Huffington Post, the allegedly "left-wing" site run by former right-wing nutcase Arianna Huffington, has literally sold out to AOL.

Amusingly, the once-mighty AOL has devolved into a company whose profits largely derive from a scam, or something close to a scam. The AOL bottom line depends on elderly people and computer illiterates who get online via DSL or cable, but who have formed the mistaken impression that they still need to pay AOL fees in order to access email.

Oddly, HuffPo recently published a piece making that very point. Click on the link now -- the page may disappear soon.

For those of us who have always suspected that Arianna's conversion was fake, her announcement confirms her as a thorough corporatist. If you manage to read through this woman's outrageous exercise in self-adoration, you'll see that she offers zero commitment to progressive ideals. Instead, she offers this gem:

Add all that to what HuffPost is doing with social, community, mobile, as well as our commitment to innovative original reporting and beyond-left-and-right commentary, and the blending will have a multiplier effect.

You know full well what that "beyond-right-and-left" remark signifies: HuffPo will sell cleverly repackaged libertarianism to squishy moderates and pseudo-progs of the "Whole Foods" genus. In fact, that has been Arianna's game for quite a while now.

Arianna's announcement evinced this comment:

I've been visiting HP from the very beginning. I can remember those early days when the mission statement of HP was simply to provide an alternativ­e news website for left-think­ing individual­s. Over time I've seen that mission slowly fade away with increased corporate news and the inclusion of viewpoints offered by those who have complete and utter disdain for those of us on left.

Right (as we geezers used to say) on.

The difference between AOL and HuffPo is that AOL became a scam over time, while HuffPo was (in my opinion) a scam from the beginning. I don't believe that Arianna was ever a genuine liberal. Her Hollywood connections allowed her to infiltrate a mostly-liberal community, hence her decision to pose as a convert. Her longtime associate, the notorious arch-conservative fraudmeister Andy Breitbart, later revealed that he designed the Huffington Post site.

Until last September, the beefy 41-year-old with graying blond hair was a largely covert power in the right-wing media, the hidden hand behind the popular Drudge Report who also, weirdly, cofounded the liberal Huffington Post.

One thing Breitbart will say about Drudge, though, is that his mentor introduced him to Arianna Huffington, then a right-wing pundit and Drudge confidant. Breitbart became her researcher and Web guru. By her side, he learned that the media could be more than scooped — it could be hacked.

“I created the Huffington Post,” he says simply. “I drafted the plan. They followed the plan.”

They're still following the plan.

Arianna thinks ten moves ahead. Younger folk may not know of her previous scheme to become shadow president of the U.S., ruling from behind the throne -- a ploy that might have worked if her former husband had not lost the 1994 election. From an earlier post:

In the mid-1990s, she was married to millionaire Michael Huffington, and was widely acknowledged as the mastermind behind his political ambitions. Born in Greece (as Arianna Stassinopoulos), she could never hope to attain the White House on her own, so she prodded her husband, scion of a conservative family, to enter politics. She was then a Republican ueber-networker devoted to a Libertarian screw-the-poor philosophy. If Paris Hilton asked a Marvel comics writer to help her formulate a world domination scheme, she'd be trodding in Arianna's Manohlo-prints.

In 1994, all politically savvy people in Santa Barbara (the Huffington home base) understood her public image to be a lie. Michael Huffington hid his homosexuality to please conservative voters. Arianna insisted to the press that she belonged to the Orthodox Church, even though "her" bishop stated that no-one could be considered a communicant who had been baptized or inducted into another faith. Life 102 contains a picture of Arianna being re-baptized by John-Roger.

John-Roger is the crooked leader of the dangerous MSIA cult; Arianna is a minister in that group.

According to the NYT, AOL exec Roger Pittman heavily invested in HuffPo well before the recent merger. Other investors include Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners, Softbank Capital, and Oak Investment Partners. Patricof, oddly enough, helped AOL get started.

Oak Investment deserves further study: According to this page, they are related to the notorious Carlyle Group, of Bush and Bin Laden ill-fame. A Google search reveals that "Oak Investment" was once mentioned on the Carlyle Group's Wikipedia page, although that reference has been scrubbed. Oak has also worked with SRI. A senior partner at Oak is Ranjan Chak, noted for creating offshore development centers in India.

When was the last time you saw a HuffPo piece that went after outsourcing?)

AOL's headquarters, amusingly enough, are located in Dulles, Virginia, just 15 miles away from CIA headquarters, as the crow flies. I don't believe a connection between the two organizations exists (despite the many rumors), but the geography does make me smile.

In 2008, a HuffPo Insider sent me this insider's view of Arianna at work:

There was always the sense that the whole thing was about attention for Arianna, never the issues. She never seemed to talk about them in a way that suggested she ever really cared about a progressive agenda -- there was never any true passion in her voice. She always spoke with the eager, smart-alecky tone of the debate team captain planning arguments for the next contest. You know, in fact, I'd bet if Hollywood's political leanings suddenly veered sharply to the right, the Huffington Post would be printing pieces in support of waterboarding and George W. Bush. Maybe Chuck Norris would be her newest pet celebrity-blogger.

Now she no longer needs Hollywood. If a genuinely left-wing alternative to Obama crops up in time for the 2012 race, don't be surprised to see HuffPo publish "investigative reports" attacking the challenger. That's what HuffPo is for. Permalink

Look, I know that the world is falling to shreds, and that there are a zillion serious events occurring right now which demand our attention. But this blog has not offered a non-political weekend post in a long time, and, well, the piffle you are about to read has been welling up for a while.

We all grew up watching unfunny television sitcoms. We all loved those old shows, back when we were young and could not recognize insipidity even when it was licking our faces like an over-affectionate Havanese with co-dependency issues. I'm talking about old TV, geezer TV, shows that were first seen on screens with round corners and scanlines so wide you could count them from the house next door. TV you watched by candlelight.

Youngsters catching up with those old shows on cable or YouTube must have one question on their minds: Back in the '60s, did anyone actually think that sitcoms like My Three Sons and Petticoat Junction or I Dream of Jeanie or F-Troop were funny?

The answer is: No. We did not laugh. Not even when we were kids.

We sat in front of the screen in granite-like silence, unamused, unsmiling -- yet strangely entranced. We didn't multi-task; we didn't talk amongst ourselves. We just sopped everything up, asking no questions, simply accepting it all the way jump drives accept new files, and we wouldn't finish downloading until the news came on.

During an episode of The Brady Bunch, my trance ended. Pop. Just like that. It was an unsettling experience: The television was on, yet I was not hypnotized. Very disturbing. Maybe (I thought) the set needed repair. That's when I gave up television, adjourned to the local public library and began my lifelong quest to be Smarter Than You.

And now here we are, decades later. I've caught up with some episodes of those old shows on YouTube. Despite being Smarter Than You, many questions remain unanswered.

1. Roy Rogers. This was the most surreal show ever broadcast, and not just because Roy, on horseback, was somehow always able to catch bad guys who drove trucks and cars. The big question is this: What the fuck did Roy Rogers do for a living?

Apparently, he owned some sort of ranch, although I don't recall seeing him do any actual ranch stuff. Dale may have had something to do with a restaurant. Okay, but then...why was he out chasing bad guys? How could someone in the modern age regularly engage in police activity without actually being in law enforcement?

Occasionally, you would see Roy pull a gun on a bad guy. Suppose he had pulled the trigger: Wouldn't he have gone to jail? What right did he have to draw a weapon?

In episode after episode, there would be a scene where we would witness the bad guys planning some evil scheme or other, and one bad guy would say: "Yeah, sure, that takes care of the cops -- but what are we going to do about Rogers?" Jeez, dude, what about Rogers? Why is he even an issue? If he's a Batman-like vigilante, why don't the cops seek to arrest him?

2. Bewitched. The big problem here may have escaped your notice when you were a kid. What's with all the art?

We're talking Rembrandt, Picasso, Modigliani, Grandma Moses. All hanging on the walls of the Stevens residence. The question is: Within the universe of the show, were these supposed to be reproductions or actual paintings?

A go-getting, desperate-to-crawl-into-the-upper-middle-class householder like Darrin ought to start buying original art, so these pictures probably were not prints. (Obviously, they were prints on the set, but I don't think that they were supposed to be prints in terms of the show's reality.) Maybe Sam blinked them onto the walls. If so, would Darrin feel comfortable accepting stolen art? Wouldn't he notice a news story announcing the mysterious theft of Rembrandt's Girl With a Broomstick?

The other big Bewitched question has probably already occurred to you. In episode after episode, Agnes Moorehead pops into the scene in medias res, and it is clear that she has somehow overheard the things that were said before her arrival. So, like, do Samantha and Darrin have any real privacy? If I were Darrin, and if I thought that Agnes Moorehead was watching me at all times, little Tabitha would never have come into being.

3. Lost in Space. Believe it or not, we '60s kids didn't think that Dr. Smith was gay, no matter how many sly hints the writers would toss into the dialogue. Yes, we were that naive. (Seen today, Mark Goddard's sheer disgust with the effeminate Smith is the funniest aspect of the show.)

Yet even at the time, I often wondered: Why does the family allow young Will Robinson to spend so much time alone with Smith?

That was a fair question not because Smith was gay but because -- in the first episodes, at least -- he was evil. A Russian spy, or something of the sort. A cold-blooded killer. Then, somewhere toward the end of the first season, he stopped scheming and started camping.

What the hell? Why does the family trust him? Did they forget all about the really evil stuff he did when the series began?

(Lost in Space and the Jetsons taught us that, in the future, the hot blonde eldest daughter would always be named Judy. And she would get hardly any lines. Oddly enough, in the real 21st century, Judy has become an unpopular name.)

4. The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. This is the show that really bugged me at the time, and it bugs me even more today.

For both the series and the old Gene Tierney movie, the set-up is simple: A woman who is a writer moves into a cottage haunted by the ghost of a sea captain. They can speak to each other freely; eventually, they develop romantic feelings for each other.

Here's the part I don't get: On occasion, she suffers from writer's block. She doesn't know what to write about.

Now, this woman has just scored the most impressive interview since Bernadette Soubirous. How can she not know what to write about? Throughout the entire series, she never thinks to ask the Captain the obvious questions: What is the afterlife like? Is there a final judgment? If so, on what basis are we judged? Is there a heaven? A hell? A supreme deity? Which religion comes closest to the truth? Why do ghosts exist? Why does suffering exist? What about reincarnation? Do ghosts look they way they did at the moment of death -- and if so, what would the ghost of someone who walked into an airplane propeller look like?

Yeah. There's your book, lady.

Instead, this stupefyingly incurious woman asks none of that stuff. Or if she does ask, she asks off-camera -- and whatever answers she may have received have not affected her life in the slightest. We never see her go to church, for example.

Also, it is established in the very first episode that the ghost watches her while she sleeps. He's in her bedroom all the time. And she's cool with this. I guess, back in the '60s, we were supposed to believe that widows never dated and never masturbated.

5. Petticoat Junction. The Shady Rest hotel is 25 miles away from the nearest town. It's not on a highway. Why would anyone build a hotel in such a place? How can this enterprise function? Why would anyone stay there -- except maybe to scope out the three hot daughters? Since this show takes place in the south, why do none of the three hot daughters have southern accents?

Okay, I know. It's just a show. I should really just relax.

PS: Football -- that's the game with the non-spherical ball, right? Permalink

It now appears that the alleged assassination attempt on Omar Suleiman never took place. Strangely, this non-event was considered real by certain key figures within the Obama administration, and by German ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger.

Lambert's new take on this is worth noting:

Mub, through FOX, deked Hillary. If we can't manage our client states, then we no longer deserve the imperial role. It's worth noting that this little bit of disinformation took three-quarters of a news cycle to play out, and only FOX and the administration, including the SoS, took it seriously. I just reviewed Google news on this, and it looks like the story never propagated successfully outside the right-wing echo chamber...

Whoever the night desk editors were who saved their media outlets bacon on this one, instead of joining the pack, kudos, because they turned out to be smarter, more skeptical, and more informed than the US government.

I can't agree with lambert on one key point: I don't think that this was a Mub job. If it had been, his government would have propagated the story, or at least allowed it to simmer for a while longer, instead of denying it.

The more I think about it, the more likely it seems that this bit-o-disinfo was a Mossad ploy.

The FOX report got huge (and respectful) play throughout the Israeli press. That's a clue right there. If you look hard enough, you'll probably find Israeli articles which cite non-FOX sources for the claim.

One can easily visualize how the Obama crew and Ischinger might fall for a false tale offered up by the Israelis. As amusing as it is to make snarky remarks about the O Team's incompetence, let's get real: Hillary Clinton is no dummy -- and neither is Ischinger, judging from the man's internet trail.

If this explanatory scenario seems paranoid or predictable or predictably paranoid -- well, my apologies. True, there are creepy people out there who blame Mossad for everything, up to and including global warming, your aching back, and the recent snowstorm. I don't think that way. But it is nevertheless a fact that Mossad has been known to take risks that older and more cautious intelligence services do not -- and obviously, the Israelis must be fearful of the new Egyptian government's attitude toward their country.

I could be wrong, but I think this was an Israeli ploy to help Mub. Permalink

Was newly-installed Egyptian veep Omar Suleiman the target of an assassination attempt which killed two of his bodyguards?

FOX News has spread spread the story. When the question was put to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, his response (allegedly) was “I’m not going to get into that question.”

But that response does not appear in any official WH transcript. Wolfgang Ischinger, a German official who was an original source for the tale has now retracted his comments. The Egyptian government denies the story. Hillary Clinton appears to have confirmed it.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the conference that the news of the assassination attempt reflects the challenges of restoring stability in Egypt.

Clinton may have spoken those words based on Ischinger's original comments, since retracted. However, an Australian news site says that the story has been confirmed by a unnamed senior Obama administration official. (Clinton? Perhaps.)

Richard Engel of NBC has said that there is "NO evidence of any attempt...rumor originated with media."

Lambert at Corrente offers the most interesting discussion of this brouhaha:

My first reaction: I've never seen the "plant the disinformation in the foreign press, then break it domestically" play worked through us instead of by us. What next? Muslim Brotherhood yellow cake?

The assassination story (pseudo-story?) received wide play in the Israeli media. The Ha'aretz piece derives from FOX News.

Was Rupert Murdoch trying to drum up sympathy for Suleiman and Mubarak? Did the story originate with the Israelis? Why doesn't the Obama administration have its act together when it comes to issuing a confirmation or denial? Permalink

As I've said previously (and as others have said), the right-wing propagandists want to have it both ways on Egypt.

Much of the conservative propaganda machine roots for Mubarak and warns that his fall will lead to Islamic chaos. But Elliot Abrams, representing the neocons, not only welcomes the fall but portrays it as the fulfillment of George W. Bush's alleged dream of democracy. That kind of spin requires much rewriting of history.

To his credit, Abrams gets this part right:

Mubarak took the same tack for three decades. Ruling under an endless emergency law, he has crushed the moderate opposition while the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood has thrived underground and in the mosques. Mubarak in effect created a two-party system - his ruling National Democratic Party and the Brotherhood - and then defended the lack of democracy by saying a free election would bring the Islamists to power.

If someone had written those very words during (say) the Clinton administration, neocons of Abrams' stripe would have damned the author as a churlish liberal and a dangerous idealist.

The fact is, Bush II was perfectly willing to toss massive amounts of money and weapons at Egypt, as did Bush I, Clinton, Reagan and Carter. The rest of Africa groans in poverty while Egypt receives more American foreign aid than does any other nation, except Israel. That's why, right now, the Egyptians are in the streets seeking freedom -- freedom from us.

Dubya, whom Abrams would portray as the Messiah of democracy, was (and probably still is) in bed with the damnably undemocratic House of Saud. Everyone knows that Prince Bandar earned the nickname "Bandar Bush," and everyone knows that the Bush administration sold the Saudis nearly $20 billion worth of weaponry. This, despite the abundance of evidence that some within the Saudi regime have backed Al Qaeda:

Salem bin Laden, Osama’s brother, has conducted all his American affairs through James Bath, a Houston crony of the Bush family. Bath’s former business partner Bill White testified in court that Bath had been a liaison for the C.I.A. In 1979 Bath invested $50,000 in Arbusto, George W. Bush’s first business venture. Rumor had it that Bath was acting as Salem bin Laden’s representative. "In conflicting statements, Bush at first denied ever knowing Bath, then acknowledged his stake in Arbusto and that he was aware Bath represented Saudi interests."

In addition to doing aviation business with Saudi sheiks, Bath was part owner of a Houston bank whose chief stockholder was Ghaith Pharaon, who represented the Bank of Commerce and Credit International (BCCI), a criminal global bank with branches in 73 countries. BCCI proceeded to defraud depositors of $10 billion during the ‘80s, while providing a money laundry conduit for the Medellin drug cartel, Asia’s major heroin cartel, Manuel Noriega, Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and Islamist terrorist organizations worldwide.

Pharaon, a notorious Saudi financier, later helped the Bushes pull off a lucrative fraud, or so says investigator Al Martin. Pharaon arranged for a Bush family company, Gulf Oil and Drilling, to obtain oil and gas leases in the Gulf. The leases were worthless and the Bushes knew it. Their value was misrepresented to a major bank in Florida, which gave massive loans to the Bush family's company, using the leases as collateral. The money was never paid back.

Bush was also very close to the corrupt rulers of Dubai. Remember when he tried to give a Dubai government-controlled firm oversight over the security of our ports? The UAE also gave tons of money to the wretched Neil Bush as part of his "educational software" scam; Lord knows what that was really about.

The Bush-friendly Prime Minister of the UAE, and the absolute monarch of Dubai, was and is Sheik Mohammed ibn Rashid al Maktum -- who has been known to pal around with none other than Osama Bin Laden.

Craig Unger got it right in this 2008 interview:

I think if you look at the neoconservative vision, which talks again about democratization, democratization, it’s really much more about strategic domination of the Middle East, and it’s been a vision to take over Iraq and eventually Iran.

The Iraq war was never about democracy. It was about oil and Israel. The Iraqis know that, even if many Americans do not -- and that's why the Iraqis are not exactly inclined to name streets after George W. Bush.

Obama is little better, of course.

Far from calling the Saudi king on his awful record on human rights and women’s issues, the president is pushing a huge arms deal and heaping praise on the monarch. He’s not only continuing Bush’s soft Saudi policy—he’s surpassing it.

In the next two months, Congress will be asked to give formal approval to a staggering new arms deal with Saudi Arabia. Valued at $30 billion, the deal includes selling the Saudis state-of-the-art missile technology, jets, ships, and helicopters.

Now, about Elliot Abrams: It is infuriating to see this notorious liar present himself as the apostle of democracy. Remember Iran-contra?

Abrams, a Democrat turned Republican who married into the cranky Podhoretz neocon clan, billed himself as a "gladiator" for the Reagan Doctrine in Central America-which entailed assisting thuggish regimes and militaries in order to thwart leftist movements and dismissing the human rights violations of Washington's cold war partners.

One Abrams specialty was massacre denial. During a Nightline appearance in 1985, he was asked about reports that the US-funded Salvadoran military had slaughtered civilians at two sites the previous summer. Abrams maintained that no such events had occurred. And had the US Embassy and the State Department conducted an investigation? "My memory," he said, "is that we did, but I don't want to swear to it, because I'd have to go back and look at the cables." But there had been no State Department inquiry; Abrams, in his lawyerly fashion, was being disingenuous. Three years earlier, when two American journalists reported that an elite, US-trained military unit had massacred hundreds of villagers in El Mozote, Abrams told Congress that the story was commie propaganda, as he fought for more US aid to El Salvador's military. The massacre, as has since been confirmed, was real. And in 1993 after a UN truth commission, which examined 22,000 atrocities that occurred during the twelve-year civil war in El Salvador, attributed 85 percent of the abuses to the Reagan-assisted right-wing military and its death-squad allies, Abrams declared, "The Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." Tell that to the survivors of El Mozote.

The Salvadoran thugs that Abrams championed made Hosni Mubarak seem like the Easter Bunny. Abrams, in his words, "supervised U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean" throughout much of the Reagan administration.

That policy included backing the contras-a surrogate army dedicated to overthrowing the democratically elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua. It also involved funding the military thugocracy of El Salvador and supervising its war against a popular leftist rebellion. In his role as public servant, Abrams found time to cover up the genocidal policies of the Guatemalan government and embrace the government of Honduras while it perpetrated serial human rights abuses through Battalion 3-16, a U.S.-trained "intelligence unit" turned death squad.

Incidentally: Working under Abrams in Honduras was Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, who later became the number 3 guy at CIA. Foggo was upended in the Wilkes/Cunningham bribery scandal.

The regimes Abrams championed in the 1980s operated according to a playbook similar to the one that Abrams now ascribes to Mubarak. When a dictatorship makes democratic opposition impossible, extremism becomes the only option. Let's have no further lectures on democracy from the likes of Elliot Abrams.

(That said, I am more than a little suspicious of his ability to "call the shot" on Egypt. What did he know...?) Permalink

Not much time to write, right now. But I want to draw your attention to a few important items.

1. The Google Art Project. This introductory video includes a special guest appearance by a certain noted comic book writer who has never before done the corporate boosterism thing. Who'd a thunk it?

2. I'm getting a bit freaked by the right's willingness to cut military spending. Previously, a hideously bloated defense budget was the only form of Keynesian stimulus the right would allow. (See: Ronald Reagan.) Earlier this year, I predicted a propaganda barrage designed to convince the American populace that our armed forces are ill-equipped, but it now seems that the barrage ain't gonna happen.

Maybe the far right simply doesn't want America to come back? After all, Rand Paul's dad is a secessionist. Maybe, within conservative-land, the stars-and-stripes nationalists have been pushed aside by the Deutschland ueber Alles crowd.

That would explain a lot.

3. Maniacs and Mubarak. I love Joan Walsh's piece on how Glenn Beck and his fellow crazies are spinning the (imminent) fall of Mubarak.

The conservatives hope to play it both ways. If Mubarak falls and Egypt becomes a democracy, the righties will try to take credit: "This all began with George Bush's program for democracy in the Middle East." If Mubarak falls and Egypt descends into chaos and/or theocracy, then the righties will blame Obama for abandoning an ally.

4 An absolute must-read: Dakinkat on corporate taxes.

...corporations here really don’t pay any where near the effective rate.

There are several reasons for this. First, many of them now set up real or pseudo headquarters in tax and off shore banking havens like the Bahamas or Qatar and place a lot of their operations out of the reach of the IRS. The second is the efficiency of lobbying efforts in getting them so many loopholes that most corporate revenues become exempt. Despite this, corporations use public services and create social costs. Social costs are those costs that the society gets to foot when corporations create problems they or their consumers can pass to the public. A big example is smoking that creates incredible public health issues or pollution. BP is definitely not taking care of the tab for its destruction down here and will most likely escape prosecution for costs the spill will continue to wreck on the environment, livings, and health of people and wildlife in the area. Meanwhile, as an oil business, they are the beneficiary of many, many tax loopholes and direct subsidies.

4. Free speech has limits. I saw this image on Covert History, which used to support Obama. Frankly, whoever created it should go to jail.

Why do Democratic presidents allow outright expressions of treason and incitement to violence? I think that this country would witness a marvelously instructive piece of political theater if, for example, a prominent advocate of secession faced legal charges. From the Constitution:

Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.

Inciting secession and presidential assassination is certainly construable as offering adherence, aid and comfort to the enemies of our union. Permalink

What caused the Egyptian rebellion? Danny Schechter has offered an analysis which should trouble us all, because what happened to Hosni could happen here.

In Egypt and elsewhere, people are hungry because food prices have risen dramatically.

Prices in Egypt are up 17% because of a worldwide surge in commodity prices that has many factors but speculation on Wall Street and big banks is a key one.

As IPS reported, "Wall Street investment firms and banks, along with their kin in London and Europe, were responsible for the technology dot-com bubble, the stock market bubble, and the recent U.S. and UK housing bubbles. They extracted enormous profits and their bonuses before the inevitable collapse of each.

Now they've turned to basic commodities. The result? At a time when there has been no significant change in the global food supply or in food demand, the average cost of buying food shot up 32 percent from June to December 2010, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Nothing but price speculation can explain wheat prices jumping 70 percent from June to December last year when global wheat stocks were stable, experts say."

In olden times, even the most heartless dictators understood the need to make sure that the common people had bread. But the dictatorship of libertarianism has a different logic. As this paper explains:

Thus, the inflow of “investment” money into commodities markets automatically lead into price increases. There is no other way, this is just simple math.

You may also want to read this paper, "Commodities Market Speculation: The Risk to Food Security and Agriculture." This was published in 2008, when the problem had already made itself known but before the real trouble had set in. From the intro:

Today, developing countries are consuming less food. About 43 percent of more than 27,000 people polled in a recent 26-nation survey said that they had cut back food consumption as a result of higher prices.2 The number of those undernourished and food insecure in the world has increased along with prices. Over the last year, riots broke out over food prices, lack of available and affordable food, and insufficient food aid.

Amidst the food price crisis, speculation is a major contributor to extreme price volatility, which is skewing agriculture commodity markets to such a degree that both farmers and consumers are losing out. This paper reviews the role of speculation in the global food crisis. It explains the particular role of U.S. regulation of commodities markets within the global regime. Finally, it offers policy recommendations for how governments can better regulate markets in support of food security and employment goals.

That was 2008. Now we have the ascent of the Tea Party libertarians, who ain't gonna regulate nothin' -- no matter how many people die.

See here:

In fact, America (and Europe, by implication) is at the very heart of this story, with Goldman Sachs and City bankers threatening to push the global economy over the precipice once again with their next bout of reckless speculation.

The Wall Streeters got huge bailouts and are now making huge profits. The money has to go somewhere. Right now, the commodities market is considered the safest place to put it.

Just a few months back, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Rome warned of another impending food crisis in 2011, the two principal causes of which will be climate change and food speculation.

This crisis is now beginning to materialize, as climate shocks in Russia, Pakistan, Australia and Argentina have conspired with rampant food speculation to cause food prices to rise to their highest levels in recorded history.

You thought housing speculation was bad? You ain't seen nothing yet.

One measure of our basic economic weakness is that we lurch from one bubble to another instead of shoring up our fundamentals. We don't have any fundamentals any more. All we have are Wall Street vampires.

In an analysis of the food price crisis of 2007-08, De Schutter documents how the U.S. government passed legislation in 2000 deregulating the food commodity markets and for the first time permitted speculation on speculation.

Here's how it used to work. In January, Farmer Brown would sign a contract to sell his 2011 future crop to a grain trader like industry giant Cargill for 100 dollars a tonne. In the fall, Cargill would then sell Farmer Brown's grain at whatever price they could get to a bakery or feedlot company for cattle. These "futures" contracts insulated both the farmer and the grain trader from wild price fluctuations.

Now, after the passage of the U.S. Commodity Futures Modernisation Act in 2000, Cargill could sell Farmer's Brown "futures" contract to an investment bank on Wall Street for 120 dollars a tonne, who could in turn sell it to a European investment company for 150 dollars a tonne and then sell it to a U.S. public pension fund for 175 dollars a tonne and so on. Add in some complex financial instruments like 'derivatives', 'index funds', 'hedges', and 'swaps', and food become part of yet another highly-profitable speculative bubble.

Now there is a new and bigger food price bubble that began midway through 2010. It's no surprise since nothing was done to change the conditions, Ghosh wrote. Regulations that could prevent or at least limit such speculative financial activity are not in place. The 2010-11 food price bubble is blamed on last summer's Russian drought and increased consumption by India and China. However, FAO figures clearly show grain consumption by those latter two countries has actually fallen, mainly because many simply can't afford to buy as much grain, Ghosh told IPS in an email interview.

Yes, we're going to be hit too

U.S. grain prices should stay unrelentingly high this year, according to a Reuters poll, the latest sign that the era of cheap food has come to an end.

Masters says the markets are now heavily distorted by investment banks: "Let's say news comes about bad crops and rain somewhere. Normally the price would rise about $1 [a bushel]. [But] when you have a 70-80% speculative market it goes up $2-3 to account for the extra costs. It adds to the volatility. It will end badly as all Wall Street fads do. It's going to blow up."

You can be sure that the fucking teabaggers are going to want to put out the fire by spraying it with gasoline. Only idiots think that the problem is "socialism" -- an imaginary bogeyman. The problem is unregulated capitalism. In a word: Libertarianism. Permalink

Mubarak is going to make the big announcement soon, it seems...

Hosni Mubarak expected to speak to soon. Tune in to #AlJazeera to watch the coverage live: http://aje.me

And who told him? Special ambassador Frank Wisner. Obama gave him the task of "negotiating a resolution" to the crisis. Translation: He was sent to Egypt to clean house. His message to Mub was blunt:

A U.S. envoy in Cairo told Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that he needed to step aside and allow a new government to take shape without him but was rebuffed, according to Middle East experts who have discussed the matter with the Obama administration.

Wisner delivered a direct message that Mubarak should not be part of the "transition" that the U.S. had called for, according to Middle East experts who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Wisner to Mub: "We put you into power, Hosni. And now we're taking you out." It comes down to that, really.

News accounts refer to Wisner as a "businessman." That's cute. He's the son of legendary spy chieftain Frank Gardiner Wisner, head of the OSS and chief of the Directorate of Plans in the CIA. The elder Wisner was the prime mover behind the toppling of Mossadegh in Iran. He also cultivated a vast number of media contacts, creating a propaganda machine jovially nicknamed "the Mighty Wurlitzer." The phrase is still in use.

So, do ya think that Wisner Jr. was recruited into the Agency, just like Dad? Gosh. Like, wow. I have no idea. That's a real puzzler.

Wisner is also a Vice Chairman of -- wait for it -- American International Group (AIG), which played such a key rule in the financial meltdown. The company insured those shady financial instruments backed by crap loans. When the shit started to hit the fan, AIG was negotiating with the banks to pay only 60% of what it owed -- but after the bailout money came in, AIG was able to pay 100 percent. The firm was semi-nationalized, but only in the sense that Wisner and company helped themselves to lots and lots of taxpayer funds.

I never did figure out why the big banks received separate bailout funds when their losses were insured by AIG.

AIG has also been known to provide cover for spooks. That's part of a story which I have long promised to write, but have not actually written. This brief post gave a taste. The firm, founded by Ken Starr's uncle, funded Victor Kozeny (the "Pirate of Prague," now an international fugitive) in his efforts to take over the oil fields in a former Soviet Republic. I suspect that Wisner was involved with that. Permalink

Freepress sends us the following message about Narus, the American firm whose product allowed Mubarak to shut down the internet in Egypt:

In Egypt this week, the Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone communications before launching a violent crackdown against political protesters (watch Free Press' Timothy Karr discuss the use of technology in Egypt in the video to the right).

Now, Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — has sold Egypt "Deep Packet Inspection" (DPI) equipment that can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political dissent over the Internet and mobile phones.

The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high. That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.

Free Press is calling for Congress to investigate the use and sale of DPI technology by American companies. Add your name to our letter now.

Narus, now a Boeing subsidiary, was begun by Israeli technicians. Here in America, they're spying on users of Facebook and other social networking services. As always, the all-purpose excuse is catching pedophiles and terrorists -- but the Mubarak example reveals the real purpose for these apps.

Narus is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.

The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating anonymously on the Internet.

It's trivial to set up a Gmail or Facebook account under a fake name. The question for law enforcement then becomes, how does it connect different pieces of information to the same person? "It's very hard to connect these two pieces of information," Nucci said. "We're really asking [law enforcement] to become almost like magicians."

Narus is best known as the creator of NarusInsight, an network monitoring device that can analyze traffic on IP networks. AT&T allegedly used a Narus system to wiretap customer data on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency as part of a U.S. domestic terrorist surveillance program.

Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci's own admission, however, it can do some pretty "scary" things.

The software's user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link what Nucci calls "islands of information." Hone can analyze VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone's voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.

"I can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn't matter; I'm going to catch you."

It uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. "It's going to go through a set of documents and automatically it's going to organize them in topics -- I'm not talking about keywords as is done today, I'm talking about topics," he said.

FreePress wants a congressional investigation of Narus. I don't expect worthwhile action from this president or this congress. But we do need a national conversation on this topic -- and we need to stop buying the "pedos and terrorists" story.

We also need to get past defeatism -- as in: "Well, there's nothing we can do. There's no such thing as privacy any more." Sorry. Not buying that. We can have our privacy back if we demand it.

Some people say: "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." Only a classic "good German" would rely on that cowardly excuse. Here's a better axiom: If the government were not doing something wrong, it would not have to worry about us. Permalink