statism watch

Julian Sanchez, arstechnica.com
October 5, 2008

An appropriations bill signed by President Bush last week allows the controversial National Applications Office to begin operating a stringently limited version of a program that would turn military spy satellites on the US, sharing imagery with other federal, state, and local government agencies. The government’s own watchdog agency, the Government Accountability Office, has warned in an unpublished report that the more expansive program in the offing lacks adequate safeguards to protect privacy and civil liberties.
For now, the law restricts the NAO to “activities substantially similar” to those carried out by the Civil Applications Committee, an interagency coordinating body formed in 1976 to give civilian agencies access to military satellites for scientific and disaster preparedness purposes, such as “monitoring volcanic activity, environmental and geological changes, hurricanes, and floods.” But as a draft charter for the Office makes clear, officials at the Department of Homeland Security hope to branch out from these traditional applications, providing assistance and information to domestic law enforcement agencies.

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This article is fairly representative of the increasing media clamour against Capitalism as the scapegoat for the current economic woes. It’s pretty ironic, considering that there hasn’t been anything approaching free market capitalism in the West for well over a hundred years. The markets were regulated up to the eyeballs, but rules against fraud by quasi-governmental institutions (Fannie & Freddie and big daddy Fed) were not enforced. This derivatives blowout is a repeat of the monetary meddling by the central state banks that took the US into the Great Depression. That’s a matter of public record. Keynesianism is where the blame lies – not liberal Capitalism on an objective currency. And the answer certainly isn’t more state control of economies, no matter which trendy Fabian rationalization you may happen to subscribe to.

Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star
October 5, 2008

Faced with a choice between Chinese- or Swedish-style capitalism, which road will U.S. take?

In 1944, a Viennese-born economic historian named Karl Polanyi wrote that the world was at a turning point.

The events of war and depression, Polanyi said, showed that the self-regulating free market was no longer viable. Its cycles of boom and bust were too destabilizing.

As a result, he wrote in The Great Transformation, nations faced a choice between authoritarianism and democracy. But even democrats would have to realize that their economies required regulation, needed to be “embedded” in society so as to meet social aims.

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CBC News
October 5, 2008

Tests have found unsafe levels of the chemical melamine in two Cadbury chocolate products made at a Beijing factory, Hong Kong’s food safety agency said Sunday.

British chocolate maker Cadbury ordered a recall of its Chinese-made products last Monday. At the time, the company said its own preliminary tests had “cast doubt on the integrity” of the chocolate.

The two items were among 11 Chinese-made products that have already been recalled by Cadbury in parts of Asia and the Pacific.

Hong Kong’s Centre for Food Safety said samples of the two products contained considerably more melamine than the city’s legal limit of 2.5 parts per million.

Cadbury’s Dairy Milk Hazelnut Chocolate Bulk Pack contained 56 parts per million of melamine, while Dairy Milk Cookies Chocolate contained 6.9 parts per million, the centre said.

“Based on the levels detected, the public is advised to stop consuming the products concerned,” a center spokesman said in a statement.

Melamine contamination in infant formula, fresh milk and other milk products in China this year has been blamed for the deaths of four children, and caused kidney ailments among 54,000 others.

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Recall that the Taliban was flown to safety in Pakistan in the war’s early days. It seems increasingly evident that this war, like the fraud of 9/11 itself, is being staged for the benefit of the viewing audience back home. And what are the wages of war as entertainment? An exploding drug trade, dead Iraqis that want to defend their country against an occupying force and the consolidation of the world economy that we’re now seeing.

60 Minutes Report
October 5, 2008

Delta Force Commander Says The Best Plan To Kill The Al Qaeda Leader In 2001 Was Nixed

(CBS) Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon ordered a top secret team of American commandos into Afghanistan with a single, simple order: kill Osama bin Laden. It was America’s best chance to eliminate the leader of al Qaeda. The inside story of exactly what happened in that mission, and how close it came to its objective has never been told until now.

The man you are about to meet was the officer in command, leading a team from the U.S. Army’s mysterious Delta Force – a unit so secret, it’s often said Delta doesn’t exist. But you are about to see Delta’s operators in action.

Why would the mission commander break his silence after seven years? He told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that most everything he has read in the media about his mission is wrong and now he wants to set the record straight.

“Our job was to go find him, capture or kill him, and we knew the writing on the wall was to kill him because nobody wanted to bring Osama bin Laden back to stand trial in the United States somewhere,” the mission commander tells Pelley.

In 2001, just 10 weeks after 9/11, he was a 37-year-old Army major leading a team of America’s most elite commandos. Even now, 60 Minutes can’t tell you his name or show you his face. 60 Minutes hired a theatrical make up artist to take this former Delta officer through a series of transformations to disguise him. He calls himself “Dalton Fury,” and is the author of “Kill Bin Laden,” a new book out this week.

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James Risen, New York Times
October 5, 2008

Reports identify brother of Afghan president as well-protected player in country’s drug trade

WASHINGTON–When Afghan security forces found an enormous cache of heroin hidden beneath concrete blocks in a tractor-trailer outside Kandahar in 2004, the local Afghan commander quickly impounded the truck and notified his boss.

Before long, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a phone call from Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs, Jan later told American investigators, according to notes from the debriefing obtained by The New York Times.

He said he complied after getting a phone call from an aide to President Karzai directing him to release the truck.

Two years later, American and Afghan counter-narcotics forces stopped another truck, this time near Kabul, finding more than 50 kilograms of heroin.

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