Over the objections of its authors, the Department of Homeland Security classified a 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences on the potential vulnerability of the U.S. electric power system until most of it was finally released yesterday.
The report generally concluded, as other reports have, that the electric grid is lacking in resilience and is susceptible to disruption not only from natural disasters but also from deliberate attack.
But even though the report was written for public release, the entire document was classified by DHS and could not be made available for public deliberation. Amazingly, it took five years for the classification decision to be reviewed and reversed …
The report contains no restricted information.
In the aftermath of the Sandy natural disaster, it has again been made obvious to some that the electrical grid can be damaged. And that electrical power, if it is disrupted for a long enough period of time, can result in death or the serious damage to the health of citizens in our modern world, particularly if they are old, sick and dependent on technological services.
For example, from the opening pages of the report:
“If such large [theoretically terrorism-caused] outages were to occur during times of extreme weather, they could also result in hundreds or even thousands of deaths due to heat stress or extended exposure to extreme cold.”
One of the recurring memes of the Cult of Cyberwar is the insistence that the electrical grid can be disrupted with little effort by cyberattack on the infrastructure.
This pernicious meme has created the impression that catastrophically turning off the electricity in parts or all of the United States can be done by many, simply by pushing software buttons from the internet.
The NAS report has this to say on “cyber vulnerability:”
If they could gain access, hackers could manipulate SCADA systems to disrupt the flow of electricity, transmit erroneous signals to operators, block the flow of vital information, or disable protective systems. Cyber attacks are unlikely to cause extended outages, but if well coordinated they could magnify the damage of a physical attack. For example, a cascading outage would be aggravated if operators did not get the information to learn that it had started, or if protective devices were disabled.
That’s about it, essentially.
The report describes the biggest hazard to the electrical grid as physical, not digital.
Physical attacks by terrorists, which are deemed not likely but possible, could — for example — destroy critical high voltage transformers. (The physical failure of such a transformer serving New York City, by Sandy and rising water levels, was recently and repeatedly on television and preserved on YouTube.)
“Although major terrorist organizations have not attacked the US power system, such terrorist attacks have occurred elsewhere in the world,” reads the report. “Simply turning off the power typically does not terrorize people. However, the United States should not ignore that possibility of an attack that turns off the power before staging a large conventional terrorist event, thus amplifying the latter’s consequences.”
The report lists many instances of cascading power failures worldwide.
Interestingly, it mentions the western United States, from 1998 to 2001, was afflicted by “rotating blackouts because of summer prices.”
Two days of rolling blackouts in June 2000 that marked the beginning of California’s energy crisis were directly caused by manipulative energy trading, according to a dozen former traders for Enron and its rivals.
The blackouts left more than 100,000 businesses and residential customers in the dark for parts of two days, trapped people in elevators and shut down some offices of high-tech companies such as Cisco Systems and Apple Computer, as well as chipmaking plants, costing millions of dollars in lost revenue.
The traders said that Enron’s former president, Jeff Skilling, pushed them to “trade aggressively” in California and to do whatever was necessary to take advantage of the state’s wholesale market to boost the price of Enron’s stock .
The NAS report also discusses the risk posed by such insider attacks and malfeasance. It characterizes these attackers as “Participants in power markets seeking a predatory competitive economic advantage by disrupting the operation of other market players …”
An animated version of the fallen US spymaster [David Petraeus] has a part in what is expected to be the top selling video game of the year – freshly-launched military espionage action title Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
Petraeus is promoted to US Secretary of Defence in the game, set in a fictional near-future, serving under a woman president who resembles Hillary Clinton …
Players following the game’s main storyline will come upon Petraeus taking custody of a terrorist prisoner on a virtual aircraft carrier called the USS Barack Obama …
Aside from the strategic implications, the Petraeus myth has inflicted a serious human cost. Since the former general’s flawed strategy was applied in Afghanistan, tens of thousands of American service members have paid for it with their lives, limbs, and emotional well-being.
It’s worth noting that when Gen. William Westmoreland told Congress how well the Vietnam War was going in April 1967, he was hailed as a hero and interrupted by applause 19 times. But years later, when an honest evaluation of his performance was made and the truth was laid bare, his name became a byword for military failure.
Before too many more get carried away lauding Petraeus with such superlatives as “one of the great American battlefield commanders,” let’s look at what actually happened in Afghanistan …
There is a very salient difference between Westmoreland and Petraeus. Westmoreland was brought down by the Tet Offensive. The latter was brought down by his penis and a jealous lover.
Which says more about how bad things have turned in this country, along with the annoying fact that more of the country’s citizens play a silly game about special operations in the war on terror than fight in it.
It couldn’t be clearer now that, from the shirtless FBI agent to the “embedded??? biographer and the “other other woman,??? the “fall??? of David Petraeus is playing out as farce of the first order. What’s less obvious is that Petraeus, America’s military golden boy and Caesar of celebrity, was always smoke and mirrors, always the farce, even if the denizens of Washington didn’t know it.
Until recently, here was the open secret of Petraeus’s life: he may not have understood Iraqis or Afghans, but no military man in generations more intuitively grasped how to flatter and charm American reporters, pundits, and politicians into praising him. This was, after all, the general who got his first Newsweek cover (“Can This Man Save Iraq????) in 2004 while he was making a mess of a training program for Iraqi security forces, and two more before that magazine, too, took the fall. In 2007, he was a runner-up to Vladimir Putin for TIME’s “Person of the Year.??? And long before Paula Broadwell’s aptly named biography, All In, was published to hosannas from the usual elite crew, that was par for the course.
“A physical fitness buff, Petraeus was accidentally shot in the chest at the firing range in Fort Campbell in 1991. His surgeon was Bill Frist . . . –Clarksville Leaf Chronicle
“He’s a fitness fanatic, a PhD in international relations from Princeton, an expert on counterinsurgency tactics and known for his ambition …” –Toronto Globe and Mail
“Petraeus, a counterinsurgency expert and an intensely competitive fitness nut …” –Slate
Lickspittle and bootlicking
“IT WAS A different war back in November 2003 … Petraeus’s office was 100 percent USA, with its military issue desk, topography maps, and his battle gear — a vest, helmet, and boots — mounted on a wooden cross and standing at the ready. His running shoes — Petraeus is a marathon runner — were neatly placed in a corner.
“And in the months that followed the invasion, Petraeus, armed with his Princeton doctorate and his reputation as a ‘warrior scholar,’ was credited with finding perhaps the best balance of hard and soft power in Iraq … Petraeus found a way to use his new assignment — and his intellect — to influence events on the ground despite being stationed in Kansas. –Charles M. Sennott, the Boston Globe
Compared to T.E. Lawrence, Robert E. Lee, Obi Wan Kenobi and Steven Jobs.
“[Petraeus] looks more like the real Colonel T. E. Lawrence, not the too-beautiful version played by Peter O’Toole in the movies. Like Lawrence, Petraeus is a little bit on the plain side, and he’s short like Lawrence, with the slightly stooped posture of a hardcore long-distance runner who simply can’t give it up despite his fifty-three years… A Washington Post article in November 2005 described Petraeus’s recall from Iraq as akin to Jefferson Davis deciding to pull General Robert E. Lee from the field of battle early in the Civil War…[Petraeus presided] over the Jedi Knights, which is the nickname given to the students of the college’s elite School of Advanced Military Studies—sort of the Army’s version of Top Gun. These are the guys whom the generals turn to when they want to take down some Death Star.” –Esquire
“By naming Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus as the top American military commander in Iraq, President Bush has done roughly what Apple Computer’s board of directors did when they brought back Steve Jobs in 1996: turned to a popular figure with a reputation for brilliant innovation to solve seemingly intractable problems.” –San Francisco Chronicle
PowerPoint slides of wisdom
“And so Petraeus also has his own version of [T.E. Lawrence’s] Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which in his case number thirteen. It’s a simple PowerPoint package of thirteen slides of lessons learned in the war.” –Esquire, again
A brilliant scholar. Did we say brilliant enough times? Well, he’s brilliant!
“Petraeus is regarded as an incisive leader and a ‘warrior-scholar.’ The 1974 West Point graduate also has a doctorate from Princeton University.” –CNN
“You see, David Petraeus is one of a rare breed of senior scholar-soldiers who knows—and can convince others, drawing on extensive historical facts…” –Family Security Matters
“Petraeus is a Warrior/Scholar in the classic tradition…” –typical random dimwit at a newspaper, the name of which I forgot to jot down
“There is no question that General Petraeus, your new military commander in Iraq, is a brilliant scholar and military mind … ” –Westwood Press
“David Petraeus. This man is probably the most brilliant person in uniform, genius IQ and Ph.D. from Princeton.” –Bloomington Pantagraph
“Members of his staff, that I know, say that he is the most brilliant man they know…” –The American Thinker
“Petraeus truly is a brilliant talent…” –The One Republic
“A guy like Petraeus is so ferociously creative and brilliant, sometimes that makes the buttoned-down senior military leadership nervous…” –The Guardian
“He’s a brilliant general who has already spent years in Iraq.” –Robertson County Times
“His cordial relations with the media, and the Newsweek cover story that depicted him as a potential savior for the Bush administration, rankled some of his superiors in the Pentagon…” Eudora News, Kansas, originally from the WaPost.
The hometown newspaper, overjoyed that someone, now a big deal, who lived there a long time ago will go to Iraq
” ‘David was always well groomed, one of the guys who had the right personality …’He was always on time, always had his homework done, always had a smile.'”
“…[A] flip through the general’s high school yearbook reads like a U.S. Military Academy admissions brochure: President of the ski club; striker on the 1969 championship soccer team; National Honor Society scholar; actor; linguist.
“In his West Point yearbook four years later, Petraeus was remembered as ‘always going for it in sports, academics, leadership, and even his social life.’ The accolades have continued. These days, Petraeus is seen as one of the Army’s premier intellectuals, with a doctorate from Princeton to bookend his West Point education. His drive and physical toughness — he’s an obsessive athlete and survived an accidental M-16 round to his chest…At 5 feet 9 and 155 pounds, the general has been compared to ‘an intensely compacted hank of steel wire.'” –The Cornwall Record
Hey, here’s a bit of wisdom from Shakespeare’s Henry V. Your horse would trot as well were some of the brags dismounted.
Rude, and it totally rules. The Echoplex effect is particularly cool.
There was just something about the pose that called for pink.
The value in the Petraeus affair is that it has given everyone a legitimate excuse to have a look at the vanity of one its national security and military rock stars.
Paula Broadwell had a p.r. sheet distributed for her book, All In, the David Petraeus biography. That is here.
A couple bits from it deserve showcasing:
“One of Petraeus’ favorite quotes comes from Seneca, a first century Roman philosopher: ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’ This has been true for Petraeus at many turns …”
The Forum is an annual summer gathering at our signature “Aspen Meadows” campus in Colorado of top-level present and former government officials from all relevant homeland security/counterterrorism agencies (the White House; Departments of Homeland Security, Defense, State, Justice, and Treasury; the intelligence community; and Congress); industry leaders (large and small homeland security/counterterrorism-related companies, as well as private equity investors, merchant and investment bankers, venture capitalists, and other financiers); leading thinkers (in other think tanks and academe); nationally noted print and broadcast journalists; and concerned citizens. During three days of in-depth conversation, participants explore various aspects of aviation security; maritime security; border security; mass transit security; critical infrastructure protection; “soft targets” security; cyber-security; intelligence; counterterrorism strategy; terrorism finance; and more.
Or, more succinctly, one of the high-button places where the upper class in the national security industry convene to network and advance their careers and standing in the business of endless war.
“[In] 2010, Humphries shot a ‘disturbed, knife-wielding man’ dead at the gates of MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa after being attacked,” reads the Hollywood Gossip.
Readers may agree with DD that during their lives, most will have been able to avoid shooting a mentally troubled disabled Vietnam vet who lived in a trailer at a military base, rented for $400/month.
Ronald Bullock made MacDill Air Force Base his home even though he was no longer in the military.
Decades had passed since a grenade blew up on him in Vietnam, rendering him disabled, his brother said. But as a veteran with a military ID, he could stay at the base’s campground for six months at a time.
Bullock, 61, didn’t have a family or a job. He told his uncle he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
“He took a mess of pills to keep him going, to keep him cool,” said his uncle, Phil Sullivan, 80, of Tampa.
Ever since Vietnam, he struggled with drugs and alcohol, his brother said. In 1994, Bullock got four years of probation for aggravated assault on a public servant in Texas. Three years later, he was found guilty of possession of a controlled substance.
Still, his family never thought it would come to this.
Humphries, not named in the original news article, was apparently one of a number of security men involved in the shooting of the fellow:
Then, Wednesday evening, an altercation broke out at the camp. Bullock took off on a motorcycle with security officials in pursuit, according to Col. Larry Martin, the 6th Air Mobility Wing commander.
He became aggressive, and the pursuit continued, Martin said. When Bullock arrived at the gate on S Dale Mabry Highway, he got off the motorcycle and pulled a knife on the FBI agent.
The agent opened fire, hitting Bullock at least once, Martin said.
No one named in the scandal inspires confidence. It will make a cheap but entertainingly tawdry movie fit for cable.
“Having a bunch of medals and badges doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve accomplished anything, you’ve got to do something beyond yourself to make a difference in life. Seek to be consequential in whatever you do.” – Paula Broadwell
Always seek to be consequential. Sounds good. Like some hooey expressly for impressing the peons. Wish I’d seen it before I made the video for the tune.
As old CREEM magazine might have captioned: “Tee-Hee. Soon we’ll be consequential together.”
I just got off the telephone with the BBC. And this was because, overnight, the news media had renewed its interest in the ongoing denial of service nuisance attacks against major banks in the US.
Ally Financial on Thursday became the latest U.S. financial institution to face cyber attacks that may stem from hackers in Iran …
Regional bank BB&T and credit card issuer Capital One confirmed disruptions earlier this week. A spokeswoman for Ally, the former auto lending arm of General Motors, said the bank was investigating the “unusual traffic” on its website.
Sources have previously told Reuters and NBC News that the attacks could be part of a year-long cyber campaign waged by Iranian hackers against major U.S. financial institutions and other corporate entities.
The number of cyber attacks on U.S. banks is rising …
Larry Castro, a managing director of The Chertoff Group (yes, that Chertoff), tells The Daily Ticker, that there’s been no breach of customer personal data or financial information as a result of these attacks, according to bank reports. Castro, who spent 44 years at the National Security Agency, says these “denial of service” attacks are “a significant nuisance” but not as serious as a loss of actual personal data.
Earlier this month Defense Secretary Leon Panetta warned about a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor,” saying it could potentially wreak havoc on the nation’s financial system, power grid, transportation system and government.
It’s always worth repeating that, as a nation, the US has put itself in a situation where it’s in no position to complain about cyberattacks from Iran. And that is because we have been attacking Iran and other Middle Eastern nations with malware produced by a state-run virus-writing lab (or labs).
However, the current round of news has been a convenience — in terms of publicity — for both sides. Those launching the attacks get the gratification of seeing stories which tend to exaggerate their impact in the mainstream press. And US government officials, anonymous and publicly, get to use them in scare statements meant to grab attention.
As near as I can figure, it’s a threat because because people say it’s a threat and because they don’t like President Ineedashaveabad’s manners.
____________________
*Loopy theories about “cyberterrorism??? are not admitted as legitimate arguments. They are part of the “full employment for security consultants??? movement and aren’t taken seriously by persons who know how computers and networks actually work.
The persistent meme from the Cult of Cyberwar is that nothing of the infrastructure is safe. Especially the financial system.
Earlier in the year, the National Security Agency’s Keith Alexander tried to get people to believe that cyberattacks on the US have constituted “the greatest transfer of wealth in history.”
The amount of damage being inflicted on countries around the world by bad economic policy is astounding. As a result of unemployment or underemployment, millions of people are seeing their lives ruined. The current policies have led to trillions of dollars of lost output. From an economic standpoint this loss is every bit as devastating as if a building had been destroyed by tanks or bombs. And people have lost their lives, due to inadequate health care, food and shelter, or as a result of the depression associated with their grim economic fate.
If an enemy had inflicted this much damage on the United States, the countries of the European Union, or the countries elsewhere in the world that have been caught up in this downturn, millions of people would be lining up to enlist in the military, anxious to avenge this outrage. But, there is no external enemy to blame. The villains are the economists, still mostly men, in business suits …
the United States is also losing close to $1 trillion in output each year, with close to 23 million unemployed, underemployed or out of the workforce altogether because of poor job prospects.
The economists in policy positions are doing their best to convince the public that the economic catastrophe that they are living through is a natural disaster that is beyond human control. But that is what Vice President Biden would call “malarkey.??? This is a disaster that is 100 percent human caused and is being perpetuated by bad policy.
The original collapse was the result of central bankers who were at best asleep at the wheel, or at worst complicit in the financial sectors’ wheeling and dealing, ignoring the risks that massive housing bubbles obviously posed to the economy. However the response to the downturn has made a bad situation far worse than necessary.
Read the entire piece. It makes sense, encapsulating the story of economic collapse and continued suffering, all due to western financial systems and easily verified economic policies.
It is not some arrant and callow bullshit about cyberwar catastrophe emitted for the benefit of stenographers on the security beat in the mainstream media.
In 1998 I wrote “Electronic Pearl Harbor, Not Likely” for the National Academy of Science published magazine, Issues in Science and Technology.”
That was fourteen years ago. When I mention to reporters who call how long I’ve actually been looking at these issues they seem to have a hard time getting their brains around such a fact.
While all the technology mentioned in the piece has dated, as a general prediction, it’s still pretty great. I was right.
And that was an unpopular position then, as it is now. What’s perhaps more surprising is that genuine education and debate on these matters has become much worse.
You can’t write critical things like this at big venues, or even publicize them very much anymore.
Cyberwar, like many other topics in national security, has been converted into a third rail issue. There is only one way it is discussed or publicized: Catastrophe is looming, always coming, imminent.
Call it the radioactive fallout of the war on terror. Careful thinking on national security was washed away in favor of compiling enemies lists and creating a great professional corps of paranoids and salesmen to develop cant on how easy it would be for just about anyone, anywhere, to bring down the US or kill tens of thousands, at any time.
Yes, we are all going to die someday. That’s certainly true.
In 1998, me:
Another reason to be skeptical of the warnings about [cyberwar] is that those who are most alarmed are often the people who will benefit from government spending to combat the threat. A primary author of a January 1997 Defense Science Board report on information warfare, which recommended an immediate $580-million investment in private sector R&D for hardware and software to implement computer security, was Duane Andrews, executive vice president of SAIC, a computer security vendor and supplier of information warfare consulting services.
Assessments of the threats to the nation’s computer security should not be furnished by the same firms and vendors who supply hardware, software, and consulting services to counter the “threat” to the government and the military. Instead, a true independent group should be set up to provide such assessments and evaluate the claims of computer security software and hardware vendors selling to the government and corporate America. The group must not be staffed by those who have financial ties to computer security firms. The staff must be compensated adequately so that it is not cherry-picked by the computer security industry. It must not be a secret group and its assessments, evaluations, and war game results should not be classified.
Quaint. And where did that reasonable suggestion go?
Nowhere.
The exact opposite is what we have today: A national security infrastructure totally permeated with conflicts of interest in threat assessment and revolving doors in which people routinely go from positions of oversight to the national security private sector and vice versa.
Trivia: Bill Clinton was president in 1999. And Leon Panetta, who probably did not even know the word cyberwar at the time, was the White House Chief of Staff.
The Clinton administration’s “digital Pearl Harbor” man was Assistant Secretary of Defense John Hamre. Hamre is now CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of those many think tanks now responsible for finding and analyzing all the many enemies we must build our fortresses against.
Now be good people and listen to Binders Full of Women Blues. That’s not faked, either.
Jorge Scientific — really, that’s the name. They’re a bunch of scientific guys, of that there can be no doubt.
Unsurprising, though. From a country that’s addicted to permanent wars, regarded by security corporations as money-making much like professional football, it would be unusual if there were none of this. In fact, one suspects there is plenty of private digital phone camera video of security men and soldiers who appear to smell strongly of drink.
Reference — Young, Fast & Scientific. I thought this was really boss when I was in high school. Still do.
The Molotov cocktail was named after Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister during the 1950s. It is a general term used to describe improvised incendiary devices.
The Molotov cocktail, contrary to the beliefs of some US news ninnies, was used in World War II and a bit before, getting its name in the Russo-Finnish conflict, as described in William L. Shirer’s “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.”
This came at the end of a story on the ridiculous gone real — how a kid’s magazine — think Highlights for Children, only Tunisian — put the above how-to for fire bombs in its current issue.
The editor was compelled to apologize for his lapse of judgment on television.
Perhaps they will give him a public whipping, it not obviously being an issue of the Tunisian edition of MAD.
Morons are much cheaper than a dime a dozen worldwide. Stan Lee, who — overall — always believed in setting a good example for young readers, if he’s seen it, must be appalled.
60 Minutes did Afghanistan last night. Fifteen minutes of total cock-up from the war that will never end until we have a President who will do it. And Barack Obama is probably not that guy.
General John Allen: “I am completely devoted to these magnificent troops …”
60 Minutes showed we’ve managed to make Afghanistan into a shit magnet for the remains of al Qaeda. Like insignificant iron filings, they’re all drawn to the lodestone of American soldiers.
Did Pete Seeger’s old song achieve any result during the Vietnam War?
He reflects on the linked page: “No one can prove a damned thing. It took tens of millions of people speaking out, before the Vietnam War was over. A defeat for the Pentagon, but a victory for the American people.”
American human right researchers on both coasts — at Stanford out here, and NYU, have published a collaborative study on the drone campaigns in Pakistan. And it isn’t pretty. For practical purpose, drones are conducting a campaign of terror despite official blandishments to the contrary.
The drone campaign is also free of democratic control.
Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged, a new study by human rights researchers at Stanford University and New York University contends.
The report, “Living Under Drones,” also concludes that the classified CIA program has not made America any safer and instead has turned the Pakistani public against U.S. policy in the volatile region.
Notably, this story was not written by the newspaper’s drone flack, W. J. Hennigan, who over the space of the last couple years has been something of a p.r. office for the armed drone industry.
[US drone strike policies] cause considerable and under-accounted-for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury. Drones hover twenty-four hours a day over communities in northwest Pakistan, striking homes, vehicles, and public spaces without warning. Their presence terrorizes men, women, and children, giving rise to anxiety and psychological trauma among civilian communities. Those living under drones have to face the constant worry that a deadly strike may be fired at any moment, and the knowledge that they are powerless to protect themselves. These fears have affected behavior. The US practice of striking one area multiple times, and evidence that it has killed rescuers, makes both community members and humanitarian workers afraid or unwilling to assist injured victims. Some community members shy away from gathering in groups, including important tribal dispute-resolution bodies, out of fear that they may attract the attention of drone operators. Some parents choose to keep their children home, and children injured or traumatized by strikes have dropped out of school. Waziris told our researchers that the strikes have undermined cultural and religious practices related to burial, and made family members afraid to attend funerals. In addition, families who lost loved ones or their homes in drone strikes now struggle to support themselves.
The Living Under Drones researchers recommend the US government institute a new set of procedure, all of which will presumably be found quite unpalatable by the Obama administration.
They include: “[ensuring] independent investigations into drone strike deaths.” conducting “robust investigations and, where appropriate, prosecutions [while establishing] compensation programs for civilians harmed by US strikes,” and fulfilling “its international humanitarian and human rights law obligations with respect to the use of force, including by not using lethal force against individuals who are not members of armed groups …”
Journalists, it advises, “should cease the common practice of referring simply to ‘militant’ deaths, without further explanation. All reporting of government accounts of ‘militant’ deaths should include acknowledgment that the US government counts all adult males killed by strikes as ‘militants’ …”
Naturally, there has been a loud cry against the incessant escalating use of drones abroad. In a slew of cartoons, editorials and even some news pieces, the drone campaign has been heavily criticized.
All without effect, demonstrating how the drone program has gone completely beyond democratic control. Indeed, the use of drones to kill people in the poorest and most desperate places of the world has not even been a momentary topic for discussion in the current presidential race.
Osama bin Laden is dead and al Qaeda has been rendered virtually non-operational, except for moments of opportunity in places wracked by civil war and total societal breakdown.
Yet, eleven years after 9/11, the eye barely blinks when news stories come across the wire on the thrumming of General Atomics’ Reaper drones in the air above the blighted areas of Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. And the subsequent technological vengeance brought down on those in the targeted areas.
The Congressional Research Service continues to produce reports laden with information on major issues, analysis unlikely to be popular with one entire side of the political spectrum. For this, it deserves a pat on the back. Sadly, it would seem facts do have a liberal bias, to repeat a common saying some now find annoying.
“In 2011, 46.2 million people were counted as poor in the United States, the same number as in 2010 and the largest number of persons counted as poor in the measure’s 53-year recorded history,” reads the opening sentence in the report’s summary.
“The increase in poverty over the last four years reflects the effects of the economic recession that began in December 2007,” it continues. “Some analysts expect poverty to remain above pre-recessionary levels for as long as a decade, and perhaps longer …”
Excerpts from graphs in the CRS report, Poverty in the United States: 2011, illustrate the assertions.
The graphs show that poverty reached a low at the end of the Clinton administration, but began a slow rise during the presidency of George W. Bush, reaching a plateau in the middle of its eight years before abruptly beginning to soar in 2007, the onset of the economic collapse brought on by Wall Street.
The Obama administration inherited the Bush economy, one that was failing catastrophically in 2008, when the number of people falling into poverty increased at a chilling rate.
The graph excerpted above shows the millions of people in poverty from 2000 to 2012, the red line showing totals, the blue — the elderly, and the green line, the national average in terms of the percentage of the national population.
This second graph shows poverty statistics by age group, one in which children are shown as the most affected.
The above map shows the states with the highest increases in poverty. In a fair interpretation, although poverty has increased virtually everywhere in the country (except perhaps in a geographic ring around the capital marking the governing population and its support) the modern radical GOP control the majority of the economies of the states where things are the worst.
Over the course of the Obama administration, GOP politics in the House and Senate have made it largely impossible to do anything about the economy except practice austerity and maintenance of the status quo. It is therefore remarkable, that at least for the elderly, poverty — the CRS notes — has reached an historic low.
However, not all of the nation has done very badly in the last few years. And, for this, the Obama administration must shoulder responsibility.
At a time when so many Americans at home see their lives blighted by an economy of no opportunity, there is one place immune from the problems of being poor.
It is in arms manufacturing and sales, and the following chart — published originally at the New York Times, shows a stark moral dilemma faced by the United States.
In a nation as powerful and with as many resources as ours, it is unconscionable that such a divergence in conditions between the many, and a chosen few — in this case, the makers of the instruments of war, exists. It is pure immorality — in graphs.
Again, Poverty in the United States: 2011, at the Secrecy blog, is here.
Alert readers will have noted the number of people in poverty aligns closely with the number receiving food stamps — 46-47 million.
[Romney] went on, “The numbers on food stamps are really revealing. When the president took office, 32 million people were on food stamps. And now that number is 15 million higher, almost 50% higher. Now, 47 million people on food stamps. You’ve got Americans falling into poverty under this president.”
That’s a rhetorical one-two punch, first emphasizing the need for jobs — a message that resonates at every rung of the economic ladder — then cite data showing how things are getting worse, not better, under Obama.
Granted, the food-stamp issue could be problematic for Romney too. Republicans have proposed to cut billions of dollars from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by narrowing eligibility for benefits …
And part of this is certainly true. But as everything from the Romney secret video, it also shows a grotesque and twisted view of how things have transpired. The majority of those who qualified for food stamps during the Obama administration do so as a consequence of the economic collapse that came upon the nation in 2007, during the Bush administration. The data is quite clear.
It should also be noted, although it contains little solace, that the graphs from the CRS report show a stabilization of the percentage of those in poverty over the last two years.
It was sent through a mail server in China, perhaps one operating off the cn.com domain, to about 1000 recipients, using a variety of spoofed originating addresses.
Six of the book’s seven “5-star” reviews were placed before, during and just after the spam campaign.
This could indicate stimulus from the spam, or perhaps more likely, astro-turfed reviews placed to take take advantage of curious clicks by those who received the spam.
Fatima received a total of 122 reviews on Amazon. 111 were “1-stars,” the others all “5-star.” It is a distribution with no middle.
All of the “1-star” reviews came in the time frame of the book’s spam,
reacting to it, some so noting with imprecations to cease and desist. They indicate the reviewers had no interest in buying it although they may have seen enough from Amazon’s “search inside … ” option to get the gist.
Indeed, I’d find it remarkable if the book sold any copies. But some rotten game was afoot.
The book was originally published in 2009 and ignored. So why the renewed push?
Early yesterday morning VICE was anonymously furnished with documents that link a California man named Robert Brownell (aka Robert Brown) to the pre-production of Innocence of Muslims, the F-grade anti-Islamic film that has resulted in violent protests at and around US embassies in Sanaa, Yemen; Cairo; Tripoli; and Doha, Qatar. He is a man who has, as of yet, not been named in association with the film.
The documents clearly state that in 2009 and 2011 Robert Brownell purchased pre-production services related to Desert Warrior, which has been widely reported as the working title of the film that the world now knows as Innocence of Muslims.
