Who is Poor in America

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TBR News March 11, 2010
The Slaughterhouse Informer

A Compendiium of Various Official Lies, Business Scandals, Small Murders, Frauds, and Other Gross Defects of Our Current Political, Business and Religious Moral Lepers.

Presenting a new magazine that contains material that is not found elsewhere and is very difficult to post on the Internet. The ‘Voice of the White House’ will appear in each issue containing material not found on TBR News for very obvious reasons.This publication will appear once a week, on Wednesday, every week, will be ten pages in length and is available by subscription only. The price is $5.00 a month and can be paid via PayPal or by check. If you don’t like it, and Bush supporters can read the Drudge Report for free, you can cancel at any time.




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The Voice of the White House

A mortgage is a financial claim against your property. You sign a document giving that claim (a lien) to the lender, and in return they give you -- money.

You give the lending institution two things: first a note or bond, which is a personal promise to repay the loan, just like any promissory note. Then you also sign another document, a mortgage (in some states, a trust deed), which says "and if I don't pay as promised, you can take the property."

It's you who mortgages the property. The lender takes the mortgage and holds it (until the debt is paid off.) So you don't look for a bank to give you a mortgage. You do the giving. You're looking for a bank that will take your mortgage.

The person who performs the action is the "or" or "er" actor. Think of "employer" or "donor". That makes the you, the borrower, the "mortgagor". You're doing the mortgaging.

The bank, or other lender, takes your mortgage. And the recepient is always the "ee" figure. That makes the bank the "mortgagee". MERS was created by the mortgage banking industry to streamline the mortgage process by using electronic commerce to eliminate paper. Our mission is to register every mortgage loan in the United States on the MERS® System.

Beneficiaries of MERS include mortgage originators, servicers, warehouse lenders, wholesale lenders, retail lenders, document custodians, settlement agents, title companies, insurers, investors, county recorders and consumers.
MERS acts as nominee in the county land records for the lender and servicer. Any loan registered on the MERS® System is inoculated against future assignments because MERS remains the nominal mortgagee no matter how many times servicing is traded. MERS as original mortgagee (MOM) is approved by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, FHA and VA, California and Utah Housing Finance Agencies, as well as all of the major Wall Street rating agencies.

MERS Rules of Membership, which is a pdf file, so I cannot copy and paste it here. However, Rule 8 regarding foreclosures sounds pretty weak to me. It says the "beneficial owner" of the loan has to designate MERS as the holder in order for MERS to foreclose, and this has been legally prevented in the State of Florida. Well, if the "beneficial owner" is unknown or happens to be 25 different slice-and-dice holders scattered around the world, the rule cannot be applied. Rule 8 section (b) says the Member (of MERS) who is servicing the loan is responsible for processing foreclosure "in accordance with the applicable agreements between such member and the beneficial owner of such mortgage loan." Well, if there is no such agreement, or if the beneficial owner is unknown, this statement is meaningless. You should both of you print off this document and study it, especially Rule 8 - I have not done so, but on a quick scan it sounds daft to me. MERS is nothing but a registration system, but is being put forward as the holder of the note, which it most certainly is not. It is like claiming a library card catalog in a file cabinet IS an actual library building full of physical books. Or that the menu in a restaurant is the actual food. Read the menu and your belly will be filled. Then the restaurant expects you to pay for the meal you read about. Right.



How Wall Street cashed in on the American Dream, and nearly killed it
March 11, 2010,

by Tony Accetta
Online Journal Guest Writer




Mortgage fraud caused the collapse of the America housing market. Mortgage fraud caused the collapse of the financial markets and the insurance markets, and threatened the global economy.

Mortgage fraud was practiced on a systemic level by major Wall Street investment banks, major commercial banks, mortgage banks, and virtually the entire real estate industry. From personal experience with Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Credit Suisse, among others, I know the practices used to knowingly create fraudulent mortgages, knowingly package them in securities, and knowingly reap hundreds of billions in profit, while passing certain failure, not mere risk, on to unsuspecting investors and insurance companies.

Government response to criminal conduct has been superficial and ineffective. Bush Attorney General Mukasey dismissed mortgage fraud as a “street crime” and left prosecution to understaffed and overwhelmed “local prosecutors.”

In 2008 mortgage fraud was number 106 on the Justice Department’s priority list. Two presidential administrations have looked the other way. Rather than demand accountability, government has paid trillions to investment banks, commercial banks, insurance companies, and their investors to hold them harmless from their own crimes, while leaving the taxpayer holding the biggest bag in history.

Goldman Sachs sold mortgage backed securities at a premium on the market, while simultaneously selling those same securities short in its own portfolio. Do you think they knew something about the quality of their collateral?

Bombastic calls for more regulation, more oversight, and more laws are camouflage for a lack of political will to prosecute, both criminally and civilly, the executives, boards, and institutions which are responsible for systemic fraud. A culture of taking profit while shifting risk has victimized the American people. Government has added to the problem, not solved it.

Mortgage fraud has been going on for over 40 years. Without serious reform, the creation of a system which shifts risk back to the mortgage and real estate industries, there will always be another cycle of corruption, and we will pay for it again and again.



Tony Accetta is a former federal prosecutor who prosecuted the largest mortgage fraud cases in American history in New York in the 1970s. He was on the scene in Wall Street investment banks, including Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Credit Suisse and others from 1999 through 2005, a period in which he repeatedly cautioned against a profound lack of quality control in mortgage origination practices. He was told by senior Wall Street executives, “Do you have any idea how much money we are making?” Hundreds of millions of mortgage default losses were dismissed as “rounding errors on our balance sheet.”

Mr. Accetta wants the public to know it is paying for fraud which its government is unwilling to prosecute, and which, because of a deliberate lack of accountability, will only be repeated in the future.

His website is www.theaccettagroup.com. He can be reached at 303 639 9000. E-mail is ata@theaccetta group.com.



U.S. Taxpayers on Hook for $5 Trillion of Fannie, Freddie Debt ... No Matter What Barney Frank Says
March 8, 2010
by Aaron Task
YahooFinancei

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank caused a bit of an uproar Friday when he suggested the U.S. government does not guarantee the debts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Rep. Frank later recanted and backed a Treasury Department statement reassuring investors that, yes, Fannie and Freddie Mae debt is guaranteed by the U.S. government. "Going forward," he said in a statement, we "will make sure that there are no implicit guarantees, hints, suggestions, or winks and nods...we will be explicit about what is and is not an obligation of the federal government."
But after years of winks and nods, there's no doubt that Fannie and Freddie now enjoy an explicit guarantee, according to most observers. The U.S. government placed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in conservatorship in September 2008: "This means that the U.S. Taxpayer now stands behind $5 trillion of GSE debt," according to the Congressional Research Service.

The problem is that $5 trillion of so-called agency paper is not treated as if it is a debt of Uncle Sam for accounting purposes, says Richard Suttmeier, chief market strategist at Niagara International Capital and ValuEngine.com.

"Get it on the balance sheet - that's where it belongs," Suttmeier says. "Add it to the $14.2 trillion in [federal] debt and let's move on."

Another Time Bomb Ticking

But $5 trillion is a lot of money - even by government standards -- and moving on may be the problem because of ongoing problems in the housing market, Suttmeier says. "There's a general concern on Main Street U.S.A. that ‘my neighbors are throwing in their keys, there's more for sale signs in my community...do I want to buy a new home, risking there's still downside risk to housing?' "

Noting the Case-Shiller 20-City Home Price Index is still 50% above 1999 levels and mortgage delinquencies are still rising despite the rebound in GDP, Suttmeier says "victory is nowhere in sight, particularly when the drain we're going to see from Fannie and Freddie is unlimited losses between now and the end of 2012 -- on top of the $400 billion that's already been allocated."

Coincidentally (or not), the FDIC is allowing U.S. banks until 2012 before forcing them to fully write-down bad or toxic loans, which is "another time bomb ticking," Suttmeier says. "They're hoping the public market comes back into the mortgage arena, which is going to be hard to do."


Our Dirty Little Secret: Who's Really Poor in America?
March 9, 2010
By Leo Hindery Jr.,
Huffington Post

Two old friends, civil rights activist David Mixner and former U.S. Senator (and my oft co-author) Don Riegle (D-MI), believe that in the economic recovery, not enough attention is being given to 'who's really poor' now. David and Don have for years advised me -- and others -- on the issue of poverty in America, and they are worried that too many people, and especially too many people in the administration and Congress, are missing this imperative.
To help make their point, they referred me to poverty activist Marsha Timpson, who describes today's poor as "America's dirty little secret, hidden in the backyards of America's shining homes, the hollows, the reservations, the border towns and the dark ghettos of the city where they are the lie of the American dream."
I agree with my friends, and with Ms. Timpson's view, and everyone else should as well, for right now in America:
At least 50 million people are ill-fed -- up from 37 million just a year ago -- including 17 million children. Hunger in America is now at an all-time high, and there are currently entire national geographic regions -- the very large 15-state 'South' being one of them -- where more than half of all public school students are poor and ill-fed.
Although I myself grew up in a fairly hardscrabble environment, as the father of a daughter who was in fact able to create a successful life from the opportunities her mother and I could give her, it is hard for me to imagine what it must be like to have your child needy and hungry. Yet all of us need to 'imagine' this, because each night in America millions of children do in fact go to bed hungry and under-nourished, while also lacking proper housing, needed clothing, and the basic education required to develop and ultimately find gainful employment. And while I wholeheartedly support the First Lady's new "Let's Move" effort to improve the nutrition of America's children, we must first react to basic hunger rather than to food quality.
30% of the nation's 50 million homeowners own a home whose value is below its mortgage balance, and this number could rise to an almost unbelievable 50% by year-end 2011. It would cost about $745 billion, more than the size of the original 2008 bank bailout, to restore these borrowers to the point where they were breaking even, which there is no obvious political will to find right now.

Despite the truly dismal 'real unemployment' figures with which most everyone now agrees -- a staggering 30 million workers and 19% of the labor force -- very little attention is being paid to the particularly adverse effects the recession is having on people of color, recent immigrants, and out-of school youth. And almost no one is acknowledging the sad reality that even the nation's 130 million full-time workers have had an average economic loss of 15% just since December 2007 -- an average effective work week of 34 hours rather than 40 -- which means that the number of unemployed workers, measured economically, is actually as high as 50 million.
The overwhelming problem today for most workers isn't this recession, as horrible as it is -- it's the fact that for every earned income level except the top 10%, average household income hasn't changed a bit for 10 years, and that for the bottom 60% of wage earners it hasn't changed for more than 20 years. Through economic expansions and recessions -- and bull and bear markets -- alike, 90% of workers in America have been standing still earnings-wise.
And 100 million people, fully one-third of the entire U.S. population, are at or below "200% of the federal poverty line of $21,834 for a family of four", which is a needs-measure made lame by the fact that no family of four can actually comfortably live on such a low annual income.
**********
The best response to this scourge would be for our government to embrace in today's troubled time the same "economic bill of rights" that FDR, in his last State of the Union Speech in January 1944, demanded for his.

Roosevelt's "bill" sought to guarantee, in addition to health care and education, rights to:
"a job with a living wage...that would earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
"protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment; and
"a decent home".
And with his typical sensitivity, FDR concluded his last SOTUS, when he knew that he was dying, by saying that, "We cannot be content, no matter how high the general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people -- whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth -- is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and insecure."

Until we in this time include the eradication of poverty as part of our economic recovery efforts, as FDR tried to do in his time, no matter how much we attempt to rebuild the nation's economy through better trade practices, enhanced workers' rights, and investments in infrastructure and the 'green economy', tens of millions of Americans, literally, will still be left impoverished.

In making this effort, and thus in trying to determine "who's really poor in America" so that we can assist them, it helps to think of America as a doughnut, with the 'hole' in the doughnut being, at any point in time, the middle class (and the elites) and with the dough-part being those Americans who aspire to get there.

When our ancestors got off their boats at Ellis Island or on the West Coast, the American doughnut was a fat one with a relatively tiny hole, because almost all of them were impoverished 'outsiders' looking to find their individual American Dream. The doughnut's hole grew relatively larger over the next 50 to 100 years as the economy grew, and then with the widespread prosperity that came with the end of the Second World War, it ballooned in size as the middle class ballooned.

In the two decades after the War, with a burgeoning middle class clearly in hand, our government, in order to help those Americans still living on the outer ring, established very powerful employment & training, education, home mortgage, and small business assistance programs, while freely allowing labor unions to advance and protect workers' rights.

The problem with how we have reacted so far to the Great Recession of 2007 is that most of the recovery programs are, as in the '50s and '60s, only for those Americans living in the outer ring: programs such as "cash for clunkers", first-time homebuyer credits, expanded Pell Grants, etc. In 2010, however, after decades of wide-spread wage stagnation, the entire middle class needs help as well, and the simple proof of this is that overall income inequality in America is now the greatest since 1928, when we first began to measure it.

Without an immediate all-of-government commitment to creating upwards of 30 million new jobs (not the 9 million that the administration has identified), without stimulus efforts that specifically target the entire struggling middle class, and without very specific initiatives aimed at breaking the back of general wage stagnation, there is not even a medium-term prospect of anything approaching real full employment and healthy economic growth that benefits all Americans.

So, the answer to the question of 'who's really poor' now is that we all are in one way or another, because, as FDR would have said if he was here, "some [way too large] fraction of our people is."

Addressing this reality -- this now virtual pandemic of poverty -- must be at the core of our current economic recovery efforts, because a vibrant middle class that grows from the bottom up will always be central to the continued health of America's democratic society.

Leo Hindery, Jr. chairs the US Economy/Smart Globalization Initiative at the New America Foundation and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the former chief executive of AT&T Broadband and other major media and telecom companies.

Leaders in House Block Earmarks to Corporations
March 10, 2010
by Eric Lichtblau
New York Times
WASHINGTON — House Democratic leaders on Wednesday banned budget earmarks to private industry, ending a practice that has steered billions of dollars in no-bid contracts to companies and set off corruption scandals. The ban is the most forceful step yet in a three-year effort in Congress to curb abuses in the use of earmarks, which allow individual lawmakers to award financing for pet projects to groups and businesses, many of them campaign donors.

But House Republicans, in a quick round of political one-upmanship, tried to outmaneuver Democrats by calling for a ban on earmarks across the board, not just to for-profit companies. Republicans, who expect an intra-party vote on the issue Thursday, called earmarks “a symbol of a broken Washington.”

Both parties are seeking to claim the ethical high ground on the issue by racing to rein in a budgeting practice that has become rife with political influence peddling. So far, though, the Senate is not joining in. House Democrats had tried to reach an agreement with their counterparts to ban for-profit earmarks, but the senators balked, Congressional officials said.

Had the ban on for-profit earmarks been in place last year, it would have meant the elimination of about 1,000 awards worth a total of about $1.7 billion, leaders of the House Appropriations Committee said in announcing that, as a matter of policy, they will no longer approve requests for awards to for-profit groups. Many of those earmarks went to military contractors for projects in lawmakers’ home districts.

Under the new restrictions, not-for-profit institutions like schools and colleges, state and local governments, research groups, social service centers and others are still free to receive earmarks. The new restrictions, for example, would still allow the type of award to local governmental agencies that became infamous in 2005 with Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere.”

Representative David R. Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who leads the Appropriations Committee, said a series of criminal investigations, ethics inquiries and political embarrassments had prompted him to take stronger steps.

“The political reality right now is that the public has lost some confidence in this institution, and one of the reasons is the past abuses of the earmark process,” Mr. Obey said. Earmarks for profit-making companies are “the most vulnerable place” for abuse in the system, he added.

If the Senate does not follow the House’s lead, that would set up a confrontation between the two chambers, with the Senate including for-profit earmarks in its budget bills and the House excluding them. Negotiators from each body would then have to determine which earmarks, if any, would make it into a final bill sent to the White House for approval.

Senator Daniel K. Inouye, the Democrat of Hawaii who leads the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Wednesday that current restrictions were already working and that “it does not make sense to discriminate against for-profit organizations” by banning earmarks to them. He noted that many nonprofits had powerful lobbying operations to secure earmarks as well.

The House ban came less than two weeks after the public release of an investigation by the Office of Congressional Ethics laid bare the pay-to-play culture on Capitol Hill, particularly on the defense appropriations subcommittee. The report found that there was a “widespread perception” among the private-sector recipients of earmarks that giving political contributions to lawmakers on the panel helped secure the grants.

Even so, the House ethics committee on Feb. 26 cleared seven members of the defense panel — five Democrats and two Republicans — of accusations that they had improperly tied earmarks to contributions. The decision prompted protests from government watchdog groups, who said the standard the committee had set for ethical wrongdoing would open the way to further abuse of the earmark process.

The practice of inserting earmarks into spending bills, once used fairly sparingly by Congress as a way of imposing its budget priorities on the executive branch, has mushroomed, with lobbyists competing for the attention of committee members who control the money. Congress, which can award no-bid contracts at its discretion, doled out nearly $16 billion in awards last fiscal year. House Democrats said the new restrictions, in addition to banning for-profit earmarks, would include greater public disclosure of other earmark requests, audits of 5 percent of nonprofit earmarks, and the establishment of a program directly financed by the Pentagon to promote awards for small, start-up military projects. “This ban will ensure good stewardship of taxpayer dollars by the federal government across all agencies,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said.

Mr. Obey announced the new restrictions in tandem with Representative Norm Dicks, a Washington Democrat who leads the powerful defense appropriations subcommittee.

Mr. Dicks’s predecessor on the panel, Representative John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, who died in February, was renowned for his use of earmarks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is examining the work of the lobbying firm known as P.M.A., which was run by a former aide to Mr. Murtha and helped secure numerous earmarks for its clients.

One of P.M.A.’s clients, a software intelligence company called 21st Century Systems, got several million dollars in earmarks requested by Representative Peter J. Visclosky, an Indiana Democrat now under investigation by the F.B.I., and executives at the firm credited their political contributions to the congressman in earning his favor.

Some analysts questioned whether the change in leadership on the committee after the death of Mr. Murtha, who had resisted past reforms, had led to the new restrictions.

Asked about the issue, Mr. Obey said: “I’m not going to comment on someone who’s gone. All I will say is that Norm Dicks understands the process.”

House Democrats in particular have been battered by accusations of earmark abuses, with ethics scandals undercutting their pledges to end a “culture of corruption” in Washington after they took over Congress in 2007.

In the last three years, Congressional Democrats have taken actions that they say helped bring more transparency and competition to the earmark process, though outside critics did not always agree. But the ban drew quick praise Wednesday from both conservative and liberal groups.

“I think it’s a pretty big deal,” said Scott Lilly, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has studied earmarks. “That was always the most questionable and problematic aspect of the whole process,” he said of the for-profit earmarks.

Stephen Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonprofit group, said that while he would prefer an all-out ban, “for-profit earmarks are ground zero for pay-to-play, and it makes sense to rein them in.”

Mr. Obey said that banning all earmarks would make Congress “a rubber stamp” of the executive branch.

“Where I come from, the Congress has a perfect right, in fact an obligation, to participate in the budget process, but we’ve got to try to do it in a way that protects the integrity of the system,” he said. “This strikes a reasonable balance.”

China-US ties strained like never before
March 10, 2010
by Benjamin A Shobert
Asia Times

WASHINGTON - In hindsight, Wednesday's United States House of Representatives Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing over "The Google Predicament" may well prove to be one of the many grains of sand which are slowly eroding the conventional logic that has kept America and China engaged for most of the past several decades.

On the whole, the testimony and congressional statements appear to suggest we are fast approaching a rebalancing act between the two countries. Such a moment might change little in the way of formal policies and promulgated laws, but it will have significant impact on the politics and philosophies of engagement between Beijing and Washington.

The relationship between the US and China is being tested nowas it has not been in 30 years, if ever. Literally every front is being strained, with the net effect being that many politicians, policymakers and even average Americans are beginning to wrestle with whether it makes sense to be in a relationship with China at all.

If one had to choose a single idea held consistently across most of the congressional statements and expert witnesses today, it would be that the grand idea of China democratizing as it opened to trade with the West may no longer be a valid framework by which to understand our situation. Around Washington, this is becoming an increasingly common question, made more heatedly and pointedly in the midst of America's perceived economic decline.

From China's perspective, this was not a friendly hearing. While some members of this congressional hearing made an effort to acknowledge the difficulties in understanding China's development and how it uses technology within its political institutions, the majority of Wednesday's congressional testimony was quite hostile towards China.

Most notable was congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Republican, California) who said about China's political leadership, "You can't treat gangsters and thugs as if they were the same as normal people, and this is what we're talking about today ... China is a vicious dictatorship." Rohrabacher has been a long-time tenacious and principled advocate for dissent, more dramatic liberalization and human-rights reforms in China.

Speaking more narrowly about the matter of the hearing, namely Google's experience of working inside of China, congressman Robert Inglis (Republican, South Carolina) said, "There are two Googles: the real one, and the one the Chinese communist dictators want you to see."

Nicole Wong, vice president and deputy general counsel of Google, testified that "Google is firm in its decision to stop censoring search results [in China] ... but we want to do it in an appropriate and responsible way."

Having said that, Wong also stated that they are prepared to "shutter our Google.cn property and leave the country" if need be. It is important to distinguish the two primary issues that Google is wrestling with: first, the original devil's bargain made when they agreed to enter China and have their search results censored. Never entirely comfortable with this, Google developed a protocol that would notify someone in China when his or her search results had been filtered due to Google's agreement with the Chinese government. This solution has never been particularly appreciated by Beijing, but has been allowed.

Similarly Google, whose unofficial corporate motto of "Don't Be Evil" may seem to some oddly unhelpful in their overall day-to-day search operations, seems particularly on-point when describing the paradox of their China business model. Google's second issue is more recent, namely its discovery of highly organized and concentrated attacks on their corporate information technology (IT) systems, including Gmail, from within China.

Wong did make it clear this event was distinct from their discovery that particular Gmail accounts of human rights advocates had also been hacked from within China. In her written testimony she elaborated on this: "We discovered in our investigation that the accounts of dozens of US-, China- and European-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. I want to make clear that this happened independent of the security breach to Google, most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers."

While Google's concerns may be best embodied by its situation in China, it faces similar questions in other countries such as Thailand, Turkey, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia. Situations in these countries follow similar paths as the company's experience in China: authoritarian political regimes that desire to "plug into" the information super-highway and want Google's information-gathering technologies deployed within their country, but who feel compelled to limit the information their people can freely access.

As Wong testified in the hearing, "More than 25 governments have blocked Google services over the past few years”. Most notably are the 13 countries that have blocked YouTube, including Turkey, whose justification is that some videos posted "insulted the Turkish nation". In addition, Wong shared that "in the last two years, we have received reports that our blogging platform [Blogger and Blog*Spot] has been or is being blocked in at least seven countries including China, Spain, India, Pakistan, Iran, Myanmar and Ethiopia."

On January 21, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton acknowledged similar events when she said, "In the last year, we've seen a spike in threats to the free flow of information. China, Tunisia and Uzbekistan have stepped up their censorship of the Internet. In Vietnam, access to popular social networking sites has suddenly disappeared. And last Friday in Egypt, 30 bloggers and activists were detained."

At best, Wednesday's hearings embraced Clinton's remarks and wrestled with how technologies can be (and whether they should be) exported to empower individual voices of dissent while enabling overbearing authoritarian political institutions. Unfortunately, at its worst, the discussion sought to elevate Google's recent problems as the embodiment of China's "true" intentions.

Google's dilemma in all of these countries is the extents to which their products and technology hold the possibility of further reinforcing the stranglehold authoritarian regimes have on information. It becomes increasingly difficult for the company to believe in its motto, knowing that its technologies are prohibited from existing in versions that could further educate, inform and provoke dissent.

A number of congressional members voiced concern over this very idea, namely Representative Albio Sires (Democrat, New Jersey) who asked whether "China could become a model for other countries who want to similarly restrict information access?" Rebecca MacKinnon, visiting fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, acknowledged that one of the more important questions was determining "how authoritarian governments are adapting to the Internet".

"Over the past five years many authoritarian regimes have shifted from reactive to proactive in terms of how they deal with the Internet. Most modern authoritarian governments now accept the Internet as an irreversible reality. Rather than try to restrict citizens' access, the most proactive regimes are working aggressively to use Internet and mobile technologies to their own advantage."

His realization may speak more to Google's reconsideration of its China business than anything else: it is one thing to make a devil's bargain with unfriendly regimes in the hopes that your products will enable liberalization. But what if the exact opposite happens and they make increased oppression and misinformation more effective?

For the most part, the IT industry in the US continues to very much wrestle with these questions. Robert Holleyman, president and chief executive officer of the Business Software Alliance, mentioned the work the Global Network Initiative has done to establish standards for IT companies to bridge the gap between the rights of individuals and the desire of some governments to control information access.

Holleyman reinforced on Wednesday his belief that allowing IT companies to "remain in these markets is important", given both their economic potential as well as their ability to empower individuals to communicate and make change, as best evidenced by the role technology played in the recent Iranian election protests.

Dr Larry Wortzel, a commissioner for the US-China Congressional Committee (USCC), clearly felt the recent attacks on Google from within China should be understood as broadly consistent with China's cyber-warfare doctrines. Wortzel, in testimony he wished be understood as his own and not that of the USCC as a body, stated he believed three types of "malicious Chinese computer network operations" needed to be recognized as originating from China, and likely government sponsored.

During the hearing, he identified these as: "Those that strengthen political and economic control in China; those that gather economic, military or technology intelligence and information; and those that reconnoiter, map and gather targeting information in US military, government, civil infrastructure or corporate networks for later exploitation or attack".

Laden throughout much of the testimony and exchanges was the matter of China's trade practices and how they impacted American business. It may be possible to see this more clearly when looking back, but how congress treats China over the course of the next two to three years is likely to have more to do with the US's economic prospects than an enlightened sense of human rights.

In response to questions by representative Sires, who asked if Americans realized "we are in the middle of a big Cold War ... we have bad economic times ... is America focused enough on this new Cold War?" Wortzel pointed out that unlike the original Cold War, we "have no containment policy [with China] … we are heavily engaged ... but we have to be very careful of how we navigate through this." He added, "Much of what China and the American public thought would happen as part of China entering the WTO [World Trade Organization] in terms of democratization has not worked."

As Wednesday's testimony reinforced, the interests of business are still so heavily inter-twined with maintaining ongoing trade relations with China that it is practically impossible to impose trade restrictions or taxes on all Chinese made products. In an exchange between representative Brad Sherman (Democrat, California) and Holleyman, Sherman asked what specifically industry was prepared to do, or what they wanted congress to do: "Beg with a louder voice? This has been particularly ineffective with China. What action are you proposing?"

Sherman wanted to know if industry was finally willing to support taxing Chinese-made products, or enforce a one-week trade holiday with China, as a means of showing solidarity over China's trade and human-rights policies. In Sherman's view, anything short of this "will not work ... they will throw paper at us, we'll throw it back at them."

However, the political calculus in Washington is beginning to change. Rohrabacher may have best illustrated this when he said, "We are trying to treat China as if they were Belgium, and it's just not ... dictatorships do not deserve the same trading rights as democracies ... free trade requires free people."

What comes through clearly after the hearing is that what America hoped the China model would come to represent - trade empowering liberalization and freedom - may never happen. Instead, the China model may come to be known the world over as using trade to gather together the pieces of technology and industry you need for your own purposes, always dangling out in front the possibility of meaningful reform, but when ultimately pushed to make these changes, stopping short.

The US-China relationship is stuck between these two models.

It may well be that the tensions we are feeling now indicate far deeper divides and incompatibilities. That we are having this realization in tandem with our own economic insecurities should give us some patience and discernment lest we entirely upend what has been a meaningful and mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries for most of the past 30 years.

Benjamin A Shobert is the managing director of Teleos Inc (www.teleos-inc.com), a consulting firm dedicated to helping Asian businesses bring innovative technologies into the North American market.

Thermite and Sulfer: Debunking the Conspiracies
Debunking 9/11

One of the pieces of evidence conspiracy theorists use to say the buildings were brought down is a photo with something they interpret as being left behind by a thermite reaction.





There are a number of things they claim with this photo. One is the timeline. They say the photo has firemen which means this was during the rescue operation which only lasted two weeks. Why would they have fireman after the rescue operations? This suggests to them that the cut on the columns were made very close to September 11. The suggestion here is that it was done during the collapse.

They claim that the angle of the cut can't be created by a welding tool and/or is designed to have the building fall in a certain direction.

The other is a yellow substance they claim is residue from a thermite reaction.
Let's examine these claims one by one to see where the evidence takes us...

Timeline and Firemen

The rescue operation took about two weeks. They figured anyone left alive would have died by then anyway, so they started clean up operations and body recovery. During this time there was always at least 50 policemen and 50 firemen left on the scene to recover their fallen brothers. There were even more than that on ground zero until the city of NY told them to leave in November 2001. The city couldn't justify risking the health of 150 police and fireman for body recovery. In fact there was a protest about it which ended with the mayor allowing 50 members of each department on the scene.

Citing safety concerns, Giuliani had sought to scale back the number of firefighters working at ground zero to 25. At one point there had been as many as 150 firefighters and police officers at the site.

The decision angered firefighters still mourning the loss of 343 colleagues in the attacks. Many bodies have not been recovered, and the firefighters said they wanted to help find the remains of their friends and colleagues.

The number of firefighters working at the site was increased to 50 on Thursday.


Thermite in general makes an ugly hole with molten metal drips/blobs. It doesn't make clean cuts. It's a powder that undergoes a violent chemical reaction as seen in the video below.
http://www.guzer.com/videos/thermite_car.php
Note how much thermite is used. The pot is about a liter, but how much thermite is that?
Stoichiometric thermite requires 2 moles of Al per 1 mole of Fe2O3

2Al + Fe2O3 = Al2O3 + 2Fe


2 moles of Al weigh 54 g
1 mole of Fe2O3 weighs 160 g

density of Al=2.64 g/cc
density of Fe2O3=5.24 g/cc

54 grams of Al is equivalent to 20.5 cc of Al.
160g of Fe2O3 is equivalent to 30.5 cc of Fe2O3

Therefore, 51 cc of fully dense powder of 20.5 cc Al and 30.5 cc Fe2O3 weighs (54+160) g = 214 g.

A volume of 1000 cc would weigh (1000/51)*214 = 4.2 kg

For a powder packing density of 50%, the powder would weigh:

0.5*4.2 kg = 2.1 kg = 4.8 lb
That much just to burn a small hole in a small car engine. I bet it's even an aluminum block but lets say it isn't. How much do you think it would take to burn a massive core column? Then add enough to burn for 6 weeks! You see where we're going. You'd need tons.

How much mass would be required to produce molten iron from thermite equal to the same volume of molten aluminum droplets shown flowing from the south tower window:

A mole of Fe weighs 54 g. For every mole of Fe produced by thermite, one mole of Al and 0.5 mole of Fe2O3 is needed.

2Al + Fe2O3 = Al2O3 + 2Fe


One mole of Al weighs 27 g. 0.5 mole of Fe2O3 weighs 80 g.

Therefore, (27 + 80) g = 107 g of Al and Fe2O3 is needed to produce 54 g of Fe.

That means the mass of the reactants to that of Fe produced is a ratio of 107/54 = 2. The mass of thermite reactants (Al, Fe2O3) is twice that of the molten iron produced.

Comparing the weight of molten aluminum droplets compared with iron:

Iron is 7.9 g/cc. Aluminum is 2.64 g/cc. Fe is denser than Al by a factor of 3. For the same volume of droplets, Fe would have three times the mass as Al.

To produce the iron from thermite requires a reactant mass that is a factor of 2 more than the iron produced. Also, Fe is 3 times as dense as Al. So, it would take 2*3 = 6 times as much mass to produce the same volume of molten iron droplets from thermite compared with molten aluminum droplets.


Example:

Assume 3000 lbs of aluminum fell from the towers. If it had been molten iron produced by thermite, then 6*3000 = 18,000 lbs of thermite reactants would have been required to produce that same volume of falling mass.

Suppose 10 tons of molten aluminum fell from the south tower, about 1/8th of that available from the airplane. If it had been molten iron produced from thermite, 60 tons of thermite reactants would have to have been stored in Fuji Bank to produce the same volume spilling out of
the south tower. The section of floor would have to hold all of that plus the aircraft.

*Amount of aluminum can be ascertained by counting the droplets and measuring their size compared to the known size of the window. It's not easy to get a good number on this. It's based on the number of slugs seen in video stills, their size relative to the window width which was about 22 inches, and the density of aluminum, assuming this was aluminum.

http://www.coolmagnetman.com/magconda.htm

The weight of a gallon of aluminum is about 22.5 pounds. A hundred of these would already be 2250 lbs. A gallon size is not unlike the size of the slugs that were pouring out the window. Look at them relative to the window size. They look small at first, but when you realize how big the towers were, the slugs were fairly large. It must have been in the thousands of pounds.

Comment: Also, it ought to be noted that the substnce, ‘Nano-thermite,” so beloved by the conspiracy nuts, does not exist and was invented very recently by a minor Danish scientist to enable him to crawl into the bizarre limelight of this concept.

Glacier melting a key clue to tracking climate change

The world has become far too hot for the aptly named Exit Glacier in Alaska

March 4, 2010
by David Fogarty and Yereth Rosen
Reuters
Like many low-altitude glaciers, it's steadily melting, shrinking two miles over the past 200 years as it tries to strike a new balance with rising temperatures.

At the Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage, managers have learned to follow the Exit and other glaciers, moving signs and paths to accommodate the ephemeral rivers of blue and white ice as they retreat up deeply carved valleys.

"Some of the stuff is changing fast enough that we now have signs on moving pedestals," said Fritz Klasner, natural resource specialist at Kenai Fjords.

The vast amounts of water stored in glaciers play crucial roles in river flows, hydropower generation and agricultural production, contributing to steady run-off for Ganges, Yangtze, Mekong and Indus rivers in Asia and elsewhere.

But many are melting rapidly, with the pace picking up over the past decade, giving glaciers a central role in the debate over causes and impacts of climate change.

That role has come even more sharply into focus after recent attacks on the U.N.'s climate panel, which included a wrong estimate for the pace of melting for Himalayan glaciers in a major 2007 report.

The report said Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035, an apparent typographical error that stemmed from using literature not published in a scientific journal. Climate skeptics seized on the error and used it to question the panel's findings on climate change.

The evidence for rapid glacial melting, though, is overwhelming.

The problem is no one knows exactly what's occurring in the more remote Himalayas and parts of the Andes. Far better measurements are crucial to really understand the threat to millions of people downstream.

"There is no serious information on the state of the melting of the glaciers in the Himalayan-Tibetan complex," Kurt Lambeck, President of the Australian Academy of Science, told a climate science media briefing in late February.

The high altitude and remoteness of many glaciers in the Himalayas and Andes is the main reason.

DATA IN A DEEP FREEZE

To try to fill the gap, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said last month the government would establish a National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology in Dehra Dun in the north.

In Europe and North America, glaciers are generally more accessible and there are more trained people to study them.

Switzerland's Aletsch glacier, the largest in the Alps, has been retreating for about 150 years.

But the glacier, which feeds the River Rhone, still stores an estimated 27 billion tonnes of ice, according to www.swissinfo.ch. That's about 12 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.

In 2008, a total of 79 Swiss glaciers were in retreat, while 5 were advancing, the Swiss Glacier Monitoring network says.

"There are a very small number of glaciers that are monitored," said veteran glaciologist Ian Allison, pointing to less than 100 globally for which there are regular "mass-balance" measurements that reflect how much a glacier grows or shrinks from one year to the next.

Such measurements are the benchmark and several decades of data is regarded as the best way to build up an accurate picture of what's happening to a glacier.

Glaciers originate on land and represent a sizeable accumulation of snow and ice over the years. They tend to carve their way through valleys as more and more ice accumulates until the point where more is lost through melting than is gained.

THAT SHRINKING FEELING

"We probably know less about the total volume of glaciers than we do about how much ice there is in the big ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctic because a lot of it is in small mass areas and a lot of it is inaccessible," said Allison, leader of the Australian Antarctic Division's ice, ocean, atmosphere and climate program.

The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland analyses mass balance data for just over 90 glaciers and says their average mass balance continues to decrease.

Since 1980, cumulative thickness loss of the reference glacier group is about 12 meters of water equivalent, it says in its latest 2007/08 report.

Estimates vary but glaciers and mountain caps could contribute about 70 cm (2.3 feet) to global sea levels, a 2009 report authored by Allison and other leading scientists says.

The "Copenhagen Diagnosis" report from the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales says there is widespread evidence of more rapid melting of glaciers and ice-caps since the mid-1990s.

That means run-off from melting glaciers and ice-caps is raising sea levels by 1.2 millimeters a year, translating to up to 55 cm (1.8 feet) by 2100 if global warming accelerates.

I n Nepal, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development says "mass-balance" measurements would provide direct and immediate evidence of glacier volume increase or decrease.

"But there are still no systematic measurements of glacial mass balance in the region although there are promising signs that this is changing," the center said in a recent notice.

It said that based on studies, the majority of glaciers in the region are in a general condition of retreat.

"Small glaciers below 5,000 meters (16,500 feet) above sea level will probably disappear by the end of the century, whereas larger glaciers well above this level will still exist but be smaller," it said.

Glaciers have almost vanished from New Guinea island and in Africa and many on Greenland, the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica are also melting quickly, dumping large amounts of ice into the sea.

BAMBOO STICKS

Part of the problem is that glaciers are fickle things to measure, said Allison, and requires legwork and lots of bamboo stakes. These are placed in holes top to bottom, a potentially dangerous job, although satellites and lasers fitted to aircraft are changing this.

After a year or so, stakes placed up high will have had snow build up on them, so you can estimate how much snow fell there.

Those down low will have lost mass due to melt and evaporation, so there would be more of the canes sticking out.

"So you can measure how much height is lowered down below, how much it's gained up top. You'll need to know the density of the snow and ice as well," Allison said.

But he said glaciers in one region can all apparently behave differently in response to the same climate signal. "Because the fluctuations that occur in the front depend on how long it takes to transfer the mass from the top of the glacier to the bottom."

"You might have an area where all the small glaciers are all rapidly retreating but big glaciers still coming forward because they are still integrating changes that happened maybe 50 years ago," he added.

For the millions that live downstream, it is the impacts that are of most concern and among them is the threat of sudden bursting of lakes created as glaciers retreat.

About 14 of the estimated 3,200 glaciers in Nepal are at risk of bursting their dams.

Ang Tshering Sherpa, from Khumjung village in the shadows of Mount Everest, said the Imja glacial lake could burst its dam anytime and wash away villages.

"When I was a child I used to take our yaks and mountain goats for grazing on grassy flat land overlooking Everest," Sherpa said.

"What was a grazing ground for yaks in 1960 has now turned into the Imja due to melting of snow," Sherpa, now a trekking and climbing entrepreneur, said in Kathmandu.

A glacial lake broke its dam 25 years ago destroying trekking trails, bridges and a hydroelectric plant in the region. Neighbouring Bhutan also faces the threat of bursting dams.

Just how much water melting glaciers contribute to major rivers such as the Ganges and Brahmaputra, though, remains unknown.

Richard Armstrong, a senior scientist of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado, said it was nonsense to think that if glaciers melted there would be no water in the Ganges, a lifeline for millions in northern India.

"Even if the glaciers disappeared tomorrow it wouldn't have a huge impact on the water supply. The rest of the river flow comes from rain and melting seasonal snow."

He said the center has put in a proposal to NASA to use satellite data to build a better picture of the area and altitude of glaciers in the Himalayas.

"What we want to look at is what's the contribution of melting glacier ice to the downstream hydrology," Armstrong said. "It's really what's of primary importance to the socio-economic impacts of retreating glaciers."

Allison and Armstrong and many other scientists have dismissed the row over the U.N. climate panel error as overblown but said it served as a useful reminder of the gaps in global glacier monitoring and the need for a far better picture.

"It certainly brought attention to the problem," said Armstrong.

(Additional reporting by Krittivas Mukherjee in New Delhi and Gopal Sharma in Kathmandu; Editing by Megan Goldin)