Watching The World ~ In Search Of The Hundredth Monkey

The Economic Crisis and What Must be Done: The Cook Plan

By Richard C. Cook

The United States does not control its own destiny. Rather it is controlled by an international financial elite, of which the American branch works out of big New York banks like J.P. Morgan Chase, Wall Street investment firms such as Goldman Sachs, and the Federal Reserve System. They in turn control the White House, Congress, the military, the mass media, the intelligence agencies, both political parties, the universities, etc. No one can rise to the top in any of these institutions without the elite’s stamp of approval.

This elite has been around since the nation began, becoming increasingly dominant as the 19th century progressed. A key date was passage of the National Banking Act of 1863, when the system was put into place whereby federal government debt was used to collateralize bank lending. Since then we’ve paid the freight through our taxes for bank control of the economy. The final nails in the coffin came with the passage of the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

In 1929 the bankers plunged the nation into the Great Depression by constricting the money supply. With Franklin D. Roosevelt as president, the nation struggled through the decade of the 1930s but did not pull out of the Depression until the industrial explosion during World War II.

After the war came the Golden Age of the U.S. economy, when the working man, protected by strong labor unions, became a true partner in the prosperity of the industrial age. That era lasted a full generation. The bankers were largely spectators as Americans led the world in exports, standard of living, science and space exploration, and every measure of health, longevity, and culture.

Roosevelt had kept the bankers subservient to the interests of the economy at large. The Federal Reserve was part of the New Deal team, and interest rates were held at historic lows despite a large federal deficit. One main impact was the huge increase in home ownership. After World War II, the G.I. Bill allowed home ownership to grow further and millions of veterans to attend college. The influx of educated graduates led to productivity growth and the emergence of new high-tech industries.

But the bankers were laying their plans. In the early 1950s they got the government to agree to allow the Federal Reserve to escape its subservience to the U.S. Treasury Department and set interest rates on its own. Rates rose throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By the time of the interest rate hikes of 1968, the economy was slowing down. Both federal budget and trade deficits were beginning to replace the post-war surpluses. High interest rates were the likely cause.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon removed the dollar’s gold peg, allowing the huge inflation resulting from oil price increases that the international bankers engineered through control of U.S. foreign policy when Henry Kissinger was national security adviser and secretary of state. Nixon’s opening to China resulted in early agreements, also overseen by banking interests, to begin to transfer U.S. industry to overseas producers like China which had cheap labor costs.

By the mid-1970s, the U.S. had been taken over by a behind the scenes coup-d’etat that included events in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by a conspiracy that could only have been instigated by the highest levels of world financial control. In the election of 1976, David Rockefeller succeeded in placing fellow Trilateral Commission member Jimmy Carter in the White House, but Carter upset the banking community, thoroughly Zionist in orientation, by working toward peace in the Middle East and elsewhere.

I was working in the Carter White House in 1979-80. Unbeknownst to the president, Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, another Rockefeller protégé, suddenly raised interest rates to fight the inflation the bankers had caused by the OPEC oil price deals, and plunged the nation into recession. Carter was made to look weak and uninformed and was defeated in the election of 1980 by Republican candidate Ronald Reagan. It was through the “Reagan Revolution” that the regulatory controls over the banking industry were lifted, mainly in allowing the banks to use their fractional reserve privileges in making mortgage loans.

Volcker’s recession shattered American manufacturing and hastened the flight of jobs abroad. Under the “Reagan Doctrine,” the U.S. military embarked on an unprecedented mission of world conquest by attacking one small nation at a time, starting with Nicaragua. Global capitalism was also on the march, with the U.S. armed forces its own private police force. With the invasion of Iraq under George H.W. Bush in 1991, mainland Asia was revealed as the principle target.

The economy was floated by productivity gains through computer automation and a huge sell-off of assets through the merger-acquisition bubble of the late 1980s which ended in a recession. This resulted in the defeat of Bush by Bill Clinton in the election of 1992. Clinton was able to create another bubble through a strong dollar policy that attracted foreign capital.

The dot-com bubble that resulted lasted all the way through to the crash of December 2000. Meanwhile, the U.S. Air Force led the way in the destruction of the sovereign state of Yugoslavia, whereby the international bankers took over the resource wealth of the entire Balkan region, and the U.S. military gained forward bases for further incursions into Asia.

Do we need to say that none of this was ever voted on by the American electorate? But they bought into it nevertheless, both with their silence and through participation in a generally favorable job market in the emerging service occupations, particularly finance.

By the time George W. Bush was inaugurated president in January 2001, the U.S. was facing a disaster. $4 trillion in wealth had vanished when the dot.com bubble collapsed. NAFTA caused even more American manufacturing jobs to disappear abroad. The Neocons who were moving into key jobs in the Pentagon knew they would soon have new wars to fight in the Middle East, with invasion plans for Afghanistan and Iraq ready to be pulled off the shelf.

But the U.S. had no economic engine available to generate the tax revenues Bush would need for the planned wars. At this moment Chairman Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve stepped in. Over a two year period from 2001-2003 the Fed lowered interest rates by over 500 basis points. Meanwhile, the federal government removed all regulatory controls on mortgage lending, and the housing bubble was on. $4 trillion in new home loans were pumped into the economy, much of it through subprime loans borrowers could not afford.

The Fed began to put on the brakes in 2003, but the mighty work of re-floating a moribund economy had been accomplished. By late 2006 another recession loomed, but it would take two more years before the crisis of October 2008 brought the entire system down.

The impact on the job market was immediate and profound. By the time Barack Obama was elected president in November 2008, the U.S. was mired in seemingly endless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the worst recession since the Great Depression was picking up speed. In order to prevent total disaster, the Bush administration ended its eight years of catastrophic misrule with a flourish, by allocating over $700 billion in financial system bailouts to cover the bad loans the banks had been making since Greenspan gave the housing bubble the green light.

It is now November 2009. Since Barack Obama was inaugurated in January, unemployment has soared from 7.9 percent to 10.2 percent. A few hundred billion dollars were allocated for “stimulus” purposes, but most of that went to pay unemployment benefits and to keep state and local governments from laying off more employees.

A fraction has been distributed for highway improvements, but largely through the bank bailouts the federal deficit has been running at an annual rate of $1.5 trillion, by far the largest in history, with the national debt now topping $12 trillion. Ironically, those Americans who still have productive jobs continue to grow in efficiency, with productivity up over five percent in the last year.

So much federal money has been spent that the Obama administration has been struggling to make its health care proposals budget-neutral through a raft of new taxes, fees, and penalties, and by announcing in recent days that the government’ first priority must now shift to deficit reduction. The word “austerity” has been mentioned for the first time since the Carter administration. Yet Congress voted $655 billion in military expenditures to continue fighting in the Middle East. A U.S. military attack on Iran, possibly in conjunction with Israel, would surprise no one.

So where do we now stand?

At present, the Federal Reserve is trying to prevent a total economic collapse. Interest rates are near-zero, to the chagrin of foreign investors in U.S. Treasury securities, and close to half of new Treasury debt instruments have been bought by the Federal Reserve itself as a way of providing free money for federal government expenditures.

But the U.S. economy shows no signs of coming back, with no economic driver emerging that could bring it back. For all the talk about alternative energy, there has been no significant growth of any home-grown industry that could possibly make up so much lost ground in either the short or the long-term.

The industries in the U.S. that are holding up are the military, including arms exports, universities that are attracting large numbers of students from abroad, especially China, and health care, especially for the aging baby boomer population. But the war industry produces nothing with a long-term economic benefit, and health care exists mainly to treat sick people, not produce anything new.

None of this provides a foundation that can bring about a restoration of prosperity to 300 million people when the jobs of making articles of consumption are increasingly scarce. On top of everything else, since government inevitably looks to its own requirements first, the total tax burden continues to increase to the point where the average employee now pays close to 50 percent of his or her income on taxes of all types, including federal and state income taxes, real estate taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, government fees, etc. Plus the cost of utilities continues to rise steadily and threatens to skyrocket if cap-and-trade legislation is passed.

The Obama administration has no plans to deal with any of this. They have projected a budget for 15 years hence that shows the budget deficit decreasing and tax revenues going way up, but it is all lies. They have no roadmap for getting us there and no plans for following the roadmap if it portrayed a realistic goal. And yet the U.S. military is still trying to conquer Asia. It is madness.

And it is madness because the big decisions are not made by the U.S., by Congress, or by the Obama administration. The U.S. has, for half-a-century, been marching to the tune played by the international financial elite, and this fact did not change with the election of 2008. The financiers have put the people of this nation $57 trillion in debt, according to the latest reports, counting debt at the federal, state, business, and household levels. Interest alone on this debt is over $3 trillion of a GDP of $14 trillion. Failure of our political leadership to deal with this tragedy over the past three decades is nothing less than treason.

But then again, at some point the decision was made that the U.S. and its population would be discarded by history, the economic status of the nation reduced to a shadow of what it once was, but that its military machine would be used for the financial elite’s takeover of the world until it is replaced by that of some other nation. All indications are that the next country up to bat as military enforcer for the financiers is China.

There you have it. That, in my opinion, is the past, present, and future of this nation in a nutshell. Great evils have been done in the world in the last century, and there is nothing anyone can do about it.

Except…. and that’s what each person caught up in these travesties must decide. What are you going to do about it?

In mulling over this question, it would be wise to recognize that the dominance of the financial elite has largely been exercised through their control of the international monetary system based on bank lending and government debt. Therefore it’s through the monetary system that change can and must be made.

The progressives are wrong to think the government should go deeper in debt to create more jobs. This will just create an even deeper hole of debt future generations will have to crawl out of.

Rather the key is monetary reform, whether at the local or national levels. People have lost control of their ability to earn a living. But change could be accomplished through sovereign control by people and nations of the monetary means of exchange.

This control has been stolen. It is time to take it back. One way would be for the federal government to make a relief payment to each adult of $1,000 a month until the crisis lifted. This money could be earmarked for goods and services produced within the U.S. and used to capitalize a new series of community development banks. I have called this the “Cook Plan.”

The plan could be funded through direct payment from a Treasury relief account without new taxes or government borrowing. The payments would be balanced on the credit side by GDP growth or be used by individuals to pay off debt. It would be direct government spending as was done with Greenbacks before and after the Civil War without significant inflation.

Another method increasingly being used within the U.S. today is local and regional credit clearing exchanges and the use of local currencies or “scrip.” Use of such currencies could be enhanced by legislation at the state and federal levels allowing these currencies to be used for payment of taxes and government fees as well as payment of mortgages and other forms of bank debt. The credit clearing exchanges could be organized as private non-profit regional currency co-operatives similar to credit unions.

These would be immediate emergency measures. In the longer run, sovereign control of money and credit must be returned to the public commons and treated as public utilities. This does not mean exclusive government control to replace bank control. As stated previously, it would be done in partnership between government and private trade exchanges. Nor does it mean government takeover of business, industry, or the banking system, though all should be regulated for the common good and fairly taxed.

This program would lead to a new monetary paradigm where money and credit would be available by, as, when, and where needed, to facilitate trade between and among legitimate producers of goods and services. In this way trade and commerce will come to serve human freedom, not diminish it as is done with today’s dysfunctional partnership between big government trillions of dollars in debt and big finance with the entire world in hock.

Such a change would be a true populist revolution.

Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public policy issues. He is an advisor to the American Monetary Institute on its model monetary reform legislation soon to be introduced in Congress. His latest book is We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. His website is www.richardccook.com.

After the crazy spending, unfunded party-time mandates, suck the marrow from your bones bailouts and a host of other evil dumbass moves the debt passed on to future generations has come due – a little sooner than planned. The money bakers need money now. The wheels that grind people into grist for the money plant are not producing enough and everybody must pay. Dead people must pay, children must pay, the unborn are just pissing off the control mongers, “Why must we wait…?”, they cry. “There is money here right now”, say’s the controlling oligarchy, “Those citizens have it. Your the Government, we’ve given you offices from which to tax these people, do your jobs, be creative – give us what we paid for or we’ll put you back on the corner where we found you”.

By Yasha Levine

In recent days, students have been rallying and barricading themselves inside buildings on University of California campuses to protest a 32 percent hike in tuition fees. Last Wednesday and Thursday, scuffles broke out between police and student protesters on UC campuses around the state, with dozens of students arrested and a few roughed up by eager cops. The protesters’ mood was combative, and they were boiling with anger that three days of protests had had little visible impact. But the students would be even angrier if they knew that the tuition increase, instead of funding essential services, was going toward securing cushy pensions for baby boomer university employees to the tune of $340 million a year.
www.truthdig.com/report

Here’s the lead of a Nov. 19 news bulletin from the San Francisco Chronicle:

Rage at UC fee hike in L.A., Berkeley protests

LOS ANGELES—The UC regents are expected to put the final seal today on a hefty 32 percent tuition increase as students resume the protests that shut down their board meeting three times Wednesday and required campus police in riot gear to maintain calm.

Students, furious at the increase that will bring their yearly fees above $10,000 for the first time, rushed the UCLA building where the regents were meeting, throwing food, sticks and vinegar-soaked red bandannas meant to look like blood.

The students are right to be enraged. This must be the worst time for such a jarring surge in tuition, occurring along with news that real unemployment had reached levels unseen since the Great Depression. Many students say they will now need to get a second job in order to pay their way through school—that is, if they can manage to find one in this almost nonexistent job market. And the tuition increase means adding even more to the student debt that many will be paying off for the remainder of their lives. For a few, the situation is so dire that the fee increase might force them to drop out.

The kids are bewildered and skittish about their future, but there is a group of people in California living a lifestyle that’s as pleasant as can be: pensioners. While students pay more and get less of an educational bang for their buck, retired UC employees are enjoying ridiculously plush pension payments, and they are guaranteed to receive the same amount each month, no matter how little money the universities have or how much students will have to shell out in order to fund their golf getaways.

UC officials say they had no choice but to raise tuition to close a massive $500 million budget hole, but they remain vague on how that money is going to be distributed. That’s because they are ignoring the big, wrinkly elephant in the room: California’s pension funds and the highly questionable, high-risk investment strategies that tanked them.

Here’s a fun pension fund fact: Two of the top five highest California pensions are being paid out to former UCLA professors. One of them, Joaquin Fuster, makes $24,712.99 a month, or $296,555.88 a year. The other, John Schlag, gets $21,300.04 every month, or $255,600.48 per year.

The biggest reason for UC’s 32 percent tuition increase is staring right at you. Without it, the university can’t possibly keep paying out pensions to smug university retirees, who are guaranteed to receive them year in, year out despite the fact that their retirement fund is sliding into insolvency.

The UC retirement fund lost 30 percent of its value—$16 billion—since 2007. The pension plan, which pays out more than $1.5 billion a year to its 500,000 retirees, had been self-sufficient while the market soared through the boom years, with its investments providing a comfortable return to keep the machine going and the pension funds high. To keep it self-sufficient, UC’s fund managers had to get increasingly cockier, buying into more and more highly profitable, high-risk bets. That approach, of course, came crashing down in 2007. Now, in order to keep making payments on its obligations for the foreseeable future, the university system has to start depositing its own cash into the fund. In other words, the pension fund is collapsing and the university needs to bail it out with money taken out of tuition fees. This hasn’t happened in nearly two decades. It seems an economic crash was a contingency the UC didn’t plan for. And now students are paying for somebody else’s mistakes.

In 2010, the university will start depositing $360 million a year into the pension fund, increasing the deposit amount by about $100 million a year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The University of California’s huge and once very healthy retirement fund lost a third of its worth in 2008, shedding about $16 billion in value primarily because investments plummeted due to the recession.

That could spell more bad news for many UC employees, who, beginning next year, will have to contribute 2 percent of their salaries to the pension plan. It also spells trouble for the UC system, which in April 2010 will begin contributing 4 percent of its roughly $9 billion payroll to the pension fund and a greater percentage in future years.

The question is, where will the increasingly cash-strapped UC system get all those hundreds of millions of dollars? Well, the 32 percent tuition hike—which is expected to bring in an additional $500 million in revenue—surely will help.

Student protesters may think they are simply battling a wasteful, callous government bureaucracy that is more concerned about bailing out Wall Street banks than supporting a frivolous thing like education. But really the fight is about something much more basic and widespread: It is a fight between the young and the old, between California’s baby boomer pensioners and everyone under 49. So far, the older set is winning, and the fleecing is bound to continue.

UC President Mark Yudof told the Associated Press that he could not guarantee that tuition would not be increased again next year if California did not come through with nearly $1 billion in aid. “I can’t make any … promises,” he said, which means that UC students can expect another massive increase because California isn’t going to valiantly rush to anyone’s economic rescue anytime soon. The Golden State has lost its Midas touch. It has a laundry list of economic catastrophes to work through, including the $50 billion hole in its pension fund that it is looking to plug with a taxpayer bailout. In the words of a key economics adviser to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, that means “less money for the University of California.”

So there you have it; that’s the way the game is rigged these days. It has been known by many different names—generational theft, wealth transfer, financial vampirism—but whatever you call it, California’s old are stealing from the young. And they seem to have no qualms about it. Baby boomers have taken everything their Greatest Generation parents fought for—public universities, Medicare, pensions and unions—and are leaving nothing for their children and grandchildren. Students aren’t being fleeced just by Wall Street con men, but by Grandma and Grandpa as well. It’s a realization that’s bound to make many young people downright uncomfortable.

Yasha Levine is a freelance journalist and editor of eXiled Online. You can contact him at lev...@exiledonline.com.

No Government Drug Profits Here

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/24/portlands_cannabis_cafe_is_the_first
AMY GOODMAN: Today we’re on the road in Portland, Oregon, as we continue our Breaking the Sound Barrier media tour. Yes, Portland, Oregon, which this month became home to the state’s first marijuana café. The Cannabis Cafe is the first of its kind outside the state of California. Although it does not sell marijuana on the premises, it allows any of Portland’s estimated 21,000 licensed medical marijuana users a space to consume marijuana in a social setting. The Cannabis Café’s debut comes a month after the Obama administration said it would stop pursuing cases against medical marijuana patients. Reversing the Bush administration stance, Attorney General Eric Holder said, it will not be a priority to use federal resources to prosecute patients with serious illness or their caregivers who are complying with state laws on medical marijuana. Fourteen states have adopted laws allowing the medical use of marijuana. I’m joined here in Portland by Madeline Martinez, she’s executive director of the Oregon chapter of NORML, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, which also runs the Cannabis cafe. Welcome to “Democracy Now!”

MADELINE MARTINEZ: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s great to have you with us. Explain exactly what this Cannabis Cafe is.

MADELINE MARTINEZ: This Cannabis Café is a place where we can gather together and be social—we’re all social creatures, and one of the problems is that it always is that we have to medicate out of public view. So we needed a place that was just that, out of public view, where only card holders enter. So we established that. For years I heard from people who were up at the big hospitals, OHSU as well as the VA hospital, and they didn’t have a place. After procedures for hours they were left in the cold and the rain in Oregon, looking for a place to be social, for someone to understand their plight. Either they found out they had cancer or some other horrible medical issue to deal with. And they had to travel home for hours, alone and desperate and needing some medicine after being away from the medicine for so long. And so this–after hearing this for years and years, it prompted me to establish a place of our own. We had been having bi-monthly meetings in the same sort of setting, but we took it to a regular basis because so many people from all over the state, 200 at a time, to get one cutting and some excess medicine. Per our law, we cannot exchange for consideration, so this is all given away, donated to me and then donated to patients.

AMY GOODMAN: So when they come into the Cannabis Cafe, they are not buying marijuana?

MARTINEZ: No, that would be illegal in the state of Oregon. You must be out of public view. As you saw last night, it is out of public view. You have to come of the back stairs. You are lucky, you came in the front door, which we reserve for handicapped people in chairs and walkers. But they come up the back stairs, they must show a piece of state ID or a password is also acceptable. You also have to have your Oregon Medical Marijuana Program Registry Identification Card with you, or stamped paperwork, date stamped by the Department of Human Services that actually registers our program.

AMY GOODMAN: How did you organize, lobby for the Cannabis Cafe?

MADELINE MARTINEZ: Well, I’ve done ten years of work with the program, I’ve been there since the very beginning and helped implement it. What I found was if you lay the groundwork and you establish your credibility to the above question, we’ve never had anyone leave our building, our meetings and complain that error in consideration. If anyone comes in and tells me one of our members exchanged for consideration or asked for consideration, I speak to them privately and they’re asked to leave and their membership is revoked and they cannot return to our meeting. We insist that patients not be taken advantage of. Many of these patients are desperate and people go out and say, give me $300, I will grow for you and they never see the money or the person again. It’s really sad because they are left to their own devices. When you get your card from the state of Oregon, you’re not given a clue. That’s not their charge, it’s out of their purview. They don’t tell you where to get a plant, where to get medicine. You’re left to your own resources, which generally includes the black market. My view is, let’s capture the revenue from the black market and let’s pay for health care in our state. We know that people aren’t growing hops in the forest because alcohol is no longer illegal, but they are growing marijuana. And I think we should take that power that we’ve given to the criminal market and establish it. Let’s tax and regulate, 357,000 Oregonians consume Cannabis by government statistics, ONDCP. And it’s really a tragedy that that money’s being just squandered. We have two state troopers on the I-5 corridor here in the state of Oregon. I’d like to pay for more. I’d like to have a safe state, and it’s really sad that our legislators don’t look beyond what they’re doing. They keep continuing the same process and expecting a different outcome. And that’s the definition of insanity.

AMY GOODMAN: What’s the response in Portland to the opening of the café?

MADELINE MARTINEZ: You knpw, it’s been really positive. We have–many of our patrons are actually neighbors in the northeast Portland area. And they’ve come and they’ve said we’re really happy that you’re here instead of a bar. Because so often, unfortunately, people consume too much alcohol and they go, they urinate on someone’s lawn or, you know, they’re misbehaving or they just get rowdy. It’s a big improvement. We’re done by ten. We close the doors, we’re quiet, we keep to ourselves, we don’t bother anybody. We’re actually planning a volunteer trip down Dekum to clean up the street.

AMY GOODMAN: Dekum is the street that the Cannabis Café that we visit last night. Madeline, talk about your own experience.

MADELINE MARTINEZ: Well, I’m a retired peace officer. I worked for the Department of Corrections. I’m a PTA mom, a grandma and I’ve consumed Cannabis for my whole life. It works for my especially well for my anxiety and depression. I never understood –- with the first time I consumed, I titrated cannabis, I could that immediately there was a click. Well, come to find out years later, we have canabanoid receptors in our brains, the first time I consumed it. Years later, we have these receptors in our brain and that’s what was happening to me that I didn’t realize. People with fibromialgia, they feel like a light switch going off in their nerve endings. It’s just amazing what it does, I have degenerative disc and joint disease. And it’s not going to get better.

Living in chronic pain, my other option is to have Vicodin, Vicodin is really a hard painkiller for me. It leaves me in a drug induced stupor. And I prefer a better quality of life. I have five grandchildren and four Pomeranians. I like enjoying my family and my home, but I can’t on the harsh pharmaceuticals. It’s a death sentence for us. If you to take them for the rest of your life, they destroy your vital organs. That’s what is happening, our Government is insisting that we use the pharmaceuticals that enriched them and that’s a real tragedy because marijuana is the safest medicine known to man. There’s never been a lethal dose of marijuana.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the other people. Last night when I went into the Cannabis Café, people were sitting around together, and among the ways they were consuming the cannabis, describe the process.

MADELINE MARTINEZ: One of the things that we’re trying to introduce people to is vaporization. It’s so much safer for us than burning a plant, plant matter, the carcinogens, you don’t want to take those in. And so what we’re doing is we’re teaching them to use this machine that heats the medicine to 375 degrees Fahrenheit, but doesn’t allow it to burn. You were there, you saw it. It captures the vapor of the THC.

AMY GOODMAN: A big plastic bag.

MADELINE MARTINEZ: Exactly, yes, it is. It’s a big plastic bag and it heats up and the vapors go in there. And then you titrate it, you push it against your lips and you consume it. We think it’s safer, we’re showing them different methods one of them, the volcano that I demonstrated is $600, not affordable for some of a fixed income. So we have other vaporization systems that are cheaper, more affordable I’d say. And that’s because the best vaporizer is the one you can afford because then you’ll use it.

AMY GOODMAN: How many people come to the Cannabis Cafe now?

MADELINE MARTINEZ: Well, you know, we have our regulars. And we’ve gotten as many as 194 people a day they come in after work. After you left it even got busier.

AMY GOODMAN: How late is it open till?

MADELINE MARTINEZ: It’s only until ten We stop letting people in about nine, close the doors and just say that’s it for the evening.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Madeline Martinez, we want to thank you for being with us.

The End Is Nigh

“One way or another this whole money game is going to blow apart. It’s just a matter of who blows it that will write the future. Money has a plan. In order for that plan to come to fruition the public must stay docile. People in this story are not cooperating and so the civilian armed forces are sent in to restore control. The key word here is control. Across the planet there is a war being waged for control. Money has the armies – but they can never get the numbers…”   Wilson

http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/24/as_uc_berkeley_investigates_police_brutality
AMY GOODMAN: The University of California Berkeley is investigating allegations of police brutality against students and workers protesting fee hikes and budget cuts last week. The university also will request an independent investigation by the campus police review board. 40 students were arrested on Friday night after campus police entered Wheeler Hall, which the students had taken over earlier in the day. The students were part of a statewide movement protesting the University of California Board of Regents decision to raise tuition by 32%. Students at UCLA, UC Davis, UC Santa Cruz, and San Francisco State also took part by taking over campus buildings last week. On Monday, more than 200 students rallied at Wheeler Hall in Berkeley to protest against what they called overtly aggressive tactics by the police. Organizers say officers hit demonstrators with batons and fired rubber bullets. Independent journalist Brandon Jourdan was embedded with the students inside the occupied building on Friday and filed this report for “Democracy Now!” from inside the takeover at Wheeler Hall.

BRANDON JOURDAN: On November 20th at approximately 5:00 in the morning, students occupied Wheeler Hall, a main lecture hall at the school.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 1: All right, now we’re locked in a building on campus. Wheeler Hall, probably the main campus building at UC Berkeley. There are tons of people in here, they’re all shuttling around making sure that doors are being held shut.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 2: This is about solidarity, This is about not only students, but it’s about faculty members, it’s about workers, and it’s about all of us being fed up with this crisis of priorities that there is. They say that it is a financial crisis, but that’s not the truth. It is what they value and honor within the education system that is the problem. We are fighting for a public good. When students come to school in the morning, they will realize that class has been canceled.

BRANDON JOURDAN: Within an hour, police arrived at the seen and broke through the barricades in the basement, attacking students inside with batons and arresting three.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 3: They’re using violent tactics. I mean, can you see my back?

BRANDON JOURDAN: Before long, crowds of supporters gathered outside the hall.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 4: The demands that we have today, right now, are that we receive amnesty, those of us that had been acting and having demonstrations across the UC system. We’re also asking that the Bear’s Lair, which is the only immigrant owned business on campus, get a fair contract. We also are asking that one of the housing, the apartments that is affordable housing for students here, Rochdale Hall, remains as it always has been for a $1 a year lease to the student’s coop. And we’re also asking that the 38 workers, AFSCME workers, are rehired here on the campus.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 5: This action is in solidarity with occupations that have occurred so far at UC Davis, UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, SF state. We hope these continue.

BRANDON JOURDAN: Striking workers and students set up picket lines and surrounded the building while police cordoned off the entrances.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 6: You think you need to get to class, keep in mind, the class you are getting too, the quality of that education is being cut into. That is why people are sitting down to protest. That is what people are taking a stand against here.

CROWD: Who’s University? Our University.

BRANDON JOURDAN: Inside Wheeler Hall, the police worked steadily to open the doors and get the occupiers out, while a students-police liaison try to negotiate their demands.

POLICE: This is the police department. Unlock the doors now.

STUDENTS-POLICE LIAISON: We have demands. We have demands.

POLICE: Open the door now.

STUDENTS-POLICE LIAISON: We have demands.

POLICE: Open the door now.

STUDENTS-POLICE LIAISON: No!

BRANDON JOURDAN: Outside, a heavy rain had started, but people stayed to support the occupiers.

CROWD: We are the teachers! The mighty, mighty teachers!

BRANDON JOURDAN: A group of Native American organizers arrived reminding people that the week marked the 40th anniversary of the occupation of Alcatraz and showed their support for the students.

NATIVE AMERICAN ORGANIZER: It’s an honor to have with me Dr. LaNada War Jack, an original organizer of the Third World Movement of 1969. We’re here to show solidarity for the occupiers.

BRANDON JOURDAN: The police were hampered time and again by the thousands of people who had come to support the occupation.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 7: Get off of him.

BRANDON JOURDAN: The police asked to be allowed inside to negotiate the students’ demands. But the students insisted any negotiations be held in public.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT 4: Unfortunately, I have to say, that it seems like the police are telling the people outside one thing and telling us another thing. They have asked to negotiate with us, and speak with us along with a professor that has been an outspoken proponent of what we’re doing for a long time, Professor Ananya Roy, and a few other administrators. And we did agreed to that, but that it happen outside. That those folks remain outside, we remain where we are inside. So that the rest of the students, faculty, workers that are outside can participate in the conversation as well. They’re also stakeholders, and they have a right to participate and they have said to us that they want to participate in that conversation.

BRANDON JOURDAN: But when the police refused, the students braced themselves for police entry.

POLICE OFFICER 2: Ok, Listen up. If we pick you up, stand up on your own. Don’t make us help you. Do you understand? You got to get up on your own.

POLICE OFFICER 3: Everybody, Stay seated until you’re stood up.

BRANDON JOURDAN: Due to the presence of an unrelenting crowd, the occupiers of the building were allowed to leave after being cited, the crowd outside roared with cheers as the students were escorted out of Wheeler Hall. After over 12 hours of occupation, 43 people from inside were arrested. 40 people were charged with misdemeanor trespassing and three persons arrested early in the day were charged with felony burglary charges. Although none of the students’ demands were met, participants view it as a massive victory. The real prize being the birth of a new movement.

AMY GOODMAN: Report by independent journalist Brandon Jourdan and co-produced by David Martinez with additional footage from Josh Wolf, and stills from Andrew Stern. Brandon Jourdan and Josh Wolf were both among the 40 people who were arrested and charged with trespassing. On Monday, UC Berkeley announced it will request an independent probe into allegations of police brutality during the crackdown.

Drug Makers Raise Prices in Face of Health Care Reform

November 16, 2009, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/business/16drugprices.html

Even as drug makers promise to support Washington’s health care overhaul by shaving $8 billion a year off the nation’s drug costs after the legislation takes effect, the industry has been raising its prices at the fastest rate in years. In the last year, the industry has raised the wholesale prices of brand-name prescription drugs by about 9 percent, according to industry analysts. That will add more than $10 billion to the nation’s drug bill, which is on track to exceed $300 billion this year. By at least one analysis, it is the highest annual rate of inflation for drug prices since 1992.

The drug trend is distinctly at odds with the direction of the Consumer Price Index, which has fallen by 1.3 percent in the last year. Critics say the industry is trying to establish a higher price base before Congress passes legislation that tries to curb drug spending in coming years. “When we have major legislation anticipated, we see a run-up in price increases”, says Stephen W. Schondelmeyer, a professor of pharmaceutical economics at the University of Minnesota. A Harvard health economist, Joseph P. Newhouse, said he found a similar pattern of unusual price increases after Congress added drug benefits to Medicare a few years ago, giving tens of millions of older Americans federally subsidized drug insurance. Just as the program was taking effect in 2006, the drug industry raised prices by the widest margin in a half-dozen years. “They try to maximize their profits,” Mr. Newhouse said.

Lots more from, reliable sources on corporate corruption