Stephen Lendman

In July 2008, the Southern California ACLU released a "Report on Mental Health Issues at Los Angeles County" Jail by Dr. Terry Kupers, a practicing psychiatrist, an expert on long-term isolated prison confinement and correctional mental health issues. He's also written numerous articles on these topics, and been an expert witness on the mental health crisis behind bars, what he wrote about in his book "Prison Madness."

In May, he toured the LA County Jail system where most inmates aren't convicted and are awaiting trial - Men's Central Jail (MCJ), Twin Towers 1 & 2 (TT 1 & 2), and the Inmate Reception Center (IRC). He interviewed 18 prisoners in private, confidential settings; others in more casual, cell-front ones; and discussed issues with mental health and custody staff.

As in all prisons nationwide, many LA County inmates suffer "serious mental illness." Incarceration exacerbates it. They need treatment, but aren't getting it.

Besides prison confinement harm, state mental hospital deinstitutionalization took hold in the 1980s, part of Reagan Revolution policies that whatever government can do, business does better, so let it. As a result, large numbers of seriously ill patients were discharged, based on studies indicating community care was superior to state facilities. The consequences were predictable. The promise was never realized because of budget cuts, unaffordable housing, and other priorities.

In 1955, state and VA psychiatric hospitals had about 550,000 patients. In 2008, there were less than 60,000, but given constraints today on budget strapped states and communities, the numbers are likely lower and dropping.

Yet according to a study by the Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, over a million individuals suffer from significant mental illness in jails and prisons. With 20,000 detainees, some call the LA County Jail system the largest psychiatric hospital in the country (the Men's Central Jail has 5,000), but, like elsewhere, treatment there's not forthcoming.

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Michael Hudson

[Impotant interview with Michael Hudson HERE]

Government debt in Greece is just the first in a series of European debt bombs that are set to explode.

The mortgage debts in post-Soviet economies and Iceland are more explosive. Although these countries are not in the Eurozone, most of their debts are denominated in euros. Some 87% of Latvia’s debts are in euros or other foreign currencies, and are owed mainly to Swedish banks, while Hungary and Romania owe euro-debts mainly to Austrian banks. So their government borrowing by non-euro members has been to support exchange rates to pay these private-sector debts to foreign banks, not to finance a domestic budget deficit as in Greece.

All these debts are unpayably high because most of these countries are running deepening trade deficits and are sinking into depression. Now that real estate prices are plunging, trade deficits are no longer financed by an inflow of foreign-currency mortgage lending and property buyouts. There is no visible means of support to stabilize currencies (e.g., healthy economies). For the past year these countries have supported their exchange rates by borrowing from the EU and IMF. The terms of this borrowing are politically unsustainable: sharp public sector budget cuts, higher tax rates on already over-taxed labor, and austerity plans that shrink economies and drive more labor to emigrate.

Bankers in Sweden and Austria, Germany and Britain are about to discover that extending credit to nations that can’t (or won’t) pay may be their problem, not that of their debtors. No one wants to accept the fact that debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. Someone must bear the cost as debts go into default or are written down, to be paid in sharply depreciated currencies, but many legal experts find debt agreements calling for repayment in euros unenforceable.

Every sovereign nation has the right to legislate its own debt terms, and the coming currency re-alignments and debt write-downs will be much more than mere “haircuts.”

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Toby Rogers [David Cogswell]

Click on cartoon to enlarge. You can find the complete 'toon by Mack White HERE.

The following appeared in an abridged form as the introduction to Ambushed by Toby Rogers.

Operation Northwoods

Operation Northwoods was an early '60s plan by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to create a pretext for an invasion of Cuba by carrying out terror attacks against Americans in US cities.

The plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), by investigative reporter James Bamford (see "U.S. Military Wanted to Provoke War With Cuba" at ABC News.) According to the ABC report, "The plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities. The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba's then new leader, communist Fidel Castro."

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Viv Forbes

Still neeeded: sound empirical science

Some people think that the global warming scam is finished, that the Ration-N-Tax Scheme is dead, and that there is no further threat to our jobs, our economy and our energy supplies. Unfortunately there is no reason to relax. Public opinion has changed but the politicians have not.

Britons recently had a chance to vote on the “Oh so Green” Labour Party of Gordon Brown. They entered the polling booths holding their noses, pleased to get rid of one lot, but with no enthusiasm for the other lot. The “Conservative” Coalition governing Britain is also deep green, and in love with the Climate Change agenda of green taxes, subsidies and mandates.

Over in USA, their Ration-N-Tax Scheme passed the lower house and was rebadged and recently re-presented to a suspicious Senate as “The American Power Act”. And the US Senate has just confirmed the right of their EPA to class carbon dioxide as a pollutant. As in much of the world, politicians are out of step with the public, who have other priorities.

Across the Tasman, Kiwi’s changed governments but got the same carbon demonization policies.

Here in Australia, we can expect Penny Wong’s discredited Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to be rebadged as something like “The Power Conservation and Clean Energy Bill” (or something equally trendy). It will be supported by the wets in the Liberal Party, but it will still have a heart of carbon taxes and rationing. (Do you want a world where a bureaucrat could turn off your electrical appliances from a switch in his office?)

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Rodrigue Tremblay

“If ever a time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will be in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin."
~ Samuel Adams (1722-1803), statesman, political philosopher, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, 1776

“America is addicted to oil.”
~ President George W. Bush, State of the Union address, 2006

“Let me be clear: BP is responsible for this leak; BP will be paying the bill.”
~ President Barack Obama, May 2, 2010

More often than not, the consequences of public policies, good or bad, are felt many years after they have been taken. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a good example. This disaster is, to a large extent, a consequence of the Bush-Cheney energy policy of 2001 and later.

After being ushered into power by a one-vote-majority Supreme Court decision, one of the first decisions made by the new Republican administration was to establish an Energy Task Force (the National Energy Policy Development Group) under the authority of oil-man Dick Cheney, former CEO of Halliburton (1995-2000). As some have asserted, chief deregulator Dick Cheney was not only a vice president but a genuine co-president in the split Bush-Cheney administration.

After some 106 days of mainly secret consultations and deliberations with the executives and interest groups representing the U.S. electricity, coal, natural gas and nuclear industries, with a pledge to keep secret the names of participating individuals, the Task Force's 163-page final report [.pdf] was sent to President George W. Bush on May 16, 2001.

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