valenzuelaclan

MOSCOW. (Lt.-Gen. Gennady Yevstafiyev (Ret.), Foreign Intelligence Service, for RIA Novosti)

The Iranian authorities and elite are busy transferring their bank accounts from Europe to Asia, or to Switzerland, whose territory is usually outside sanctions. These are multi-billion sums. Many analysts see this as Tehran's precaution ahead of a potential armed clash with the U.S. and its allies, which may take place if the attempt to settle the situation around Iran's nuclear program falls through.

Apparently, the Iranians have learnt their own lessons well and remember the sad experience of neighboring Iraq, which was attacked for its alleged attempt to hide the weapons of mass destruction from the world community.

For all the differences between the two regimes and their political and economic potentialities the Washington-drafted plan of action against Iran is strangely similar to the U.S. scenario for Iraq. But there are some indications that the U.S. strategists have lost some of their confidence since the cruel lesson in Iraq. This fact creates an additional chance for a diplomatic settlement of the problem.

According to U.S. political tradition, George W. Bush is an outgoing president, a lame duck. It would seem nothing should prevent him from being totally reckless in foreign policy, except for a natural desire to go down in history with a more positive image. The problem is that his entourage is not motivated to make a positive contribution to history. To the contrary, it is obsessed with a messianic idea to prove single-handed the prevailing military force of the U.S. super power, and its readiness to bear the heavy cross of the only propagator of American democracy, the only true democracy in the world.

It is this entourage that sets the pace of the attempts to step up the preparations for a strike against the Iranian regime. Clearly, the latter is no bargain either to professional diplomats or international officials who are trying to find a compromise on the Iranian nuclear problem.

U.S. long-term goals in Iran are obvious: to engineer the downfall of the current regime, establish control over Iran's oil and gas, and use its territory as the shortest route for the U.S.-controlled transportation of hydrocarbons from the regions of Central Asia and the Caspian Sea bypassing Russia and China. This is not to mention Iran's intransient military and strategic significance.

It is not yet clear what long-term goals are in the minds of the Iranian leaders, whose positions are far from flexible. Of course, for starters, they would like to have nuclear weapons like their second-rate neighbor Pakistan. Incidentally, it was the U.S., a vigorous fighter for the non-proliferation of the weapons of mass destruction, that allowed Pakistan to get the bomb without a problem. Now it is making declarations of love to its enemy India.

The ayatollahs believe that nuclear weapons would make Iran invulnerable to foreign pressure, and turn it into the number one nation of the Persian Gulf. Well-known Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus thinks that the Iranian nuclear program is not anti-Western, but was a response to Saddam Hussein's nuclear bid. But now that Saddam is no longer in the picture, and that Tehran has declared that its nuclear program is exclusively civilian, why repeat all these loud statements about the need to erase Israel like Carthage from the face of the Earth? Why make them sound as if Tehran already has nuclear weapons? It seems that if Tehran's policy were peaceful and well balanced, it would bring it many more benefits and allies against the background of the aggressive line adopted by the U.S., and would rule out any military initiatives.

In the absence of this line anything may happen; all the more so if the Americans or Israelis decide to provoke some particularly malicious act of terror in the Middle East through their local agents (Israel has more of them than the U.S.), and blame it on the verbose ideologists from Tehran.

The mentality of the current U.S. Administration officials suggests the following tentative scenario. First, they will persuade the world that the talks with Iran are a thing of the past, and that priority should be given to sanctions against it. A Security Council resolution on the imposition of any sanctions will be a key element. Once adopted, the sanctions will be followed by a chain of consistent steps, which, regardless of what the world might think, would result in the use of military force to overthrow the current regime.

But this far from simple task requires a lot of effort. To begin with, it is necessary to consolidate the Western alliance. It seems that although British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has said more than once that military solution is unthinkable, Prime Minister Tony Blair is, as usual, in Mr. Bush's pocket, and already taking part in drafting a plan of joint action as a junior partner. It may be that the Brits have been told to deal with the Shiites in Iraq because without at least some appeasement of this group it will be very difficult to guarantee success in the operation against Iran, which may use the Shiite lever any time for an asymmetrical but very painful response. Incidentally, this is evidence of the fact that the second-stage task - Iran's complete isolation - is far from being fulfilled. Therefore, now the focus of attention is still on exerting heavy psychological pressure on Iran, as well as on those countries, which do not give the U.S. complete carte blanche.

Last January the Director of the U.S. National Intelligence John Negroponte appointed Ms. S. Leslie Ireland as the Mission Manager for Iran. She was involved in intelligence in the Middle East for more than 20 years. It is easy to see what this mission is all about. Obviously, some Gulf nations already have their own Gateway, which became so infamous during the effort of the Security Council Special Commission to disarm Iraq. Moreover, Joseph Sirinsione, a major expert on the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, admitted that he was not right when he thought that the Bush Administration was not going to deal a military blow at Iran. Now he is sure that it will strike.

When told that the Iranians have many underground nuclear and military installations, the Pentagon proudly responds that it is already testing 700-ton precision bombs designed to destroy facilities (bunkers and depots) deep underground.

The U.S. has inspired the leak that the Iranian rulers are trying to persuade Turkmenbashi to let them stay in Turkmenistan during hostilities. Even the Pentagon's latest attack on Russian security services for alleged transfer of information about a future U.S. aggression to Iraq, is obviously aimed at creating a political atmosphere where nobody would even think of backing Tehran.

And what about a resolution submitted to the Senate in early 2006 with the demand of a ban (to be imposed by whom?) on Russian and Chinese arms supplies to Iran?

And what to do about Ukraine, which has ostensibly supplied Iran with 250 nuclear charges? What kind of an Orange ally is it?!

In general, the Americans have started playing the bear, like they did in Iraq.

Needless to say, Condoleezza Rice would like Iran to surrender, but this seems to be wishful thinking. Tehran has its own hawks. So the remaining options are to engineer a coup, preferably velvet, or to go for a blitz-intervention, or a completely disarming sudden attack.

It is clear that the Administration will try to minimize its military casualties, and will focus on the use of cruise missiles, and pilotless reconnaissance and assault aircraft. This is exactly why the Iranian hawks defiantly demonstrated their military arsenal not long ago. But they will fight the U.S. with other instruments, and their asymmetrical response may cost Washington dearly. Its allies will pay even more.

The situation is developing in fits and starts with monthly intervals. One more moment of truth is approaching today. The Iranians took a step when their Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced at the disarmament conference on March 30 Tehran's readiness to consider the formation of regional uranium-enrichment consortiums where all interested parties will take an equal part. Apparently, it is necessary to quickly analyze this step. What is it - a proposal of compromise, or an attempt to gain time? Meanwhile, another IAEA inspection is at work in Iran (all in all, IAEA inspectors have already spent 1,700 working inspection days in Iran, but the evidence of its involvement in the military program is not yet there). Let's repeat: the world sees these tricks as clumsy. However, the promotion by the Bush Administration of its ideas at home has produced results - the polls have shown a steady increase in the number of people who are ready to accept the use of any military force against Iran. As of March 15, their number was well over 55%. Continuous advocacy of even the most unjustified demands works wonders, as the Third Reich proved a long time ago.

In summary, the combined state and federal debt of the United States now stands at $14 trillion. The United States, the world's largest creditor nation when Ronald Reagan took office, is now the world's largest debtor nation. The federal debt has doubled in the last 8 years, during what is reported to the American people as being a record setting economic boom. During this same supposed economic boom, the federal government looted your social security trust fund for another 3/4 of a trillion dollars to balance the books.

A serious doubt exists as to whether this huge debt and its crushing interest payments ($60,000 per taxpayer since 1960) are really the responsibility of the taxpayers. Considering that the law under which this debt was incurred was voted into law before most of us were born, it's clear that the taxpayers have never really had a choice in the matter. Certainly the young people of today, not yet old enough to vote, have had no choice regarding the continuing payment of interest charges for a debt not of their making. To hand such a huge debt to our children and order them to pay it is indentured servitude at best, outright slavery at worst. No valid argument exists as to why children not yet old enough to vote are obliged to pay the debts of reckless government officials who held office before these children were born. The government decides that children shall be slaves to the debt, so slaves they shall be (until some courageous parents decide to put a stop to it).

Virtually every argument coming from those who would convince us to go on parting with our hard-earned money to pay this massive and impossible debt amounts to a claim that we always have the choice to vote for politicians who will somehow change things, and that the election of a particular candidate amounts to approval of his or her policies. Put simply, the fact that the public voted for Bill Clinton amounts to permission by the public for him to run the federal government deeper into debt and loot our retirement money, or so goes the theory.

One can easily challenge the logic behind such a claim. If, after all, the only candidates on the ballot intend to borrow more money, does that mean the voters approve of the eventual loans? Does the fact that Hitler won his election prove that all Germans approved of the death camps?

But beyond that simple fallacy lies a greater issue, one that until now has never been fully and properly examined. And that is whether the public really voted for those who are in power at all. Are our elections truly fair, or are they simply an illusion that the public approves of whatever despot has cheated his or her way to power.

Cuba is a good example. It's now generally acknowledged by historians that the elections which kept Batista in power were rigged. The CIA is known to have rigged elections in numerous countries around the world, to put in governments friendly to American interest, often detrimental to the people of those nations (often leading to revolution). A search through the news reports of elections around the world shows that a truly fair and honest election is indeed a rarity. It is therefore naive (not to mention racist) to start out assuming American elections are honest simply because we are Americans.

Are the elections in the United States fair and honest? A review of the facts is far less than reassuring.

Since 1964, right after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, vote tabulation for national elections has been handled not by the government, but by a private company lacking any official oversight at all. This company, which changes its name on a regular basis, is currently called "Voters News Service" and is located in New York City. This company is owned by a consortium of TV networks and wire services, which are in turn controlled by the CIA through its Operation MOCKINGBIRD. The TV networks will make a great show of being "first with the election results", but in reality all of them rely on the numbers sent to them by VNS, while seldom acknowledging its existence during the election coverage.

This is the voting process most in use in America today. A voter punches a card in the voting booth. That card is run through a computer at the local voting center, then that computer contacts computers at Voters News Service, or the precinct official telephones the numbers the computer shows him to Voters News Service, which then announces the results via the networks. Poll watchers are allowed to watch the voting booths, to guard against polling place electioneering, but in most precincts, the actual counting of the ballots is concealed from the public, and nobody is allowed to see inside the voting machines, or review the computer software that counts the ballots. 70% of all votes in America are counted by machine, and nobody, not private citizen, not local election official, nobody, is allowed to examine how it all works. The accuracy tests conducted on the voting machines before and after the actual election are utterly worthless, as they cannot detect fraud designed to fool the accuracy test itself. In 1988, when voting machines in Illinois were tested with tens of thousands of ballots instead of the few dozen normally used for the accuracy test, over 1/4 of the machines which had passed the standard accuracy test were found to have mistabulated the larger test vote results!

While researching the book, "VOTESCAM", the Collier brothers actually managed to videotape members of the League of Women voters forging ballots, and found hard evidence that Shouptronics and Printomatic vote machines were rigged in the Dade County Elections. In the Shouptronics, the wheels of the mechanical counters were shaved to cause miscounts. In the Printomatic machines, a malfunction revealed that the paper tape with the voting results had been pre-printed before the voting even started! The Colliers, along with attorney Ellis Rubin, handed the evidence to the assistant State Attorney for Florida. Sadly, that assistant State Attorney was Janet Reno, who in a pattern we have all become too familier with, killed the investigation. 60 Minutes taped a segment on the Dade County Vote Fraud, but never aired it.

Mandatory voter registration laws, such as "Motor voter" have been a boon to election fraud, generating registered voters who don't vote and whose names may be used to obtain absentee ballots. In the California election that unseated Bob Dornan following his efforts to investigate the Clinton White House, canvassers discovered that nearly half of the names registered to vote in the GOP election from 7 precincts simply did not exist. The California Attorney General's office was informed by the precinct worker, but again nothing was done. In 1998, almost 20,000 fraudulent voter registrations were discovered on the voting rolls, but were allowed to remain on the excuse that their removal in time for the election would cost too much!

The evidence for massive vote fraud in the United States uncovered by the Voting Integrity Project and organizations like it are ignored by the government, which has obviously been the beneficiary of such chicanery, and by the media, which is complicit in the fraud. When vote fraud was suspected in the 1996 Arizona Primary (the one that ended Pat Buchanon's winning streak after New Hampshire), the Arizona legislature passed a special law forbidding a recount for that one primary election only! When the Miami Magazine ran a story on the Dade County Vote Fraud, the magazine was purchased just one month later by the editor of the Miami News, Sylvan Meyer, who ordered that no further stories on vote fraud be published. When precinct workers in the 1974 Dade County elections discovered that the voting machines they were using were rigged, they walked off the job and refused to certify the election process. Police and fire fighters took over the polling duties. The next day, the Miami Herald reported the walk out, but not the reason. When the precinct workers went to the media to report the election rigging, the media ignored them. So did the local attorney general. So did the FBI. Citizens who tried to observe the next election were arrested.

Typical of the horror stories associated with the media-owned Voters News Service is what happened in Dubuque County Iowa during the 1996 Caucuses. The county's 41 precincts met in 41 classrooms at two high schools and voted on old fashioned paper ballots, which were then counted in full view of all present (including representatives of the candidates), and the results posted for all to see and verify. The vote totals were then phoned directly into Voters News Service by the county chairman, again in full view of all participants that night. Buchanon won the county by a wide margin, garnering 870 votes. By next morning, Voters News Service had dropped Buchanon's vote total for that county down to 757 votes, a 13% drop. Buchanon lost Iowa by a much smaller margin than 13%.

The Iowa state GOP claimed it could do nothing about the problem; they were "in VNS' hands". VNS, despite the paper ballots proving Buchanon's 870 votes, refused to admit error and refused to change the results for the county. Needless to say, the question of whether Buchanon had had 13% of his votes shaved off in other Iowa counties, ones in which computerized vote machines meant there was no audit trail to check, was ignored. The fact that an obviously fraudulent vote had made it all the way through the system to be reported on national television was also ignored by the media. (Iowa is the state, it should be noted, where a columnist for Salon magazine was charged with vote fraud.)

The complicity by the law enforcement machinery of this nation is astounding. In one election in Boston, a judge declared 968 ballots which had been declared "blank" due to multiple punches to be valid, arbitrarily assigning most of the disputed votes to the incumbent candidate, thereby reversing his defeat. In a computer vote fraud case in West Virginia, an expert witness testifying for the plaintiff sat down at a CES voting machine provided by the defendants, studied it for a while, then with a single ballot card added 10,000 votes to one of the fictional candidates. The judge refused to allow the jury to see the demonstration and the charges were eventually dropped.

Only three states, California, Florida, and Michigan, have laws requiring that the voting machine source code be placed in escrow should it need to be examined after an election. None of those states have any means to verify that the source code placed in escrow is in fact the origin of the compiled code running on the machines election night, and in Michigan, the escrow is simply handled by the voting machine company itself with no overview by a state agency or public interest group.

All the voting machines used in the United States come from just three companies. The Presidents of two of them have been convicted of vote fraud and yet all state governments continue to do business (at very steep fees) with just these three companies. The largest of the three companies has direct access to 50% of the nation's votes. Nobody is allowed to inspect the machines, or watch as the vote totals are accumulated and counted, and there is no audit trail anywhere along the path from the voting machine to Voter's News Service, the private media-owned company that without any official oversight, tells us all what the election results are.

Most states have now passed laws requiring a challenge to election results to be filed within a few weeks of the election, far too short a time for anyone to properly determine if such a challenge is warranted.

Despite such an obvious inhibition, a Democrat who lost a legislative seat in the 1998 Hawaiian election did file a challenge, claiming there was vote fraud. A quick audit showed that vote fraud involving absentee ballots had indeed occurred, but mostly by the Democrat; who had cheated, but not enough to win. This scandal triggered public questions about several races, including that of the Democratic Governor, Ben Cayutano, who had been trailing his Republican challenger all during the election night, only to have a sudden surge of votes at the last second push him over the top. The governor offered to over-ride the state's two week filing deadline for election challenges and allow a full recount, then back-pedaled and made a full recount contingent on a "pre-audit". The "pre-audit" was assigned to the company which had run the election, along with a warning that if it turned out the election was flawed, their final payment would be withheld by the State of Hawaii. Needless to say the pre-audit found no errors in the election, and despite the urging of the Voter Integrity Project (which was conducting its own investigation) the full recount was canceled. The voting company, ES&S was again been awarded the voting contract for the 2000, 2002, and 2004 elections, without any open bidding.

Who chooses what government we live under? Those who cast the votes, or as Stalin observed, those who count them? Do We The People pick those who govern us, or does a private company, owned by the CIA controlled media, and operating without any public oversight? Have We The People consented by vote to bear the $14 trillion burden of a government's reckless fiscal policy, or was that consent and that vote fraudulently obtained?

Just think about all it really means if the elections are being rigged on a massive scale.

It means that the contract between ruler and ruled is broken. The government does not govern with the consent of the governed, it rules by treachery and deception. The crown it wears is a stolen one, usurped from the people by three voting machine companies and one media owned results-announcer totally beyond review and reproach.

So, now we come back to the issue of government debt and who is really responsible for it. If, as appears to be the case, our elections are routinely being rigged, then it cannot be argued that We The People either chose, or approved of, those officials who borrowed trillions of dollars without our permission and sought to enslave us to that debt.

In an atmosphere of doubt about the validity of the voting process, it cannot be assumed that the American people have actually voted for or approved of any of the government's actions and policies for the last 35 years. That includes a couple of wars and some $14 trillion in debt, and the $60,000 in interest payments alone each taxpayer has had to fork over since the 60s.

In light of the numerous incidents of vote fraud uncovered through the years and the quite obvious stonewall on the subject by the officials who benefit from rigged elections and the media that at least helps in the rigging, it is dangerous to assume that American elections are honest. The burden of proof must lie with VNS and the voting machine companies to prove their honesty.

In an atmosphere of doubt about the validity of the voting process, it appears that the entire voting process is a sham, a trick to fool the American people into accepting whatever is done to them by creating the illusion that the people somehow voted for and approved of whatever is being done. That's how Batista fooled the Cuban people. That's how the USSR fooled the Soviet citizens. And that's how the American government fools us.

Do We The People owe that $14 trillion? No, we do not. It was borrowed without our permission. No citizen agreed to repay that money.

Those government officials who borrowed that money and intend that We The People should be forced to repay it can no longer do so on the assumption that they rule with the consent of those who vote.

The best that can be said is that they rule with the consent of those who count the vote.

 WOW I didnt know gold was such a bad bet.  If only I got in at $250 and ounce.  Still a good buy, Buy this time next year maybe $1000.  People only buy gold before or after an economic crisis.  Expect an attack on Iran.  Or the Iranian oil burse is making a dent on the dollar and investers are looking for something real and safe...
 
 Gold Reaches $600 an Ounce for First Time Since 1981 as Commodities Rally

Oil Rises to Two-Month High, Gasoline Jumps on Concern Over Fuel Supplies

U.S. Stocks' Three-Day Rally Ends as Gold, Oil Gains May Signal Inflation  
 
Gold Tops $600 as Investors Bet Metals Will Beat Stocks, Bonds
April 6 (Bloomberg) -- Gold in New York climbed above $600 an ounce for the first time in 25 years as investors bet metals will fetch better returns than stocks and bonds.

Gold has gained more than $100, or about 20 percent, since the end of November, beating the Standard & Poor's 5 percent return. U.S. corporate bonds earned less than 1 percent. Investments in index-linked commodity funds will rise 38 percent this year to $140 billion, according to Barclays Capital.

``Commodities are the flavor of the month,'' David Gornall, head of foreign exchange and bullion at Natexis Commodity Markets Ltd. in London, said in an interview today. ``Gold, silver, zinc or copper, it doesn't really matter what it is, as long as it's a commodity.''

Gold for June delivery rose $7.10 or 1.2 percent to $599.60 an ounce at 1:24 p.m. on the Comex division of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices earlier reached $601.90, the highest since January 1981.

Funds are betting commodities will keep outperforming other assets such as stocks and bonds. The soaring gold price has mirrored gains this year in other metals such as copper, zinc and silver, and agricultural commodities including sugar. Copper has climbed 30 percent this year. Zinc has jumped almost 48 percent. Sugar has advanced 21 percent.

`A Valid Asset Class'

``You're bringing in a new segment into the market that was never there,'' said Michael Guido, director of hedge fund marketing and commodity strategy for Societe Generale SA in New York. ``A lot of investor money is pouring into gold and commodities. It's become a valid asset class.''

Gold may attract investors as worldwide interest rates remain too low to contain inflation, analysts said. Oil prices hit a two-month high today.

Uncertainty over future interest rate hikes in the U.S., Japan and Europe has depleted confidence in currencies and enticed investors to accumulate gold, analysts said.

The European Central Banks left its main rate at 2.5 percent today. The U.S. benchmark rate is at 4.75 percent after 15 straight increases. Japan's rate remains close to zero. Gold gained in all currencies last year, paced by a 36 percent surge in gold sold in euros and yen. The metal priced in yen has climbed 15 percent this year. Gold sold in euros has gained 12 percent.

``Gold is benefiting on the backs of the dollar, the euro and the yen,'' said William Fleckenstein, president of Fleckenstein Capital Inc. in Seattle, who began buying gold when it was $300 and last purchased futures when the metal traded around $550. ``Even if you like one, it's just the lesser of evils. The move in gold has been against all currencies.''

Central Banks

Some central banks are buying gold to diversify their foreign currency reserves. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hinted yesterday that China might change the makeup of its foreign exchange reserves, the South China Morning Post reported. China's currency reserves climbed to $853.7 billion in February. The country has now surpassed Japan as the world's largest holder of foreign currencies.

About 75 percent of China's reserves are held in U.S. dollars while about 1.3 percent are held in gold.

``It could be bullish for gold if they decide to move wholesale out of the dollar into gold,'' Fleckenstein said. ``I have no interest in selling any of my gold.

Higher oil prices are also boosting gold prices as investors seek a hedge against accelerating inflation. Gold typically rises as price increases quicken. The precious metal surged to $873 an ounce in 1980, when U.S. consumer prices jumped more than 12 percent.

Crude gained for a second day in New York as declining gasoline stockpiles before the peak U.S. summer-driving season added to concern about reduced exports from Nigeria and Iran.

`Everything is Bullish'

``Everything is bullish for gold,'' Christoph Eibl, head of commodities trading at Zug, Switzerland-based Tiberius Asset Management AG, said in an interview today. ``Look at oil prices, look at the euro and base metals. People are just crazy for commodities.''

Investment funds have been the biggest buyers of gold this year, outpacing purchases by jewelers, who accounted for 73 percent of demand last year, the London-based World Gold Council said in a March 29 newsletter.

Speculative long positions in gold futures, or bets prices will rise, outnumbered short positions by 120,586 contracts as of March 28 on the Comex, the Washington-based Commodity Futures Trading Commission said March 31. Net-long positions rose by 16,322 contracts, or 16 percent, the biggest weekly increase since November 2005.

``We're entering bubble territory,'' said Eibl at Tiberius, which has holdings in energy, metals and agricultural commodities. ``Prices have moved away from reality, and are no longer linked to fundamentals.''
 

To contact the reporters on this story:
Danielle Rossingh in London  drossingh@bloomberg.net;
Pham-Duy Nguyen in Seattle at  pnguyen@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: April 6, 2006 14:07 EDT

Published on Thursday, April 6, 2006 by the Washington Spectator 
A Culture of Corruption
Let's Save Our Democracy by Getting Money Out of Politics
 
by Bill Moyers
 
Money is choking our democracy to death. Our elections are bought out from under us and our public officials are doing the bidding of mercenaries. So powerful is the hold of wealth on politics that we cannot say America is working for all Americans. The majority may support such broad social goals as affordable medical coverage for all, decent wages for working people, safe working conditions, a secure retirement, and clean air and water, but there is no government "of, by, and for the people" to deliver on those aspirations.

Our system of privately financed campaigns has shut regular people out of any meaningful participation in democracy. Less than one-half of one percent of all Americans made a political contribution of $200 or more to a federal candidate in 2004. When the average cost of winning a seat in the House of Representatives has topped $1 million, we can no longer refer to that chamber as "The People's House." Congress belongs to the highest bidder.

At the same time that the cost of getting elected is exploding beyond the reach of ordinary people, the business of influencing our elected representatives has become a growth industry. Since President Bush was elected the number of registered lobbyists in Washington has more than doubled. That's 16,342 lobbyists in 2000 and 34,785 last year: 65 lobbyists for every member of Congress. The total spent per month by special interests wining, dining, and seducing federal officials is now nearly $200 million. Per month.

Numbers don't tell the whole story. With pro-corporate officials running both the executive and legislative branches, lobbying that was once reactive has sallied forth to buy huge chunks of public policy. One example: In 2004 the computer maker Hewlett-Packard sought Republican-backed legislation that would enable it to bring back to the United States, at a dramatically lowered tax rate, as much as $14.5 billion in profits from foreign subsidiaries. The company nearly doubled its budget for contract lobbyists and took on an elite lobbying firm as its Washington arm. Presto! The legislation passed. The company's director of government affairs was quite candid: "We're trying to take advantage of the fact that Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House."

GREED WITHOUT APOLOGIES—I am an equal opportunity muckraker. Anyone who saw the documentary my team and I produced on the illegal fund-raising for Bill Clinton's re-election knows I am no fan of the Democratic money-machine that helped tear away the party from whatever roots it had in the struggles of working people. But today the Republicans own the government lock, stock, and barrel. And they have turned their self-proclaimed revolution into a cash cow.

Look back at the bulk of legislation passed by Congress in the past decade: an energy bill that gives oil companies huge tax breaks at the same time that ExxonMobil has just posted $36.13 billion in profits and our gasoline and home heating bills are at an all-time high; a bankruptcy "reform" bill written by credit card companies to make it harder for poor debtors to escape the burdens of divorce or medical catastrophe; the deregulation of the banking, securities and insurance sectors, which brought on rampant corporate malfeasance and greed and the destruction of the retirement plans of millions of small investors; the deregulation of the telecommunications sector, which led to cable industry price-gouging and an undermining of news coverage; protection for rampant overpricing of pharmaceutical drugs; and the blocking of even the mildest attempt to prevent American corporations from dodging an estimated $50 billion in annual taxes by opening a P.O. box in an off-shore tax haven like the Cayman Islands.

In every case the results were produced by rivers of cash flowing to favored politicians from interests whose return on their investment put Wall Street equities to shame. This happens because our public representatives need huge sums to finance their campaigns, especially to pay for television advertising. The masters of the money game have taken advantage of that weakness in our democracy to turn our elections into auctions.

A WALK DOWN K STREET—It's the Wall Street of lobbying, the address of many of Washington's biggest lobbying firms. The "K Street Project"—the most successful shakedown operation since the first Gilded Age—was the brainchild of Representative Tom DeLay and Grover Norquist, the right-wing strategist who famously said that his goal is to shrink government so that it can be "drowned in a bathtub" (when, finally, it will be too impotent to protect democracy from plunder and powerless citizens from the rapacity of corporate power). For his part, Tom DeLay ran a pest exterminating business in Sugar Land, Texas, where he hated government regulators who dared to tell him that some of the pesticides he used were dangerous. He got himself elected to the Texas legislature at a time when the Republicans were becoming the majority in the once-solid Democratic South, and early in his new career "Hot Tub Tom," as he was known in Austin, became a born-again Christian.

In addition to finding Jesus, Tom DeLay discovered the power of money to drive his career. By raising more than $2 million from lobbyists and business groups and distributing it to dozens of Republican candidates in 1994, the year of the Republican breakthrough in the House, DeLay bought the loyalty of many freshmen legislators who helped elect him Majority Whip, the House's number three man.

He wasted no time in inviting lobbyists to write the Republican agenda. Their first priority was "Project Relief"—"relief" from labor standards that protected workers from the physical injuries of repetitive work, "relief" from tougher rules on meat inspection, "relief" from effective monitoring of hazardous air pollutants. Scores of companies were soon adding one juicy and expensive tidbit after another. On the eve of the debate, according to Michael Weisskopf and David Maraniss of the Washington Post, 20 major corporate groups advised lawmakers that "this was a key vote, one that would be considered in future campaign contributions."

The Machine was off and running. As then-Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich famously told the lobbyists: "If you are going to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules." The rules were simple enough. Contribute to Republicans only. Hire only Republicans as lobbyists (priority preference: DeLay's own staff). Centralize the power to write legislation in the hands of the party bosses (assisted by hovering lobbyists). Allow no amendments. Produce bills in secret. Permit members no time to read them. Pass important bills late at night. Avoid compromise by banning Democrats from conference committees. Give lobbyists and campaign contributors what they want.

While examples abound of how the rules stacked the deck, consider one: the Medicare prescription coverage bill. Enacted after midnight, its hundreds and hundreds of pages unintelligible to anyone but lobbyists, the legislation enriched the pharmaceutical and insurance companies while giving senior citizens and taxpayers the shaft.

THE MONEY MAN—DeLay, who had announced that God had chosen him to return American to a "biblical worldview," needed help to sustain the cash flow necessary for spreading the Gospel of Greed. He found it in a fellow right-wing ideologue named Jack Abramoff, who personified the K-Street money-machine of which DeLay, with the blessing of his party's leaders, was the major-domo. It was Abramoff who helped DeLay raise those millions of dollars from campaign donors to create the base for an empire of corruption.

Abramoff has now pleaded guilty to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. It's a spectacular fall for a man whose rise to power began in his school days with his election as chairman of the College Republicans. Despite its innocuous name, the organization became a political attack machine for the far right and a launching pad for younger conservatives on the make.

"Our job," Abramoff, then 22 years old, wrote after his first visit to the Reagan White House, "is to remove liberals from power permanently. . . ." (He would later acknowledge that his agenda also included moving K Street closer to the Republican Party.) Karl Rove had once held the same job as chairman. So did Grover Norquist, who ran Abramoff's campaign. A youthful $200-a-month intern named Ralph Reed was at their side. These were the rising young stars of the conservative movement who came to town to lead a revolution and stayed to run a racket.

CASINO ROYALE—Abramoff made his name, so to speak, representing Indian tribes and their gambling interests. As his partner he hired a DeLay crony named Michael Scanlon. Together they would bilk half a dozen tribes who hired them to protect their gambling interests from competition. What the two men had to offer, of course, was their connections to the Republican power structure, including members of Congress, friends at the White House (Abramoff's personal assistant became the personal assistant of Karl Rove), Christian Right activists like Reed, and right-wing ideologues like Norquist. The network hummed smoothly for its inside traders—as, for example, when two lobbying clients of Abramoff paid $25,000 to Norquist's organization, Americans for Tax Reform, for lunch at the White House and a meeting with President Bush in May 2001, according to the Texas Observer.

In a scheme they called "Gimme Five." Abramoff would refer tribes to Scanlon for grassroots public-relations work, and Scanlon would then kick back about 50 percent to Abramoff, all without the tribes' knowledge. Before it was over, the tribes had paid the two lobbyists $82 million, much of it going directly into Abramoff's and Scanlon's pockets. And that doesn't count the thousands more that Abramoff directed the tribes to pay out in campaign contributions.

Some of the money found its way into an outfit called the Council of Republicans for Environment Advocacy, founded by Gale Norton before she was appointed to run the Department of the Interior, which—surprise! surprise!—is the agency most responsible for Indian gaming rights. Some went to so-called charities, set up by Abramoff and DeLay, that filtered money for lavish trips for members of Congress and their staffs, as well as salaries for Congressional family members and DeLay's pet projects.

And some of the money found its way to the Holy High Rollers of the Christian Right. Ralph Reed, for one, had his hand out. Reed had become the religious right's poster boy against gambling ("We believe gambling is a cancer on the American body politic," he had said). Now Abramoff and Scanlon would pay Reed some $4 million to help them protect their own gaming interests. His assignment was to whip up Christian opposition to gambling initiatives that could cut into the profits of Abramoff's clients.

Reed enlisted some of the brightest stars in the Christian firmament in a ruse conducted on Abramoff's behalf: they would oppose gambling on religious and moral grounds in strategic places at decisive moments when competition threatened Abramoff's clients. Bogus Christian groups were part of the strategy. A gaggle of influential Baptist preachers in Texas danced to Reed's fiddling. Folks in Louisiana heard the voice of God on the radio—performed by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson—thundering against a riverboat gambling scheme that Abramoff feared would jeopardize the profits of a client. Reed even got James Dobson, whose nationwide radio "ministry" reaches millions of people (and whose videos helped Tom DeLay find Jesus) to deluge the Interior Department and White House with telephone calls from indignant Christians.

Abramoff arranged for the Mississippi Choctaws, who were trying to stave off competition from other tribes, to contribute over $1 million to Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, which then passed the money along to the Alabama Christian Coalition and to another anti-gambling group Reed had duped into aiding the cause. It is unclear how much these Christian soldiers knew about the true purpose of their crusade, but Reed knew all along that his money was coming from Abramoff. The e-mails between the two men read like a modern version of Elmer Gantry.

As reported by the Washington Post and National Journal, some of Abramoff's money from lobbying went to start a non-profit organization called the U.S. Family Network, founded with the help of a top aide to Tom DeLay while he was still in DeLay's employ (his salary at the time paid by—you guessed it—taxpayers). DeLay even wrote a fundraising letter in its behalf. The group announced that its purpose was to promote policies favorable for "families, the economic prosperity, social improvement, moral fitness, and general well being of the United States," and its fund-raising screeds warned that the American family "is being attacked from all sides: crime, drugs, pornography . . . and gambling." But its first donation came from the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians, followed by other Abramoff clients who couldn't care less about the professed moral agenda.

The U.S. Family Network turns out to be another scam in the Abramoff-DeLay money laundering machine. Its money paid for attack ads on Democrats, bought a townhouse three blocks from DeLay's Congressional quarters, providing him with free office space where he could go to raise funds for the Machine, and awarded DeLay's wife a sizable salary.

But that's the least of it. Working with Abramoff through a now defunct law firm in London and an obscure offshore company in the Bahamas, oil and gas executives from Russia used the U.S. Family Network to funnel money to influence Tom DeLay, then-majority leader of the House of Representatives. A Christian pastor recruited to serve as the titular president of the organization was told by DeLay's sidekick that $1 million was passed through from sources in Russia who wanted DeLay's support for legislation enabling the International Monetary Fund to bail out the faltering Russian economy without demanding new taxes on the country's energy industry. Lo and behold, there was Tom Delay, appearing on an obliging Fox News television show, arguing the Russian position. The rueful pastor who was the organization's nominal head said he was told, "This is the way things work in Washington."

"REFORM" TALK FIZZLES—The Republican leaders would have us believe this is just a "lobbying scandal." They assume that if they pass a few minor reforms to put a little distance between the politician and the lobbyist, we will think everything is okay and they can go back to business as usual. Just look at Congressman John Boehner, elected to replace Tom DeLay as House Majority Leader. He's been a full player in the K Street Project and DeLay's money machine. The top lobbyists in town frequent his office. He thinks nothing of cruising with them in the Caribbean or of hopping on corporate jets arranged by them. This is the man who ten years ago moved around the floor of the House—the "People's House"—handing out checks from tobacco executives.

As for Tom Delay? He is under indictment in Texas for money laundering and had to resign as Majority Leader. But just the other day the party bosses gave him a seat on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, where big contributors get their rewards. And—are you ready for this?—they put him on the subcommittee overseeing the budget of the Justice Department, which is investigating the Abramoff scandal, including Abramoff's connections to DeLay. I'm not making this up. It's business as usual. Rotten business as usual.

I have touched on only a few of the astonishing details pouring out about the sacking of Washington. The corrupting power of money in politics is an old story. This time is different, because in a one-party government the opposition is impotent and the corporate media, with a few notable exceptions, have bought into the notion that this is "just the way Washington works." Already the calls for reform are fading away.

CLEAN ELECTIONS—You may say, "What can we do about it? These forces are too rich, too powerful, too entrenched to be defeated." Maybe. But if others had given up before us, blacks would still be three-fifths of a person, women wouldn't have the vote, workers couldn't organize, and children would still be working in the mines. It's time to fight again. These people in Washington have no right to be doing what they are doing. It's not their government, it's your government. They work for you, and if they let you down and sell you out, they should be fired. That goes for everyone, from the lowliest bureaucrat in town to the senior leaders of Congress on up to the president of the United States. The stakes are too high for us to give up.

Fortunately, there is something we can do. A movement is gathering across the country that could restore democracy to a country run by money. It's the "clean money" campaign for the public funding of our elections. Maine led the way in 2000. Arizona followed suit. So have several municipalities, including Portland, Oregon, and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Races are more competitive and attract a more diverse group of candidates.

No sooner had Janet Napolitano been elected governor of Arizona under the state's public financing program than she instituted reforms establishing low-cost prescription drug subsidies for seniors. There have also been advances in Maine in providing low-cost prescription drugs for residents. Why? Because the politicians write the legislation, not the lobbyists.

Look what happened in Connecticut last year, a state rocked by multiple political scandals. People decided to break the link between big donors and public officials. By December the legislature had passed clean-money reform, banning campaign contributions from lobbyists and state contractors. Connecticut is the first state where the legislature and governor have approved full public funding for their own races. In thirty other states clean-money campaigns are also forming. (You can find out more about the movement at the website of Public Campaign.)

While public funding won't solve all the problems—the Abramoffs and DeLays of the world will always find ways to abuse the public trust—it would go a long way toward restoring the hope of government "of, by, and for the people." Even some business lobbyists are having second thoughts. Business Week recently quoted one of them as saying: "As a conservative, I've always opposed government involvement. But it seems to me the real answer is federal financing of Congressional elections."

Just think: For about $10 per taxpayer, per year, we, the people, could buy back our politicians in Congress and the White House with full public funding. But time is running out. Unless we offer qualified candidates a different source of campaign funding with clean, disinterested and accountable public money, the selling of America will go on, and we will wake up one day in a country we no longer recognize.

Bill Moyers is a broadcast journalist and former host the PBS program NOW With Bill Moyers. Moyers also serves as president of the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy.

Don't worry, everthing will be OK, please go back to your sofa and put on the Nightly news.  You'll see, they will tell you want you need to know to calm down.  Oh look over there,  BOOOOMM, damit its alqida...whatch out over there!!! 

Gold is at a thirty year high...HMMM

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