James van Luik, Publisher, Editor & Compiler of The JvL Bi-Weekly

Friday, June 29, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 063007

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Saturday, June 30^th, 2007

Volume 6, No. 12

(Editor's note: Subject: FW: Cell Phone numbers to be released to telemarketing companies

REMINDER....by the time you receive this email, all cell phone numbers will have been released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls.

....YOU WILL BE CHARGED FOR THESE CALLS

To prevent this, call the following number from your cell phone:888-382-1222. It is the National DO NOT CALL list. It will only take a minute of your time. It blocks your number for five (5) years. You must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked. You cannot call from a different phone number. It take about 20 seconds.) Received from a subscriber

3 Articles

1. Net Taxes Could Arrive By This Fall

2. Chomsky Takes on the World (Bank)

3. The Cry of the Invisible

1. NET TAXES COULD ARRIVE BY THIS FALL

(PART 2 OF 2 PARTS)

DECLAN MCCULLAGH

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

If that doesn't happen, other taxes may zoom upward instead, warned Sen. Michael Enzi, a Wyoming Republican, at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. "Are we implicitly blessing a situation where states are forced to raise other taxes, such as income or property taxes, to offset the growing loss of sales tax revenue?" Enzi said. "I want to avoid that."

A flurry of proposals that pro-tax advocates advanced this week push in that direction. On Tuesday, Enzi introduced a bill that would usher in mandatory sales tax collection for Internet purchases. Second, during a House of Representatives hearing the same day, politicians weighed whether to let a temporary ban on Net access taxes lapse when it expires on November 1. A House backer of another pro-sales tax bill said this week to expect a final version by July.

"The independent and sovereign authority of states to develop their own revenue systems is a basic tenet of self government and our federal system," said David Quam, director of federal relations at the National Governors Association, during a Senate Commerce committee hearing on Wednesday.

Internet sales taxes
At the moment, for instance, Seattle-based Amazon.com is not required to collect sales taxes on shipments to millions of its customers in states like California, where Amazon has no offices. (Californians are supposed to voluntarily pay the tax owed when filing annual state tax returns, but few do.)

Ideas to alter this situation hardly represent a new debate: officials from the governors' association have been pressing Congress to enact such a law for at least six years. They invoke arguments--unsuccessful so far--like saying that reduced sales tax revenue threatens budgets for schools and police.

But with Democrats now in control of both chambers of Congress, the political dynamic appears to have shifted in favor of the pro-tax advocates and their allies on Capitol Hill. The NetChoice coalition, which counts as members eBay, Yahoo and the Electronic Retailing Association and opposes the sales tax plan, fears that the partisan shift will spell trouble

One long-standing objection to mandatory sales tax collection, which the Supreme Court in a 1992 case left up to Congress to decide, is the complexity of more than 7,500 different tax agencies that each have their own (and frequently bizarre) rules. Some legal definitions (PDF) tax Milky Way Midnight candy bars as candy and treat the original Milky Way bar as food. Peanut butter Girl Scout cookies are candy, but Thin Mints or Caramel deLites are classified as food.

The pro-tax forces say that a concept called the Streamlined Sales Tax Agreement will straighten out some of the notorious convolutions of state tax laws. Enzi's bill, introduced this week, relies on the agreement when providing "federal authorization" to require out-of-state retailers "to collect and remit the sales and use taxes" due on the purchase. (Small businesses with less than $5 million in out-of-state sales are exempted.)

It's "important to level the playing field for all retailers," Enzi said during Wednesday's hearing.

While it's too early to know how much support Enzi's bill will receive, foes of higher taxation are marshaling their allies. Sen. Ted Stevens, an Alaska Republican, said Wednesday that he'd like "to see an impregnable ban on taxes on the Internet."

A taxing question

Pro-tax and antitax forces are jockeying for position before a Net access tax moratorium expires in November. Also on the table: a proposal to usher in mandatory online sales taxes.

Enzi bill: Ushers in mandatory sales taxes on Internet purchases.

S. 156: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently.

H.R. 1077: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently and eliminates grandfather provision permitting nine states to collect taxes.

H.R. 763: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently.

Jeff Dircksen, the director of congressional analysis at the National Taxpayers Union in Alexandria, Va., said in written testimony prepared for the hearing: "If such a system of extraterritorial collection is allowed, Congress will have opened the door to any number of potential tax cartels that will eventually harm rather than help taxpayers."

Internet access taxes

A second category of higher Net taxes is technically unrelated, but is increasingly likely to be linked when legislation is debated in Congress later this year. That category involves access taxes, meaning taxes that local and state governments levy to single out broadband or dial-up connections. (See CNET News.com's Tech Politics podcast this week with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey on this point.)

If the temporary federal moratorium is allowed to expire in November, states and municipalities will be allowed to levy a dizzying array of Net access taxes--meaning a monthly Internet connection bill could begin to resemble a telephone bill or airline ticket with innumerable and confusing fees tacked on at the end. In some states, telephone fees, taxes and surcharges run as high as 20 percent of the bill.

These fees that states levy on mobile phones, cable TV and landlines run far higher than state sales taxes at an average of 13.3 percent, cost the average household $264 a year, and total $41 billion annually, according to a report published by the Chicago-based Heartland Institute this month. Landlines are taxed at the highest rate, 17.23 percent, with Internet access being virtually tax free, with the exception of a few states that were grandfathered in a decade ago.

Dircksen, from the National Taxpayers Union, urged the Senate on Wednesday to "encourage economic growth and innovation in the telecommunications sector--in contrast to higher taxes, fees and additional regulation" by at least renewing the expiring moratorium, and preferably making it permanent. Broadband providers like Verizon Communications also want to make the ban permanent.

But state tax collectors are steadfastly opposed to any effort to renew the ban, let alone impose a permanent extension. Harley Duncan, the executive director of the Federation of Tax Administrators, said Wednesday that higher taxes will not discourage broadband adoption and his group "urges Congress not to extend the Act because it is disruptive of and poses long-term dangers for state and local fiscal systems."

Sen. Daniel Inouye, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, said: "Listening to the testimony, I would opt for a temporary extension, if at all."

If the moratorium expires, one ardent tax foe is predicting taxes on e-mail. A United Nations agency proposed in 1999 the idea of a 1-cent-per-100-message tax, but retreated after criticism. (A similar proposal, called bill "602P," is, however, actually an urban legend.)

"They might say, 'We have no interest in having taxes on e-mail,' but if we allow the prohibition on Internet taxes to expire, then you open the door on cities and towns and states to tax e-mail or other aspects of Internet access," said Sen. John Sununu, a New Hampshire Republican. "We need to be honest about what we're endorsing and what we're opposing."

2. CHOMSKY TAKES ON THE WORLD (BANK)

INTERVIEW

MICHAEL SHANK

Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On April 26, Michael Shank interviewed him about the conflict between Congress and the U.S. president over Iraq and Syria, the scandal enveloping World Bank head Paul Wolfowitz, and the nature of foreign debt.

Michael Shank: Given that the U.S. Congress is no longer calling for binding timelines for troop withdrawal, how is this indicative of a broader struggle between the executive and legislative branches?

Noam Chomsky: There are a number of issues. One is the unitary executive conception. The Republican Party happens to be right now in the hands of a very extreme fringe. That goes from the legal system and the Federalist Society to the executive and so on. What they basically want, to put it simply, is a kind of an elective dictatorship. The chief executive should have total control over the executive branch. And the executive branch should dominate the other branches. That’s an effective mode of authoritarian control, natural for those whose dislike of democracy goes beyond the norm.

There’s a real fascist streak there, definitely. And Congress, to some extent, is trying to recreate more of a balance between the executive and legislative branch. So that’s part of the struggle. Part of it is just that neither party is willing to face the consequences of a withdrawal from Iraq. It’s not a trivial matter. First of all, there’s almost no public discussion of the issues involved in the war. Why did we invade? Why don’t we want to get out?

Shank: Right, it is minutiae now; it is troop numbers, timelines, etc.

Chomsky: That’s right. I was listening to the National Public Radio tribute to David Halberstam the other day, and they had on Neil Sheehan, David Greenway, and others. They were talking correctly about these young reporters in Vietnam who with great courage stood up against power and told truth to power. Which is correct, but what truth did they tell to power? The truth they told to power was: "you’re not winning the war." I listened through the hour and there were never any questions like: should you be fighting the war or should you be invading another country? The answer to that is not the kind of truth you tell to power.

In fact, it’s rather similar to what critical journalists in the Soviet Union were saying in the 1980s. They were saying, “Yeah we’re not winning the war in Afghanistan.” From my point of view, that’s not telling truth to power. Truth to power would be: why are you invading Afghanistan, what right do you have to commit crimes against peace and against humanity? But that question never came up. And the same is true in the discussion of Iraq. The question of whether it’s legitimate to have a victory doesn’t even arise. In fact, the current debate about Iraq reminds me very much of the dove/hawk debate over Vietnam.

Take, for example, Arthur Schlesinger, leading historian, Kennedy advisor, and so on. He was originally a strong supporter of the war during the Kennedy years. But by the mid-1960s, there was a mood spreading in the country generally, but also among the elites, that the war is not wise, it’s harming us. Then he had a book that came out in 1966 called Bitter Heritage, which is very much like what’s happening today. He was one of the extreme liberal critics of the war by then. He said, “We all pray that the hawks will be correct in thinking that sending more troops will bring us victory. And if they are, we’ll be praising the wisdom and statesmanship of the American government in winning a victory in a land that they’ve left in wreck and ruin. But it doesn’t look like it’s going to work.”

You can translate that almost verbatim into the liberal dove critique of the war today. There’s no question about whether we are justified in invading another country. The only question is: is this tactic going to work, or is some other tactic going to work, or maybe no tactic and it’s costing us too much. And those are the limits of the presidential debates, the congressional discussion, and the media discussion.

That’s why you can have debates such as those going on now about whether Iran is interfering in Iraq. You can only have that debate on the assumption that the United States owns the world. You couldn’t debate in 1943 whether the Allies were interfering in occupied France. It was conquered and occupied by a foreign power. Who can interfere in it? In fact, it’s the right thing to do, interfering. Or, say, Russia’s Afghanistan: is the United States interfering in Afghanistan while the Russians conquered it? You’d crack up in laughter if you heard that question.

Those are the limits of discussion here. That’s part of the reason the outcomes of the debates are so inconclusive. The issues are not discussable.

First of all there is the issue of legitimacy. Invading Iraq was the kind of crime for which Nazi war criminals were hanged at Nuremberg. They were hanged, primarily, for crimes against peace, i.e. aggression, the supreme international crime. Von Ribbentrop, foreign minister, was hanged. One of the main charges was that he supported a preemptive war against Norway. It’s kind of striking that at the end of the Nuremberg tribunal, the chief counsel for the prosecution Justice Robert Jackson, an American justice, made some pretty eloquent speeches about the nature of the tribunal. After the sentencing, he said, “We’re handing the defendants a poisoned chalice and if we sip from it we must be subject to the same charges and sentencing or else we’re just showing that the proceedings are a farce.” So if they mean anything the principles have to apply to us.

Try to find a discussion of that anywhere, either in the case of Vietnam or in the case of Iraq, or any other aggression.

Shank: Another schism opened up recently between the two branches with Cheney’s comment that Pelosi’s trip to Syria was bad behavior. Do you think Pelosi has a right to speak to Syria?

Chomsky: Of course she does. If you don’t believe in an elective dictatorship, everyone has that right, even the local congressman, even you and I. If it’s a free democratic country you don’t have to follow the orders of the dear leader. The whole discussion is ridiculous. And the fact that she has to defend herself is ridiculous.

The question is: are we living in an elective dictatorship? Or is it supposed to be a free country in which people pursue their interests?

Shank: How much will that [unitary executive] foundation shift if/when the Democrats take over the executive branch in 2008? Will it be more open?

Chomsky: It’ll be more open, but I don’t think there will be fundamental changes. The basic fundamentals are shared by the parties. But the Bush administration happens to be on the very extreme end of a pretty narrow spectrum. So if liberal Republicans were in [the White House] it would also change. The mainstream Democrats by now are kind of liberal Republicans. It’s very hard to make a distinction.

So sure, it would soften the edges. The parties have different constituencies, and you give something to your constituency. The Democratic constituency is more of the general population, the working people and so on. So you give something to them and maybe less to the super rich. But the framework of thinking is almost the same.

Shank: Is the foundation on which the current unitary executive stands beginning to erode? Given the corruption charges facing Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank, the scandal surrounding Alberto Gonzales, the Justice Department’s firing of attorneys, and the indictment of Scooter Libby?

Chomsky: The struggle over the unitary executive and the elective dictatorship… that’s beginning to erode from internal corruption primarily, not because what it did was wrong. Yes, of course, some of things were wrong, like firing a prosecutor, but that is so minor compared to the array of crimes committed by the administration. It gains its significance because of the conflict over legislative and executive powers.

Take Wolfowitz. The charges against Wolfowitz are maybe correct but pretty minor compared to his record. Forget his involvement in the Iraq war, let’s put that aside, though it was surely significant. He was the ambassador to Indonesia under Reagan. He was one of the strongest supporters of Suharto, who was one of the worst monsters in the modern period, comparable to Saddam Hussein. When Wolfowitz was appointed to the World Bank, Indonesian human rights and democracy activists were bitterly critical because he never lifted his finger to help them when he was ambassador. In fact, he harmed them and they explained how he did it.

Here’s a man who strongly opposes democracy, who strongly opposes human rights. That’s not the myth. The myth is his great ideals. But in his actions, he supported a hideous dictator and in fact he supported extreme corruption. Transparency International ranked Suharto’s Indonesia as the world champion in corruption. This is the man he was defending while at the same time saying that he was going to the World Bank to do something about corruption.

His record with regard to democracies is also outlandish. You may recall in Turkey, to everyone’s surprise, the government went along with the will of 95% of the population and did not let U.S. troops use the country as a base for the war against Iraq. There was bitter condemnation of Turkey in the United States, from Colin Powell and others. But the most extreme was Wolfowitz. He berated the Turkish military for permitting this to happen. He said, “look, you have power, you can force the civilian government to do what we want them to do. The idea that they should listen to 95% of the population is outrageous.” Then he demanded that Turkey apologize to the United States and in fact say that it understands its job to help the United States. A couple of months later he was being hailed as the “idealist-in-chief” leading the crusade for democracy.

Shank: So why is he going down now for a salary?

Chomsky: He’s very much disliked in the Bank. Apparently he’s very authoritarian. So they picked an issue on which to expel him: a kind of corruption issue and a governance issue. And that’s okay. It’s good to see corrupt people go down. But those are not the issues. It’s just like in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Shank: Analysts in the media are questioning whether or not the Bank can redeem itself post-Wolfowitz. Can it redeem itself or is it done?

Chomsky: Redeem itself from what? Through the 1970s, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were pressuring countries to take loans, borrow, and create huge debt. They argued that it was the right thing to do. In the early 1980s, with the Volcker regime in Washington, the whole system collapsed and the countries that had taken the debts were hung out to dry. Then the World Bank and the IMF pressured them strongly to introduce structural adjustment programs -- which means that the poor have to pay off the debts incurred by the rich. And of course there was economic disaster all over the world.

That’s the World Bank. They’ve done some good things. I’ve seen some World Bank projects that I think are great. For example, in Colombia the World Bank has supported very interesting projects run partly by the church, partly by human rights organizations. They are trying to create zones of peace, which means communities that separate themselves from the various warring factions and ask the military, paramilitaries, and guerillas to leave them alone. The people that are doing that are very brave, honorable people. It’s very constructive work, and it’s supported by the World Bank.

So again, I think that’s good. But if you look at the overall range of the Bank’s policies, it hasn’t been benign by any means. The Bank would have a long way to go to “redeem itself.”

Shank: So it’s the same problem facing Iraq, the whole conversation is wrong?

Chomsky: The conversation is too narrow. Within the narrow framework, yes, it’s a good thing to get rid of corruption and press for good governance. But there’s a much wider framework…

Shank: …that’s not being talked about.

Chomsky: Right. Take the IMF. The IMF is not the World Bank, but it’s closely related. The IMF’s former U.S. executive director Karin Lissakers accurately described the Fund as the credit community’s enforcer. The IMF is very anti-capitalist. For example, suppose I lend you money. And I know that you’re a risky borrower, so I insist on a high-interest rate. Now, suppose that you can’t pay me back. In a capitalist system, it’s my problem. I made a risky loan. I got a lot of profit from the interest. You defaulted. It’s my problem.

That’s now what the IMF is about. What the IMF is saying, to put it in personal terms, is that your friends and neighbors have to pay off the loan. They didn’t borrow the money, but they have to pay it back. And my friends and neighbors have to pay me to make sure that I don’t lose any money. That’s essentially what the IMF is.

If Argentina takes out an IMF loan with huge interest rates because it’s risky and then they default, the IMF comes along and says the workers and peasants and other people in Argentina have to pay for that. They may not have borrowed it, it may have been borrowed by a military dictatorship, but they have to pay it back. That’s what structural adjustment is. And the IMF will ensure that western taxpayers pay off the bank. It’s radically anti-capitalist, whether you like that or not. The whole system has no legitimacy. In fact the whole debt system in the world, which is crushing much of the world, most of it is fake debt.

If Suharto, one of the biggest debtors in the world, borrows money and ends up the richest man in Indonesia or maybe the world, why is it the responsibility of the farmers in Indonesia to pay it off? They didn’t borrow it; they didn’t get anything from it. They were repressed, but they have to pay it off. And the IMF makes sure that the lenders don’t lose money on their risky loan after making a lot of profit from it. Why should the system even exist?

Shank: The micro version of that in the United States with sub-prime lending is coming back to bite us pretty quickly.

Chomsky: Exactly.

Shank: Are we going to have that kind of awareness on the global scale? Because I think people are realizing that sub-prime lending isn’t working.

Chomsky: It’s bad because vulnerable people were exploited. But at least you can say that the sub-prime borrowers did borrow the money. In the South the people didn’t borrow the money. It was their leadership that did. What do the people of Indonesia have to do with Suharto borrowing money from the Bank?

Take Duvalier in Haiti. He fled with U.S. help, with most of the treasury. Why do the people of Haiti have to pay off the debt? Most debt is just illegitimate. In fact, the United States itself has instituted an international regime that regards these debts as totally illegitimate. They’re called odious debts. It’s the notion that the United States introduced when we “liberated” Cuba. The United States didn’t want to pay off the debts to Spain, so they were dismissed accurately as illegitimate, later called odious debts. The people of Cuba had no responsibility for them.

A huge amount of the debt in the global south is odious debt. Why should anybody pay it?

3. THE CRY OF THE INVISIBLE

IN LATIN AMERICA, POPULIST MOVEMENTS ARE RISING UP AGAINST WESTERN INTERVENTION

BY

JOHN PILGER

In the 1960s, when I first went to Latin America, I travelled up the cone of the continent from Chile across the Altiplano to Peru, mostly in rickety buses and single-carriage trains. It was an experience my memory stored for life, especially the spectacle of the movement of people. They moved through the dust of a snow-capped wilderness, along roads that were ribbons of red mud, and they lived in shanties that defied gravity. "We are invisible," said one man; another used the term abandonados; an indigenous woman in Bolivia unforgettably described her poverty as a commodity for the rich.

When I later saw Sebastiao Salgado's photographs of Latin America's working people, I recognised the people at the roadside, the gold miners and the coffee workers and the silhouettes framed in crosses in the cemeteries. Perhaps the idea for a cinema film began then, or when I reported Ronald Reagan's murderous assault on Central America; or when I first read the words of Victor Jara's ballads and heard Sam Cooke's anthem A Change Is Gonna Come.

The War On Democracy is my first film for cinema. It follows more than 55 documentary films for television, which began with The Quiet Mutiny, set in Vietnam. Most of my films have told stories of people's struggles against rapacious power and of attempts to subvert and control our historical memory. It is this control, this organised forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of whole societies against their crimes is merely "superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged ... It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn't matter. It was of no interest".

This was true of Nicaragua in the early 1980s, when a popular revolution began to turn back poverty and bring literacy and hope to a country long dismissed as a banana republic. In the United States, the Sandinista government was successfully portrayed as communist and a threat, and crushed. After all, Richard Nixon had said of all of Latin America: "No one gives a shit about the place." The War On Democracy is meant as an antidote to this.

Modern fictional cinema rarely seems to break political silences. The very fine Motorcycle Diaries was a generation too late. In this country, where Hollywood sets the liberal boundaries, the work of Ken Loach and a few others is an honourable exception. However, the cinema is changing as if by default. The documentary has returned to the big screen and is being embraced by the public, in the US and all over. They were still clapping Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 two months after it opened in this country. Why? The answer is uncomplicated. It was a powerful film that helped people make sense of news that no longer made sense. It did not present the usual phony "balance" as a pretence for presenting an establishment consensus. It was not riddled with the cliches, platitudes and power assumptions that permeate "current affairs". It was realist cinema, as important as The Grapes of Wrath was in the 1930s, and people devoured it.

The War On Democracy is not the same. It comes out of a British commercial television tradition that is too often passed over: the pioneering of bold factual journalism that treated other societies not as post-imperial curios, as useful or expendable to "us", but extraordinary and important in their own terms. Granada's World in Action, where I began, was a prime example. It would report and film in ways that the BBC would not dare. These days, with misnamed "reality" programmes consuming much of television like a plague of cane toads, cinema has been handed a timely opportunity. Such are the dangers imposed on us all today by a rampant, neo-fascist superpower, and so urgent is our need for uncontaminated information that people are prepared to buy a cinema ticket to get it.

The War On Democracy examines the false democracy that comes with western corporations and financial institutions and a war waged, materially and as propaganda, against popular democracy. It is the story of the people I first saw 40 years ago; but they are no longer invisible; they are a mighty political movement, reclaiming noble concepts distorted by corporatism and they are defending the most basic human rights in a war being waged against all of us.

Cinema and television production are closely related, of course, but the differences, I have learned, are critical. Cinema allows a panorama to unfold, giving a sense of place that only the big screen captures. In The War On Democracy, the camera sweeps across the Andes in Bolivia to the highest and poorest city on earth, El Alto, then follows Juan Delfin, a priest and a taxi driver, into a cemetery where children are buried. That Bolivia has been asset-stripped by multinational companies, aided by a corrupt elite, is an epic story described by this one man and this spectacle. That the people of Bolivia have stood up, expelled the foreign consortium that took their water resources, even the water that fell from the sky, is understood as the camera pans across a giant mural that Juan Delfin painted. This is cinema, a moving mural of ordinary lives and triumphs.

Chris Martin and I (we made the film as a partnership) used two crews and two very different cinematographers, Preston Clothier and Rupert Binsley. They shot in high-definition stock, which then had to be converted to 35mm film - one of cinema's wonderful anachronisms.

The film was backed by the impresario Michael Watt, a supporter of anti-poverty projects all over the world, who had told producer Wayne Young that he wanted to put my TV work in the cinema. Granada provided additional support, and ITV will broadcast the film later in the year. The extra funding also allowed me to persuade the late Sam Cooke's New York agents to license A Change Is Gonna Come, one of the finest, most lyrical pieces of black music ever written and performed. I was in the southern United States when it was released. It was the time of the civil-rights movement, and Cooke's song spoke to and for all people struggling to be free. The same is true of the ballads of the Chilean Victor Jara, whose songs celebrated the popular democracy of Salvador Allende before Pinochet and the CIA extinguished it.

We filmed in the National Stadium in Santiago, Chile, where Jara was taken along with thousands of other political prisoners. By all accounts, he was a source of strength for his comrades, singing for them until soldiers beat him to the ground and smashed his hands. He wrote his last song there and it was smuggled out on scraps of paper. These are the words:

What horror the face of fascism
creates
They carry out their plans with
knife-like precision ...
For them, blood equals medals ...
How hard it is to sing
When I must sing of horror ...
In which silence and screams
Are the end of my song.

After two days of torture, they killed him. The War On Democracy is about such courage and a warning to us all that "for them" nothing has changed, that "blood equals medals".

The War On Democracy has opened at selected cinemas. A DVD collection of Pilger's documentaries, In the Name of Justice, is released by Network.

Thursday, June 14, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 061507

I can be most easily reached through the following email address for suggesting new additions to the subscription list or to cancel your subscription to the Bi-Weekly:

channujames@yahoo.com

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Please forward the Blog address for the Bi-Weekly to any who might be interested

Friday, June 15^th,2007

Volume 6, No. 11

(Editor's note: "The transcendental temptation lurks deep within the human breast. It is ever-present, tempting humans by the lure of transcendental realities, subverting the power of their critical intelligence, enabling them to accept unproven and unfounded myths….Any impartial observer of human history must be duly impressed by the tenacious character of religious faiths and the persistence of transcendental myths in human history, as well as the ability of the most outrageous myths to sprout and take root, even in the graveyards of defeated and dying ideas. Is this a perverse strain, like original sin, but beyond any hope of human redemption?" Paul Kurtz

Editor's Second note: Repudiate “faith-based initiatives” pushed by any branch of government. Repudiate a weak Congress. Repudiate weak senators or representatives, especially those with a track record of abrogating their constitutional mandate. Repudiate ignorance, especially that of the American citizen who knows little or nothing about the Constitution which empowers him or her. Repudiate consumerism, especially the virulent form it takes in the selfish framework of American-centric capitalism. Repudiate pre-emptive wars of aggression. Repudiate American Empire. Instead, embrace the empowerment of education. Embrace active citizenship. Embrace the rule of law, as set forth by the Constitution. Do all of this and, in the end, if conditions and circumstance warrant, impeach President Bush and any of those in his administration so deserving. Scott Ritter)

5 Articles

1. Net Taxes Could Arrive By this Fall

2. Coup D'État

3. Starving the Poor

4. Venezuela and the Media: Fact and Fiction

5. Ideas Cannot be Killed

1. NET TAXES COULD ARRIVE BY THIS FALL

(PART 1 OF 2 PARTS)

DECLAN MCCULLAGH

(The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.)

It's "important to level the playing field for all retailers," Enzi said during Wednesday's hearing.

A taxing question

Pro-tax and antitax forces are jockeying for position before a Net access tax moratorium expires in November. Also on the table: a proposal to usher in mandatory online sales taxes.

Enzi bill: Ushers in mandatory sales taxes on Internet purchases.

S. 156: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently.

H.R. 1077: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently and eliminates grandfather provision permitting nine states to collect taxes.

H.R. 763: Renews expiring access tax moratorium permanently.

Internet access taxes
A second category of higher Net taxes is technically unrelated, but is increasingly likely to be linked when legislation is debated in Congress later this year. That category involves access taxes, meaning taxes that local and state governments levy to single out broadband or dial-up connections. (See CNET News.com's Tech Politics podcast this week with former House Majority Leader Dick Armey on this point.)

Now on News.com

The wide, wide world of Google Photos: The future, someday, from China Photos: Microsoft maps out 3D for the browser Extra: Invention tips from the pros Video: Facebook announces widgets galore

Sen. Daniel Inouye, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Commerce committee, said: "Listening to the testimony, I would opt for a temporary extension, if at all."

2. COUP D'ÉTAT

BY

EDWARD LUTTWAK

During the time the Vietnam war was in full swing, Edward Luttwak wrote a seminal book on the phenomena of overthrowing governments, Coup d'état: A Practical Handbook. In defining the attributes of a typical coup, Luttwak explains:

A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder.

Let that definition rattle around your brain for a moment. When we think of coups, our mental image tends to be populated by medal-festooned lapels of banana republic military commanders, surrounded by gun toting militias riding around in jeeps, in a location somewhere south of the equator. Obviously, that is not an accurate picture. A coup is typically a partnership between civilian politicians (usually, but not always, by the party in opposition to the current government) and sympathetic military commanders. Contrary to popular concept, the "use of military or other organized force is not the defining feature of a coup d'état. It can be argued, though, that co-opted military command of civilian authority and positions is integral to consolidation of power in a coup environment. With yesterday's appointment of General Lute as the war czar, there are more active duty military commanders involved in the operational control of America's war and intelligence efforts than ever before. Additionally, James Comey's remarks this week to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the race to John Ashcroft's hospital bed to authorize the warrentless wiretap program, we get a small peek behind the curtain of how the Bush regime has operated, time and time again, outside the bounds of (at least) propriety and (potentially) beyond the confines of constitutional authority. The confluence of several events over the past year or so lead to the question: did a true coup d'état occur in the U.S., and we missed it? ...

Since the time that George Bush came to power in the contested election of 2000, many have opined that the Supreme Court decision in Bush -v- Gore was, in fact, a coup. Legal historians will certainly be arguing the finer points of the SCOTUS decision long after most of us are dead. However, a coup in the classic sense requires that fundamental changes occur to both the power structure of a government and the precepts of enabling documents and legislation (for example, constitutional interpretations).

Setting aside the constitutionality and use of presidential signing statements and all of the other challenges to constitutional authority that have occurred in the past 6 years, let's just take a quick look at the recent militarization of the heretofore civilian infrastructure of the U.S. government:

Item: In an unprecedented presidential appointment, active duty General Michael Hayden was installed as director of the CIA in 2006. Item: General David Petraeus makes the rounds in Washington, and updates political leaders on progress / lack thereof in Iraq. George Bush holds a press conference, and invokes Petraeus' name no less than 12 times. He also implores, "Let the commanders do their job". Some would argue that Bush is abdicating his authority (and responsibility) as Commander in Chief for the prosecution of war.

Item: 11 GOP congressmen hold a frank conversation with Bush, telling him that he has no clothes (or credibility). They'll "only believe General Petraeus".

Item: Active duty generals are going on record (at least anonymously) telling journalists that they'll "revolt against the regime" in September if the regime is still sticking with the surge into 2008.

Item: General Petraeus denies that he has come under pressure from President Bush or other political leaders to paint a false or skewed picture of the U.S. military campaign in Iraq:

"I am not being pressured by the president to say anything," Petraeus told reporters after 3 hours of back-to-back briefings of House and Senate members on the situation in Iraq. "I am not going to be pressured by political leaders of either party."

Item: Lt. Gen. Lute is selected as the Bush regime's "war czar", in an apparent direct contravention to the constitution of the United States and the powers of the executive branch. Thoroughly unreported in the U.S. legacy media (or even the progressive new media) is that Lute views the internet as a battleground in the war on terror. Either Gen. Petraeus is being set up as the biggest patsy in history, or he's already taken over. He's basically been anointed as the "honest broker" and ombudsman between the Bush regime and congress. Everyone is deferring to him, and it doesn't seem as if much of anyone is questioning Gen. Lute's new job, either. The civilian cabinet position of Secretary of War was deprecated in 1947, but it seems that it's now been resurrected, and that a military guy is running the show. General Hayden is running the intelligence apparatus of the United States, and holds no allegiance to the civilian legislative branch, even though that branch was required to confirm him (another GOP rubber stamp job in 2006). It's acceptable to squirm in your chair a little bit. Perhaps "coup" is too strong of a word, but clearly, the Bush regime has consolidated the executive branch's hold over the military, and the military's current influence over day-to-day decision making at the highest levels of government is pretty much unprecedented in U.S. history.

3. STARVING THE POOR

NOAM CHOMSKY

The chaos that derives from the so-called international order can be painful if you are on the receiving end of the power that determines that order’s structure. Even tortillas come into play in the ungrand scheme of things. Recently, in many regions of Mexico, tortilla prices jumped by more than 50 per cent.

In January, in Mexico City, tens of thousands of workers and farmers rallied in the Zocalo, the city’s central square, to protest the skyrocketing cost of tortillas.

In response, the government of President Felipe Calderon cut a deal with Mexican producers and retailers to limit the price of tortillas and corn flour, very likely a temporary expedient.

In part the price-hike threat to the food staple for Mexican workers and the poor is what we might call the ethanol effect — a consequence of the US stampede to corn-based ethanol as an energy substitute for oil, whose major wellsprings, of course, are in regions that even more grievously defy international order.

In the United States, too, the ethanol effect has raised food prices over a broad range, including other crops, livestock and poultry.

The connection between instability in the Middle East and the cost of feeding a family in the Americas isn’t direct, of course. But as with all international trade, power tilts the balance. A leading goal of US foreign policy has long been to create a global order in which US corporations have free access to markets, resources and investment opportunities. The objective is commonly called “free trade,” a posture that collapses quickly on examination.

It’s not unlike what Britain, a predecessor in world domination, imagined during the latter part of the 19th century, when it embraced free trade, after 150 years of state intervention and violence had helped the nation achieve far greater industrial power than any rival.

The United States has followed much the same pattern. Generally, great powers are willing to enter into some limited degree of free trade when they’re convinced that the economic interests under their protection are going to do well. That has been, and remains, a primary feature of the international order.

The ethanol boom fits the pattern. As discussed by agricultural economists C Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, “the biofuel industry has long been dominated not by market forces but by politics and the interests of a few large companies,” in large part Archer Daniels Midland, the major ethanol producer. Ethanol production is feasible thanks to substantial state subsidies and very high tariffs to exclude much cheaper and more efficient sugar-based Brazilian ethanol. In March, during President Bush’s trip to Latin America, the one heralded achievement was a deal with Brazil on joint production of ethanol. But Bush, while spouting free-trade rhetoric for others in the conventional manner, emphasized forcefully that the high tariff to protect US producers would remain, of course along with the many forms of government subsidy for the industry.

Despite the huge, taxpayer-supported agricultural subsidies, the prices of corn — and tortillas — have been climbing rapidly. One factor is that industrial users of imported US corn increasingly purchase cheaper Mexican varieties used for tortillas, raising prices.

The 1994 US-sponsored NAFTA agreement may also play a significant role, one that is likely to increase. An unlevel-playing-field impact of NAFTA was to flood Mexico with highly subsidised agribusiness exports, driving Mexican producers off the land.

Mexican economist Carlos Salas reviews data showing that after a steady rise until 1993, agricultural employment began to decline when NAFTA came into force, primarily among corn producers — a direct consequence of NAFTA, he and other economists conclude. One-sixth of the Mexican agricultural work force has been displaced in the NAFTA years, a process that is continuing, depressing wages in other sectors of the economy and impelling emigration to the US.

It is, presumably, more than coincidental that President Clinton militarised the Mexican border, previously quite open, in 1994, along with implementation of NAFTA.

The “free trade” regime drives Mexico from self-sufficiency in food towards dependency on US exports. And as the price of corn goes up in the United States, stimulated by corporate power and state intervention, one can anticipate that the price of staples may continue its sharp rise in Mexico.

Increasingly, bio fuels are likely to “starve the poor” around the world, according to Runge and Senauer, as staples are converted to ethanol production for the privileged — cassava in sub-Saharan Africa, to take one ominous example. Meanwhile, in Southeast Asia, tropical forests are cleared and burned for oil palms destined for bio fuel, and there are threatening environmental effects from input-rich production of corn-based ethanol in the United States as well.

The high price of tortillas and other, crueler vagaries of the international order illustrate the interconnectedness of events, from the Middle East to the Middle West, and the urgency of establishing trade based on true democratic agreements among people, and not interests whose principal hunger is for profit for corporate interests protected and subsidised by the state they largely dominate, whatever the human cost.

4. VENEZUELA AND THE MEDIA: FACT AND FICTION

ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY & MARK WEISBROT

To read and view the U.S. news media over the past week, there is an episode of grand tyranny unfolding, one repugnant to all who cherish democratic freedoms. The Venezuelan government under “strongman” Hugo Chavez refused to renew the 20-year broadcast license for RCTV, because that medium had the temerity to be critical of his regime. It is a familiar story.

And in this case it is wrong.

Regrettably, the US media coverage of Venezuela’s RCTV controversy says more about the deficiencies of our own news media that it does about Venezuela. It demonstrates again, as with the invasion of Iraq, how our news media are far too willing to carry water for Washington than to ascertain and report the truth of the matter.

Here are some of the facts and some of the context that the media have omitted or buried:

1. All nations license radio and TV stations because the airwaves can only accommodate a small number of broadcasters, far fewer than the number who would like to have the privilege to broadcast. In democratic nations the license is given for a specific term, subject to renewal. In the United States it is eight years; in Venezuela it is 20 years.

2. Venezuela is a constitutional republic. Chavez has won landslide victories that would be the envy of almost any elected leader in the world, in internationally monitored elections.

3. The vast majority of Venezuela’s media are not only in private hands, they are constitutionally protected, uncensored, and dominated by the opposition. RCTV’s owners can expand their cable and satellite programming, or take their capital and launch a print empire forthwith. Aggressive unqualified political dissent is alive and well in the Venezuelan mainstream media, in a manner few other democratic nations have ever known, including our own.

Now consider the specific facts of RCTV as it applied to have its broadcast license renewed.

The media here report that President Chavez “accuses RCTV of having supported a coup” against him. This is a common means of distorting the news: a fact is reported as accusation, and then attributed to a source that the press has done everything to discredit. In fact, RCTV - along with other broadcast news outlets - played such a leading role in the April 2002 military coup against Venezuela’s democratically elected government, that it is often described as “the world’s first media coup.”

In the prelude to the coup, RCTV helped mobilize people to the streets against the government, and used false reporting to justify the coup. One of their most infamous and effective falsifications was to mix footage of pro-Chavez people firing pistols from an overpass in Caracas with gory scenes of demonstrators being shot and killed. This created the impression that the pro-Chavez gunmen actually shot these people, when in fact the victims were nowhere near them. These falsified but horrifying images were repeated incessantly, and served as a major justification for the coup.

RCTV then banned any pro-government reporting during the coup. When Chavez returned to office, this too was blacked out of the news. Later the same year, RCTV once again made all-day-long appeals to Venezuelans to help topple the government during a crippling national oil strike.

If RCTV were broadcasting in the United States, its license would have been revoked years ago. In fact its owners would likely have been tried for criminal offenses, including treason.

RCTV’s broadcast frequency has been turned over to a new national public access channel that promises to provide programming from thousands of independent producers. It is an effort to let millions of Venezuelans who have never had a viable chance to participate in the media do so, without government censorship.

The Bush Administration opposes the Chavez government for reasons that have nothing to do with democracy, or else there would be a long list of governments for us to subvert or overthrow before it would get close to targeting Venezuela. Regrettably, our press coverage has done little to shed light on that subject.

Our news media should learn the lesson of Iraq and regard our own government’s claims with the same skepticism they properly apply to foreign leaders. Then Americans might begin to get a more accurate picture of the world, and be able to effectively participate in our foreign policy.

5. IDEAS CANNOT BE KILLED

(I am not the first person whose death George Bush has anticipated, nor will I be the last.)

FIDEL CASTRO

A few days ago, while analysing the expenses involved in the construction of three submarines of the Astute series, I said that with this money "75,000 doctors could be trained to look after 150 million people, assuming that the cost of training a doctor would be one-third of what it costs in the United States." Now, along the lines of the same calculations, I wonder: how many doctors could be graduated with the one hundred billion dollars that Bush gets his hands on in just one year to keep on sowing grief in Iraqi and American homes. Answer: 999,990 doctors who could look after 2 billion people who today do not receive any medical care.

More than 600,000 people have lost their lives in Iraq and more than 2 million have been forced to emigrate since the American invasion began. In the United States, around 50 million people do not have medical insurance. The blind market laws govern how this vital service is provided, and prices make it inaccessible for many, even in the developed countries. Medical services feed into the gross domestic product of the United States, but they do not generate conscience for those providing them nor peace of mind for those who receive them.

The countries with less development and more diseases have the least number of medical doctors: one for every 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000 or more people. When new sexually transmitted diseases appear such as Aids, which in merely 20 years has killed millions of persons - while tens of millions are afflicted, among them many mothers and children, although palliative measures now exist - the price of medications per patient could add up to 5,000, 10,000 or up to 15,000 dollars each year. These are fantasy figures for the great majority of Third World countries where the few public hospitals are overflowing with the ill who die piled up like animals under the scourge of a sudden epidemic.

To reflect on these realities could help us to better understand the tragedy. It is not a matter of commercial advertising that costs so much money and technology. Add up the starvation afflicting hundreds of millions of human beings; add to that the idea of transforming food into fuels; look for a symbol and the answer will be George Bush.

When he was recently asked by an important personality about his Cuba policy, his answer was this: "I am a hard-line president and I am just waiting for Castro's demise." The wishes of such a powerful gentleman are no privilege. I am not the first nor will I be the last that Bush has ordered to be killed; nor one of those people who he intends to go on killing individually or en masse.

"Ideas cannot be killed," Sarría emphatically said. Sarría was the black lieutenant, a patrol leader in Batista's army who arrested us, after the attempt to seize the Moncada Garrison, while three of us slept in a small mountain hut, exhausted by the effort of breaking through the siege. The soldiers, fuelled by hatred and adrenalin, were aiming their weapons at me even before they had identified who I was. "Ideas cannot be killed," the black lieutenant kept on repeating, practically automatically and in a hushed voice.

I dedicate those excellent words to you, Mr Bush.

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 053107

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Thursday, May 31^st,2007

Volume 6, No. 10

2 Articles, 16 pages

1. The Case of Mr. Guthrie, Bilking the Elderly & Many Others

2. "Are We Headed Toward Another Great Depression"?

1. THE CASE OF MR. GUTHRIE, BILKING THE ELDERLY & MANY OTHERS

CHARLES DUHIGG

InfoUSA advertised lists of “Elderly Opportunity Seekers,” 3.3 million older people “looking for ways to make money,” and “Suffering Seniors,” 4.7 million people with cancer or Alzheimer’s disease. “Oldies but Goodies” contained 500,000 gamblers over 55 years old, for 8.5 cents apiece. One list said: “These people are gullible. They want to believe that their luck can change.”

As Mr. Guthrie sat home alone - surrounded by his Purple Heart medal, photos of eight children and mementos of a wife who was buried nine years earlier - the telephone rang day and night. After criminals tricked him into revealing his banking information, they went to Wachovia, the nation’s fourth-largest bank, and raided his account, according to banking records.

“I loved getting those calls,” Mr. Guthrie said in an interview. “Since my wife passed away, I don’t have many people to talk with. I didn’t even know they were stealing from me until everything was gone.”

Telemarketing fraud, once limited to small-time thieves, has become a global criminal enterprise preying upon millions of elderly and other Americans every year, authorities say. Vast databases of names and personal information, sold to thieves by large publicly traded companies, have put almost anyone within reach of fraudulent telemarketers. And major banks have made it possible for criminals to dip into victims’ accounts without their authorization, according to court records.

The banks and companies that sell such services often confront evidence that they are used for fraud, according to thousands of banking documents, court filings and e-mail messages reviewed by The New York Times.

Although some companies, including Wachovia, have made refunds to victims who have complained, neither that bank nor infoUSA stopped working with criminals even after executives were warned that they were aiding continuing crimes, according to government investigators. Instead, those companies collected millions of dollars in fees from scam artists. (Neither company has been formally accused of wrongdoing by the authorities.)

“Only one kind of customer wants to buy lists of seniors interested in lotteries and sweepstakes: criminals,” said Sgt. Yves Leblanc of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “If someone advertises a list by saying it contains gullible or elderly people, it’s like putting out a sign saying ‘Thieves welcome here.’ ”

In recent years, despite the creation of a national “do not call” registry, the legitimate telemarketing industry has grown, according to the Direct Marketing Association. Callers pitching insurance plans, subscriptions and precooked meals collected more than $177 billion in 2006, an increase of $4.5 billion since the federal do-not-call restrictions were put in place three years ago.

That growth can be partly attributed to the industry’s renewed focus on the elderly. Older Americans are perfect telemarketing customers, analysts say, because they are often at home, rely on delivery services, and are lonely for the companionship that telephone callers provide. Some researchers estimate that the elderly account for 30 percent of telemarketing sales - another example of how companies and investors are profiting from the growing numbers of Americans in their final years.

While many telemarketing pitches are for legitimate products, the number of scams aimed at older Americans is on the rise, the authorities say. In 2003, the Federal Trade Commission estimated that 11 percent of Americans over age 55 had been victims of consumer fraud. The following year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut down one telemarketing ring that stole more than $1 billion, spanned seven countries and resulted in 565 arrests. Since the start of last year, federal agencies have filed lawsuits or injunctions against at least 68 telemarketing companies and individuals accused of stealing more than $622 million.

“Most people have no idea how widespread and sophisticated telemarketing fraud has become,” said James Davis, a Federal Trade Commission lawyer. “It shocks even us.”

Many of the victims are people like Mr. Guthrie, whose name was among the millions that infoUSA sold to companies under investigation for fraud, according to regulators. Scam artists stole more than $100,000 from Mr. Guthrie, his family says. How they took much of it is unclear, because Mr. Guthrie’s memory is faulty and many financial records are incomplete.

What is certain is that a large sum was withdrawn from his account by thieves relying on Wachovia and other banks, according to banking and court records. Though 20 percent of the total amount stolen was recovered, investigators say the rest has gone to schemes too complicated to untangle.

Senior executives at infoUSA were contacted by telephone and e-mail messages at least 30 times. They did not respond.

Wachovia, in a statement, said that it had honored all requests for refunds and that it was cooperating with authorities.

Mr. Guthrie, however, says that thieves should have been prevented from getting access to his funds in the first place.

“I can’t understand why they were allowed inside my account,” said Mr. Guthrie, who lives near Des Moines. “I just chatted with this woman for a few minutes, and the next thing I knew, they took everything I had.”

Sweepstakes a Common Tactic

Investigators suspect that Mr. Guthrie’s name first appeared on a list used by scam artists around 2002, after he filled out a few contest entries that asked about his buying habits and other personal information.

He had lived alone since his wife died. Five of his eight children had moved away from the farm. Mr. Guthrie survived on roughly $800 that he received from Social Security each month. Because painful arthritis kept him home, he spent many mornings organizing the mail, filling out sweepstakes entries and listening to big-band albums as he chatted with telemarketers.

“I really enjoyed those calls,” Mr. Guthrie said. “One gal in particular loved to hear stories about when I was younger.”

Some of those entries and calls, however, were intended solely to create databases of information on millions of elderly Americans. Many sweepstakes were fakes, investigators say, and existed only to ask entrants about shopping habits, religion or other personal details. Databases of such responses can be profitably sold, often via electronic download, through list brokers like Walter Karl Inc., a division of infoUSA.

The list brokering industry has existed for decades, primarily serving legitimate customers like magazine and catalog companies. InfoUSA, one of the nation’s largest list brokers and a publicly held company, matches buyers and sellers of data. The company maintains records on 210 million Americans, according to its Web site. In 2006, it collected more than $430 million from clients like Reader’s Digest, Publishers Clearinghouse and Condé Nast.

But infoUSA has also helped sell lists to companies that were under investigation or had been prosecuted for fraud, according to records collected by the Iowa attorney general. Those records stemmed from a now completed investigation of a suspected telemarketing criminal.

By 2004, Mr. Guthrie’s name was part of a list titled “Astroluck,” which included 19,000 other sweepstakes players, Iowa’s records show. InfoUSA sold the Astroluck list dozens of times, to companies including HMS Direct, which Canadian authorities had sued the previous year for deceptive mailings; Westport Enterprises, the subject of consumer complaints in Kansas, Connecticut and Missouri; and Arlimbow, a European company that Swiss authorities were prosecuting at the time for a lottery scam.

(In 2005, HMS’s director was found not guilty on a technicality. Arlimbow was shut down in 2004. Those companies did not return phone calls. Westport Enterprises said it has resolved all complaints, complies with all laws and engages only in direct-mail solicitations.)

Records also indicate that infoUSA sold thousands of other elderly Americans’ names to Windfall Investments after the F.B.I. had accused the company in 2002 of stealing $600,000 from a California woman.

Between 2001 and 2004, infoUSA also sold lists to World Marketing Service, a company that a judge shut down in 2003 for running a lottery scam; to Atlas Marketing, which a court closed in 2006 for selling $86 million of bogus business opportunities; and to Emerald Marketing Enterprises, a Canadian firm that was investigated multiple times but never charged with wrongdoing.

The investigation of Windfall Investments was closed after its owners could not be located. Representatives of Windfall Investments, World Marketing Services, Atlas Marketing and Emerald Marketing Enterprises could not be located or did not return calls.

The Federal Trade Commission’s rules prohibit list brokers from selling to companies engaged in obvious frauds. In 2004, the agency fined three brokers accused of knowingly, or purposely ignoring, that clients were breaking the law. The Direct Marketing Association, which infoUSA belongs to, requires brokers to screen buyers for suspicious activity.

But internal infoUSA e-mail messages indicate that employees did not abide by those standards. In 2003, two infoUSA employees traded e-mail messages discussing the fact that Nevada authorities were seeking Richard Panas, a frequent infoUSA client, in connection with a lottery scam.

“This kind of behavior does not surprise me, but it adds to my concerns about doing business with these people,” an infoUSA executive wrote to colleagues. Yet, over the next 10 months, infoUSA sold Mr. Panas an additional 155,000 names, even after he pleaded guilty to criminal charges in Nevada and was barred from operating in Iowa.

Mr. Panas did not return calls.

“Red flags should have been waving,” said Steve St. Clair, an Iowa assistant attorney general who oversaw the infoUSA investigation. “But the attitude of these list brokers is that it’s not their responsibility if someone else breaks the law.”

Millions of Americans Are Called

Within months of the sale of the Astroluck list, groups of scam artists in Canada, the Caribbean and elsewhere had the names of Mr. Guthrie and millions of other Americans, authorities say. Such countries are popular among con artists because they are outside the jurisdiction of the United States.

The thieves would call and pose as government workers or pharmacy employees. They would contend that the Social Security Administration’s computers had crashed, or prescription records were incomplete. Payments and pills would be delayed, they warned, unless the older Americans provided their banking information.

Many people hung up. But Mr. Guthrie and hundreds of others gave the callers whatever they asked.

“I was afraid if I didn’t give her my bank information, I wouldn’t have money for my heart medicine,” Mr. Guthrie said.

Criminals can use such banking data to create unsigned checks that withdraw funds from victims’ accounts. Such checks, once widely used by gyms and other businesses that collect monthly fees, are allowed under a provision of the banking code. The difficult part is finding a bank willing to accept them.

In the case of Mr. Guthrie, criminals turned to Wachovia.

Between 2003 and 2005, scam artists submitted at least seven unsigned checks to Wachovia that withdrew funds from Mr. Guthrie’s account, according to banking records. Wachovia accepted those checks and forwarded them to Mr. Guthrie’s bank in Iowa, which in turn sent back $1,603 for distribution to the checks’ creators that submitted them.

Within days, however, Mr. Guthrie’s bank, a branch of Wells Fargo, became concerned and told Wachovia that the checks had not been authorized. At Wells Fargo’s request, Wachovia returned the funds. But it failed to investigate whether Wachovia’s accounts were being used by criminals, according to prosecutors who studied the transactions.

In all, Wachovia accepted $142 million of unsigned checks from companies that made unauthorized withdrawals from thousands of accounts, federal prosecutors say. Wachovia collected millions of dollars in fees from those companies, even as it failed to act on warnings, according to records.

In 2006, after account holders at Citizens Bank were victimized by the same thieves that singled out Mr. Guthrie, an executive wrote to Wachovia that “the purpose of this message is to put your bank on notice of this situation and to ask for your assistance in trying to shut down this scam.”

But Wachovia, which declined to comment on that communication, did not shut down the accounts.

Banking rules required Wachovia to periodically screen companies submitting unsigned checks. Yet there is little evidence Wachovia screened most of the firms that profited from the withdrawals.

In a lawsuit filed last year, the United States attorney in Philadelphia said Wachovia received thousands of warnings that it was processing fraudulent checks, but ignored them. That suit, against the company that printed those unsigned checks, Payment Processing Center, or P.P.C., did not name Wachovia as a defendant, though at least one victim has filed a pending lawsuit against the bank.

During 2005, according to the United States attorney’s lawsuit, 59 percent of the unsigned checks that Wachovia accepted from P.P.C. and forwarded to other banks were ultimately refused by other financial institutions. Wachovia was informed each time a check was returned.

“When between 50 and 60 percent of transactions are returned, that tells you at gut level that something’s not right,” said the United States attorney in Philadelphia, Patrick L. Meehan.

Other banks, when confronted with similar evidence, have closed questionable accounts. But Wachovia continued accepting unsigned checks printed by P.P.C. until the government filed suit in 2006.

Wachovia declined to respond to the accusations in the lawsuit, citing the continuing civil litigation.

Although Wachovia is the largest bank that processed transactions that stole from Mr. Guthrie, at least five other banks accepted 31 unsigned checks that withdrew $9,228 from his account. Nearly every time, Mr. Guthrie’s bank told those financial institutions the checks were fraudulent, and his money was refunded. But few investigated further.

The suit against P.P.C. ended in February. A court-appointed receiver will liquidate the firm and make refunds to consumers. P.P.C.’s owners admitted no wrongdoing.

Wachovia was asked in detail about its relationship with P.P.C., the withdrawals from Mr. Guthrie’s account and the accusations in the United States attorney’s lawsuit. The company declined to comment, except to say: “Wachovia works diligently to detect and end fraudulent use of its accounts. During the time P.P.C. was a customer, Wachovia honored all requests for returns related to the P.P.C. accounts, which in turn protected consumers from loss.”

Prosecutors argue that many elderly accountholders never realized Wachovia had processed checks that withdrew from their accounts, and so never requested refunds. Wachovia declined to respond.

The bank’s statement continued: “Wachovia is cooperating fully with authorities on this matter.”

Some Afraid to Seek Help

By 2005, Mr. Guthrie was in dire straits. When tellers at his bank noticed suspicious transactions, they helped him request refunds. But dozens of unauthorized withdrawals slipped through. Sometimes, he went to the grocery store and discovered that he could not buy food because his account was empty. He didn’t know why. And he was afraid to seek help.

“I didn’t want to say anything that would cause my kids to take over my accounts,” he said. Such concerns play into thieves’ plans, investigators say.

“Criminals focus on the elderly because they know authorities will blame the victims or seniors will worry about their kids throwing them into nursing homes,” said C. Steven Baker, a lawyer with the Federal Trade Commission.

“Frequently, the victims are too distracted from dementia or Alzheimer’s to figure out something’s wrong.”

Within a few months, Mr. Guthrie’s children noticed that he was skipping meals and was behind on bills. By then, all of his savings - including the proceeds of selling his farm and money set aside to send great-grandchildren to college - was gone.

State regulators have tried to protect victims like Mr. Guthrie. In 2005, attorneys general of 35 states urged the Federal Reserve to end the unsigned check system.

“Such drafts should be eliminated in favor of electronic funds transfers that can serve the same payment function” but are less susceptible to manipulation, they wrote.

But the Federal Reserve disagreed. It changed its rules to place greater responsibility on banks that first accept unsigned checks, but has permitted their continued use.

Today, just as he feared, Mr. Guthrie’s financial freedom is gone. He gets a weekly $50 allowance to buy food and gasoline. His children now own his home, and his grandson controls his bank account. He must ask permission for large or unusual purchases.

And because he can’t buy anything, many telemarketers have stopped calling.

“It’s lonelier now,” he said at his kitchen table, which is crowded with mail. “I really enjoy when those salespeople call. But when I tell them I can’t buy anything now, they hang up. I miss the good chats we used to have.”

2. "ARE WE HEADED FOR ANOTHER GREAT DEPRESSION"?

My talks with Elaine Meinel Supkis

By Mike Whitney

"The blue collar class which is the backbone of any society, is so oppressed and crushed under debts here in the US, they see no hope, being hired for a lifetime in some industry, they have been told, they must fend for themselves and be rootless, moving from job to job across the country or if displaced, removing themselves entirely via crime or death. No longer being asked to be part of a specific community, they are told; they must be more flexible and move from region to region, a leaf in a thunderstorm in the gutter of life". Elaine Meinel Supkis

Question: I've been getting get more and more e-mails from people who are worried that the policies of the Bush administration will bring about a severe economic downturn or, perhaps, even another Great Depression. Do you believe that the problems in the real estate market, the falling dollar, the massive current account deficit, or the shaky hedge fund industry are likely to cause major meltdown?

E.M.S. : Great Depressions like the one that hit in 1929 are very rare. They usually happen only after two great empires exhaust their finances. WWI involved two of the biggest industrial powers in a massive death-struggle that didn't destroy their industries but wrecked their currencies and beggared their workers. Russia was a major empire but a minor industrial power so when the workers there revolted, the loss of this sector's industrial base had much less impact than the collapse of Germany's currency and its huge war debts.

This chart is from one of my most dog-eared books, one of the greatest works explaining relative power and why empires collapse, 'The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers' by Paul Kennedy. This chart shows how England, the leading nation in the world, supposedly the richest, spent the most money during that grinding, depressing stalemate of a war.

Germany spent $3.9 billion less than England. Inflation since 1913 has been ferocious. This probably would represent well over several trillion dollars in today's currency. Even today, no nation can take a financial hit that big and stay solvent. Europe's industrial production fell 30% and the US, fattened off of billions of dollars of loans to all parties in Europe, lived high and mighty during the 1920's. But with industrial production lagging, Europe spiralled downwards. The US cheerfully gave everyone more and more loans and the promise of being repaid was fantastic! Why, these were basically AAA subprime loans.

Then Germany couldn't pay and kept asking for better terms. This was OK with the US but not with bankrupt England or France. So they demanded full payments and Germany defaulted. This triggered the Great Depression. Even though the US was now the world's largest manufacturing power, our currency was mostly for home use so the British had to keep the pound strong. Trying to do this made things worse.

And so it is today: our empire won't retreat from its distant borders but these same borders are bankrupting us for we never recovered from the Vietnam War, we literally papered over the mess which remained and continues to poison our nation. The military/industrial complex is not making us rich, it is making us poorer. And the paper being laid over all this is the same paper the Germans used in 1924 to paper over their own bankruptcy: printed money.

When an empire does what we are doing today, society falls apart. And if this happens, there is no easy way out. Individuals can avoid the worst by avoiding debts but outside of that simple thing, there is no other answer. Of course, the true answer is a strong working class that believes in unity and not underselling each other. Alas, the USA has a long and tragic history of slavery. And the legacy of this culture divides the nation and half loves slavery and enables wretched working conditions and thinks the road to wealth is via cheap labor.

Germany has an advantage here: their recent attempt at slavery, the Nazi empire, was a total disaster and they don't want a repeat. I only wish the USA felt the same way. For no nation gets very rich for very long if the working class is poor and can't work their way into the middle class.

Question: Would you explain what is meant by “reserve currency” and how it serves the greater political interests of the United States? Do you think that preserving “dollar hegemony” was an important part of the decision to go to war with Iraq?

E.M.S.: It may sound trite but thinking about great banking matters as if it is one's own bank account no matter how small, works. Namely, it is dangerous for anyone to live life where everything is juggled and there isn't a penny to spare. Then something bad happens and boom. You go bankrupt. This is why savings accounts matter and why inflation is so deadly. No one in their right mind keeps a savings account because it can't grow, it shrinks!

The Federal Reserve was set up to maintain a reserve funds that supposedly wouldn't be touched by politicians. But alas, this is a fiction. Just like your own bank account, if one is married and sharing an account and one party keeps raiding it and spending it on guns and cars or fur coats or whatever, it runs out of funds and then something bad happens like a hurricane hits, and the cupboard is bare.

In the case of empires, a way to gage solvency is, how big is their own reserves compared to the size of these same currency reserves held by potentially hostile rivals? In the case of the USA, we send dollars out as fast as we can print them. If too many people getting this flood of money, around $800 billion a year now!!!!!! If they don't keep a big chunk in bank vaults, the value of the dollar drops. So they keep it in reserve, in case of a 'rainy day'. Like 9/11.

And if we think of these funds as boats, then China has Noah's Ark, Japan has an aircraft carrier, Europe has a holiday cruise liner, Russia has a very fancy yacht and the USA has a rowboat made out of an old bathtub. That is leaking.

China has $1.3 trillion in its reserves and is therefore, King of the Mountain. Japan has $900 billion and is no longer holding new currency so all the red ink in trade is no longer staying away, it is floating back home to here, as inflation. Europe has about $600 billion and Russia, $330 billion. The USA has only $66 billion and the numbers released today by the Federal Reserve shows that number is DROPPING. Yikes.

Question: President Bush has said that he intends to make his tax cuts “permanent” even though they have produced enormous deficits. At the same time the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates below the real rate of inflation and increased the money supply to approximately 10% per annum. Are these policies designed to maintain a healthy economy with a potential for strong growth or are they the means for transferring wealth from working people to the “very rich”?

E.M.S.: How do they 'transfer' wealth? Through unfair taxes. Under Reagan, American workers, worried about the eventual baby boomer retirement event horizon, decided to double taxes on Social Security. This pile of money was instantly, less than a year later, leaped upon and devoured by our corrupt government. They instantly gave unfair tax cuts to the upper incomes and basically used SS excess funds to pay for the government.

This worked OK until Bush took over. He and the GOP have run up debts so high, they added half a trillion a year in red ink and over the last six years, this is nearly $3 trillion and our national debt stands at nearly $9 trillion. During the last major money crisis, the 1972 collapse of the Bretton Woods concord, we had a national debt of not even $1 trillion. We have not had 900% inflation so I would say, this debt that the GOP rang up consisted of taking taxes out of the hides of the working class and handing it on a golden platter to the rich who, incidentally, buy bonds.

But no more! Today, the chief buyer of bonds is the Treasury itself. Next is China!

Question: Will you explain how the inflationary policies of the Federal Reserve are causing the stock market to soar and what the potential dangers are for the global economic system?

E.M.S.: Oh, that is so simple! In 2003, interest rates were dropped to 1% despite inflation of +5%. Instantly, the value of all assets shot upwards as bankers moved money along as fast as possible since the Fed undercut their own interest rates! So mortgages were below the rate of inflation. But this didn't make enough money so banks and other entities offered loans to bad risks who had to pay a higher rate. As inflation rages, they need to give loans to worse and worse customers who pay over 11% interest!

Alas, the fly in this ointment is exactly that: risky customers can't pay back loans! They go bankrupt and everyone acts like a good little domino and over they fall, one after another. Right now,the crashing sound of dominoes falling is like the hissing of waves on a distant shore but it is rapidly approaching. We can certainly hear it coming.
Question: Last week, reports showed that US manufacturing unexpectedly rose in March. However, the Financial Times said that, “The rise in the ISM index is impossible to square with either the regional surveys released over the past few weeks or our medium-term yield-driven model. We think it is quite likely that in their next iterations the ISM will drop sharply.” Do you think the government is deliberately falsifying data on manufacturing to make the economy look stronger than it really is? Could they be doing this in areas as well, such as money supply, inflation, employment, and GDP?

E.M.S.: Do alligators bite? Of course, they lie all the time. Some things were sacred and they didn't lie about them. The M3 data that shows how much money the Fed prints as well as how much is in circulation, etc, just last year, they announced, 'No one is really interested in these numbers and they are too hard to compile.' Like a drunken, gambling spouse declaring there is no need to balance the check books or look into the bank accounts, so it is here. Many people yelled about the M3 numbers being suppressed but to no avail, of course.

Onwards! Since they are lying about basic bank accounting, they have to lie about everything else or people will figure out, something smells rotten in Denmark, DC.

They redrew the rules for figuring out inflation so it no longer tracks inflation. This is so they can cheat retirees and have fake interest rates and thus, steal from granny and gramps and starve school children while lining their own pockets.

Question: Do you believe that the extraordinary “police-state” measures enacted by the Bush administration (Patriot Act, Military Commissions Act, repeal of habeas corpus, NSA “surveillance” of American citizens without court order) are intended to address the threat of terrorism or the social disorder that may arise in response to an economic collapse?

E.M.S.: They planned this for a long, long time. Do note that the 'war on drugs' was launched as we lost the Vietnam War. Thanks to inflation and a collapsing currency as well as a sudden hike in oil prices due to the US hitting the Hubbert Oil Peak here in 1972, there was great unrest. I saw some of this right up close. Once, when the lights went out in NYC during a thunderstorm of all things, riots and looting spread like wildfire. My community was nearly burned to the ground and all the businesses destroyed.

This, the rulers fear a lot. But no number of police can stop it if it happens. I have seen up close when a whole city revolts. More than once, including in Europe in 1968. The new, right wing French President will learn this the hard way next year. There will be riots and insurrections there.

Question: Can you explain--in simple “layman’s” terms--the effect of Japan’s low interest “carry trade” on the U.S. stock market? Is this practice inflating the value of securities in foreign markets? What are the risks? How is it affecting the euro?

E.M.S.: Europe lends money for more than 5% interest. So does the USA now although the financiers are getting worried about this and are egging on the Fed to lower rates back down to 1%. This is pure insanity. Japan has near zero inflation because they have decided to utterly destroy the purchasing power of the people in Japan who are living worse and worse off if they are below the top 20%. Many are now homeless. It is pathetic.

The world's #2 economic power that holds the world's #2 FOREX reserves can't give pay raises to anyone earning below $10 an hour because this will 'cause inflation' and so they get to live on the street and starve. Great. Anyone can eliminate inflation by enslaving the workers. Then they get cut out of the profits entirely and can't buy things and thus, can't cause inflation!

This is the plan being readied for us! We get to live in shanties while the rich live in palaces. And we won't buy anything while they have a zillion servants earning practically nothing. Sort of like England, circa 1914.

Bush and his gangsters hosted the Queen of England who loves him because he is making her very rich via Carlyle. And the royals of England didn't care if they starved their subjects who lived like savages under the rule of the royals. We are sliding backwards, not moving forwards here.

Question: Consumer spending is 70% of US- GDP, and yet, workers wages have not kept pace with the real rate of inflation. This has led to increased borrowing on the part of the American consumer. Now that housing prices have flattened out; consumers can no longer draw on their home equity for their spending. This has resulted in a huge spike in credit card spending. For example, “first-quarter profits at MasterCard surged 70% to a record $214.9 million following a 19% jump in transactions.” (Peter Schiff) As the weary American consumer is forced to curtail his spending, GDP will shrink and foreign investment will dry up. Are we likely to see “capital flight” from American markets or are foreign investors still confident in America’s resilience?

E.M.S.: In most places, housing prices are falling by 30%! All the people who responded to ads about getting cheap loans are now discovering they can't use their homes as ATM machines and simply re-finance over and over again. The house is supposed to be an asset: if you have to sell it to pay bills or move because of a job situation, if the debt is greater than the selling price, you go bankrupt. And this is happening all over the place now. And it will impact on buying.

Last year, Americans took out half a trillion in extra loans on the house! The surge in MasterCard (gads, Snidely Whiplash!) charges is because banks are no longer giving loans to people who are too deep in debt. The money that flowed there is flowing into the stock market just like it always does during the first half of an inflationary binge.

The second half is when the stocks collapse like they did in 1974. Then we see a 5 year bear market. Housing markets ALWAYS take 5+ years to recover from a bubble. But this last bubble launched by 1% Fed interest rates will take 20 years to recovery in most places.

Question: You have stated in your blog that the Federal Reserve is “buying back its own debt”. Would you explain how this works and whether it is intended to confuse the public about the real value of their currency?
(In your blog you say: “The US is the fulcrum for world trade. As the yen goes down (the yuan is so low, even as it gains, it is very minimal), the euro goes up. This is crushing the dollar because the US is printing money like mad to keep commerce flowing at home since it is bleeding red ink in trade and in government spending. Most of the bonds issued by our own government are bought by our own government. The only entity to buy much of that on the open market today is China. Japan is selling its hoard of US bonds.)

E.M.S.: Yes, aside from forcing Social Security to buy government bonds, the Treasury sells them to the Feds. This is Peter selling to Paul who then gives it back to Peter only it shrinks in value during this time. The Fed and Treasury can play this game to infinity. The only country to nearly reach that upper limit was Germany in 1924. They added more and more zeros to the money they printed every hour, day and night until they ran out of room on the bills. Literally! Then they simply cancelled the money! Bang. It was gone. Forever.

If no one stops us, we will do this just the same way.

Question: Wall Street reacts with wild enthusiasm every time two mega-corporations merge. These mergers always seems to generate boatloads of new credit from maximizing leverage and “creative financing”.. You say in your blog that this is “also a sign of impending collapse. For every pfennig of this is debt-loaded and is seeking a stable currency and high interest rates.” What do you think are the hidden dangers of these mergers?

E.M.S.: That happened in Germany, too. Everyone merged as money moved faster and faster and inflated more and more. Bubbles inflate because currency inflates. They are one and the same. And mergers are caused by money bubbles.

Question: What do you think the real rate of inflation is?

E.M.S.: Inflation is around 10% now. How do we know? The Federal Reserve just demanded banks hold 10% of their currency rather than rush it out the door. This reserve ratio is always a good indicator of inflation. In China, it was raised to 11% last week. Japan sets theirs at 0%, of course. They are insane.

Question: Is there a chance that the dollar could collapse?

E.M.S.: I hate to say this but I have a whole book of dead currencies my family has collected this last 180 years. From 1848 to today, in the USA, Germany, China, Japan, etc. Many 'pay the holder in gold' bonds. All worth something as historic documents but all ended up being worthless. Hope springs ever eternal and bad money is like winter: it always is around the corner.

Question: In 1966, Alan Greenspan wrote an article called “Gold and Economic Freedom” in which he described the events leading up to the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. In his essay he says:

“When business in the United States underwent a mild contraction in 1927, the Federal Reserve created more paper reserves in the hope of forestalling any possible bank reserve shortage. More disastrous, however, was the Federal Reserve's attempt to assist Great Britain who had been losing gold to us because the Bank of England refused to allow interest rates to rise when market forces dictated (it was politically unpalatable). The reasoning of the authorities involved was as follows: if the Federal Reserve pumped excessive paper reserves into American banks, interest rates in the United States would fall to a level comparable with those in Great Britain; this would act to stop Britain's gold loss and avoid the political embarrassment of having to raise interest rates.

The "Fed" succeeded; it stopped the gold loss, but it nearly destroyed the economies of the world, in the process. The excess credit which the Fed pumped into the economy spilled over into the stock market-triggering a fantastic speculative boom. Belatedly, Federal Reserve officials attempted to sop up the excess reserves and finally succeeded in braking the boom. But it was too late: by 1929 the speculative imbalances had become so overwhelming that the attempt precipitated a sharp retrenching and a consequent demoralizing of business confidence. As a result, the American economy collapsed. Great Britain fared even worse, and rather than absorb the full consequences of her previous folly, she abandoned the gold standard completely in 1931, tearing asunder what remained of the fabric of confidence and inducing a world-wide series of bank failures. The world economies plunged into the Great Depression of the 1930's.”

Hasn’t the Federal Reserve created similar “speculative imbalances” today through its increases in the money supply, its low interest rates, and the massive liquidity it pumped into the housing bubble? And, haven’t the deregulatory policies of the Fed exacerbated our current account deficit---forcing US exports to compete with countries that artificially lower the prices of their manufactured goods by manipulating their currencies?

If the economic policies of the Federal Reserve and the Bush administration are deliberate, than how can we say that the destruction of the dollar and the subsequent crushing of the American middle class are accidental?

Greenspan’s essay proves that he fully understood the implications of “excess credit” and “excessive paper reserves” and yet he persisted with the same destructive policies for 6 years. So---Is the housing bubble merely the “unintended consequence” of the Fed's policies or is it the clearly calculated goal?

E.M.S.: Hahaha. The preacher telling us how to avoid the evils of drug abuse and hanging out with prostitutes comes to mind, doesn't it? The very moralists warning us about our sins are usually the worst sinners.

I'll never forget Congress praising Greenspan and telling him they should stuff him and use him as a scarecrow for this would mean no one would ever question him about finances! Well, I say, hang him high. He is a criminal. He destroyed our economic might. Treason, it is! And all those people who betrayed us in order to make a mighty empire on our backs and bank accounts should be held accountable! There is no excuse for this mess! It was fixable. But alas, too many people are making too much money off of it the way it is now and they won't stop no matter what. Just like their latest imperial wars: endless.

I wish I could say something happy here but history is a bitch who laughs at us all. We should listen to her.

James van Luik, Publisher, Editor & Compiler of The JvL Bi-Weekly

Friday, June 29, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 063007

Thursday, June 14, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 061507

Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The Jvl Bi-Weekly for 053107

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