment rate was slightly lower than had been expected, but was still the highest since August 1983.

ENDS

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