The United States remains largely unprepared for a large-scale bioterrorism attack or deadly disease outbreak, according to the WMD Terrorism Research Center.
The finding are in a report card released Wednesday, which gave the country 15 failing grades in categories ranging from detection to medical countermeasures.
The report card gave 15 F’s,15 D’s and no A’s in its assessment of current bio-defense capabilities in the United States.
The bipartisan center, headed by former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Florida, and former Sen. Jim Talent, R-Missouri, did find improvements since the 9-11 2001 attacks, but its analysis suggests the nation’s readiness to respond to various levels of biological disasters remains a work in progress.
Longtime readers know the Graham-Talent lobby for biodefense has regularly issued reports on the US government’s (read the Obama administration’s) readiness for bioterror. And they always give out bad grades for the sake of repeating publicity stunts.
Then they proceed to opinion pages of the nation’s newspapers and write the same script they have always written: Calamity is coming if we don’t spend more of bioterror defense. And anyone can make biological weapons. Easy.
The report points out “advances in biotechnology have now enabled a small team of individuals with college-level training to create biological weapons.”
Since the Graham-Talent sock puppet lobby never varies in its presentation, simply cutting and pasting the same old stuff into whatever new publicity campaign it has lined up, DD feels no regret in simply cutting-and-pasting from old blog posts on them.
Their greatest hits:
Ex-famous politician Graham remade himself as a fugleman for increasing spending on bioterror defense, mostly by planting the same opinion pieces over and over in the nation’s press over the last decade.
Graham also fell into the role of professional committee chairman.
If a president has to put together a fig leaf commission to “research??? something, Graham is always picked. Because no one wants him for anything meaningful outside selling bioterror defense spending.
So life as a professional Washington chairman soaks up the rest of his time, along with publishing contracts for books no one who isn’t paid to would read.
Then it’s always back to selling the dread of bioterror …
Having dumped that load of well-earned steaming hot superciliousness one other thing needs to be added. In the ten years of the war on terror, Bob Graham has never been right about anything.
Graham’s lesser Siamese twin in this matter is ex-GOP Senator Jim Talent, whose only legislative contribution came during the Clinton administration as part of Newt Gingrich’s Contract On For America and its subsequent Welfare Reform Act.
Jim Talent’s signal contribution, bless his heart, was to make it harder for the poor to get food stamps. This made him a darling of the Heritage Foundation on the subject of entitlement.
Like Graham, Jim Talent is nothing but a shill for the bioterror defense industry. And in that role he recently contributed horrible, what amounts to virtually fraudulent testimony, to Congress.
Here’s a fellow who has never had a single serious course in microbiology in his entire life, a man who wouldn’t know a Gram stain from a grass stain, as an “expert??? on bioterrorism and how one makes diseases into weapons before Congress of the allegedly most advanced country in the world.
It’s flabbergasting in its audacity.
Compared to [big lobbying groups like the Chamber of Commerce], and other standard GOP-aligned [agencies], like KochPAC or AHIP, WMD Center is very small beer.
Anyway, the website of the WMD Center is not particularly informative — this from a group allegedly about educating the public on the pressing danger of bioterrorism.
It publicizes only that it’s in the process of preparing a report card on the Obama administration’s progress in buttressing the nation against bioterror.
These report cards are rigged exercises, designed to give the government crappy grades. And they’ve done it before.
Last year, when Graham and Talent were still funded by the US government as part of the old WMD Commission, they gave the president an F on bioterror defense. Just before their funding from the US government ran out.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby is upset because the Obama administration wants to spend money on the middle class. It wants to use two billion dollars from Project Bioshield to save middle class jobs in this very bad economy.
During 2008-09 the Graham-Talent Commission acted as an instrument of Tara O’Toole’s biodefense shop, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s Center for Biosecurity.
Writing here in December, we summarize:
More accurately, [the commission’s public faces] — Bob Graham and Jim Talent — are little more than fuglemen for the Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and a small consortium of biodefense firms called the Alliance for Biosecurity. And the ‘commission’s’ top two staffers are indistinguishable from the Center for Biosecurity.
The special interest group known as the Graham-Talent commission, though, does have a script it efficiently delivers.
It’s an apocalyptic one, a dire and extreme claim delivered free of correspondingly extreme or convincing evidence in support of it. It lives on the idea that if enough people can be rounded up to repeat it in press, it will be taken as fact by others who should perhaps know better.
And that script, delivered through the end of 2009 for the purposes of bonking the Obama administration over the head on the nation’s unpreparedness for bioterrorism was this, as taken from an example in USA Today:
“[Anthrax spores] released by a crop-duster could ‘kill more Americans than died in World War II’ and the economic impact could exceed $1.8 trillion in cleanup and other costs.???
An anthrax attack, in other words, would make World War II and the economic collapse seem like walks on a sunny day.
The Graham-Talent bioterror defense industry lobby regularly astro-turfed this substance-free meme into the mainstream press.
Synopsis: In 2009 the Obama administration kicked Bob Graham and Jim Talent’s group of biodefense lobbymen off the government payroll. They saw it coming and came up with a report to give the administration an F. Ever since, they’ve been generating more F-rated reports as payback.
From the Financial Times, the most famous hedge fund man, John Paulson, reported as losing 6 billion on a gamble that a US recovery would occur. After making a fortune shorting “US subprime mortgage securities.”
John Paulson made his name in 2007 for the greatest trade ever. He may now be losing it, fear some, with one of the worst.
So far this year, Paulson & Co, the giant hedge fund Mr Paulson founded in 1994, has lost an estimated $6bn or so of his investors’ – and his own – money …
Mr Paulson’s current losses are a factor of a far less esoteric trade: a bet in which he wagered, at a greater scale than anyone else, that the US economy was on the road to rude health.
The FT piece then goes on to explain all the hedging Paulson’s firm is now engaged in to protect itself from further “market volatility.”
Your host did an interview for Voice of America radio this morning.
Sparked by the circulating news of malware on the Creech AFB network used in Predator drone missions, it unavoidably got into the area of cyberattack aimed at the US.
News from the wires today on Mr. Corporate American Hates You — GE’s Jeff Immelt — on his compensation (as well as the compensations of his cronies in the President’s jobs council) and a new report on how to fix mass unemployment.
Sure to be on the agenda [today] will be the country’s stagnant labor market, but it’s doubtful the council will discuss their own executive compensation, which runs well into the millions annually for many in the group …
4. Jeffrey R. Immelt, CEO: $15.1 million General Electric (GE), energy, technology, consumer products and financial services company
A spokesman pointed out that since 2009, GE has announced the creation of 8,000 new U.S, jobs, 7,000 of which are industrial jobs and that GE will hire about 15,000 people in the country in 2011.
5. W. James McNerney Jr., CEO: $13.8 million Boeing (BA), defense and aerospace contractor
In January, Boeing announced 1,100 layoffs but had a spokesman said the company will have a net gain in U. S. jobs this year in Washington state and South Carolina.
There’s more, of course. But one gets the gist. It has been repeated so many times it’s now simply a pro forma list of the same old corporate kings and dukes consulted for their wisdom on everything because to go elsewhere for advice would be to roil and disturb the plutocracy.
GE chief executive Jeffrey Immelt, who also chairs the non-partisan advisory panel, said the long list of proposals — which include streamlining drug approvals, reducing costs of initial public offerings and improving air traffic control — could have a big impact taken together.
“We never thought there was going to be a silver bullet to create jobs,” Immelt told Reuters in a telephone interview.
“What we want to offer the president is a very broad set of ideas that can help more the economy forward,” he said. “It’s comprehensive and it’s specific.”
The ideas, as excerpted by Reuters, are all old bathwater, the same stuff the US has practiced for decades, the entrenched thinking of people who want things to stay just the same.
But who now realize that with public anger at a high level they must make up some new lies for purposes of repackaging.
So we get demands for more investment in domestic fossil fuel exploitation, the same stuff you can see in commercials everyday on MSNBC, ads from Exxon and the national propane lobby for expanded aggressive exploitation of domestic “fracking” in shale aquifers and mining Canadian oil sands.
We get the old model of expanded hiring of foreign scientists and engineers because they’re governments have a much more attractive track record of paying for their education here.
And we get Immelt’s biggest practice, more rent-seeking, in reduced taxation on the biggest corporations, tax repatriation holiday, less regulation on pharmaceutical industry, etc:
It also recommends lower corporate taxes for new companies in their first three years, a reduced capital gains rate for investors buying equity in young firms and other measures to encourage people to launch start-up companies.
The report calls for tax reforms to make it more competitive for companies to locate in the United States, part of an effort to attract more foreign direct investment.
All his employees love him eh? He wants people to root for him? Not very likely with the globalist corporate/business culture he’s engendered.Not to mention that there’s an engrained elitism towards those who work on the? factory/shop floors from many in mgmnt. How so many knowledgeable engineers were driven/forced out because the bs was incredible. Only to be replaced by inexperienced,arrogant brainwashed pricks who’ve been pumped up to reinvent the wheel
Immelt is the boss because he knows how to make you feel good while he’s screwing you. He’s making friends with GE’s investors, he has no moral obligations, it’s? all about the bottom line…profits. If it means he’s selling his soul to the devil and throwing middle class america under the bus, so be it.
Insane. Wall Street is alive with a movement that makes the tea party look? like a corporate funded joke (which it was), and Obama sends out this 1%er to cry about how Americans don’t “love” GE?
Tone Deaf!
I don”t trust that greedy bastard. He only cares about money, not creating American? jobs. The president needs to get rid of this poker face bastard.
Of course, it would be unfair to omit the contributions of the few who defend the king and the markets:
Fucking great. A super-major company (mostly owned by Buffet) CEO is hired by the Prez, and people talk about shooting him. That’s what’s wrong with this country, white-hot hatred. I don’t give a shit whether you or I trusts him. If he can help dig us out of this mess, he’s my boy. Now for the dark side. His success is building plants overseas where he believes (correctly) the opportunities lie. Does anyone really believe he can do the same for the US? ?
I do not? blame Jeff afterall Unions demands and regulations are over the top. If Obama got out the unions pockets and stopped the regulations that kill jobs we would have more jobs. Push coal and oil and jobs would be back in a month. It is a joke to think GE could pay 50 dollars an hour here instead of right to work states or China and Brazel. But even Obama said we would be Brazels biggest customers for OIL? are you kidding me why not America being the producer not the customer …
Immelt: “I want you to root for me. Everybody in Germany roots for Siemens … I want you to say, ‘Win GE!’
“I think this notion that it’s the population of the US against the big companies is just wrong, it’s just wrong-minded … Our employees root for us, they want us to win. I don’t know why you don’t.”
“I am not a commie!” T-shirts, coming soon from the Pasadena Consulting Group.
As far as peer-reviewed science publication goes it’s pretty slim pickings. Readers can view the current issue as an example and decide for themselves.
This is not Science, Nature, the New England Journal of Medicine, the Journal of Bacteriology or even Infection & Immunity.
It is not any American Society for Microbiology publication.
And at least two of the paper in question’s three authors are lifers in the mythos of anthrax denial.
The short version: Hatfill’s life was turned upside down. He sued the FBI and, after years, won remuneration and was exonerated.
Kristof, for his part, recanted, saying: “I owe an apology to Dr. Hatfill … the job of the news media is supposed to be to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Instead, I managed to afflict the afflicted.”
Mostly, Rosenberg was never heard from again. Until now. When perhaps it is deemed safe to emerge from the hole for an obscure journal, or something.
Another author of the paper, Stuart Jacobsen, has long pursued the idea that the anthrax was weaponized.
Years ago, he used to upload into the comment section at DD blog whenever something on the anthrax case was published.
The central idea here — that since the anthrax was weaponized Ivins could not have made it — has been worked for years. A decade, it seems. And it will never go away.
Now, three scientists argue that distinctive chemicals found in the dried anthrax spores — including the unexpected presence of tin — point to a high degree of manufacturing skill, contrary to federal reassurances that the attack germs were unsophisticated.
One can view this as a re-laundering the same old Ivins-didn’t-do-it argument.
When this, too, fails to move the down marker the same people will go back to working it until another publication can be found to air something slightly different and allegedly eye-opening.
And the cycle will repeat.
Clearing Ivins and changing the official version on the anthrax case will require extraordinary material well beyond arguments in off market journals. And that is something no one has yet produced.
Imagine DD’s delight at seeing Mr. Corporate America Hates You on 60 minutes last night.
As a symbol everything’s that wrong, as one of the very big reasons Occupy Wall Street is campaigning against economic injustice, General Electric’s Jeffrey Immelt didn’t have to work at it. All that was within came out and condemned him.
Behold the unapologetic CEO of the giant tax cheat, GE, using his spot to lobby for another tax holiday so his company could cash in on more swag.
How many jobs would be created?
Immelt did not know. But he thought giving his firm another big economic opportunity, even bigger than the one last year, would do something.
There was Immelt lobbying on national television for even lower corporate taxation. GE paid none, even received a giant bonus from Uncle Sam.
Immelt looked mentally and unconstitutionally incapable of seeing how he’d come off — another white-haired bigshot from corporate greed USA, smiling and demanding to be given more treasure because he is so great.
The head rent-seeker for a giant rent-seeking corporation doing even more rent-seeking on the most famous primetime investigative news show.
Near the end of the interview Immelt voiced the opinion that Americans ought to be more appreciative of their corporations. We should like them more, as the citizens of Germany allegedly do with theirs.
We should root for General Electric as much as the Deutsch root for Siemens Immelt indicated.
GE needs more bootlicking, please!
One must assume Immelt was self-referential, that he wanted to feel more love from the citizenry. After all, he said, when he visits GE factories everyone seemed to like him. They cheer. His employees love GE.
Cue to the sitcom or comedic movie or skit from SNL, a bit about a venal boss who gets applause on trips into the field. As soon as he’s out of the showroom everyone starts with the insults and takedowns.
Can guys like Immelt really be that bad?
It appears so since 60 Minutes isn’t known for playing jokes.
One could always see it coming.
Immelt, appointed to be Barack Obama’s jobs advisor months ago was immediately hit with a barrage of criticism. Immelt was a woeful and tone-deaf choice, his firm guilty of professional tax avoidance and off-shoring. Immelt’s selection was only a convenient signal from the president that he really wasn’t sore at big corporate America.
A person with a sense of national context and a basic inner decency, someone of substance and character or, at least, a working sense of shame, might have withdrawn from the position.
And there you have it. The human example defining one of the many problems systemic in America: A total lack of selection for decent leadership in favor of character as defined by pitiless avarice and self-service.
It’s probably not a coincidence that almost immediately YouTube informed me that “GE and Jeff (Taxavoidination)” might be eligible for a revenue sharing plan.
Is my leg being pulled? Or is it a nefarious trap?
“Jeff thought it was mighty funny, takin’ away all that money/Everyone else had to pay, but we bribe Jeff just to stay.” The Pasadena Consulting Group kills the Ecomagination p.r. with its first quarterly report.
“While Chinese labour costs are rising, US competitiveness has been improving,??? says Mei Xu, the Chinese-born co-owner of Chesapeake Bay Candle, which makes candles and other home fragrance products. “We can invest in automation to make our candles in a factory near Baltimore for a similar cost to doing the same job in China.???
Chesapeake Bay Candle has created 50 jobs, with another 50 likely next year, since it invested in US production. Half of the company’s production is now US-based. Last year all of its products were made in China.
While some will say “it’s jobs,” they’re only dribs and drabs, by magnitude unless multiplied by tens to hundreds of thousands of instances, not statistically significant enough to make a difference in the country’s mass unemployment debacle.
Lacking from the two stories this week — wage level and benefits — which, if they’re typical of US 2011, do nothing to address inequality and inability to provide a living.
Bringing jobs back at a level where people still are eligible for food stamps isn’t a thing to crow about. It’s just chasing pseudo-slave labor around the globe once US levels of labor compensation have stabilized at such a low level the government must subsidize families lest people starve.
Unlike the ABC News story, the Financial Times piece puts a skeptic into the piece.
“What’s going to stop the current trickle of extra employment from becoming a real trend is the behaviour by the Chinese government in persistently finding ways to help its domestic manufacturers,??? said a lobbyist for American manufacturers to the publication.
New Empire’s Dog Feces material, lads, Wired and Reuters on the excrement stick about a computer virus (a keystroke logger) on the Creech AFB network used to control Predator drone missions.
No links.
Full of anonymous sources, obvious US mil tech geeks getting erections over spilling the beans, readers are informed no one is panicking yet.
It’s safe to say malware as well as spyware has probably been found wherever we have networked computers involved in killing various paupers around the world.
“Holy s—, man!” I hear someone mutter. “It’s Predator drones!”
Yeah, so? All things considered, what took so long?
The Whirlpool jobs are a drop in the bucket of the unemployed. A third instance is for unskilled factory work making hair dryers in Texas. One assumes it pays barely above minimum wage.
All of the factories are based in the south, all in Right to Work states, indicating one of the drivers is to simply take a vulture’s advantage of lack of labor collective bargaining rights and depressed wages.
ABC News wraps this up in an ongoing series emblazoned with an American flag, desperate for any news it can package as good.
When you get right down to it, if there is any job return it’s about exploiting the desperation of a labor market willing to do things ever more cheaply, even if it’s personally ruinous.
The Alachua County Republican Party has canceled Ted Nugent’s appearance at Thursday’s Black Tie and Blue Jeans BBQ fundraiser, citing low ticket sales, which the party blamed on “Obamanomics.???
“We started hearing heartbreaking stories,??? Stafford Jones, the party chairman, said of the tales he and other party officials heard when they contacted usual supporters who hadn’t purchased tickets, which cost between $65 and $125 for single tickets and $680 and $1,000 for eight-person tables.
Jones said there was more excitement for Nugent, a rock ‘n’ roll musician and an outspoken conservative, than other speakers in recent years, but people are struggling.
“The problem is that, thanks to Obamanomics and ‘trickle-up-poverty’, nobody has any money,??? the party said in a statement announcing that Nugent wouldn’t be appearing. “It became evident that small business owners and working Republicans were hurting, tremendously, and simply couldn’t afford to come to Black Tie and Blue Jeans.???
In an interview, Jones said, “We’re spending billions of dollars in stimulus money that is just going into black holes — Solyndra is one.???
“In Nugent’s keynote stead will be former state Rep. Adam Hasner, a South Florida Republican who is running for the U.S. Senate and won’t be paid for his appearance …” it finishes.
Trickle up poverty is a GOP dog whistle phrase for the idea, one that really didn’t catch on (coming as it did from a Michael Savage book that didn’t sell like gangbusters), that unemployment is kind of, like, contagious. And that it’s the poor that have dragged the nation down, not Wall Street.
Therefore, from the tortured logic on display in the brief newspaper piece, the poor, Solyndra and Obama are responsible for the inability to pay pricey tickets to see a Ted Nugent rant in Alachua County.
Another unintentionally funny item from the Tennessean, this on a Stand With Gibson [Guitars] rally.
[Gibson spokespeople] also said one or two surprise guests might show up unannounced but wouldn’t give many clues as to who, other than to say it will not be Ted Nugent. (Not sure whether that was a rumor they were trying to squash or just an obvious pick for a conservative rally.) Organizers neither confirmed nor denied another reporter’s guess, Hank Williams, Jr.
Hank Williams, Jr. The reporter may have been making a not so subtle joke.
