BAILOUT: Former Bailout Watchdog Neil Barofsky to Release Tell-All Account Of Bush/Obama Administration Banking Policies

Posted: 24 May 2012 11:22 AM PDT

Neil Barofsky, a former official who actually put bankers in jail (imagine that!) is coming out with a tell-all book called “Bailout” about his experience as the Special Inspector General for TARP.  I don’t normally put up press releases, but this book will be upsetting to the administration because this is someone who was involved in the decisions, and Barofsky did not play ball with the Wall Street crowd.  Here’s the announcement.

From December 2008 until March 2011, Barofsky was the Special Inspector General charged with oversight of TARP, working to ensure against fraud and abuse in the spending of the $700 billion allocated for the bailouts. From the start he was in constant conflict with the officials at the Treasury Department in charge of the bailouts who were in thrall to the interests of the big banks and steadfastly failed to hold them accountable, even as they disregarded major job losses caused by the auto bailouts and failed to help struggling homeowners. Barofsky recounts how his reports of a wave of criminal mortgage fraud and other abuses being perpetrated against homeowners in connection with programs that the Treasury itself set up were ignored time and again.
Barofsky offers detailed accounts of the behind-the-scenes conflicts and his struggles with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, the Bush appointed “TARP Czar” Neel Kashkari and his successor, the Obama appointed Herb Allison, and others. His revelations show in stark detail just how captured by Wall Street our political system is; why the banks have not been held accountable; and how the failure to enact effective regulation has put the country in danger of an even bigger crisis in the future.

There are two broad narratives about Barack Obama from American elites.  On the right, there’s a racist narrative about Obama’s socialist Kenyan origins, with offshoot dishonest arguments about his policies.  He’s anti-corporate!  He’s gone on a government spending frenzy!  He’s going to cut the size of the military!  These are not true.  On the Democratic side, there’s an equally dishonest set of arguments.  He’s not bold enough!  Congress is holding him back from his progressive instincts!  We haven’t made him do what we know he wants to do!  The real Obama is hidden behind a racist veneer on the right, that he’s a Kenyan socialist, and a fake narrative on the left, that he’s not bold enough.  The third narrative, which you can find on this blog, is that Barack Obama is a great deceiver, with a charming and cool demeanor that mask his ruthlessness and bank-friendly neoliberal ideology.  It’s hard to talk to this third narrative, because Democrats overwhelmingly approve of Obama, and Republicans simply cannot countenance the idea that their socialist enemy is as friendly or even more friendly to corporate power than they are.
But there are a few brave souls who are speaking truth, and the information about who Obama is and what he has done is slowly coming out.  Charles Ferguson’s excellent new book, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America, is the first post-mortem of the financial crisis in which the lens is political corruption in both parties and in economics.  Ferguson, who made the Academy Award documentary Inside Job, sees the financial crisis first and foremost as a political problem, of oligarchy and a captured political system.  The technical details – Volcker Rule, Dodd-Frank, etc – are just that.  Ferguson isn’t dancing around the problem, either.  He puts the blame on, among other people, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.  I’ll have more on this book.
Still, very few elite actors are actually giving talking to this third narrative.  We can see this in the 2012 election, in which, for all its fake heat, Romney and Obama are both trying as best they can to nose each other out, while promising virtually nothing of economic substance to the public.  Romney and Obama are simply talking to economic elites who will pay them off - occasionally this becomes obvious, as we’re seeing with a recent flap over private equity.  Corey Booker’s comments, when he called attacks on private equity “nauseating”, brought in a brief flash to the public the hidden election of elites behind the scenes making decisions about who to back and why.  In the actually race itself, the polling is dead even, and has been since Romney consolidated the nomination.  Neither candidate has much power to shift the polls, except through gruesome errors or by talking to voters instead of the economically powerful interests who fund them.  The latter won’t happen, the former might.  At this point, Alexis Tsipras in Greece and Angela Merkel have more power over the American election than either candidate.
The reality is that it is the strength of Obama’s narrative, and the lack of a left-wing analysis of who he is as a person, that gives Obama all the cover he needs to enact bank-friendly policies.  You can see this strength in the utter lack of an effective comedic impersonator of Barack Obama.  When Tina Fey first gave her impression of Sarah Palin, the political world exploded in chatter about how perfectly Fey had captured Palin’s character.  Will Ferrell nailed something about Bush (as did my favorite impressionist, James Adomian), a kind of juvenile cunning frat-boy type spirit.  American comics play the role of the jester, and are sometimes the only ones who can speak truth to power.  The comedy world has produced a series of people who can mimic what Obama sounds like, but these people tend to see him as having a heart of gold and hiding his anger at the Republicans.  There is no comedian who has captured the breezy self-aware cynicism, the way that Obama dishonestly promises actions he does not intend to follow through on, while giving a sort of running commentary as a meta-pundit on himself and the political system.
A third narrative needs to emerge.  A true impression of Obama would be both devastating and hilarious.  It would also require a profound level of bravery and skill to showcase a picture of the first black President as a corrupt plutocrat.  This lack of comedic insight is directly related to the broader phenomenon of American elite dishonesty about Barack Obama.  Comedians get their information largely from the news, and from elite actors who tell them about what is going on.  As more people who have direct experience with the administration, people like Barofsky, give clear details about the policy choices (and they are choices, the system is not set in stone) that this administration made, the strength of Obama’s narrative will erode.

via:Naked Capitalism

Quelle Surprise! Barclays Settlement on Massive Interest Rate Price Fixing Illustrates Bank Crime Pays Well

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 11:05 PM PDT

It’s become oh-so-predictible that banks get at most “cost of doing business” punishments that they almost seem not worth noting. But that’s precisely why it’s important to keep tabs on them, to let the complicit authorities and the perps know that the public is not fooled, even it is not in a position to do anything about it…yet…
Even though the Libor/Euribor price-fixing scandal hasn’t gotten much attention in the US, this is a really big deal. Admittedly, it did not crash the economy the way toxic RMBS and CDOs did. Instead, it was a massive price manipulation, the sort of victimless-looking crime where stealing a few basis points over a monster volume of transactions has a huge aggregate impact. This scheme went on for a full five years, with 20+ banks fingered, meaning everyone who was anyone was in on the game. As Ben Walsh put it:

The importance of Libor and, to a lesser extent, Euribor, is hard to overstate. They are used to value of hundreds of trillions of dollars of financial instruments. Or as Matt Levine puts it, they “set the rates on pretty much all the loans and swaps in the world … CFTC order mentions $350 trillion of [over-the-counter] swaps, $10 trillion of loans, and $437 trillion of CME eurodollar contracts indexed to Libor alone”.

Barclays is first to settle, and given the scale and potential profitability of this activity, the fine looks paltry: $450 million among the FSA, the CFTC, and the Department of Justice (£230 million to the US authorities, £60 million to the FSA). The DOJ has granted “conditional leniency” on anti-trust charges. Price fixing is criminal under the Sherman Act. Four top executives, including CEO Bob Diamond are also giving up bonuses this year.
It’s a bit early to reach hard conclusions, since Barclays got reduced penalties for cooperating early. We’ll be able to calibrate the degree of lack of seriousness by the punishments meted out on the other banks. But there is no reason to think we’ll see a sea change, despite the magnitude and duration of this scheme. Masaccio correctly included the settlement in a list of “This Week in Financial Not-Crime.” Guardian’s editorial inveighs on why much more serious action is needed:

The £60m it [Barclays] will hand over to the Financial Services Authority alone is the biggest penalty ever levied by the City watchdog – yet the nature of the alleged transgression is so fundamental, so serious and, according to officials, so “widespread” that it appears utterly inadequate. Nor will the decision of Mr Diamond and his team to apologise and forfeit this year’s bonuses take the sting out of the matter…
What regulators appears to have uncovered is a scam at the heart of a £350tn market; one that ultimately affects how much families pay on their tracker mortgages, as well as the costs of transactions for big City institutions. It should not be settled with a fine, no matter how large, but must be followed up with a further investigation into Barclays – making public just how many employees took part (rather than yesterday’s mentions of Trader C and Manager E), and how they will be punished, up to and including criminal proceedings…
Strip away the acronyms and the charges against Barclays are straightforward. Its traders and senior management are accused of tampering with two key interest rates to bolster their own profits. And they apparently did this not once, but repeatedly over four years. Indeed, the practice seems to have become so widespread that staff joke about it in emails: “Always happy to help, leave it with me, Sir.”; “Done … for you big boy”; “I love you”. This from the bank that earlier this year held citizenship days for its staff – and which, through state guarantees and emergency provisions of liquidity, has been supported by the British taxpayer.
There has been much talk about banks being too big to fail, or too big to bail. The picture presented by Wednesday’s charge sheets is altogether simpler: throughout boom and bust, Barclays staff saw themselves as being too big to play by the rules.

The e-mails get at what is most disturbing about this, the banality of it all. At least with Bankers Trust, the public was roused by recordings of traders who discussed ripping clients’ faces off and luring them into the dark to fuck them. The anodyne nature of these crimes, the routinized ripping off of the public on a scale hard to imagine, took place via small nicks over all the deals in huge swathes of the capital markets.
The Financial Times holds out some hope, pointing out that the European Commission was not part of the settlement and is continuing its own probe. The authorities can still target individuals at the bank. And it is vulnerable to private suits:

While the settlements focus on “attempted manipulation”, the DoJ statement of facts said, “on some occasions, however, the manipulation of Barclays’ submissions affected the fixed rates,” a statement that could leave the bank open to class action lawsuits from Libor users.

But all we need to do is contrast this case with the municipal bid-rigging prosecution described by Matt Taibbi in the current Rolling Stone. Here you have three individuals at GE Capital going to jail for price fixing, which is crime under the Sherman Act. But they were merely the arms and legs of big banks. Where were the prosecutions of the higher ups, or of the senior officers of banks who were in on this con? We see the same pattern over and over: justice is meted out only on the foot soldiers, those far enough away from the executive ranks so as not to call into question the integrity of the system. The irony of it all is the public is well aware of how crooked the financial services industry is (the poll data alone is proof). But for the elites, it is vital that they not admit that something is rotten in Denmark, for if they did, they’d have to do something about it.

Why Don’t Americans Take More Vacations? Blame It on Independence Day

Posted: 27 Jun 2012 03:55 AM PDT

An article in the Boston Review by professor of sociology Claude Fischer falls prey to a pattern that is all too common: attributing social/political outcomes to American attitudes without bothering to examine why those attitudes came to be.
Let me give you a bit of useful background before I turn to the Fischer article as an illustration of a lack of curiosity, or worse, among soi disant intellectuals in America, and how it keeps Americans ignorant as to how many of our supposed cultural values have been cultivated to inhibit disruptive thought and action.
Since I have managed to come in on the last act of Gotterdammerung and am still trying to find the libretto, I’ve been in what little spare time I have reading history, particularly on propaganda. One must read book is by Alex Carey, Taking the Risk Out of Democracy. Carey taught psychology in Australia, and he depicts the US as the breeding ground for the modern art of what is sometimes more politely called the engineering of consent. The first large scale campaigns took place before World War I, when the National Association of Manufacturers began its decades-long campaign against organized labor. Carey stresses that propaganda depends on cultivating Manichean perspectives, the sacred versus the Satanic, and identifying the cause to be promoted with symbols that have emotional power. For many people, Americans in particular, patriotism is a rallying point.
Carey demonstrates how, again and again, big business has managed to wrap itself in the flag, and inculcate hostility to unions. One of the early struggles was over immigrants. A wave of migration from 1890 to 1910 left many citizens concerned that they were a threat to the American way of life. Needless to say, corporations were opposed to restrictions on immigration, since these migrants were willing to accept pretty much any work. Thus the initial alignment of interests was that whole swathes of American society were allied with the nascent labor movement in opposing immigration. And this occurred when even conservatives saw concentrated corporate power as a threat to American values (witness the trust busting movement, the success of the Progressives).
Big business split these fair weather friends by promoting an Americanization movement. These foreigners simply needed to be socialized: taught to speak English, inculcated in American values. In addition, the radical International Workers of the World had become a force to be reckoned with, culminating in its success in the Lawrence textile mill strike in 1912. So even though labor unions were particularly hostile to immigrants, the IWW’s leadership role made it possible to cast unions as subversive, a symbol of foreign influence.
The counterweight, the Americanization movement, was born in 1907 with the establishment of the North American Civic League for Immigrants, headed by conservative businessmen. Aligned groups. such as the New England Industrial Committee, were created as NACLI promoted its program.
The success of the Lawrence strike, which garnered national outrage due to police beatings of women who had volunteered to transport and harbor children of strikers, increased the urgency of countering the union threat. The message was that chambers of commerce, as “conservators of the ‘best interests’ of their communities” needed to educate (as in domesticate) adult alien workers. This Americanization movement had business backers in every sizable city with an immigrant population doing outreach to business organizations, church leaders, and other community groups. In 1914, NACLI decided to extend its program nation-wide, and changed its name to the Committee for Citizens in America. The CIA paid and provided staff to the Department of Education to sponsor Americanization programs (private interests’ ability operate directly through the Federal government ended in 1919).
The outbreak of World War I was a Godsend to the Americanization movement. The war stoked nationalist sentiment and with it, suspicion of obvious aliens as at best “un American” and at worst, subversive. President Wilson spoke at a highly staged “patriotic” event for 5000 recently naturalized citizens in spring 1915. This event was so successful that the movement leaders succeeded in forming local Americanization committees all over the US. Quoting Carey:

The CIA also produced a brilliant propaganda strategy to involve every American in an annual ritual of national identification. This ritual would embed the cultural intolerance of the Americanization movement with an identification that was formally and officially sanctified. The CIA thereby launched its campaign for the fourth of July 1915 to be made a national Americanization Day, a day for a ‘great nationalistic expression of unity and faith in America’.

Carey describes and quotes a pamphlet promoting the event written by one of the executive committee members:

….the ultimate success of the policy would depend on how effectively the ‘average American citizen’ could be induced to bring the influence of his conservative views to bear on the immigrant….’such a citizen is the natural foe of the IWW and of the destructive forces that seek to direct unwisely the expressions of the immigrant in his nwe country and upon him rest the hope and defense of the country’s ideals and institutions.’ Here we have a blatant industrial and partisan view fused with an intolerance of the immigrant and values of national security, in a submission that would cement these interests and intolerances within the paraphernalia of the annual ritual of what would become Independence Day.

This hidden history of our national celebration is only a small portion of Carey’s account of the extent and reach of the Americanization campaign. It shows how big business has led a long standing, persistent, and well financed campaign to turn the public against fighting for one’s rights if those rights are workplace rights.
Now let’s look at the Fischer article in light of this. He does, usefully, describe how Americans toil far more than their advanced economy peers:

Americans just don’t vacation like other people do. Western European laws require at least ten and usually more than twenty days. And it’s not just the slacker Mediterranean countries. The nose-to-the-grindstone Germans and Austrians require employers to grant at least twenty paid vacation days a year. In the United States, some of us don’t get any vacation at all. Most American workers do get paid vacations from their bosses, but only twelve days on average, much less than the state-guaranteed European minimum. And even when they get vacation time, Americans often don’t use it.
Perhaps Americans are Protestant-ethic work obsessives; we are likelier than Europeans to say that we want to work more hours than we do. But this leisure gap is a recent development. In the 1960s Americans and Europeans worked about the same number of hours. Leisure time then expanded everywhere—only more slowly and much less in the United States than elsewhere, leaving today’s disparity. Some argue that high taxes in Europe discourage working, but economist Alberto Alesina and his colleagues point to legislation—that is, politics. The right to a long vacation is one of the benefits that unions and the left have in recent decades delivered to Western workers—except American ones.

This sets up the key question:

Just about everywhere in the West except the United States, where there is no mandatory paid time off, workers not only get vacations but also short work weeks, government health care, large pensions, high minimum wages, subsidized childcare, and so forth. Why is the United States the exception?
The answer comes in two general forms: one, Americans do not want such programs and perks because we do not want the kind of government that would legislate them. Two, Americans want them but cannot get them.

Fischer’s teasing out of the first “answer” (he offers only two options and later points out that they are not mutually exclusive) is an embarrassment. He claims Americans have little “class consciousness” and in passing contends well financed propaganda efforts have no effect:

Even though economic inequality is substantially greater in the United States than in Europe, Americans acknowledge less economic inequality in their society than Western Europeans do in theirs, and Americans are more likely to describe such inequality as fair, deserved, and necessary. Americans typically dismiss calls for the government to narrow economic differences or intrude in the market by, say, providing housing. Working-class voters in the United States are less likely than comparable voters elsewhere to vote for the left or even to vote at all.

Anyone who has studied the history of public relations in the US will not only tell you it works, and will be able to provide numerous examples, starting with the Creel Committee in World War I, which turned a pacifist US into rabid German-haters in a mere 18 months. But Fischer would rather appeal to Americans’ vanity and exceptionalism. Carey, by contrast, documents the intensity of messaging efforts, the channels used, and tracks how polls and headlines changed. And contra Fischer, he finds Americans to be particularly susceptible to propaganda (by contrast, Australians’ native skepticism of authority, keen sense of irony, and strong community orientation gives them a wee bit of resistance, although Carey described how they were being worn down too).
Mark Ames wrote on the same topic in 2006, and his article is more on point:

According to a New York Times article, British workers get more than 50% more paid holiday per year than Americans, while the French and Italians get almost twice what the Americans get. The average American’s response is neither admiration nor envy, but rather a kind of sick pride in their own wretchedness, combined with righteous contempt for their European worker counterparts, whom most Americans see as morally degenerate precisely because they have more leisure time, more job security, health benefits and other advantages.
It’s like a classic case of East Bloc lumpen-spite: middle Americans would rather see the European system collapse than become beneficiaries themselves. If there is one favourite recurring propaganda fable Americans love to read about Europeans, it’s the one about how Europe is decaying and its social system is on the verge of imploding; we Americans pray for that day to come, with even more fervour than we pray for the End of Days, because the very existence of these pampered workers makes us look like the suckers and slaves we really are. This is why you won’t see Bono or Sir Bob Geldof rallying the bleeding-hearts anytime soon on behalf of America’s workers. They’re not in the least bit sympathetic. Better to stick with well-behaved victims like starving Africans.
The cultural propaganda that accompanied the Reagan Revolution has been so hugely successful that America’s workers internalised it too well, like those famously fanatical Soviet workers who literally worked themselves to death in order to help bring true communism that much closer. According to Expedia, American workers save their employees some $21 billion per year by not taking even the meagre vacation time they’re allowed.

Now in fairness to those office slaves, while Americans buy into the “always on duty” attitude (I noticed how little smart phones and IPads were visibly in use, even in the toniest parts of London, compared to New York City), some of it is rational. Even before the bust, it was hard for anyone over 35 who loses a job to land another, much the less at the same level of pay, job tenures are short, and companies keep squeezing workers. Everyone I know who is still on the corporate meal ticket is doing what would have been one and one half or two jobs ten years ago.
So while there is no easy way to turn to regain control of a cultural commons so throughly under the sway of well heeled corporate interests, perhaps we can start to engage in small acts of reprogramming. While I am not telling you to skip Fourth of July fireworks, it might be time to recognize key events that help us look at our history with fresh eyes. Perhaps we should quietly celebrate what we still have of the America our founders envisaged, say on the anniversary of the signing of the articles of Confederation (a protracted affair, with the last signature affixed on March 1, 1781) or their replacement with the Constitution on March 4, 1789. But regardless of how individuals go about it, the more we recognize how cultural memes are created and propagated, the more hope we have of freeing ourselves from them. (via: Naked Capitalism)

Yes Lab Gives US Trade Negotiators “Corporate Power Tool” Award

Posted: 12 May 2012 09:10 PM PDT

The Yes Lab is a is brainstorming/training effort associated with the Yes Men to help activists subject people in positions of influence to well deserved ridicule. Aquifer highlighted their latest project, which was infiltrating an award ceremony for a trade group in Dallas and bestowing their own prize.
Unfortunately, it looks like the police intervention interfered with the best parts being captured on tape.
This part (from in the press release) describes the part not recorded (with some overlap for continuity):

The crowd of negotiators and corporate representatives applauded, and “Haversall” continued: “I’d like to personally thank the negotiators for their relentless efforts. The TPP agreement is shaping up to be a fantastic way for us to maximize profits, regardless of what the public of this nation—or any other nation—thinks is right.”
At that point, the host of the reception took the microphone back and announced that the evening’s formal programming had concluded. But Mr. Haversall confidently re-took the microphone and warmly invited Kirk to accept the award.
Kirk moved towards the stage, but federal agents blocked his path to protect him from further embarrassment. At that point, a dozen well-dressed “delegates” (local activists, some from Occupy Dallas) broke into ecstatic dance and chanted “TPP! TPP! TPP!” for several minutes until Dallas police arrived.
Fifteen minutes later, another dozen interlopers from Occupy Dallas interrupted the reception with a spirited “mic-check.” Outside, activists projected a message on the hotel, and throughout the night, delegates discovered that hundreds of rolls of custom toilet paper had been installed in the conference venue.

And this was the objective:

The activists disrupted the gala to protest the hijacking of trade negotiations by an extreme pro-corporate agenda. “The public and the media are locked out of these meetings,” said Kristi Lara from Occupy Dallas, one of the infiltrators. “We can’t let U.S. trade officials get away with secretly limiting Internet freedoms, restricting financial regulation, extending medicine patents, and giving corporations other a whole host of other powers allowing them to quash the rights of people and democracies, for example by offshoring jobs in ever new ways. Trade officials know the public won’t stand for this, which is why they try to keep their work secret—and that’s why we had to crash their party.”

Frankly, so many corporate events are boring, self-important, and in thrall to bad ideas or narrow interests that the more derision, the better. I hope we see a lot more of this sort of thing.

Mark Ames: The Left’s Big Sellout – How the ACLU and Human Rights Groups Quietly Exterminated Labor Rights

Posted: 23 Jun 2012 11:41 PM PDT

By Mark Ames, the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion from Reagan’s Workplaces to Clinton’s Columbine. Cross posted from The Daily Banter.


Progressive intellectuals have been acting very bipolar towards labor lately, characterized by wild mood swings ranging from the “We’re sorry we abandoned labor, how could we!” sentiment during last year’s Wisconsin uprising against Koch waterboy Scott Walker, to the recent “labor is dead/it’s all labor’s fault” snarling after the recall vote against Gov. Walker failed.
It must be confusing and a bit daunting for those deep inside the labor movement, all these progressive mood swings. At the beginning of this month, New York Times’ columnist Joe Nocera wrote a column about having a “V-8 Moment” over the abandonment of labor unions, an abandonment that was so thorough and so complete that establishment liberals like Nocera forgot they’d ever abandoned labor in the first place!
The intellectual-left’s wild mood swings between unrequited love towards labor unions, and unrequited contempt, got me wondering how this abandonment of labor has manifested itself. While progressives and labor are arguing, sometimes viciously, over labor’s current sorry state, one thing progressives haven’t done is serious self-examination on how and where this abandonment of labor manifests itself, how it affects the very genetic makeup of liberal assumptions and major premises.
So I did a simple check: I went to the websites of three of the biggest names in liberal activist politics: Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the ACLU. Checking their websites, I was surprised to find that not one of those three organizations lists labor as a major topic or issue that it covers.
Go to Amnesty International’s home page at www.amnesty.org. On the right side, under “Human Rights Information” you’ll see a pull-down menu: “by topic.” Does labor count as a “Human Rights topic” in Amnesty’s world? I counted 27 “topics” listed by Amnesty International, including “Abolish the death penalty”, “Indigenous Peoples”, “ “Children and Human Rights” and so on. Nowhere do they have “labor unions” despite the brutal, violent experience of labor unions both here and around the world. It’s not that Amnesty’s range isn’t broad: For example, among the 27 topics there are “Women’s rights”, “Stop Violence Against Women” and “Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity”. There’s even a topic for “Business and Human Rights”—but nothing for labor.
Puzzled, I called Alex Edwards, Amnesty’s Media Relations guy in Washington DC, to ask him why labor unions didn’t rate important enough as a “topic” on Amnesty’s “list of topics.” Edwards was confused, claimed that he was totally unaware that there was a “list of topics” on Amnesty’s home page, and promised to get back to me. I haven’t heard back from him.

Amnesty’s “Topics”: Labor rights “disappeared”

Next, I checked Human Rights Watch. From my experience in Russia and Eastern Europe, I’ve learned to expect less from HRW than I would from Amnesty—my memory of HRW during the Kosovo conflict and in others is that, when called to, HRW acts as a propaganda arm for the liberal hawk war party. But HRW has also done a lot of important good work in areas not covered by the press, and they’re certainly better than most—so does Human Rights Watch consider labor unions an important human rights issue?
Checking Human Rights Watch’s homepage (www.hrw.org), there’s a tab listing “topics”—14 topics in all. Once again, labor is not listed among Human Rights Watch’s covered “topics.” Instead, Human Rights Watch lists everything from “Children’s Rights” to “Disability Rights” to “LGBT Rights” and “Women’s Rights”—along with “Terrorism”, “Counterterrorism” and, I shit you not, “Business”—as vital human rights topics. But not labor. “Business”—but not “Labor.”
On the advice of an old friend, Jan Frel, I read an excellent book on the human rights industry, James Peck’s Ideal Illusions, which helps answer why labor rights have been airbrushed out of the language of human rights. It wasn’t always this way: Economic rights and workplace rights were for decades at the very heart of the human rights movement. This was officially enshrined in 1948, when the United Nations adopted a 30-point “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” putting labor rights and economic equality rights alongside those we’re more familiar with today, like freedom of expression, due process, religion and so on. But somehow, labor rights and economic justice have been effectively amputated from the human rights agenda and forgotten about, in tandem with the American left’s abandonment of labor.
In Peck’s history, Human Rights Watch stands out as a force for rank neoliberalism, a major player in the extermination-by-omission of labor rights and economic equality rights from the language of human rights. How this happened sheds at least a bit more light on how the left abandoned labor.
Aryeh Neier, founder of Human Rights Watch and its executive director for 12 years, doesn’t hide his contempt for the idea of economic equality as one of the key human rights. Neier is so opposed to the idea of economic equality that he even equates the very idea of economic equality and justice with oppression—economic rights to him are a violation of human rights, rather than essential human rights, thereby completely inverting traditional left thinking.
Here’s what Neier wrote in his memoir, Taking Liberties:

“The concept of economic and social rights is profoundly undemocratic… Authoritarian power is probably a prerequisite for giving meaning to economic and social rights.”

Neier here is aping free-market libertarian mandarins like Friedrich von Hayek, or Hayek’s libertarian forefathers like William Graham Sumner, the robber baron mandarin and notorious laissez-faire Social Darwinist. As with Neier, William Graham Sumner argued that liberty has an inverse relationship to economic equality; according to Sumner, the more economic equality, the less liberty; whereas the greater the inequality in a society, the more liberty its individuals enjoy. It’s the fundamental equation underlying all libertarian ideology and politics—a robber baron’s ideology at heart.
Neier goes further, explicitly rejecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because nine of its 30 articles focus on economic rights as human rights. Neier objects to that, singling out for censure “such economic issues as a right to work; to social security; and to an adequate standard of living.” The human rights article on “a right to work” that Neier dismisses as “authoritarian” is Article 23, and it reads:

“Article 23 (1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work. (3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection. (4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

It’s interesting that Neier rejects Article 23, the article on labor, which he mislabels as “a right to work”, because back in the 1970s, when Neier was executive director of the ACLU, he supported big business’s “Right To Work” anti-labor laws, against the rest of the left and the ACLU, which at the time still supported labor rights as civil rights. The so-called “Right To Work” laws are grossly misnamed—they’re really laws designed to bust unions by making it even more difficult for them to organize worker power against the overwhelming power of the corporation. It was corporate PR flaks hired to deceive and conceal the real purpose of those laws who came up with the false name “Right To Work” laws. Fred Koch, father of Charles and David Koch and one of the founders of the John Birch Society, got his start in rightwing politics as a leader of the “Right To Work” movement in Kansas in the mid-1950s.

Less than twenty years after Fred Koch fought to destroy labor rights through “Right To Work” laws, the executive director of the ACLU, Aryeh Neier—the same Aryeh Neier who later led Human Rights Watch— colluded with William Buckley to push the ACLU rightward against labor by getting the ACLU to represent big business and “Right To Work” laws, under the guise of “protecting free speech”—the same bullshit pretense always used by lawyers and advocates to help big business crush labor and democracy. This “free speech” pretense is the basis on which the ACLU currently supports the Citizens United decision, which effectively legalized the transformation of America into an oligarchy.
I found an article from 1971 written by William Buckley in which the National Review founder praises Neier for working with him to turn the ACLU against labor: “I invited the ACLU to practice consistency by associating itself with a lawsuit which would prove unpopular among its labor union supporters,” Buckley wrote. “The executive director, Aryeh Neier, has replied, rather straightforwardly, I think. He says, ‘for many years, it has been the ACLU’s policy that the union shop does not, by itself, violate civil liberties. I have felt for some time that we should review this policy and I will use your request to initiate reconsideration,’ going on to say that it will take a while to canvass the directors.”

New Right “libertarian” William Buckley teams up with ACLU’s Neier to destroy labor

A few years later, Buckley boasted of his first early success in turning the ACLU against labor, citing not just his ally Aryeh Neier, but also another well-known name in the so-called “left,” Nat Hentoff. Buckley wrote in 1973:

“Meanwhile, Mr. Nat Hentoff, a left-winger of undiluted loyalty to the first amendment, has urged his very important constituency to side with me and with Evans [M. Stanton Evans, an early libertarian and longtime defender of Joseph McCarthy] and has attempted to persuade the American Civil Liberties Union to file a brief amicus curiae. He has almost singlehandedly persuaded the ACLU to change its historic opinion about union membership. The union shop, the ACLU now says belatedly, ought not to be required for people who are journalists.”

The lawsuit Buckley refers to, Buckley and Evans vs. AFTRA, was backed by the National Right To Work Legal Defense Foundation, the legal arm of the notorious union-busting outfit of the same name. And “leftist” Nat Hentoff. People used to think Hentoff was a leftist—and he seemed like one to de-politicized Baby Boomer imbeciles, who figured the Village Voicelabel on Hentoff’s columns meant whatever he said was leftist. Today, Hentoff is finally in his ideological home at the Cato Institute, the Koch brothers’ anti-labor, pro-oligarchy libertarian think-tank. Despite the Cato Institute’s tireless efforts to undermine democracy and labor, many progressives today consider Cato as “left” or “progressive”—a perversion only possible in today’s mutant left, stripped of its historical relationship to labor and economic justice.
The ACLU under Aryeh Neier also allied with another Buckley in another key decision that hurt labor and democracy and helped the oligarchy: Buckley v Valeo in 1976. Neier was the ACLU head at the time that the ACLU sided with William Buckley’s brother, James Buckley, in a lawsuit to open up the money floodgates into American politics. Most people don’t know Neier’s role in moving the ACLU against labor and against egalitarianism—instead, he did a lot of cheap grandstanding on behalf of Nazi marchers in Skokie. That’s the sort of pseudo-politics and pseudo-bravery that, stripped of economic politics and labor politics, results in the pseudo-left of today, a left absorbed by “identity politics” at the expense of labor, egalitarianism and socio-economic justice.
And that brings me to the ACLU today—the most depressing part of this story. I had an inkling that the ACLU had abandoned labor before my simple exercise check of their website. Mike Elk has shared with me some of his research into this subject. And it’s well known that the ACLU vigorously supported the disastrous Citizens United decision; the ACLU also took $20 million dollars from the Koch brothers, whose libertarian outfits have played a major role in making Citizens United a reality. Supposedly that money was meant to “fight the Patriot Act”—which is odd, considering that the director of the Koch brothers’ Center for Constitutional Studies at Cato and Vice President for Legal Affairs at Cato, Roger Pilon, explicitly supported the Patriot Act from 2002 through 2008, and that the Kochs’ Cato Institute hired John Yoo to serve on their editorial advisory board for the Cato Supreme Court Review. One should be skeptical when it comes to Koch “donations” sold to the public as charity work in the service of human rights.
Maybe there’s no connection there whatsoever between the Kochs’ $20 million gift to the ACLU, and the ACLU’s advocacy for the Kochs’ pet political issue, Citizens United, which transferred greater power from democracy and into the hands of billionaire oligarchs like the Kochs. Maybe it’s all a coincidence, I don’t know. But we do know that there is precedent for the ACLU taking money from corporations, advocating their cause under the guise of “protecting free speech” and hiding the conflict of interest from the public in order to make their defense seem more convincing.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the ACLU vigorously defended the interests of the tobacco lobby under the guise of protecting their “first amendment rights”—and they did it for payments in-kind. Leaked tobacco documents in the 1990s exposed the ACLU working out explicit deals with the tobacco industry to take their money in exchange for advocating their interests in public, without disclosing that gross conflict of interest and violation of the public trust. The documents and memos revealed that the hundreds of thousands of dollars paid to the ACLU by the tobacco companies were payments in kind to for the ACLU’s defense of Big Tobacco, a relationship that both parties tried to hide in order to confuse the public into believing that the ACLU’s arguments for tobacco were motivated by purely altruistic constitutional arguments, rather than sleazy under-the-table cash payments. The ACLU is, after all, a trusted institution among progressives—that made them the ideal “Third Party Advocate” in PR terms for the tobacco industry’s interests.

Yessiree, it’s all about protecting our Constitutional liberties!

One of the best accounts of the ACLU’s sleazy relationship with big tobacco comes from former Washington Post investigative reporter Morton Mintz, in his piece, “The ACLU and the Tobacco Companies,” published in Harvard University’s Nieman Reports. Mintz reported how the ACLU laundered the tobacco lobby’s money as supposedly charity money to fight for workplace rights. This abuse of public trust so outraged former ACLU legal director, Melvin Wulf, that he publicly denounced the ACLU’s rationalization as a “sham” — the ACLU worked with tobacco to fight against second-hand smoke laws, the very opposite of “workplace rights”:

“The justification that the money is used to support workplace rights is a sham. There is no constitutional right to pollute the atmosphere and threaten the health of others. The revelations…support the conclusion that the ACLU’s mission is being corrupted by the attraction of easy money from an industry whose ethical values are themselves notoriously corrupt and which is responsible for the death annually of 350,000 to 400,000 persons in the U.S. alone.”

So it should come as no surprise that on the ACLU’s website, on the page marked “Key Issues”— labor does not appear. Not among the 14 categories of ACLU “Key Issues” — which include “HIV/AIDS”, “LGBT Rights”, “Technology and Liberty” and “Women’s Rights”. Not even among the 90 sub-categories of “Key Issues” is there a single mention of “labor rights.”
Everything under the civil liberties sun but labor rights and economic/social equality are named as ACLU “key issues.” Among the 90 sub-categories: “Marijuana Law Reform”, “Flag Desecration”, “LGBT Parenting”, “Medical Care in Prison” and “Mental Care In Prison” [separate sub-categories], “Biological Technologies”, “Internet Privacy”, and “Sex Education.” All of these certainly qualify as key issues to progressives; but the list of categories, 114 in all, without a single mention of labor unions, let alone economic equality or even the very word “equality”—provides a grim and shameful picture of a left stripped of labor, stripped of economic egalitarianism. It is not a left at all: It is, alas, libertarianism. The left was born of labor struggles and the fight against oligarchy and for egalitarianism, economic justice and equality. Now there isn’t even a memory of that.
Stunned by the fact that the ACLU didn’t even include “labor” or “equality” among the 114 “key topics” listed, I called and then wrote to the ACLU asking for comment.
Here is the response I received from Molly Kaplan, the media relations liaison at the American Civil Liberties Union:

Hi Mark,
Labor rights are certainly a key issue for the ACLU; it is folded into our work for free speech, immigrants’ rights and women’s rights. If you look into the pages for those issues, you will find that labor rights have a presence. Let us know if we can be of any further assistance.
Cheers,
Molly

Well, at least someone has labor rights.

Bill Black: Embedded Examiners always married the Natives, but now their Bosses Do Hook Ups

Posted: 28 May 2012 08:59 AM PDT

Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Cross posted from New Economic Perspectives.
Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Ben Protess have written an extraordinarily important column for the New York Times about embedded examiners at JPMorgan.
Embedded examiners’ are federal regulators whose normal work station is a desk at the bank.  We only embed examiners for systemically dangerous institutions (SDIs) – banks so large that they pose a systemic risk to global economy.

Embedded examiners do not work.  They get too close to the bank officers and employees.  In the regulatory ranks we called this “marrying the natives.”  Nothing works with SDIs – they are too big to manage, too big to fail, and too big to regulate.  A conventional bank examination, scaled up to size to fit an SDI the size of JPMorgan would have 500 examiners and take 18 months to “complete.”  (Obviously, when it takes that long to complete an examination it is impossible to “complete” an examination in any meaningful sense – by the time you’ve spent 18 months examining an SDI it can be a radically different bank.)  One cannot conduct an effective conventional bank examination of even a medium-sized bank on a “real time” basis because of the amount of new information pouring in every minute.  Conventional examinations examine a bank’s records and operations “as of” some date (typically the last quarter-end for which reports have been filed).  Embedding examiners is an effort at achieving an “early warning” system.  It has one virtue – it indicates that some senior regulator(s) recognized that they cannot rely on the bank’s own reports to determine whether it is steering toward trouble.
In fairness, twenty-five years ago the proponents of embedding recognize the severity of the “marrying the natives” problem.  They simply viewed embedding as the least bad manner of attempting the impossible – effectively regulating SDIs.  Here is the key passage of the NYT column.

Roughly 40 examiners from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and 70 staff members from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency are embedded in the nation’s largest bank. They are typically assigned to the departments undertaking the greatest risks, like the structured products trading desk. Even as the chief investment office swelled in size and made increasingly large bets, regulators did not put any examiners in the unit’s offices in London or New York, according to current and former regulators who spoke only on condition of anonymity.
Senior JPMorgan executives assured the bank’s watchdogs after the financial crisis that the chief investment office, with hundreds of billions in investments, was not taking risks that would be a cause for concern, people briefed on the matter said. Just weeks before the trading losses became public, bank officials also dismissed the worry of a senior New York Fed examiner about the mounting size of the bets, according to current Fed officials.

The authors of the article frame the issue as whether Jamie Dimon’s role as Director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York poses a conflict of interest and could have led to the regulatory failure to place any examiners in the chief investment office (CIO).  The CIO appears to be the largest de facto hedge fund in the world.  (Note: “hedge fund” is a deliberately misleading term.  Entities called hedge funds typically speculate rather than hedge.  When I call the CIO a “hedge fund” I mean that it largely speculates and disingenuously calls its bets “hedges.”)
I have often expressed my view that Congress answered the policy question about such conflicts of interest with the passage of FIRREA in 1989 – which decided that the analogous conflicts of interest in the structure of the Federal Home Loan Bank System were intolerable and mandated that the governmental functions of examination and supervision be conducted by federal officials.  The regional Federal Reserve banks should be stripped of any involvement in examination and supervision.  That conflict, however, is not my focus in this column.  The point I emphasize is that even at the OCC where that conflict of interest did not exist the “marry the natives” syndrome posed an inherent problem.  Embedded examination did not work even in an era a quarter-century ago when examiners were considerably more willing to say “no” to banks.
I also write to explain why the remainder of the NYT article illustrates how embedded examiners come to see bank propaganda as fact.  I focus on the CIO’s propaganda that it “hedges” and does not gamble.  (The examiners and supervisors also come to believe the SDIs’ proprietary models and to pore over the output of those models rather than the perverse incentive structures that cause the models to err so disastrously and the core, false, assumption that there is some exogenous distribution of financial risk that can be modeled using statistical techniques that require an exogenous distribution.  Example, if we create a criminogenic environment encouraging massive amounts of fraudulent “liar’s” loans then the probability of catastrophic failure becomes 1.0.  Models are not my focus here, though I note that models that assume that bets are “hedges” must produce disaster.)
Let us start with one of the essential attributes of successful bank examination and supervision – professional skepticism.  Our job is to kick the tires.  Our job is to figure out when banks and their officers have perverse incentives, typically arising from compensation.  Our most important task is to detect accounting control fraud – the “weapon of choice” in finance.  We have long known that hedge accounting abuses are a fertile area for fraud.  Fannie and Freddie were the most infamous SDIs to have recently abused hedge accounting – causing the SEC to take action against what it explicitly charged was an effort by Fannie’s senior managers to maximize their bonuses by manipulating supposed hedges.  If JPMorgan’s senior officers were using the CIO to gamble instead of hedge, then they were violation the purpose of the Volcker rule and posing a grave threat to the nation.  Phony hedges designed to hide doubling-down on losing bets are such a common problem that skeptical examiners and supervisors would have made examining the CIO a high priority.  When you’ve married the natives, however, skepticism is the first and primary regulatory casualty.
Here’s how the NYT reporters (inconsistently) describe the CIO.

“Regulators are not typically stationed at divisions like JPMorgan’s chief investment office, which are known as Treasury units. The units hedge risk and invest extra money on hand, and tend to make short-term investments. But JPMorgan’s office, with a portfolio of nearly $400 billion, had become a profit center that made large bets and recorded $5 billion in profit over the three years through 2011.”

It is not clear that the reporters understand that the paragraph contradicts itself.  It states, as if it were an indisputable fact, that the CIO is a “Treasury unit” and such “units hedge risk and invest extra money on hand.”  The next sentence contradicts the first.  It admits that the CIO actually made “large bets” and “recorded $5 billion in profit.”  It gambled on derivatives rather than hedged.  It may have won these bets in the first three years.
Skepticism about the “$5 billion in profit” is essential.  It is easy to abuse investments in financial derivatives in a manner that creates fictional income and hides real losses in the early years.  AIG’s sale of credit default swaps (CDS) protection provide a classic example – book the income now, pay the bonuses now, create no reserves to pay for the massive liability taken on by AIG, and make the officers wealthy while destroying AIG.  By selling CDS protection, AIG was agreeing to guarantee other entities against loss for their investments in “green slime,” e.g., the toxic collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) “backed” largely by endemically fraudulent “liar’s” loans.  It is apparent that the OCC and NY Fed have not examined the CIO sufficiently vigorously to draw any conclusion as to whether the CIO actually made $5 billion in “profit” on its “large bets” in the early years.  The fact that the CIO “recorded” $5 billion in “profit” does suffice to show that they were making bets, not hedges.
Unfortunately, the anonymous regulators quoted by the reporters display even weaker analytics on this point.  JPMorgan has followed an aggressive strategy to keep the regulators on their (round) heels.  When the examiners married Jamie Dimon they married a shrill harpy convinced of his innate superiority over the examiners.  He also has trust issues.  Dimon views examiners who are skeptical and kick the tires as disloyal.  The president of the United States, after Dimon got it very badly wrong, sang his praises.  Obama will stand by his man (donor).  Dimon responds badly to anything less than unreserved praise.  He is a traditional type, he wants the regulator he marries to be a submissive help mate.

“Long before the recent trading blunder, JPMorgan had a pattern of pushing back on regulators, according to more than a dozen current and former regulators interviewed for this article. That resistance increased after Mr. Dimon steered JPMorgan through the financial crisis in better shape than virtually all its rivals.
‘JPMorgan has been screaming bloody murder about not needing regulators hovering, especially in their London office,” said a former examiner embedded at the bank, adding, in reference to Mr. Dimon, “But he was trusted because he had done so well through the turmoil.’”

There are two ways an agency leadership can respond to such a prima donna.  They can be professional but skeptical.  Whenever Dimon “screams bloody murder” they can demonstrate their support for the troops asking the tough questions.  Alternatively, they can send the message that they do not want to upset Dimon.  This will undercut the professional examiners who have resisted marrying the natives.  Over time, the best examiners will tend to leave or wangle transfers to other assignments.  The OCC and New York Fed have historically followed the second management approach.  The reporters cite a specific example involving access to JPMorgan’s capital plan that the examiner believed represented a deliberate effort by JPMorgan management to undercut the examiner.
But here is a vital point – even at their weakest the regulators who marry the natives are better than the natives when it comes to evaluating risk.  The most recent President Bush (in sharp distinction to his father) chose as his regulatory leaders the some of the nation’s leading opponents of regulation.  These regulatory leaders were exceptionally anti-regulatory and pro-industry, but they still were years ahead of most of the industry (and virtually every SDI – including JPMorgan) in warning about liar’s loans, CDOs, and over concentration in commercial real estate.  The NYT authors make the point that the NY Fed examiners want the CIO gamble on a derivative of derivatives unwound “yesterday” while the CIO has continued the gamble.
The tendency of embedded examiners to “marrying the natives” at the SDIs is a serious problem, but the most severe weaknesses in regulation are at the senior levels.  The examiners remain the strongest part of the regulatory chain at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and the Federal Reserve System.  The reporters provide an excellent example of the this point in their discussion of the OCC’s role at JPMorgan.

“At JPMorgan, when media reports surfaced that the bank was making aggressive bets on credit derivatives, comptroller officials began taking a closer look, people briefed on the matter said. After thumbing through the bank’s own projections for the related risks in early April, the people said, the examiners pushed for more answers but saw no immediate need to change course. The agency notes that it does not bless specific trades.
In a briefing on Capitol Hill last week, two comptroller officials told a room of Congressional staff members that it was ‘common’ and ‘appropriate’ for banks in general to hedge their exposure to various risks, according to people who attended.
‘I know in college they teach you everything is black and white,’ one official said in response to hypothetical questions about creating the perfect hedge.  ‘But it’s not that way in the real world.’”

This brief passage shows why regulators who lack professional skepticism are abject failures.  First, one cannot evaluate adequately a purported hedge by “thumbing through the bank’s own projections for the related risks….”  By the time the OCC was looking, those projections had been shown to have relationship to reality.  Second, of course, the agency does not “bless specific trades.”  No one said it did.  The OCC leaders created a straw man to deflect criticism.  Third, yes it is “common” and “appropriate” to hedge risks, but that is another straw man.  One of the few common elements to the four contradictory major stories that JPMorgan’s press flacks have put out is that their own descriptions of the specifics of the transactions demonstrates that they were bets, not hedges.
Fourth, no, they don’t teach in college that hedging is simple or has no gray areas.  Fifth, the relevant issue has nothing to do with “the perfect hedge.”  A perfect hedge exhibits a negative correlation of -1.0.  JPMorgan engaged in “hedginess” – it made subsequent bets in the same direction as the original bets (positive correlation) – it “doubled down” and lost the gamble.  It delayed informing investors and regulators that it had lost and falsely stated that nothing meaningful had gone wrong.  Dimon then declared his earlier declarations about CIO losses inoperable.
The OCC officials, however, gave Congress the opposite impression that JPMorgan was engaged in “appropriate” “hedging” and should, if anything, be applauded for doing so.  OCC is a bureau within the Treasury Department.  Treasury Secretary Geithner is a virulent opponent of the Volcker rule.  The current draft of the regulation that will eventually implement the Volcker rule was, at the behest of Dimon, crafted by Treasury and the Federal Reserve (another fierce opponent of the Volcker rule) to embrace “hedginess.”  If an SDI claims that a bet on financial derivatives is a hedge (and with portfolios the size of the SDIs one can always claim that “X” is a hedge to “Y”), then Geithner and Bernanke want them to be able to evade the Volcker rule.  This will, of course, destroy the rule.  It was SDIs’ investments in “green slime” financial derivatives that drove much of the ongoing financial crisis and caused eight SDIs to fail.  There is no evidence that the SDIs or their regulators have learned this core lesson.  That is understandable because SDIs inherently have perverse incentives.
As always, I urge that conservatives, libertarians, and progressives join to end the SDIs.  SDIs that are banks receive an explicit federal subsidy through deposit insurance and a far larger implicit subsidy because of the “too big to fail” doctrine.  Congress has never approved this implicit subsidy.  The SDIs are, as they proved during the ongoing crisis, capable of causing global systemic damage.  A nation cannot, therefore, credibly claim that it will not bail out the SDIs’ general creditors.  SDIs are, implicitly, government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) most akin to Fannie and Freddie.
(For those readers who think Fannie and Freddie failed due to government-imposed “affordable housing goals,” please see my articles on their failure.  The short version is that no entity ever required Fannie and Freddie to purchase “liar’s” loans – which did not count towards their affordable housing goals.  Consider why they both, eventually, purchased massive amounts of fraudulent liar’s loans.  The truth is that Fannie and Freddie eventually emulated the (then) investment banks’ massive purchases of liar’s loans and the creation of CDOs for the same reason that the investment banks did – it created guaranteed, massive (albeit fictional) “income” in the near term and made the officers wealthy.  Remember also that Fannie and Freddie did not have any explicit federal guarantee and that their bonds explicitly stated on their face that they were not federally guaranteed.)
The implicit subsidy of FDIC paying the SDIs’ creditors in full even if there is a receivership means that the SDIs can borrow money more cheaply than smaller competitors.  SDIs, therefore, make a mockery of “free markets.”  They are so large that they also make a mockery of democracy.  SDIs are the face of American crony capitalism.
SDIs are not simply dangerous, they are also inefficient.  Shrinking the SDIs to the point where they no longer posed a systemic risk would also increase their efficiency, make them small enough to regulate, and help recover our democracy.
SDIs that function as banks pose intolerable risks to the global economy.  SDIs that function as (thinly disguised) hedge funds should be far beyond the pale.  Conservative and libertarian philosophy rightly condemn providing enormous federal subsidies to a private entity whose senior officers claim any wins and socialize any severe losses.

via:China Daily

Human Rights Record of United States in 2011

Updated: 2012-05-26 09:02

(China Daily)

Editor's note: The State Council Information Office of the People's Republic of China published a report titled "The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011" on Friday. Following is the full text:

Occupy Seattle protesters, an off-shoot of the Occupy Wall Street movement, scuffle with police officers during a May Day rally and anti-capitalist march in Seattle. Stuart Isett / Bloomberg

The State Department of the United States released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011 on May 24, 2012. As in previous years, the reports are full of over-critical remarks on the human rights situation in nearly 200 countries and regions as well as distortions and accusations concerning the human rights cause in China. However, the United States turned a blind eye to its own woeful human rights situation and kept silent about it. The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2011 is hereby prepared to reveal the true human rights situation of the United States to people across the world and urge the United States to face up to its own doings.
I.
On life, property and personal security
The United States has mighty strength in human, financial and material resources to exert effective control over violent crimes. However, its society is chronically suffering from violent crimes, and its citizens' lives, properties and personal security are in lack of proper protection.
A report published by the US Department of Justice on Sept 15, 2011, revealed that in 2010 the US residents aged 12 and above experienced 3.8 million violent victimizations, 1.4 million serious violent victimizations, 14.8 million property victimizations and 138,000 personal thefts. The violent victimization rate was 15 victimizations per 1,000 residents (www.bjs.gov). The crime rate surged in many cities and regions in the United States. In the southern region of the United States, there were 452 violent crimes and 3,438.8 property crimes per 100,000 inhabitants (in 2010) on average (The Wall Street Journal, Sept 20, 2011). Just four weeks into 2011, San Francisco saw eight homicides - compared with five during the same time of the previous year, with Oakland racking up 11, when the previous year in the same period it had four (The San Francisco Chronicle, Jan 29, 2011). Grand larcenies in the subway in New York City increased from 852 in 2010 to 1,075 cases in the first nine months of 2011, a 25 percent jump (The China Press, Sept 24, 2011). Homicide cases in Detroit in 2011 saw a 13.5 percent rise over 2010 (www.buzzle.com). Between January and October 2011, a total of 123,924 serious crime cases took place in Chicago (portal.chicagopolice.org). An anti-bullying public service announcement declared in January 2011 that more than six million schoolchildren experienced bullying in the previous six months (CNN, Mar 10, 2011). According to statistics from the Family First Aid, almost 30 percent of teenagers in the United States are estimated to be involved in school bullying (www.familyfirstaid.org).
The United States prioritizes the right to keep and bear arms over the protection of citizens' lives and personal security and exercises lax firearm possession control, causing rampant gun ownership. The US people hold between 35 percent and 50 percent of the world' s civilian-owned guns, with every 100 people having 90 guns (Online edition of the Foreign Policy, Jan 9, 2011). According to a Gallup poll in October 2011, 47 percent of American adults reported that they had a gun. That was an increase of six percentage points from a year ago and the highest Gallup had recorded since 1993. Fifty-two percent of middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 54, reported to own guns, and the adults' gun ownership in the south region was 54 percent (The China Press, Oct 28, 2011). The New York Times reported on Nov 14, 2011, that since 1995, more than 3,300 felons and people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors had regained their gun rights in the state of Washington and of that number, more than 400 had subsequently committed new crimes, including shooting and other felonies (The New York Times, Nov 14, 2011).
The United States is the leader among the world's developed countries in gun violence and gun deaths. According to a report of the Foreign Policy on Jan 9, 2011, over 30,000 Americans die every year from gun violence and another 200,000 Americans are estimated to be injured each year due to guns (Online edition of the Foreign Policy, Jan 9, 2011). According to statistics released by the US Department of Justice, among the 480,760 robbery cases and 188,380 rape and sexual assault cases in 2010, the rates of victimization involving firearms were 29 percent and 7 percent, respectively (www.bjs.gov). On Jun 2, 2011, a shooting rampage in Arizona left six people dead and one injured (The China Press, Jun 3, 2011). In Chicago, more than 10 overnight shooting incidents took place just between the evening of Jun 3 and the morning of Jun 4 (Chicago Tribune, Jun 4, 2011). Another five overnight shootings occurred between Aug 12 evening and Aug 13 morning in Chicago. These incidents have caused a number of deaths and injuries (Chicago Tribune, Aug 13, 2011). Shooting spree cases involving one gunman shooting dead over five people also happened in the states of Michigan, Texas, Ohio, Nevada and Southern California (The New York Times, Oct 13, 2011; CNN, Jul 8, 2011; CBS, Jul 23, 2011;USA Today, Aug 9, 2011). High incidence of gun-related crimes has long ignited complaints of the US people and they stage multiple protests every year, demanding the government strictly control the private possession of arms. The US government, however, fails to pay due attention to this issue.
II.
On civil and political rights
In the United States, the violation of citizens' civil and political rights is severe. It is lying to itself when the United States calls itself the land of the free (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012).
Claiming to defend 99 percent of the US population against the wealthiest, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement tested the US political, economic and social systems. Ignited by severe social and economic inequality, uneven distribution of wealth and high unemployment, the movement expanded to sweep the United States after its inception in September 2011. Whatever the deep reasons for the movement are, the single fact that thousands of protesters were treated in a rude and violent way, with many of them being arrested - the act of willfully trampling on people' s freedom of assembly, demonstration and speech - could provide a glimpse to the truth of the so-called US freedom and democracy.
Almost 1,000 people were reportedly arrested in first two weeks of the movement, according to British and Australian media (The Guardian, Oct 2, 2011). The New York police arrested more than 700 protesters for alleged blocking traffic over Brooklyn Bridge on Oct 1, and some of them were handcuffed to the bridge before being shipped by police vehicles (uschinapress.com, Oct 3, 2011). On Oct 9, 92 people were arrested in New York (The New York Times, Oct 15, 2011). The Occupy Wall Street movement was forced out of its encampment at Zuccotti Park and more than 200 people were arrested on Nov 15 (The Guardian, Nov 25, 2011). Chicago police arrested around 300 members of the Occupy Chicago protest in two weeks (The Herald Sun, Oct 24, 2011). At least 85 people were arrested when police used teargas and baton rounds to break up an Occupy Wall Street camp in Oakland, California on Oct 25. An Iraq war veteran had a fractured skull and brain swelling after being allegedly hit in the head by a police projectile (The Guardian, Oct 26, 2011). A couple of hundred people were arrested when demonstrations were staged in different US cities to mark the Occupy Wall Street movement' s two-month anniversary on Nov 17 (USA Today, Nov 18, 2011). Among them, at least 276 were arrested in New York only. Some protesters were bloodied as they were hauled away. Many protesters accused the police of treating them in a brutal way (The Wall Street Journal, Nov 18, 2011). As a US opinion article put it, the United States could be considered, at least in part, authoritarian. (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012).
While advocating press freedom, the United States in fact imposes fairly strict censoring and control over the press and "press freedom" is just a political tool used to beautify itself and attack other nations. The US Congress failed to pass laws on protecting rights of reporters' news sources, according to media reports. An increasing number of American reporters lost jobs for "improper remarks on politics." US reporter Helen Thomas resigned for critical remarks about Israel in June 2010 ("Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states," the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, Dec 28, 2011). While forcibly evacuating the Zuccotti Park, the original Occupy Wall Street encampment, the New York police blocked journalists from covering the police actions. They set cordon lines to prevent reporters from getting close to the park and closed airspace to make aerial photography impossible. In addition to using pepper spray against reporters, the police also arrested around 200 journalists, including reporters from NPR and the New York Times (uschinapress.com, Nov 15, 2011). By trampling on press freedom and public interests, these actions by the US authorities caused a global uproar. US mainstream media' s response to the Occupy Wall Street movement revealed the hypocrisy in handling issues of freedom and democracy. Poll by Pew Research Center indicated that in the second week of the movement, reports on the movement only accounted for 1.68 percent of the total media reports by nationwide media organizations. On Oct 15, 2011, when the Occupy Wall Street movement evolved to be a global action, CNN and Fox News gave no live reports on it, in a sharp contrast to the square protest in Cairo, for which both CNN and Fox News broadcast live 24 hours.
The US imposes fairly strict restriction on the Internet, and its approach "remains full of problems and contradictions." (The website of the Foreign Policy magazine, Feb 17, 2011) "Internet freedom" is just an excuse for the United States to impose diplomatic pressure and seek hegemony.
The US Patriot Act and Homeland Security Act both have clauses about monitoring the Internet, giving the government or law enforcement organizations power to monitor and block any Internet content "harmful to national security." Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act of 2010 stipulates that the federal government has "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. According to a report by British newspaper the Guardian dated Mar 17, 2011, the US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas, and will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives. The project aims to control and restrict free speech on the Internet (The Guardian, Mar 17, 2011). According to a commentary by the Voice of Russia on Feb 2, 2012, a subsidiary under the US government' s security agency employed several hundred analysts, who were tasked with monitoring private archives of foreign Internet users in a secret way, and were able to censor as many as five million microblogging posts. The US Department of Homeland Security routinely searched key words like "illegal immigrants," "virus," "death," and "burst out" on Twitter with fake accounts and then secretly traced the Internet users who forwarded related content. According to a report by the Globe and Mail on Jan 30, 2012, Leigh Van Bryan, a British, prior to his flight to the US, wrote in a Twitter post, "Free this week, for quick gossip/prep before I go and destroy America?" As a result, Bryan along with a friend were handcuffed and put in lockdown with suspected drug smugglers for 12 hours by armed guards after landing in Los Angeles International Airport, just like "terrorists". Among many angered by the incident in Britain, an Internet user posted a comment, "What's worse, being arrested for an innocent tweet, or the fact that the American Secret Service monitors every electronic message in the world?"
The US democracy is increasingly being influenced by capitalization and becoming a system for "master of money." Data issued by the US Center for Responsive Politics in November 2011 show that 46 percent of the US federal senators and members of the House of Representatives have personal assets of more than a million dollars. That well explains why US administration' s plans to impose higher tax on the rich who earn more than one million dollars annually have been blocked in the Congress (www.finance-ol.com). As a commentary put it, money has emerged as the electoral trump card in the US political system, and corporations have a Supreme Court-recognized right to use their considerable financial muscle to promote candidates and policies favorable to their business operations and to resist policies and shut out candidates deemed inimical to their business interests (Online edition of Time, Jan 20, 2011). According to a media report, nearly two thirds of all the contributions that the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee received during the 2010 election cycle came from industries regulated by his committee. A ranking Democrat Representative on the Agriculture Committee, who served as chairman between 2007 and 2010, saw a 711 percent increase in contributions from groups regulated by his committee and a 274 percent increase in contributions over all, in the same period (The New York Times, Nov 16, 2011). According to a Washington Post report on Aug 10, 2011, nearly eight in 10 of Americans polled were dissatisfied with the way the political system is working, with 45 percent saying they are very dissatisfied (The Washington Post, Aug 10, 2011).
The US continued to violate the freedom of its citizens in the name of boosting security levels (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012). The Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2011 released a report, "Patterns of Misconduct: FBI intelligence violations from 2001-2008," which reveals that domestic political intelligence apparatus spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate the rights of American citizens and legal residents. The report shows that the actual number of violations that may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing intelligence investigations. The FBI issued some 200,000 requests and that almost 60 percent were for investigations of US citizens and legal residents (www.pacificfreepress.com). The New York Times reported on Oct 20, 2011, that the FBI has collected information about religious, ethnic and national-origin characteristics of American communities (The New York Times, Oct 20, 2011). According to a Washington Post commentary dated Jan 14, 2012, the US government can use "national security letters" to demand, without probable cause, that organizations turn over information on citizens' finances, communications and associations, and order searches of everything from business documents to library records. The US government can use GPS devices to monitor every move of targeted citizens without securing any court order or review (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012).
Abuse of power, brutal enforcement of law and overuse of force by US police have resulted in harassment and hurt to a large number of innocent citizens and have caused loss of freedom of some people or even deaths. According to a report carried by the World Journal on Jun 10, 2011, the past decade saw increasing stop-and-frisks by the New York police, which recorded an annual of 600,000 cases in 2010, almost double of that in 2004. In the first three months of 2011, some 180,000 people experienced stop-and-frisks, 88 percent of whom were innocent people (World Journal, Jun 10, 2011). In early July of 2011, two police officers beat a mentally ill homeless man to death in Orange County, Southern California (FoxNews.com, Sept 21, 2011). In August 2011, North Miami police shot and killed a man carrying realistic toy gun (The NY Daily News, Sept 1, 2011). On Jan 8, 2011, a Central California man was shot and killed by the police, who thought of him as a gang member only because the jacket he was wearing was red, "the chosen color of a local street gang." (www.kolotv.com, Jan 19, 2011) In May 2011, Arizona' s police officers raided the home of Jose Guerena and shot him dead in what was described as an investigation into alleged marijuana trafficking. However, the police later found nothing illegal in his home (The Huffington Post, May 25, 2011). Misjudged and wrongly-handled cases continued to occur. According to media reports, Anthony Graves, a Texas man, was imprisoned for 18 years for crimes he did not commit (CBS News, Jun 22, 2011). Forty-six-year-old Thomas Haynesworth spent 27 years in prison after being arrested at the age of 18 for crimes he didn't commit (Union Press International, Dec 7, 2011). Eric Caine, who was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment after being tortured by police into confessing to two murders, spent nearly 25 years behind bars.(Chicago Tribune, Jun 13, 2011).
The US lacks basic due lawsuit process protections, and its government continues to claim the right to strip citizens of legal protections based on its sole discretion (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012). The National Defense Authorization Act, signed Dec 31, 2011, allows for the indefinite detention of citizens (The Washington Post, Jan 14, 2012). The Act will place domestic terror investigations and interrogations into the hands of the military and which would open the door for trial-free, indefinite detention of anyone, including American citizens, so long as the government calls them terrorists (www.forbes.com, Dec 5, 2011).
The US remains the country with the largest "prison population" and the highest per capita level of imprisonment in the world, and the detention centers' conditions are terrible. According to the US Department of Justice, the number of prisoners amounted to 2.3 million in 2009 and one in every 132 American citizens is behind bars. Meanwhile, more than 140,000 are serving life sentences (Report: On the situation with human rights in a host of world states, the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Russia, Dec 28, 2011). According to a Los Angeles Times report on May 24, 2011, in a California prison, as many as 54 inmates may share a single toilet and as many as 200 prisoners may live in a gymnasium (Los Angeles Times, May 24, 2011). According to data issued by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the estimated number of prison and jail inmates experiencing sexual victimization totaled 88,500 in the US between October 2008 and December 2009 (www.bjs.gov). Since April 2011, officials stopped serving lunch on the weekend in some US prisons as a way to cut food-service costs. About 23,000 inmates in 36 prisons are eating two meals a day on Saturdays and Sundays instead of three (The New York Times, Oct 20, 2011). Harsh conditions and treatment in prisons have caused recurring protests and suicides of inmates. There were two major hunger strikes in California prisons staged by a total of more than 6,000 and 12,000 prisoners in July and October 2011, respectively, to protest against what they call harsh treatment and detention conditions (CNN, Oct 4, 2011; The New York Times, July 7, 2011). According to a Chicago Tribune report on July 20, 2011, since 2000, at least 175 youths have attempted to kill themselves inside Department of Juvenile Justice lockup facilities in Chicago and seven youths committed suicide. The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture in a 2011 report noted that in the US, an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 individuals are being held in isolation, and the US government in 2011 for twice turned down the Special Rapporteur's request for a private and unmonitored meeting with detainees held in isolation.

Demonstrators call for justice in the murder of Trayvon Martin at Leimert Park in Los Angeles on March 22, 2012. Florida Governor Rick Scott appointed a task force to investigate the shooting death of unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin as calls grew for charges to be filed against the neighborhood watch volunteer who killed him. Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters

III.
On economic, social and cultural rights
The United States is the world's richest country, but quite a lot of Americans still lack guarantee for their economic, social and cultural rights, which are necessary for personal dignity and self-development.
The United States has not done enough to protect its citizens from unemployment. At no time in the last 60 years had the country's long-term unemployment been so high for so long as it was in 2011. It has been one of the Western developed countries that provide the poorest protection of laborer's rights. It has not approved any international labor organization convention in the last 10 years. Moreover, the US lacks an effective arbitration system to deal with enterprises that refuse to compromise with employees. The New York Times reported on Dec 12, 2011, that at last count, 13.3 million people were officially unemployed and that 5.7 million of them had been out of work for more than six months (The New York Times, Dec 12, 2011). The unemployment rate was 8.9 percent for 2011 (www.bls.gov), and the unemployment rate for American youths between 25 and 34 stood at 26 percent in October of that year (The World Journal, Nov 18, 2011), with more underemployed. A total of 84 metropolitan areas reported jobless rates of at least 10.0 percent, and El Centro, California, recorded the highest unemployment rate of 29.6 percent in September of 2011 (www.bls.gov). The unemployed people suffered from not only financial pressures but also mental pressures including anxiety and depression.
There is a widening of the gap between the extreme top and bottom (The USA Today, Sept 13, 2011), showing apparent unfair wealth distribution. The United States claims to have a large population of middle class, making up 80 percent of its total population, while there is only very few impoverished and extremely rich people (The China Press, Oct 13, 2011). However, this is not the truth. According to the report issued by the US Congressional Budget Office (CBO) on Oct 25, 2011, the richest one percent of American families have the fastest growth of family revenue from 1979 to 2007 with an increase of 275 percent for after-tax income, while the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent grew by only 18 percent (The World Journal, Oct 26, 2011). Cable News Network reported on Feb 16, 2011, that in the last 20 years, incomes for 90 percent of Americans have been stuck in neutral, while the richest 1 percent of Americans have seen their incomes grow by 33 percent. Economic Policy Institute published a paper on Oct 26, 2011, saying that in 2009 the ratio of wealth owned by the wealthiest one percent to the wealth owned by median households was 225 to 1 (www.epi.org). Besides, in the United States, the best-off 10 percent made on average 15 times the incomes of the poorest 10 percent (Reuters, Dec 9, 2011). The wealthiest 400 Americans have $1.5 trillion in assets (The China Press, Oct 13, 2011), or the same combined wealth as the poorest half of Americans - more than 150 million people (www.currydemocrats.org). The annual incomes of the richest 10 chief executive officers (CEO) were enough to pay the salary of 18,330 employees (The World Journal, Oct 16, 2011). Roughly 11 percent of Congress members had net worth of more than $9 million, and 249 members were millionaires. The median net worth: $891,506, was almost nine times the typical household (The USA Today, Nov 16, 2011). A commentary by the Spiegel said that the US has developed into an economic entity of "winners take all". American politician Larry Bartels said that fundamental shifts in wealth allocation was caused by political decisions rather than the consequences of market forces or financial crisis (The Spiegel, Oct 24, 2011).
Contrary to the wealthiest 10 percent, the number of Americans living in poverty as well as the poverty rate continued to hit record highs, which is a great irony in affluent America. A report published by the Census Bureau on Sept 13, 2011, showed that 46.2 million people lived below the official poverty line in 2010, 2.6 million more than 2009, hitting the highest record since 1959. The report also said that the percentage of American who lived below the poverty line in 2010 was 15.1 percent, the highest level since 1993. An analysis done by the Brookings Institution estimated that at the current rate, the recession would have added nearly 10 million people to the ranks of the poor by the middle of the decade. According to the analysis, 22 percent of children were in poverty (The New York Times, Sept 13, 2011). Another survey showed that 12 states of the US had poverty rates above 17 percent, with Mississippi's poverty rate standing at 22.4 percent (The Huffington Post, Oct 21, 2011). The US has grown into a country dependent on food stamps (Reuters, Aug 22, 2011). The percentage of Americans who did not have enough money to buy food grew from 9 percent in 2008 to 19 percent in 2011 (The World Journal, Oct 15, 2011). In 2010, 17.2 million households, or 14.5 percent, were food insecure (www. Worldhunger. org). In 2011, 46 million Americans lived on food stamps, about 15 percent of the total population, up 74 percent from 2007 (Reuters, Aug 22, 2011).
Millions of homeless people wandered around streets. Reports said that about 2.3 million to 3.5 million Americans did not have a place that they call home to sleep in the night (www.homelessnessinamerica.com). Between 2007 and 2010, the number of homeless families grew by 20 percent (The Huffington Post, Aug 26, 2011). Over the past five years, the percentage of singles arriving at shelters after living with family or elsewhere in the community has jumped from 39 percent to 66 percent (The USA Today, Dec 9, 2011). There was an all-time record of more than 41,000 homeless people in New York City, including 17,000 homeless children (www.coalitionforthehomeless.org). On any given night in Santa Clara County, California, 7,045 people were homeless according to a 2011 Santa Clara County Homeless Census and Survey (www.santaclaraweekly.com). And advocates estimated that Chicago had up to 3,000 homeless youths in need of shelter on any given night (www.chicagonewscoop.org).
The US declared it has the best healthcare service in the world, but quite a lot of Americans could not enjoy due medication and healthcare. The Cable News Network reported on Sept 13, 2011, that the number of people who lacked health insurance in 2010 climbed to 49.9 million (Cable News Network, Sept 13, 2011). Bloomberg reported on March 16, 2011, that 9 million Americans have lost health insurance during the past two years. An additional 73 million adults had difficulties paying for healthcare and 75 million deferred treatment because they could not afford it (Bloomberg, March 16, 2011).
Death and infection risks caused by AIDS grew. Since the first American patient was diagnosed with AIDS in 1981, 600,000 people have died from the disease in the US By the end of 2008, 1,178,350 Americans had been infected with AIDS (The China Press, June 3, 2011). AFP reported that nearly three quarters of Americans with HIV do not have their infection under control and one in five people with human immunodeficiency virus are unaware that they have the disease. Among people who know their HIV status is positive, only 51 percent get ongoing medical treatment (AFP, Nov 29, 2011). Statistics given by the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention showed that, in the last 10 years, death caused by prescription drugs in America had doubled and that one would die from taking prescription drug every 14 minutes. Prescription drug overdose caused 37,485 deaths in 2009, exceeding traffic fatalities (The China Press, Sept 19, 2011).
The US government has significantly cut the expense on education, reduced teaching staff, and shortened school hours with tuition fees soaring. The guarantee for teenagers' rights to education is weakening. The New York Times reported on Oct 3, 2011, that since 2007, school budgets in New York city have been cut by 13.7 percent every year on average. Since 2008, 294,000 posts in the American education industry, including schools of higher education, have been cut (The China Press, Oct 25, 2011). Four-day per week classes have been practiced in 292 school districts, which was only put into use during the financial crisis in the 1930s and the oil crisis in the 1970s (The World Journal, Oct 30, 2011). A report by College Board showed that the average tuition fee of American four-year public universities in the school year of 2011 through 2012 was $8,244, $631 more than the last school year, up 8.3 percent (The China Press, Oct 27, 2011). About 3,000 people gathered on Sproul Plaza to protest tuition increases at Berkeley on Nov 9, 2011 (The New York Times, Nov 13, 2011). Reuters reported that two-thirds of undergraduate students would graduate with student loans about $25,000 on average owing to expensive college tuition (Reuters, Feb 1, 2011).
Native American culture in the United States has long been suppressed. The country assimilated the Native American culture through legislation and mainstream culture. At the end of the 19th century, the United States carried out "white man's education" and implemented compulsory English-only education. Most of the people who now speak Native American languages are the seniors living in reservations. It is estimated that only five percent of Native Americans will speak their own languages 50 years later if there are no measures from the US government.
The financial crisis was far from being the sole reason for the inadequate guarantee of Americans' economic, social and cultural rights. So far, the US has not approved the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The above problems concerning human rights are the reflection of the US ideology and political system that ignore people's economic, social and cultural rights.
IV.
On racial discrimination
Ethnic minorities in the United States have long been suffering systemic, widespread and institutional discrimination. And racial discrimination has become an indelible characteristic and symbol of American values.
Ethnic minorities have low political, economic and social positions due to discrimination. The number of ethnic people in civil service is not proportional to their population. New York Times reported on June 23, 2011, that the number of Asian Americans in New York City has topped one million, nearly 1 in 8 New Yorkers, but only one Asian-American serves in the State Legislature, two on the City Council and one in a citywide post of the New York City. According to the annual report released by the National Urban League of the US, African-Americans' 2011 Equality Index is currently 71.5 percent, compared to 2010's 72.1 percent, among which the economic equality index declined from 57.9 percent to 56.9 percent, and the health index, from 76.6 percent to 75 percent, and the index in the area of social justice, from 57.9 percent to 56.9 percent.
Ethnic Americans are badly discriminated against when it comes to employment. It was reported that the unemployment rate of Hispanics rose to 11 percent in 2010 from 5.7 percent in 2007 (The New York Times, Sept 28, 2011). The unemployment rate of African Americans was 16.2 percent. For black males, it's at 17.5 percent; and for black youth, it's nearly 41 percent, 4.5 times the national average unemployment rate (CBS News, June 19, 2011). Nationally, black joblessness stands at 21 percent, rising to as high as 40 percent in major urban centers such as Detroit (The Wall Street Journal, Aug 31, 2011). In Ziebach County of South Dakota, a community mainly composed of Native Americans, more than 60 percent of the residents live at or below the poverty line, and unemployment rate hits 90 percent in the winter (The Daily Mail, Feb 15, 2011). A study shows that of the seven occupations with the highest salaries, six are overrepresented by whites (Washington Post, Oct 21, 2011).
The poverty rate of African Americans doubles that of whites, and the ethnic minority groups suffer severe social inequalities. According to a report by the Pew Research Center released in June 2011, the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households (pewresearch.org). In 2010, poverty among blacks rose to 27.4 percent, and poverty among Hispanics increased to 26.6 percent, much higher than the 9.9-percent poverty rate among whites (www.census.gov). A Pew Research Center report says the lopsided wealth ratios among whites, Hispanics and African-Americans in 2009 were the largest in the past 25 years (pewresearch.org). According to an investigation done by the Washington-based Bread for the World, "black children are suffering from poverty at a rate of nearly 40 percent, and over a quarter of Blacks reported going hungry in 2010". "The figures are both startling and very telling," said Rev Derrick Boykin (www.amsterdam.com).
Ethnic minorities are denied equal education opportunities, and ethnic minority kids are discriminated against and bullied in schools. According to a report by the US Census Bureau on June 8, 2011, in 2008, among 18-to 24-year-olds, 22 percent were not enrolled in high schools for Hispanics, 13 percent for African-Americans, whereas only 6 percent for whites (www.census.gov). US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said on Oct 28, 2011, one-third of American students are bullied at schools, and Asian-American children bear the brunt. The teases and insults they get in cyber space are three times more compared with kids from other ethnic groups. A research finds 54 percent of Asian-American students have been bullied in schools, 38.4 percent for African-Americans and 34.3 percent for Hispanics (World Journal Oct 29, 2011).
Ethnic minorities and non-Christians are also badly discriminated against in fields such as law enforcement, justice and religion, rendering the so-claimed ethnic equality and religious freedom nothing but self-glorifying forged labels. A New York Times story (Dec 17, 2011) says the New York Police Department recorded more than 600,000 stops in 2010 and 84 percent of those stopped were blacks or Latinos. It was reported that black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males (World Report 2011: United States, www.hrw.org). On Dec 1, 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union said that "the FBI is using its extensive community outreach to Muslims and other groups to secretly gather intelligence in violation of federal law". (Washington Post, Dec 2, 2011) A survey by Pew Research Center finds that 52 percent of Muslim-Americans surveyed said their group is under government's surveillance, about 28 percent said they had been treated or viewed with suspicion and 21 percent said they were singled out by airport security (articles.boston.com). More than half of Muslim-Americans in another poll said government anti-terrorism policies singled them out for increased surveillance and monitoring, and many reported increased cases of name-calling, threats and harassment by airport security, law enforcement officers and others (Washington Times, Aug 30, 2011).
Illegal immigrants also live under legal and systematic discrimination. It was reported that after Arizona passed its anti-illegal immigration bill, Alabama began implementing its immigration law on Sept 28, 2011. The Alabama immigration law provides differentiated treatments to illegal immigrants in each of its term, rendering their daily lives rather difficult. Critics argued that the law runs counter to the US Constitution and to certain terms in relevant international human rights law regarding granting equal protections to illegal immigrants (www.hrw.org). The New York Times reported on May 13, 2011, that Georgia passed an anti-illegal immigration law which outlaws illegal immigrants working in the state and empowers local police officers to question certain suspects about their immigration status. Illegal immigrants suffer ferocious mistreatments. Internal reports from the Office of Detention Oversight of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) revealed grave problems in many US detention facilities for immigrants, including lack of medical care, the use of excessive force and "abusive treatment" of detainees (The Houston Chronicle, Oct 10, 2011). A report released on Sept 21, 2011, by an Arizona-based non-profit organization revealed that thousands of illegal immigrants detained across the border between Mexico and Arizona are generally mistreated by US border police, being denied enough food, water, medical care and sleep, even beaten up and confined in extreme coldness or heat, suffering both psychological abuse and threats of death (The World Journal, Sept 24, 2011).
Native Americans are denied their due rights. From January to February 2011, UN Special Rapporteur James Anaya lodged two accusations against the United States, including accusing the Arizona State government of approving the use of recycled wastewater for commercial ski operations on the San Francisco Peaks, a site considered sacred by several Native American tribes (www.forgottennavajopeople.org), as well as the case of imprisoned indigenous activist Leonard Peltier. Peltier was sentenced to life in prison in 1977 for the alleged murder of two FBI agents. However, Peltier has been claiming he is innocent and persecuted by the US government for participating in the American Indian Movement (www.ohchr.org). On April 26, 2011, Farida Shaheed, independent expert in the field of cultural rights, Heiner Bielefeldt, special rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief, and James Anaya, special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, of the UN Human Rights Council, jointly lodged accusations against the US, claiming that the city of Vallejo, California, is planning to level and pave over the Sogorea Te, held sacred to indigenous people in northern California, in order to construct a parking lot and public restrooms (www.treatycouncil.org).
Race-motivated hate crimes occur frequently. According to an FBI report, 6,628 hate crime incidents were reported in 2010, 2,201 of which were against African-Americans, 534 against Hispanics and 575 against whites. And 47.3 percent of all were motivated by racial bias, 20 percent by religion and 12.8 percent by an ethnicity/national origin bias (ww.fbi.gov). According to a report released by the Center for American Progress in August 2011, seven American charitable groups, over the past decade, had spent 42.6 million US dollars on inciting hatred against Muslim communities (The New York Times, Nov 13, 2011). There are three active white supremacy groups in the city of San Francisco, which focus on attacking ethnic minorities and immigrants (www.abclocal.go.com). On Nov 10, 2010, two Mexican nationals were beaten by a group of whites who were members of these organizations (www.sfappeal.com). According to an investigation, black men aged 15 to 29 years old were most likely to be victims of murders. In New York City, they make up less than 3 percent of the city's population but in 2010 represented 33 percent of all homicide victims (The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2011).
The sufferings of civil rights activists who oppose racial discriminations arouse attention. The Huffington Post reported on May 31, 2011, Catrina Wallace, a civil rights activist in Jena, Louisiana, was sentenced to 15 years in prison by authorities only based on a drug dealer's accusation. Previously, Wallace had taken part in organizing a 50,000-people protest against racial discrimination that won freedom for six black high school students. The article deemed the sentence was revenge taken by authorities on Wallace's human rights activism. "I am a freedom fighter," she says. "I fight for people's rights."

Yang Ting Lye (left) and Amy Huang hug at an impromptu memorial on campus for the two graduate students from China, Qu Ming of Jilin and Wu Ying of Hunan, who were shot dead near the University of Southern California in Los Angeles on April 11, 2012. Jonathan Alcorn / Reuters

V.
On the rights of women and children
To date, the US has ratified neither the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, nor the Convention on the Rights of the Child. As the US neglects the rights of women and children, their situation deteriorates.
Gender discrimination against women widely exists in the US. According to statistics, women are not fully represented in governments at all levels in the US, as women hold only 17 percent of the seats in Congress (www.wcffoundation.org). Women doing the same work as men often get less payment in the US, and the wage gap has narrowed by only 18 cents in the past half century (www.thedailybeast.com). According to a report released by the American Civil Liberties Union, in 2009, women working full-time, year-round were paid 77 cents on average for every dollar paid to men (www.aclu.org). Women in the US widely suffer discrimination in terms of employment, promotion and work. A new study confirms that American tech companies are woefully behind in including women among their board members and highest-paid executives. On average, fewer than one in 28 of the highest-paid tech executives is a woman. At California's biggest public companies, only about 10 percent of the board members and top executives are women (The New York Times, Dec 9, 2011).
The poverty rate among American women reached a record high. According to data from the US Census Bureau, over 17 million women lived in poverty in 2010, including more than 7.5 million in extreme poverty and 4.7 million single mothers in poverty. The poverty rate among women climbed to 14.5 percent in 2010 from 13.9 percent in 2009, the highest in 17 years; the extreme poverty rate among women climbed to 6.3 percent in 2010 from 5.9 percent in 2009, the highest rate ever recorded (www.merchantcircle.com). According to a report of the Associated Press on April 12, 2011, a single mother named Lashanda Armstrong drove her four kids in a minivan into the Hudson river in Newburgh, New York, due to the unbearable burden of raising the kids. Only her 10-year-old boy survived.
Women in the US often experience discrimination, violence and sexual assault. Ethnic minority women face discrimination during pregnancy. According to a report provided by the LAMB (The Los Angeles Mommy and Baby Project), 32.4 percent of Asian-American mothers felt discriminated against during pregnancy, second only to African-American mothers among whom the ratio amounts to 47.9 percent, while the ratio among Latin American mothers is 31.1 percent (The China Press, June 1, 2011). According to statistics from the website of the Los Angeles Police Department, more than 2 million American women are victims of domestic violence annually. The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey shows nearly one in five women has been raped in her lifetime, and one in four has experienced serious physical violence from an intimate partner at some point in her life (Los Angeles Times, December 14, 2011). Throughout the military, sexual assault affects about 19 percent of female troops but most of them choose to keep silent, according to a survey of sexual assault conducted by the US military (www.csmonitor.com). From March to October in 2011, a string of 20 sexual assaults happened in Bay Ridge, Sunset Park and Park Slope and the victims were all young women (The New York Times, Oct 19, 2011). Reports say many of the 1 million women in prison in the US experienced harsh treatment and even had their arms and legs chained when they were giving birth (www.globalissues.org).
The poverty rate for children in the US reached a record high. According to the report released by the US Census Bureau, more than 1 million children were added to the poverty population between 2009 and 2010, making the total number of children living below the poverty line reach more than 15 million, the greatest since 2001. The poverty rate for children in 2010 climbed to 21.6 percent in 2010 from 20 percent in 2009, with 653 counties seeing a significant increase in poverty rate for children aged 5 to 17 and about one-third of counties having school-age poverty rates above the national poverty rate (www.census.gov). The Daily Mail reported on Aug 17, 2011, that child poverty increased in 38 states from 2000 to 2009 and Mississippi is the state with the highest level of 31 percent. The US Census Bureau said that children living in poverty, especially small children, are more likely to develop cognitive and behavioral difficulties and may have a shorter education time and a longer time being unemployed when they grow up (The China Press, Nov 21, 2011).
The number of homeless children has surged. In 2010, 1.6 million children in the US were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, up 33 percent from that in 2007, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness (USA Today, Dec 15, 2011). According to the Education Department of New York, there are 53,503 homeless students and children of 3 to 21 years old in New York, and the Homeless Service Department's count also shows an average of 6,902 children of 6 to 17 years old a month are homeless in the city (The New York Times, Nov 14, 2011). Nearly 17,000 children slept in the municipal shelters in New York on Halloween night in 2011. From May 2011 to November 2011, children in shelters rose 10 percent (The Wall Street Journal, Nov 9, 2011).
Children are severely exposed to violence and pornography. BBC reported on Oct 17, 2011, that over the past 10 years, more than 20,000 American children were believed to have been killed by their family members. More than 1 million children are confirmed each year as victims of child abuse (www.preventchildabuse.org), and one in every two families in the US is involved in domestic violence at some time (www. reverepolice.org). The Wall Street Journal reported on Nov 14, 2011, that roughly 120,000 calls were made to the state hotline for child abuse calls administrated by the state Department of Public Welfare in Pennsylvania, but only about 24,000 cases were investigated. A 13-year-old boy named Christian Choate was allegedly beaten to death in 2009 by his father. The report said prosecutors had alleged that the boy endured beating daily and was kept locked in a 3-foot-high dog cage, where he had little to eat and often soiled himself (Chicago Tribune, June 24, 2011). Campus violence and cyber bullying are growing more malicious in the US. According to a report of the US News & World Report on June 3, 2011, at least 40 percent of high school students have been bullied by cyber bullies (www.usnews.com). The Women's eNews reported on May 23 last year, the sex-trafficking problem is acute in the state of Georgia, with an estimated 250 to 300 underage teens and girls being sexually exploited each month there (womensenews. org). According to a report published by Stanford University, the number of reports of sexual assaults received in its campus in 2010 rose by 75 percent over that in 2009 (CBS, Sept 30, 2011).
Infant mortality rate remains high in the US. According to a report of The New York Times on Oct 15, 2011, the infant mortality rate in the US is 6.7 deaths per 1,000 live births. The rate among African-Americans is 13.3 deaths per thousand, while the rates among whites, Hispanics and Asian-Americans are respectively 5.6, 5.5 and 4.8 per thousand. In Pittsburgh, the infant mortality rate for black residents of Allegheny County was 20.7 per thousand in 2009, while the rate among whites in the county was only 4 per thousand in the same period. Nationally, black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before the age of 1.
VI.
On US violations of human rights against other nations
The US has been pursuing hegemony in the world, grossly trampling upon the sovereignty of other countries and capriciously violating human rights against other nations. It "appears more and more to be contributing to international disorder" (After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, by Emmanuel Todd).
The revelation of the history of human experiments conducted in the US is yet another scandal sparking public outcry around the world after the prisoner abuse scandal. The British newspaper The Telegraph reported on Aug 30, 2011, that from 1946-1948, a US government-paid medical experiment program had made nearly 5,500 people in Guatemala subjected to diagnostic testing, and the researchers deliberately exposed more than 1,300 people, including soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and mental patients, to syphilis and other venereal diseases. Seven women with epilepsy were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, and a female syphilis patient with a terminal illness was infected with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. These experiments had caused over 80 deaths. An article on a US-based journalistic website said that "these revelations are only the latest in an ongoing series of scandals regarding government illegal and unethical experimentation" and that "there are plenty of other underreported and important stories out there on the terrible scandal that has been US illegal experimentation. "The article said that the list of such illegal experiments is quite long, including government radiation experiments, human mind control (also known as MKULTRA) experiments and the CIA and DoD (Department of Defense) experiments on "enemy combatants" in the "war on terror" (Pubrecord.org). Newspaper The Hindu reported on Aug 30, 2011, that in 1932, the US public health service agency started a study of untreated syphilis in the human body in Alabama. The researchers told the subjects that they were being treated for some ailments, and nearly 400 African-American men were infected with syphilis without informed consent. In fact, the men infected did not receive proper treatment needed. The study lasted until 1972 after media disclosures. Austrian national TV commented that this was a disgraceful event in the US history and a dark period in US medical ethics.
The US-led wars, albeit alleged to be "humanitarian intervention" efforts and for "the rise of a new democratic nation", created humanitarian disasters instead. For Iraqis, the death toll in the US-initiated Iraq war stands at 655,000 (Tribune Business News, Dec 15, 2011). According to figures released by the Iraq Body Count, at least 103,536 civilians were killed in the Iraq war (Reuters, Dec 18, 2011). In 2011, there were an average of 6.5 deaths per day from suicide attacks and vehicle bombs (www.iraqbodycount.org). It is estimated that civilian casualties in the military campaign in Afghanistan could exceed 31,000 (Tribune Business News, Oct 17, 2011). According to a news report, on May 28, 2011, a US-led NATO airstrike killed 14 civilians and wounded six others in the southern region of Afghanistan (The New York Times, May 29, 2011). Separately, on May 25, a total of 18 Afghan civilians and 20 police were killed in a NATO airstrike in the province of Nuristan (BBC News, May 29, 2011). The British newspaper The Guardian reported on March 11, 2012, that an American soldier stationed in Afghanistan burst into three civilian homes in two villages in the small hours of March 11, shot dead 16 sleeping Afghan villagers, injured five others and burned the dead bodies. The victims included nine children and three women. According to a Reuters report, witness accounts said there were several US soldiers involved (Reuters, March 11, 2012). Another Deutsche Presse-Agentur report quoted a member of the Afghan parliamentary investigative team as saying that there were 15 to 20 soldiers who had conducted the night raid operation in several areas in the village. The source also told DPA that some of the Afghan women who were killed were sexually assaulted, according to the findings (DPA, March 18, 2012). Such "American-style massacre" against innocent civilians has once again pierced the veil of the US proclaiming itself "a country under the rule of law" and "a human rights defender." Incomplete statistics revealed that the US has launched more than 60 drone attacks in Pakistan in 2011, killing at least 378 people (USA Today, Jan 11, 2012; Newamerica.net). The number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan increased 15 percent in the first half of 2011 over the same period of 2010 (The New York Times, Aug 6, 2011). According to media reports, on the night of Feb 20, 2012, some American soldiers of the NATO troops at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan transported copies of Koran and other religious books to a rubbish pit and burned them (BBC News, Feb 23, 2012). The acts of desecration of the Quran have sparked strong protests and large-scale demonstration activities among the people across Afghanistan as well as in the countries of Pakistan and Bengal (www.pakistantoday.com.pk; www.firstpost.com).
The US does not support the right to development, which is a concern of most of the developing countries. In September 2011, the 18th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on "the right to development." Except for an abstention vote from the US, all the HRC members voted for the resolution.
The US continues its conduct that seriously violates the right of subsistence and right of development of Cuban people. On Oct 26, 2011, the 66th session of the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly adopted a resolution titled "Necessity of ending the economic, commercial and financial embargo imposed by the United States of America against Cuba," the 20th such resolution in a row. A total of 186 countries voted in favor of the resolution, three countries abstained, and only the US and Israel voted against the resolution. The resolution urged the US to repeal or invalidate the almost 50-year-long economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba as soon as possible (www.un.org). The US, however, continues to defy the resolution. The blockade imposed by the US against Cuba qualifies as an act of genocide under Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which was adopted in 1948.
The above-mentioned facts are but a small yet illustrative enough fraction of the US' dismal record on its human rights situation. The US' own tarnished human rights record has made it in no condition, on a moral, political or legal basis, to act as the world's "human rights justice," to place itself above other countries and release the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse and blame other countries. We hereby advise the US government once again to look squarely at its own grave human rights problems, to stop the unpopular practices of taking human rights as a political instrument for interference in other countries' internal affairs, smearing other nations' images and seeking its own strategic interests, and to cease using double standards on human rights and pursuing hegemony under the pretext of human rights.

(China Daily 05/26/2012