Your blogger the failure...*sigh*

Your blogger had to give a final presentation today. they totally flubbed it. *Sigh* They don't see it as an end-of-the-world thing, but...that was really something to stand there in front of three Professors and have like, absolutely no project to show. And what's more, your blogger had six weeks to work on this project. Maybe if they'd had less time, they would've gotten more done? Maybe? Oh, well...guess it's just a learning experience.

Goldman Sachs, Sacked

(Above) Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs, during testimony before the

Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Investigations Subcommittee

hearing on Tuesday.

Bu', we didn't do notin'.

By Susan Pulliam and Evan Perez

Federal prosecutors are conducting a criminal investigation into whether Goldman Sachs or its employees committed securities fraud in connection with its mortgage trading. Prosecutors haven't determined whether they will bring charges in the case.

The investigation from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office, which is at a preliminary stage, stemmed from a referral from the Securities and Exchange Commission, these people say.

The SEC recently filed civil securities-fraud charges against the big Wall Street firm and a trader in its mortgage group. Goldman and the trader say they have done nothing wrong and are fighting the civil charges.

Prosecutors haven't determined whether they will bring charges in the case, say the people familiar with the matter. Many criminal investigations are launched that never result in any charges.

The criminal probe raises the stakes for Goldman, Wall Street's most powerful firm. The investigation is centered on different evidence than the SEC's civil case, the people say. It couldn't be determined which Goldman deals are being scrutinized in the criminal investigation.

A spokesperson for the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment. Goldman declined to comment.

Goldman shares fell 2.6% in after-hours trading to $156.08 after The Wall Street Journal reported the news of the investigation. At the 4 p.m. market closing, Goldman shares were up 2.1%.

The development comes amid public calls for more Wall Street accountability for the industry's role in the financial crisis.

Though there are multiple ongoing criminal and civil investigations, no Wall Street executives connected with the meltdown have been convicted of criminal charges.

During congressional hearings this week into Goldman's role in the crisis, legislators grilled Goldman executives for nearly 11 hours.

The SEC and Justice Department often coordinate their actions on investigations. The probe underscores heightened efforts by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office in prosecuting white-collar and Wall Street crime.

It is in the midst of pursuing the largest insider-trading case in a generation, charging 21 individuals and negotiating 11 guilty pleas in that matter.

But the Goldman probe presents a significant challenge for the government. Prosecutors in the Brooklyn office of the U.S. Attorney last year lost a high-profile fraud case against two former Bear Stearns Cos. executives, in the first major criminal case linked to the financial meltdown.

Prosecutors had accused the Bear Stearns employees of lying to investors in 2007 about the health of two funds that eventually collapsed.

The case centered on what the government viewed as incriminating emails indicating the traders knew the mortgage market would fall but didn't disclose that view to investors.

To bring any criminal charges in the Goldman matter, prosecutors would need to believe they had gathered evidence that showed that the firm or its employees knowingly committed fraud in their mortgage business. Proving such intent to break the law typically is the toughest hurdle for prosecutors to clear.

Another stumbling block: Such financial cases can be highly complex. Few outside of Wall Street understand arcane products such as collateralized debt obligations, the pools of mortgage-related holdings at the heart of the SEC civil case against Goldman.

On April 16, the SEC charged Goldman and an employee, Fabrice Tourre, with securities fraud in a civil suit relating to a mortgage transaction, known as Abacus 2007-AC1, a deal the government said was designed to fail.

The SEC alleged that Goldman duped its clients by failing to disclose that hedge fund Paulson & Co. not only helped select the mortgages included in the deal but also bet against the transaction. Both Goldman and Mr. Tourre have denied wrongdoing.

Even the SEC's case, which is subject to a lesser standard of proof than a criminal case, is viewed as a challenge for regulators. The SEC's commissioners were split 3-2 along party lines on whether the agency should bring a case.

In battling the SEC charges, Goldman says its investors were sophisticated and knew the underlying securities they were buying. Goldman says it wasn't required to disclose who provided input into the deal or the views of its clients in the transaction.

The congressional hearing involved numerous other mortgage deals Goldman arranged in 2006 and 2007. Lawmakers criticized Goldman and its executives for allegedly stacking the deck against clients during the market meltdown in 2007.

Some of the emails released by regulators, lawmakers and Goldman suggest a callous attitude among Goldman employees toward the risks involved in some of the Goldman mortgage deals, including one in which a Goldman employee referred to a mortgage transaction the firm sold to investors as a "sh—y" deal.

Over the years, the government has been reluctant to criminally charge financial firms with wrongdoing because the charge itself can cause a business to implode. Some investing clients can't or won't trade with a firm facing such a taint.

Indeed, in the more than two-century history of the U.S. financial markets, no major financial firm has survived criminal charges.

Securities firms E.F. Hutton & Co. and Drexel Burnham Lambert Inc. crumbled after being indicted in the 1980s.

In 2002 Arthur Andersen LLP went bankrupt after it was convicted of obstruction of justice for its role in covering up an investigation into Enron Corp. The conviction was later overturned by the Supreme Court.

In recent years, some financial firms have agreed to "deferred prosecutions," in which they agree to a probationary period for which they won't commit any future wrongdoing.

That's what Prudential Securities Inc. famously did in 1994 when that securities firm faced criminal charges that it misled investors about the risks and rewards of limited-partnership investments.

Prudential agreed to a three-year deferred prosecution, as well as fines and restitution, to end a criminal securities-fraud investigation.

American Media's Cultural Conquesnt

Watch our shows! Wear our cloths!

By Peter Mwaura

This form of imperialism colonizes the mind. There's a growing dominance of global media/entertainment systems, influenced mainly by the culture and interests of the US. The dominance results in the displacement or destruction of indigenous cultures.

Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day. The day celebrates press freedom and evaluates press freedom worldwide. Maybe, May 3 should also be a time to think about casting out the demons of cultural imperialism.

The UN General Assembly, when it proclaimed the day in 1993, forgot cultural imperialism, which has been around since the 1960s. Cultural imperialism, otherwise known as media imperialism, describes a situation where one country, or countries, dominate others through exports of their media products, such as television programming and news.

To speak of casting out the demons is, therefore, an allegory for decolonising the mind. There is a growing dominance of global media systems and entertainment products, influenced mainly by the culture and interests of the United States. The dominance results in the displacement or destruction of indigenous cultures.

Much of the dominance comes from the American media system. The US exports more media and entertainment products than any other nation and three of the most important transnational media corporations — AOL Time Warner, Disney and News Corporation (owned by Australian Rupert Murdoch, who acquired American citizenship) — are American.

At the same time, English remains the predominant language on the Internet, even though it is not the native language that most people in the world speak. There are, for example, three times as many native speakers of Chinese as native speakers of English.

In cultural imperialism, nations with dominant media systems impose their beliefs, values, lifestyles, and ideologies on others. America’s dominance in the entertainment industries makes it difficult for African countries to produce and distribute their own cultural products.

Add to that the growing popularity of Mexico’s romantic soaps, and the competition becomes tougher. Cultural imperialism prevents the development of native cultures and has a negative impact on the natives, who reject their own culture in favour of a foreign one.

The story of the women of Fiji is illustrative. Women with fuller figures are traditionally admired. Then television was introduced on the island in 1995 and Fijians started watching American shows like Baywatch, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place.

Over a three-year period, Anne Becker, director of research at the Harvard Eating Disorders Center of Harvard Medical School, carried out a study on the island to investigate shifts in body image and eating practices.

She found that the Western images and values transmitted via television led to an increase in disorders such as anorexia and bulimia.

A survey of teenage girls found that 74 percent of them felt they were “too big or fat”. The girls had absorbed the Western ideals of beauty. “The teenagers see TV as a model for how one gets by in the modern world,” reported Dr Becker. “They believe the shows depict reality.”

Cultural imperialism can take many forms. John Tomlinson, author of the book, Cultural Imperialism, defines cultural imperialism as “the use of political and economic power to exalt and spread the values and habits of a foreign culture at the expense of a native culture.”

Herbert Schiller, one of the best known writers on media imperialism, defines cultural imperialism as:

“The sum of the process by which a society is brought into the modern world system and how its dominating stratum is attracted, pressured, forced and sometimes bribed into shaping social institutions to correspond to, or even promote, the values and structures of the dominating centre of the system.”

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, in Decolonising the Mind, gives many examples of cultural imperialism. “But the biggest weapon wielded and actually daily unleashed by imperialism,” he writes, “is the cultural bomb.”

The effect of a cultural bomb is to “annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves,” he says.

“It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland,” he concludes. The intended results are despair, despondency and a collective death-wish.”

Cultural domination by the media was not something that was foreseen when on December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in which Article 19 states that press freedom includes the right “to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

China Bites Back With Report On; US Police' use of unrestrained violence

China redirects blame

By Patrick Martin

Last year, 315 police officers in New York City were subject to internal supervision due to “unrestrained use of violence. 7.3 million Americans [predominantly black] were banged up in the prison system, more than in any other country.

On March 13, China’s Information Office of the State Council published a report titled, “The Human Rights Record of the United States in 2009.”

This document was clearly intended as a rebuttal to the annual US State Department Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2009, released two days earlier.

The Chinese report quite legitimately notes that the US government “releases Country Reports on Human Rights Practices year after year to accuse other countries.

The US takes human rights as a political instrument to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, defame other nations’ image and seek its own strategic interests. This fully exposes its double standards on the human rights issue…”

The Chinese report is an eye-opening document—factual, sober, even understated, drawn entirely from public government and media sources in the United States, with each item carefully documented.

It presents a picture of 21st century America as much of the world sees it, one which is in sharp contrast to the official mythology and American media propaganda.

Not surprisingly, the report went unmentioned in the US mass media.

The 14-page report is divided into six major sections: Life, Property and Personal Security;

Civil and Political Rights;

Economic, Social and Cultural Rights;

Racial Discrimination;

Rights of Women and Children;

US Violations of Human Rights Against Other Nations.

The cumulative picture is one of a society in deep and worsening social crisis.

A few of the facts and figures cited on violence and police repression in the United States:

• Each year, 30,000 people die in gun-related incidents.

• There were 14,180 murders last year.

• In the first ten months of 2009, 45 people were killed by police use of tasers, bringing the total for the decade to 389.

• Last year, 315 police officers in New York City were subject to internal supervision due to “unrestrained use of violence.”

• 7.3 million Americans were under the authority of the correctional system, more than in any other country.

• An estimated 60,000 prisoners were raped while in custody last year.

On democratic rights, the report notes the pervasive government spying on citizens, authorized under the 2001 Patriot Act, extensive surveillance of the Internet by the National Security Agency, and police harassment of anti-globalization demonstrators in Pittsburgh during last year’s G-20 summit.

Pointing to the hypocrisy of US government “human rights” rhetoric, the authors observe, “the same conduct in other countries would be called human rights violations, whereas in the United States it was called necessary crime control.”

The report only skims the surface on the socioeconomic crisis in the United States, noting record levels of unemployment, poverty, hunger and homelessness, as well as 46.3 million people without health insurance. It does offer a few facts rarely discussed in the US media:

• 712 bodies were cremated at public expense in the city of Los Angeles last year, because the families were too poor to pay for a burial.

• There were 5,657 workplace deaths recorded in 2007, the last year for which a tally is available, a rate of 17 deaths per day (not a single employer was criminally charged for any of these deaths).

• Some 2,266 veterans died as a consequence of lack of health insurance in 2008, 14 times the military death toll in Afghanistan that year.

The report presents evidence of pervasive racial discrimination against blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans, the most oppressed sections of the US working class, including a record number of racial discrimination claims over hiring practices, more than 32,000.

It also notes the rising number of incidents of discrimination or violence against Muslims, and the detention of 300,000 “illegal” immigrants each year, with more than 30,000 immigrants in US detention facilities every day of the year.

It notes that the state of California imposed life sentences on 18 times more black defendants than white, and that in 2008, when New York City police fired their weapons, 75 percent of the targets were black, 22 percent Hispanic and only 3 percent white.

The report refers to the well-known reality of unequal pay for women, with median female income only 77 percent that of male income in 2008, down from 78 percent in 2007. According to the report, 70 percent of working-age women have no health insurance, or inadequate coverage, high medical bills or high health-related debt.

Children bear a disproportionate burden of economic hardship, with 16.7 million children not having enough food at some time during 2008, and 3.5 million children under five facing hunger or malnutrition, 17 percent of the total.

Child hunger is combined with the malignant phenomenon of rampant child labor in agriculture: some 400,000 child farm workers pick America’s crops.

The US also leads the world in imprisoning children and juveniles, and is the only country that does not offer parole to juvenile offenders.

US foreign policy comes in for justifiable criticism as well. A country with so many poor and hungry people accounts for 42 percent of the world’s total military spending, a colossal $607 billion, as well as the world’s largest foreign arms sales, $37.8 billion in 2008, up nearly 50 percent from the previous year.

The Chinese report notes the documented torture of prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, the worldwide US network of military bases, the US blockade of Cuba (opposed by the UN General Assembly by a vote of 187 to 3).

And the systematic US spying around the world, utilizing the NSA’s “ECHELON” interception system, as well as the US monopoly control over Internet route servers.

The report also points out the deliberate US flouting of international human rights covenants.

Washington has either signed but not ratified or refused to sign four major UN covenants: on economic, social and cultural rights; on the rights of women; on the rights of people with disabilities; and on the rights of indigenous peoples.

The report does not discuss the source of the malignant social conditions in the United States and the causal connection between poverty, repression and discrimination and the operations of the capitalist profit system.

Taking a much needed spring break from Uni

School is out, and I've the week ahead of me. My schedule holds nothing save the promise of social fulfillment and tranquil dreaming. It is a much needed break, at school, I have managed to collect a number of new obsessions, and shed a few old ones. I no longer feel obligated to wash my hands every time I come back from class, nor do I always wash before eating anymore. On a good run, I can manage to wash my hands maybe only once or twice in a single washing.

I am however, obsessed with gathering resources, by which I mean food and water. I seem to have taken to the curious obsession that I will run out. and so I'm always packing and stuffing food and water, sometimes beyond anything I could ever finish. Laughably, I'm not too unlike a squirrel, but without the tree climbing or the big bushy tale. Although, I would like to think I'm every bit as cute.

I am home from Uni now. This is, I feel, the best place for me to relax and begin to de-stress. Although homecoming hasn't been entirely stress free, I pick up little worries here and there, but thankfully they don't last long.

And on another note, I finally weighed myself. Just a quick note, I'm a fairly tall, and rather thin individual. Most people tell me I could afford to gain a few.When I weighed myself, I found I'd gained 5lbs since August. For a moment I was a tad concerned that it had taken me this long to gain any weight, however, now that I think about it, I think it's a good number. Thankfully I did not loose any weight, as that would've been cause for great concern.

Also, regarding my job. Well I used to work for the school paper. Keyword there, used to. I think I've just been (perhaps unofficially) fired; for poor attendance. I can't say I didn't see it coming. I'm waiting on a new job now, hopefully I'll get to work for the Uni's radio station. It's supposed to have more flexible hours. Which is good. I wasn't able to make very much money with the school paper and now, hopefully, this job will prove a little more lucrative for me.