New Twist in Kennedy Mystery; Photo Negatives of Robert F. Kennedy's Assassination Disappear

By: EMI ENDO and ERIC MALNIC TIMES STAFF WRITERS

The negatives of some photographs taken in the moments surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy are missing.

That is not a matter of debate.

But almost everything else about the pictures is.

Did they show the crucial seconds when bullets felled the presidential candidate in a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, as claimed by the photographer, Jamie Scott Enyart? Or did they show nothing of the assassination, as alleged by the city attorney's office?

Could they have been destroyed, along with other evidence, after the official assassination investigation, as suggested by Enyart? Or were they simply misplaced, only to turn up in state archives more than 25 years later, as claimed by city and state officials?

And was a manila envelope containing the recently rediscovered negatives stolen from a courier's car in Inglewood last Friday, as claimed by the courier? Even attorneys for the city, who may soon have to mount a defense in Enyart's $2-million lawsuit over the missing negatives, admit that the circumstances surrounding the alleged theft are "highly unusual."

Enyart's attorney, Alvin Greenwald, hinted darkly at a conspiracy--a suggestion, never substantiated, that has haunted every investigation of the New York senator's death.

"Somebody, for some reason, is making sure those photos do not reach public view," Greenwald said.

Louis "Skip" Miller, an attorney for the city, conceded that the incident in Inglewood was strange, but he scoffed at Greenwald's suggestion.

"What happened here is just a petty theft," Miller said. "A run of bad luck."

The Los Angeles City Council offered a $5,000 reward Wednesday for the negatives' safe return, saying they are "critical evidence" in the defense against Enyart's lawsuit.

Enyart said Wednesday that he is in "absolute shock" over the missing negatives.

"They've been playing fast and loose with the evidence since Day 1," he said, suggesting that some important material in the case had been deliberately destroyed. "All I want is my photos."

Enyart, now a 43-year-old television special effects director, was a 15-year-old amateur photographer when he attended the primary election gathering at the Ambassador in 1968. By his account, he shot three rolls of film that night.

He said most of those exposures were made during Kennedy's victory speech in the Ambassador's ballroom, but a few captured the critical moments when Kennedy was gunned down seconds later in a nearby pantry.

(Enyart's pictures should not be confused with the widely circulated photos of the dying senator by Times staff photographer Boris Yaro and Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge.)

In the weeks that followed the slaying, investigators confiscated every photograph they could find that had been taken that night at the Ambassador. Enyart's were among them.

Later, when he asked for his film, he learned that the courts had ordered that investigative files on the case--and all evidentiary material related to it--be sealed for 20 years.

After waiting 20 years, Enyart asked for his photos back in 1988. The city said it had lost them. Enyart, who had begun work on a book about the assassination, responded with a $2-million lawsuit that he filed against the city and state on Aug. 14, 1989.

Last August, Enyart was told that his negatives had been found in the state archives in Sacramento, where they had been filed mistakenly under the wrong name. The state hired a courier, George Phillip Gebhardt, who flew to Los Angeles International Airport on Friday with an envelope that was said to contain the negatives.

Gebhardt later told Inglewood police that as he headed downtown in a rented car, he got a flat tire on Century Boulevard near Freeman Avenue. He said that when he got out to inspect the tire, he may have left the right front window partially open. The courier said that when he got back into the car, his jacket, which he had left on the front seat, and the envelope, which he had left on the back seat, were missing.

Gebhardt acknowledged that he didn't see anyone near the car when he got out to check the tire. But he said that when he had stopped for a traffic light a block earlier, he had seen a man get out of a red car behind him and start pounding the fender of the red car with his fist. That man, Gebhardt suggested, might have slashed his tire.

On Wednesday, during preliminary court maneuverings for the trial of the lawsuit, which is scheduled to start Feb. 5, attorneys for the city displayed contact prints they said had been made from the negatives before they were lost. None of the prints showed Kennedy after he left the ballroom.

Enyart insisted that the contact prints were incomplete. He said he had taken pictures that showed Kennedy twisting and falling after he was shot in the pantry: "I watched Kennedy fall to the ground. Where are those photos?"

Miller, the attorney for the city, responded with skepticism.

"He's trying to say two more rolls of film are missing, but they don't exist," Miller said. "There are no pantry pictures."

AIPAC TRIAL POSPONED INDEFINITELY!

A judge has again delayed the trial of two pro-Israel lobbyists after prosecutors indicated they may take an unusual pre-trial appeal of a ruling on what classified information the defense may present to the jury.

At a hearing today in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Judge Thomas Ellis III postponed indefinitely the trial that had been set for April 29 for the two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman

Messrs. Rosen and Weissman were charged in 2005 with conspiring to receive classified information and pass it on to journalists and foreign diplomats.

Prosecutors told Judge Ellis that they are likely to file a notice of appeal of a lengthy order he issued Wednesday after months of hearings under the Classified Information Protection Act. Lawyers close to the case cautioned that the notice is simply a mechanism to protect the government's right to appeal and does not necessarily mean an appeal will be pursued.

A spokesman for the prosecution, James Rybicki, confirmed the in-courtroom events. He would not comment on whether prosecutors had approval from officials in the Solicitor General's office at the Justice Department to pursue an appeal, which would be directed to the 4th Circuit in Richmond, Va

Mr. Rosen's defense attorney, Abbe Lowell, expressed frustration over the further delay. "It now appears the government does not want to try this case," Mr. Lowell told The New York Sun this evening. "They filed these charges almost three years ago without thinking them through and there doesn't appear to be anybody in the government with either the authority or the courage to admit they made a mistake. The delays are devastating to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman."

Mr. Lowell's suggestion of disarray in the prosecution team seemed to refer to the fact that a longtime lead prosecutor on the case, Kevin DiGregory, quit last month and took a job with a private law firm.

Under the law, an appeal of the classified-information order is supposed to be expedited, but lawyers said it was unclear how quickly the 4th Circuit would move if an appeal is pursued.

At issue is an order of more than 270 pages that Judge Ellis issued setting out what classified information the defense can use at trial and how classified information can be paraphrased or substituted. The judge cannot force the government to abide by the order, but he has the authority to dismiss the case or to impose some other sanction such as partial dismissal or exclusion of evidence important to the government.

In federal court, appeals are not usually permitted during pretrial proceedings, but the classified-information law, known as Cipa, permits them. Nevertheless, such appeals are rare. One previous Cipa appeal in the 4th Circuit was taken in the case of a former CIA station chief for Costa Rica charged with making false statements in the Iran-Contra probe, Joseph Fernandez. A district judge in Alexandria, Claude Hilton, threw the case out after the government refused to accept his rulings on what classified information was essential to the defense. The 4th Circuit upheld the dismissal.

Judge Ellis indicated today that he plans to hold another hearing next week to discuss how to proceed with the case against Messrs. Rosen and Weissman.

NSA Had Access Built into Microsoft Windows

A CARELESS mistake by Microsoft programmers has revealed that special access codes prepared by the US National Security Agency have been secretly built into Windows. The NSA access system is built into every version of the Windows operating system now in use, except early releases of Windows 95 (and its predecessors). The discovery comes close on the heels of the revelations earlier this year that another US software giant, Lotus, had built an NSA "help information" trapdoor into its Notes system, and that security functions on other software systems had been deliberately crippled.

The first discovery of the new NSA access system was made two years ago by British researcher Dr Nicko van Someren. But it was only a few weeks ago when a second researcher rediscovered the access system. With it, he found the evidence linking it to NSA.

Computer security specialists have been aware for two years that unusual features are contained inside a standard Windows software "driver" used for security and encryption functions. The driver, called ADVAPI.DLL, enables and controls a range of security functions. If you use Windows, you will find it in the C:Windowssystem directory of your computer.

ADVAPI.DLL works closely with Microsoft Internet Explorer, but will only run cryptographic functions that the US governments allows Microsoft to export. That information is bad enough news, from a European point of view. Now, it turns out that ADVAPI will run special programmes inserted and controlled by NSA. As yet, no-one knows what these programmes are, or what they do.

Dr Nicko van Someren reported at last year's Crypto 98 conference that he had disassembled the ADVADPI driver. He found it contained two different keys. One was used by Microsoft to control the cryptographic functions enabled in Windows, in compliance with US export regulations. But the reason for building in a second key, or who owned it, remained a mystery.

A second key

Two weeks ago, a US security company came up with conclusive evidence that the second key belongs to NSA. Like Dr van Someren, Andrew Fernandez, chief scientist with Cryptonym of Morrisville, North Carolina, had been probing the presence and significance of the two keys. Then he checked the latest Service Pack release for Windows NT4, Service Pack 5. He found that Microsoft's developers had failed to remove or "strip" the debugging symbols used to test this software before they released it. Inside the code were the labels for the two keys. One was called "KEY". The other was called "NSAKEY".

Fernandes reported his re-discovery of the two CAPI keys, and their secret meaning, to "Advances in Cryptology, Crypto'99" conference held in Santa Barbara. According to those present at the conference, Windows developers attending the conference did not deny that the "NSA" key was built into their software. But they refused to talk about what the key did, or why it had been put there without users' knowledge.

A third key?!

But according to two witnesses attending the conference, even Microsoft's top crypto programmers were astonished to learn that the version of ADVAPI.DLL shipping with Windows 2000 contains not two, but three keys. Brian LaMachia, head of CAPI development at Microsoft was "stunned" to learn of these discoveries, by outsiders. The latest discovery by Dr van Someren is based on advanced search methods which test and report on the "entropy" of programming code.

Within the Microsoft organisation, access to Windows source code is said to be highly compartmentalized, making it easy for modifications to be inserted without the knowledge of even the respective product managers.

Researchers are divided about whether the NSA key could be intended to let US government users of Windows run classified cryptosystems on their machines or whether it is intended to open up anyone's and everyone's Windows computer to intelligence gathering techniques deployed by NSA's burgeoning corps of "information warriors".

According to Fernandez of Cryptonym, the result of having the secret key inside your Windows operating system "is that it is tremendously easier for the NSA to load unauthorized security services on all copies of Microsoft Windows, and once these security services are loaded, they can effectively compromise your entire operating system". The NSA key is contained inside all versions of Windows from Windows 95 OSR2 onwards.

"For non-American IT managers relying on Windows NT to operate highly secure data centres, this find is worrying", he added. "The US government is currently making it as difficult as possible for "strong" crypto to be used outside of the US. That they have also installed a cryptographic back-door in the world's most abundant operating system should send a strong message to foreign IT managers".

"How is an IT manager to feel when they learn that in every copy of Windows sold, Microsoft has a 'back door' for NSA - making it orders of magnitude easier for the US government to access your computer?" he asked.

Can the loophole be turned round against the snoopers?

Dr van Someren feels that the primary purpose of the NSA key inside Windows may be for legitimate US government use. But he says that there cannot be a legitimate explanation for the third key in Windows 2000 CAPI. "It looks more fishy", he said.

Fernandez believes that NSA's built-in loophole can be turned round against the snoopers. The NSA key inside CAPI can be replaced by your own key, and used to sign cryptographic security modules from overseas or unauthorised third parties, unapproved by Microsoft or the NSA. This is exactly what the US government has been trying to prevent. A demonstration "how to do it" program that replaces the NSA key can be found on Cryptonym's website.

According to one leading US cryptographer, the IT world should be thankful that the subversion of Windows by NSA has come to light before the arrival of CPUs that handles encrypted instruction sets. These would make the type of discoveries made this month impossible. "Had the next-generation CPU's with encrypted instruction sets already been deployed, we would have never found out about NSAKEY."

The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright and the Audacity of Truth

This article cuts to the chase about Rev. Wright.


By Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III


Saturday 22 March 2008

Over the past week or so, mainstream media have turned much of their attention to the fiery sermons of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Dr. Wright is pastor to Senator Barack Obama (D-Illinois) and his family. He was also, until recently, pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ of Chicago.

Most of the discussion and commentary about Dr. Wright's sermons have come from a predominantly white media. The points of discussion have centered on what they consider to be the "vile, racist and un-American things" said by Dr. Wright. Very few, if any, of the discussions have focused on the historical basis and accuracy of what Dr. Wright actually said.

The major problem with the discussions is they have been largely one-sided. The media have used the imagery of Dr. Wright, clad in African garb, shouting in the cadence of an old-time fire and brimstone minister and playing to the camera as a scare tactic. Has this become the "Willie Hortonization" of Senator Barack Obama? The reporting and commentary on Dr. Wright's words have been presented from the perspective of people who either have no appreciation for the African-American historical experience or a personal agenda when it comes to presenting these issues.

Dr. Wright is under attack for saying such things as "... the government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strikes law, and then wants us (African-Americans) to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no; not 'God Bless America,' God damn America ... for killing innocent people; God damn America for treating its citizens as less than human...." These are very strong words, delivered at what many are calling a possible turning point in American history with regard to America's willingness to elect an African-American candidate. While the mainstream media have found no merit in any of Dr. Wright's statements, let's examine their merit from a historical basis.

When people read the Constitution, the supreme law of the United States, they see the oldest governing constitution in the world. They see a great document that has articulated the precepts of life, liberty and happiness that all in this country try to follow. What is often overlooked are the parts of the Constitution that laid the foundation for hundreds of years of slavery and oppression for African-Americans; the constitutional framework for human beings to be treated as less than human. It's these sections of the Constitution that America has never truly atoned for and still refuses to make right.

Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution stated, "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons." This was known as the Three-Fifths Compromise and laid the groundwork for African slaves brought into America as forced labor to be defined as non-persons.

Article I, Section 9 allowed the importation of slaves to continue in America for twenty-one years after ratification of the Constitution by declaring: "The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person." This section only outlawed the importation of slaves once the domestic stock of slaves could be replenished by natural birthrates and importation would no longer be needed; again, treating its citizens as less than human.

Article IV, Section 2 stated, "No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due." This was enforced by Congress on September 18, 1850, when the Fugitive Slave Act was passed, allowing Southern states to reclaim slaves that had escaped to the North.

The Three Fifths Compromise and the Fugitive Slave provisions were superseded by constitutional amendments only after their damage to African-Americans had been done and the benefit to America had been served.

It is very easy to wrap oneself in the history and glory that is America and forget that from 1619 to 1868 (249 years) African-Americans suffered under the brutality and oppression of government-supported chattel slavery. In 1857, as Dred Scott, a slave, petitioned the US Supreme Court for his freedom, Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote, "beings of an inferior order (African-Americans), and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

Even after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, the 14th Amendment granted their citizenship, and the 15th Amendment grated them the right to vote, from 1876 to 1965 (89 years) African-Americans continued to suffer under state-supported Jim Crow oppression in America. This was codified in 1896 by another Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation under the doctrine of separate but equal. These vestiges of slavery and oppression still plague many sectors of the African-American community, and the sense of white privilege they created continues to foster a false sense of white entitlement.

This is just the historical background for Dr. Wright's comments. During his lifetime he has dealt with segregated schools, separate and unequal education, and discrimination in housing, employment and lending. He has witnessed civil rights protesters beaten by the police, ravaged by dogs, brutalized by fire hoses and COINTELPRO. Since his birth in 1941, an estimated 40 African-Americans have been lynched in this country. He was 14 years old when Emmett Till was brutally murdered and 23 years old when James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were killed. Americans continue to deal with racial profiling, driving while black, the disproportionate rate of incarceration of African-Americans, the suspension of habeas corpus, warrantless wiretapping and other constitutional violations.

Regarding Dr. Wright's comments about drugs and AIDS, let's not forget the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments. From 1932 to 1972, the US Public Health Service (PHS) conducted an experiment on 399 black men in the late stages of syphilis. These men, for the most part illiterate sharecroppers from one of the poorest counties in Alabama, were never told what disease they were suffering from or of its seriousness. In his May 16, 1997, apology, President Bill Clinton said:

"The United States government did something that was wrong - deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens ... clearly racist."

With this historical understanding, it is not too far-fetched to think that the US government could be involved in similar activity as it relates to AIDS.

What has been conspicuously absent from the discussions about Dr. Wright's comments in mainstream media is any analysis of the validity of his comments based upon his personal history and life experiences. It is very easy for white commentators such as Bill O'Reilly to dismiss his sermons as racist diatribes, since O'Reilly has no interest in trying to understand the plight of people of color in America.

Dr. Wright has also said, "We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is brought right back into our own front yard; America's chickens are coming home to roost...." Well, let's examine the record.

The Arms Exports Control Act prohibits the president from furnishing military aid to any country which engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights. In spite of all of the evidence supporting claims of the Israeli government's human rights abuses of the Palestinian people, for FY2005 the United States provided $2.22 billion in military aid. This aid to Israel has a dramatic effect on Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. It is the US funding that pays for the guns and ammunition, F-16 bombers and Apache helicopters that are used to carry out Israel's occupation of Palestinian land and people.

According to The Boston Globe, in 1984, just after Ronald Reagan's re-election, Bishop Desmond Tutu referred to the Reagan administration's support for the South African government as "Immoral, evil and totally un-Christian." Reagan ignored the rising number of Americans who were calling for American companies to stop doing business there. The president of so-called sunny optimism attempted to blind Americans with his policy of "constructive engagement" with the white minority regime in Pretoria. All constructive engagement did was give the white minority more time to mow down the black majority in the streets and keep dreamers of democracy, such as Nelson Mandela, behind bars.

History is replete with examples of the United States arranging to depose foreign leaders. In 1909, President Taft ordered the overthrow of Nicaraguan President Jose Santos Zelaya. According to Stephen Kinzer, "In Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam and Chile, diplomats and intelligence agents replaced generals as the instruments of American intervention." More recent examples of US intervention would be the invasion of Panama and the illegal invasion of Iraq.

Some may take issue with the earlier statement, "... the government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strikes law, ..." by asking, "is Rev. Wright accusing the US government of supplying drugs to the black community?" This story has been well-documented in the 1996 San Jose Mercury News expose entitled "Dark Alliance: The CIA Complicity in the Crack Epidemic."

I can understand people being uncomfortable with the comments made by the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright. White Americans have also been lied to, miseducated and desensitized about the plight of African-Americans. With the help of the social conservative agenda, many have developed a "deaf ear" when it comes to issues regarding race. The truth, especially an ugly truth that forces Americans to examine the precepts of America, "with liberty and justice for all," and compare them with the hypocrisy of the American reality can be troubling. For far too long, Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security. Americans have believed history as told by the oppressor and failed to understand the reality of the oppressed.

Dr. Wright is not un-American. He embodies what America was founded upon, the free exchange of ideas in the public space, speaking truth to power, challenging America to be the best that it can be. The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright's views might not reconcile with many Americans' perceptions of America, but they must not be discarded as the ranting of an angry man. His statements were founded in the historical truths that African-Americans have and continue to live through.

Vast Antarctic Ice Shelf on Verge of Collapse

Andrea Thompson
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com

A vast ice shelf hanging on by a thin strip looks to be the next chunk to break off from the Antarctic Peninsula, the latest sign of global warming's impact on Earth's southernmost continent.

Scientists are shocked by the rapid change of events.

Glaciologist Ted Scambos of the University of Colorado was monitoring satellite images of the Wilkins Ice Shelf and spotted a huge iceberg measuring 25 miles by 1.5 miles (41 kilometers by 2.5 kilometers) that appeared to have broken away from the shelf.

Scambos alerted colleagues at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) that it looked like the entire ice shelf - about 6,180 square miles (16,000 square kilometers - about the size of Northern Ireland)- was at risk of collapsing.

David Vaughan of the BAS had predicted in 1993 that the northern part of the Wilkins Ice Shelf was likely to be lost within 30 years if warming on the Peninsula continued at the same rate.

"Wilkins is the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula yet to be threatened," he said. "I didn't expect to see things happen this quickly. The ice shelf is hanging by a thread - we'll know in the next few days and weeks what its fate will be."

Aircraft reconnaissance

The BAS scientists sent an aircraft out on a reconnaissance mission to survey the extent of damage to the ice shelf.

Jim Elliot, who captured video of the breakout said, "I've never seen anything like this before - it was awesome. We flew along the main crack and observed the sheer scale of movement from the breakage. Big hefty chunks of ice, the size of small houses, look as though they've been thrown around like rubble - it's like an explosion."

An initial iceberg calved away from the Wilkins Ice Shelf on Feb. 28. A series of images shows the edge of the ice shelf proceeding to crumble and disintegrate in a pattern characteristic of climate-caused ice shelf retreats throughout the northern Antarctic Peninsula. The disintegration left a sky-blue patch of hundreds of large blocks of exposed old glacier ice floating across the ocean surface.


Though these broken chunks of ice have spread into the sea, they won't raise sea levels because the ice shelf was already floating on the water.


By March 8, the ice shelf had lost just over 160 square miles (414 square kilometers) of ice, and the disintegrated ice had spread over 540 square miles (1,400 square kilometers). As of mid-March only a narrow strip of shelf ice between Charcot and Latady islands was protecting several thousand more kilometers of the ice shelf from potentially breaking up.

The region where the Wilkins Ice Shelf lies has experienced unprecedented warming in the past 50 years, with several ice shelves retreating in the past 30 years. Six of these ice shelves have collapsed completely: Prince Gustav Channel, Larsen Inlet, Larsen A, Larsen B, Wordie, Muller and the Jones Ice Shelf.

Antarctic warming

The Wilkins Ice Shelf was stable for most of the last century until it began retreating in the 1990s. A previous major breakout occurred there in 1998 when 390 square miles (1,000 square kilometers) of ice was lost in just a few months.

"We believe the Wilkins has been in place for at least a few hundred years, but warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing it to break up," Scambos said.

The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than anywhere else in the Southern Hemisphere; temperature records show that the region has warmed by nearly 3 degrees Celsius during the past 50 years - several times the global average and only matched in Alaska.

Other parts of Antarctica, including the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, seem to be more stable, though areas of melt have been observed in recent years.

Melting in the Antarctic is different than the recent record melt in the Arctic. Antarctica is composed of ice sheets, or huge masses of ice up to 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) thick that lie on top of bedrock and flow toward the coast, and ice shelves, the floating extensions of ice sheets. Arctic ice is primarily sea ice, some of which persists year-round and some of which melts in the summer and freezes again in the winter.

Greed Is Not Good

By Marie Cocco

WASHINGTON—“The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be the survival of the un-fittest,” the fictitious shareholders of the phony corporation Teldar Paper are told.

Then Gordon Gekko, the ruthless takeover artist depicted in the 1987 movie “Wall Street,” goes on to deliver a memorable soliloquy: “The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed—for lack of a better word—is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. ... And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA.”

That malfunctioning corporation called the USA is still malfunctioning. At the moment, the cause is a surfeit of greed not seen since the 1980s if, in fact, it ever went away. Our corporate culture has been transformed from one based, legitimately, on the profit motive to one that is based, illegitimately, on elaborate paper-pushing. At its essence, this is a practice of making money from transacting and not from transforming a commodity into a product, or a brilliant idea into something so useful that millions rush to buy it.

And when these greedy transactions go bad—as they have in the incomprehensible subprime mortgage mess and, specifically, in the unfolding Bear Stearns imbroglio, greed again carries the day. If the Bear Stearns catastrophe is opaque to most Americans, it is because the business the giant investment bank was conducting was designed that way. The shortest, most oversimplified version of the story is that Bear is neck-high in perilous assets stemming from its role in the sketchy mortgage market and appears unable to meet its own creditors’ demands. So the Federal Reserve engineered what amounts to a public bailout, a transaction smoothed by J.P. Morgan Chase, originally with an offer of about $2 per share to take over Bear Stearns and save it from bankruptcy.

You would think such a gesture would be welcomed by the very managers and shareholders who’d driven Bear into the tank. But they balked at the $2 price: “Derisory” is what Joseph Lewis, a billionaire investor, called it, according to Bloomberg News. And so these sharp investors who could not, for the life of them, see that they’d made a lousy investment threatened to block the takeover by finding another suitor or—what else?—by suing to stop it. Now they’ve gotten J.P. Morgan to up its offer to about $10 per share.

Greed is still good.

Consider those on the other end of the subprime mortgage meltdown, the homeowners—some, by now, former homeowners—who were locked into loans they could not afford, either because of their own misguided financial choices or because these loans were presented to them with predatory and deceptive practices. Those who have not yet been foreclosed have been offered no real way to hold on to the roofs over their heads. They have not had their government bail them out of their bad choices. Indeed, the Bush administration has repeatedly said it will not engineer such a rescue, though in the end it may have to if we are to avoid a Depression-like contagion.

We are presented with an ugly portrait of ourselves. The misguided investments of billionaires who kept buying stock in Bear Stearns are given a hand up by the Federal Reserve. Then they demand more, and get it. The misguided homeowners are told to pack up and move.

If this picture were just a snapshot of the mortgage implosion, it would be repulsive enough. But it is the same movie we see again and again, as corporate chieftains in search of the cheapest labor move jobs overseas, freeze or eliminate pensions at home and often discard workers who have given their lives to a company. Then the managers, having delivered to shareholders the additional “value” they seek, are rewarded with compensation packages that, in and of themselves, could fund the pensions or the health insurance of more than a few displaced workers.

It is no longer enough to blame lax regulation and a political system that has nurtured it. It is no longer enough to blame “globalization,” as if this were some force that we are powerless to tame. We’ve chosen to do nothing to tame it.

The malfunctioning corporation called the USA is just as Gordon Gekko saw it. But it is a corporation that cannot be saved by greed. It is greed run amok that is bringing it to its knees.

War of the Word

By Robert Scheer

Would God ever damn America? Is there anything we have done or could do as a nation that might court such severe judgment from an almighty, or is there a peculiar American exemption from God’s wrath? The prediction of God’s damnation for bad behavior is made in both black and white churches.

One authority on such matters, the Rev. Pat Robertson, didn’t think the latter when he blamed the ravaging effects of Hurricane Katrina on the Lord’s retribution against those who “shed innocent blood.” Robertson’s reference to legalized abortion cited a passage from Leviticus that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright also might have been thinking of when he sermonized: “The government ... wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” a reference to African-Americans sacrificed on ghetto streets.

While the “innocents” about whom they spoke are different, the scriptural reference seems to be the same. As Robertson put it, in a statement preserved in a video clip posted on the Internet by Media Matters: “I was reading yesterday ... about what God has to say in the Old Testament about those who shed innocent blood ... ‘the land will vomit you out,’ ” which he related to attacks “either by terrorists or now by natural disaster.”

Robertson, a firm ally of Republican administrations, has not always been warm to the presumed GOP presidential nominee, Sen. John McCain, although the two recently mended their strained relationship. However, in this season of pastor-baiting, McCain has his own problem, having expressed his thrill in receiving “the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee.”

Hagee, citing a planned “homosexual parade,” had previously told National Public Radio that Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment of the people of New Orleans for “a level of sin that was offensive to God.” Obviously, the almighty with whom Hagee is on intimate terms is in need of MapQuest, given that New Orleans’ gay neighborhoods were among the ones least impacted by the hurricane.

Hagee long has been denounced by Catholics for labeling the Vatican “The Great Whore” and blaming Hitler’s genocidal policies on his having “attended a Catholic school as a child.” An Hagee issue that has some current relevance to the Iraq disaster is his blasting of the Roman Catholic Church for sponsoring the Crusades, which “plunged the world into the Dark Ages.”

In a warning that imperial adventures lose some of their luster with the passage of time, Hagee wrote in his book “Jerusalem Countdown”: “The brutal truth is that the Crusades were military campaigns of the Roman Catholic Church to gain control of Jerusalem from the Muslims and to punish the Jews as the alleged Christ killers on the road to and from Jerusalem.” What will future theologians say about George W. Bush’s crusade to liberate Iraq, shedding the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocents?

I know what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. would say were he alive today, for it would be consistent with his denunciation of the Vietnam War in a sermon at New York’s Riverside Church a year before his assassination. Recounting his difficulty in spreading the message of nonviolence and personal responsibility to the very ghetto youths that the Rev. Wright has worked with for four decades, King stated, “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

King delivered that speech the year Wright ended his six years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps and Navy, for which he received three commendations from President Lyndon Johnson, whom King was confronting. No doubt Wright was influenced by King’s oratory decrying “the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens ... in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.” And neither could Wright.

I respect Barack Obama’s right to repudiate his pastor’s comments, as he did, but I respect even more his refusal to throw the man overboard in a practice we witnessed all too often with the Clintons when they came under right-wing attacks. Hillary did it again Tuesday, telling the right-wing Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editorial board that Wright “would not have been my pastor.” So she says, but the record shows she was there in the White House on Sept. 11, 1998, when her husband posed for a photo with the Rev. Wright and was grateful for his support in the midst of that wrath-of-Leviticus blue dress flap. Ingrate.