[Biofuel] Is juggernaut Japan being driven to destruction (and no one's to blame)?
Wakeup call for Japan's politicians By CHRISTOPHER HOBSON Special to The Japan Times The Japan Times: Sunday, Dec. 30, 2012 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/eo20121230a1.html As the new year approaches, Japan still reels from 2011 http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/fd20121230bj.html 2012: a year of low points EDITORIAL http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/ed20121230a1.html --0-- http://www.japantimes.co.jp/print/fl20121230rp.html Is juggernaut Japan being driven to destruction (and no one's to blame)? By ROGER PULVERS Special to The Japan Times Ryotaro Shiba, the great author of historical novels, was a student of Mongolian at Osaka University of Foreign Languages when, at the end of 1943, he was drafted into the army. Then aged 20, he received a provisional graduation qualification (the actual certificate was issued the following year) and found himself in Manchuria, which was at that time the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. After he entered the Army School at Siping, where he was already exhibiting literary traits and founded a haiku club among the ranks, he was assigned to tank duty. Though he excelled more with tanka poems than tanks, he was sent to Mudanjiang, in what is now Heilongjiang Province in northeastern China, and made platoon commander of a tank unit. Writing years later, he recalled putting a question to his commanding officer. If the enemy lands here, he said, we'll have to take the tanks south. But the roads are really narrow. What do we do if horse-drawn carts are coming the other way? The officer stared at me in silence for a while, wrote Shiba, and then gave his answer. 'Run 'em down,' he said. I bring up this incident from long ago not because it characterized the attitude toward forward planning that pervaded this country's military forces during World War II - but because that attitude is eerily pervasive today in the government and corporate culture of the nation. In Japan, it's customary at the end of each year to choose a word that best describes the esprit of that year. My choice for 2012, hands down, is musekinin. Musekinin means irresponsibility; but the Japanese word is somewhat stronger in tone than the English one, more akin to a total absence of responsibility, or a lack of a sense of liability. In the general election on Dec. 16, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was elected in a landslide on the pledge to pump a mass of new money into the economy in order to jump-start it out of its stalled misery. But this is precisely what the LDP did when it was in power in the 1990s, pouring tens of billions of yen into public-works projects that left Japan with much often-useless concrete infrastructure and the mother of all national debts. Why, one asks, would such a policy work now, when the debt is already galactic in size and most local governments have no appetite for old-fashion pump-priming? The LDP answer to anything blocking its way is the same as that given to tank-soldier Shiba, as the mentality has not changed in three-quarters of a century: Run 'em down. No matter that the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, was followed by events at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant leading to three reactor meltdowns, because the LDP government is now poised to okay the restart of most of the country's dozens of idled reactors. And that despite adequate safety checks, which should have been conducted before the plants were built, not having been carried out. It is ironic, too, that both major parties - the LDP and the then-ruling Democratic Party of Japan - kicked off campaigning in the recent election, which began on Dec. 4, in Fukushima. The residents of that prefecture have been treated like the unwanted. They have been deprived of information and sufficient compensation. Tokyo Electric Power Co. (Tepco), the owner and operator of the stricken nuclear plant, has simply wished they would go away - which, with time, they will, one way or another. As with the millions of Asian victims of Japanese aggression prior to the end of World War II in 1945, the policy adopted after the events is to mollify with ambiguous and insincere apologies ... and wait until the last one dies. The same run 'em down attitude is again, basically, not far from being the mindset of the corporate bosses in the nuclear industry - or, if not run 'em down, then run 'em out - which is what they did to the people of the radiation-affected districts of Fukushima Prefecture. In this way, politicians, bureaucrats and the corporate elite are evading responsibility for either the collapse and stagnation of Japan's economy or the contamination of its land, air and water, and what that has meant for people's livelihoods. They have not apologized in any meaningful way nor have they shown any true sense of responsibility for these two catastrophes of mismanagement and cover-up regarding
[Biofuel] Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy New documents prove what was once dismissed as paranoid fantasy: totally integrated corporate-state repression of dissent Naomi Wolf guardian.co.uk, Saturday 29 December 2012 It was more sophisticated than we had imagined: new documents show that the violent crackdown on Occupy last fall - so mystifying at the time - was not just coordinated at the level of the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police. The crackdown, which involved, as you may recall, violent arrests, group disruption, canister missiles to the skulls of protesters, people held in handcuffs so tight they were injured, people held in bondage till they were forced to wet or soil themselves -was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, in a groundbreaking scoop that should once more shame major US media outlets (why are nonprofits now some of the only entities in America left breaking major civil liberties news?), filed this request. The document - reproduced here in an easily searchable format http://www.justiceonline.org/commentary/fbi-files-ows.html - shows a terrifying network of coordinated DHS, FBI, police, regional fusion center, and private-sector activity so completely merged into one another that the monstrous whole is, in fact, one entity: in some cases, bearing a single name, the Domestic Security Alliance Council. And it reveals this merged entity to have one centrally planned, locally executed mission. The documents, in short, show the cops and DHS working for and with banks to target, arrest, and politically disable peaceful American citizens. The documents, released after long delay in the week between Christmas and New Year, show a nationwide meta-plot unfolding in city after city in an Orwellian world: six American universities are sites where campus police funneled information about students involved with OWS to the FBI, with the administrations' knowledge (p51); banks sat down with FBI officials to pool information about OWS protesters harvested by private security; plans to crush Occupy events, planned for a month down the road, were made by the FBI - and offered to the representatives of the same organizations that the protests would target; and even threats of the assassination of OWS leaders by sniper fire - by whom? Where? - now remain redacted and undisclosed to those American citizens in danger, contrary to standard FBI practice to inform the person concerned when there is a threat against a political leader (p61). As Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, executive director of the PCJF, put it, the documents show that from the start, the FBI - though it acknowledges Occupy movement as being, in fact, a peaceful organization - nonetheless designated OWS repeatedly as a terrorist threat: FBI documents just obtained by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund (PCJF) reveal that from its inception, the FBI treated the Occupy movement as a potential criminal and terrorist threat The PCJF has obtained heavily redacted documents showing that FBI offices and agents around the country were in high gear conducting surveillance against the movement even as early as August 2011, a month prior to the establishment of the OWS encampment in Zuccotti Park and other Occupy actions around the country. Verheyden-Hilliard points out the close partnering of banks, the New York Stock Exchange and at least one local Federal Reserve with the FBI and DHS, and calls it police-statism http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/27/the_fbi_vs_occupy_secret_docs: This production [of documents], which we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, is a window into the nationwide scope of the FBI's surveillance, monitoring, and reporting on peaceful protestors organizing with the Occupy movement These documents also show these federal agencies functioning as a de facto intelligence arm of Wall Street and Corporate America. The documents show stunning range: in Denver, Colorado, that branch of the FBI and a Bank Fraud Working Group met in November 2011 - during the Occupy protests - to surveil the group. The Federal Reserve of Richmond, Virginia had its own private security surveilling Occupy Tampa and Tampa Veterans for Peace and passing privately-collected information on activists back to the Richmond FBI, which, in turn, categorized OWS activities under its domestic terrorism unit. The Anchorage, Alaska terrorism task force was watching Occupy Anchorage. The Jackson, Michigan joint terrorism task force was issuing a counterterrorism preparedness alert about the ill-organized grandmas and college sophomores in Occupy there. Also in Jackson, Michigan, the FBI and the Bank Security Group - multiple private banks - met to discuss the reaction to National Bad Bank Sit-in Day (the
[Biofuel] Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth
We Are Being Nuked With False Information on Atomic Energy Friday, 21 December 2012 00:00 By Gar Smith, Chelsea Green Publishing | Book Excerpt http://www.mail-archive.com/sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org/msg78117.html --0-- http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/13600-nuclear-roulette-the-truth-about-the-most-dangerous-energy-source-on-earth Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth Saturday, 29 December 2012 00:00 By Mark Karlin, Truthout | Interview According to Chelsea Green, the publisher of the new book Nuclear Roulette: Each new disaster demonstrates that the nuclear industry and governments lie to avoid panic, to preserve the myth of safe, clean nuclear power, and to sustain government subsidies. Tokyo and Washington both covered up Fukushima's radiation risks and - when confronted with damning evidence - simply raised the levels of acceptable risk to match the greater levels of exposure. Nuclear Roulette dismantles the core arguments behind the nuclear-industrial complex's Nuclear Renaissance. While some critiques are familiar - nuclear power is too costly, too dangerous, and too unstable - others are surprising: Nuclear Roulette exposes historic links to nuclear weapons, impacts on Indigenous lands and lives, and the ways in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too often takes its lead from industry, rewriting rules to keep failing plants in compliance. Nuclear Roulette cites NRC records showing how corporations routinely defer maintenance and lists resulting near-misses in the US, which average more than one per month. Truthout interviewed the book's author, Gar Smith: Mark Karlin: The first part of your book covers 14 arguments against nuclear power. Let's talk about a couple, starting with one that is a bit inclusive of most of the others. What are the catastrophic dangers of nuke plants that you detail in Chapter 4? Gar Smith: Atomic energy is impractical on many levels. Nuclear power has proven too costly to survive without massive government support and taxpayer bailouts. Nuclear power is inherently unreliable because reactors must be regularly shut down to replace used fuel assemblies. Reactors also experience unplanned shutdowns, which means they can be offline more than 10 percent of the time. In 2011, the NRC's own records revealed at least 75 percent of US reactors were routinely leaking radioactive tritium. Nuclear reactors are not energy efficient. They produce far more heat than they can possibly use. It takes as much as 500,000 gallons of water per minute to keep these plants cool. Even then, around two-thirds of the heat is wasted and needs to be spilled into nearby waterways or into the atmosphere. A reactor is like a sports car built to travel 600 miles per hour in a world where the speed limit is 60 mph. To operate it safely, you need to have your foot on the brakes - at all times. And good luck if the brakes fail. The world now has experienced three catastrophic events in three decades - with explosions, fires and meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima. Add to that the increasing number of accidents as aging reactors in the US and around the world continue to crack, leak and fail. Whether the industry likes it or not, it is inevitable that nuclear accidents are going to increasingly make the evening news. Mark Karlin: We hear so much nuclear industry talk of new and improved reactors. What is the reality behind that claim? Gar Smith: While there are new designs, as yet, none of them have been built or fully tested. Most of the so-called Generation IV reactors will probably never be built. The new AP1000 reactors under construction in Georgia and South Carolina have fundamental design flaws that prompted the former chair of the NRC to vote against granting them a license. Construction of Georgia's two AP1000 Vogtle reactors (supported with billions in taxpayer-backed loan guarantees) has been plagued by shoddy construction and second-rate building materials. In addition to the proposed new reactors (which would operate at temperatures two to three times greater than existing plants), the Department of Energy is providing funds to kick-start something called a small modular reactor. These mini-nukes could be housed inside a two-car garage but would probably be placed underground. Dispersing these small reactors across the landscape would increase security risks, magnify supply-and-transportation hazards, and do nothing to reduce the danger of reactor accidents and routine releases of radioactivity. Let's be clear: nuclear plants don't generate electricity. They produce only three things: vast amounts of heat (which is used to spin the turbines that generate electricity), radioactive fallout (in the form of permissible leaks that have been linked to thyroid tumors and childhood leukemia) and tons of radioactive garbage.
[Biofuel] Fearful of Ban, Frenzied Buyers Swarm Gun Stores
New Poll Shows Surge in Support for Gun Control Saturday, 29 December 2012 10:27 By Matt Pearce, Los Angeles Times | Report http://truth-out.org/news/item/13608-new-poll-shows-surge-in-support-for-gun-control UN's Last Stand on Arms Trade Treaty Saturday, 29 December 2012 10:36 By Thalif Deen, Inter Press Service | Report http://truth-out.org/news/item/13609-uns-last-stand-on-arms-trade-treaty --0-- http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/fearful-ban-frenzied-buyers-swarm-gun-stores-18086623#.UOAdo9x91i9 Fearful of Ban, Frenzied Buyers Swarm Gun Stores By By JOSEPH PISANI AP Business News Writer NEW YORK December 29, 2012 (AP) The phones at Red's Trading Post wouldn't stop ringing. Would-be customers from as far away as New York wanted to know if the Twin Falls, Idaho gun shop had firearms in stock. Others clamored to find out if their orders had been shipped. Overwhelmed, gun store manager Ryan Horsley had to do what no employee would ever think of doing just days before Christmas: He disconnected the phone lines for three whole days. We had to shut everything off, says Horsley, whose family has owned Red's Trading Post, the state's oldest gun shop, since 1936. We were swamped in the store and online. The phones at gun shops across the country are ringing off the hook. Demand for firearms, ammunition and bulletproof gear has surged since the Dec. 14 massacre in Newtown, Conn., that took the lives of 20 schoolchildren and six teachers and administrators. The shooting sparked calls for tighter gun control measures, especially for military-style assault weapons like the ones used in Newtown and in the Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting earlier this year. The prospect of a possible weapons ban has sent gun enthusiasts into a panic and sparked a frenzy of buying at stores and gun dealers nationwide. Assault rifles are sold out across the country. Rounds of .223 bullets, like those used in the AR-15 type Bushmaster rifle used in Newtown, are scarce. Stores are struggling to restock their shelves. Gun and ammunition makers are telling retailers they will have to wait months to get more. Store owners who have been in the business for years say they have never seen demand like this before. When asked how much sales have increased in the past few weeks, Horsley just laughed. We haven't even had a chance to look at it, he says. Horsley spends his days calling manufacturers around the country trying to buy more items for the store. Mainly, they tell him he has to wait. Franklin Armory, a firearm maker in Morgan Hill, Calif., is telling dealers that it will take six months to fulfill their orders. The company plans to hire more workers and buy more machines to catch up, says Franklin Armory's President Jay Jacobson. The shortage is leaving many would-be gun owners empty handed. William Kotis went to a gun show in Winston-Salem, N.C., last weekend hoping to buy a rifle for target shooting. Almost everything was sold out. Assault rifles were selling like crazy, says Kotis, who is president and CEO of Kotis Holdings, a real estate development company based in Greensboro. People are stockpiling. He left without buying anything. Luke Orlando's parents were able to get him the 12-gauge shotgun he wanted for Christmas to bird hunt, but his uncle wasn't as lucky. At Christmas dinner, my uncle expressed outrage that after waiting six months to use his Christmas bonus to purchase an AR-15, they are sold out and back ordered over a year, says Orlando, 18, a student at the University of Texas. No organization publicly releases gun sales data. The only way to measure demand is by the number of background checks that are conducted when someone wants to buy a firearm. Those numbers are released by the Federal Reserve Bureau every month. Data for December is not out yet. But the Federal Bureau of Investigation says that it did 16.8 million firearm background checks as of the end of November, up more than 2 percent from a year ago. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation, which handles background checks for the state, can't keep up with the number of requests it is getting. The bureau has pulled staff from other units and increased its hours, says spokesperson Susan Medina. Many firearm dealers and manufacturers say that Obama's comments since the Newtown school shooting are driving demand. James Zimmerman of SelwayArmory.com, a website that sells guns, ammunition and knives, says that sales really took off on Dec. 19 after President Barack Obama held a White House press conference announcing that Vice President Joe Biden would lead a team tasked with coming up with concrete proposals to curb gun violence. That day, one customer ordered 32,000 rounds of ammunition from SelwayArmory.com, worth close to $18,000. The order had to be shipped from the company's Lolo, Mont., office to Kentucky on a freight truck. I've done more sales in the week
[Biofuel] US Kills 12 Civilians and Destroys a Community
Villagers Join al-Qaeda After Deadly US Strike Keith Addison Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:41:44 -0800 When U.S. drones kill civilians, Yemen's government tries to conceal it By Sudarsan Raghavan, Published: December 25, 2012 Dhamar, Yemen Villagers Join al-Qaeda After Deadly US Strike By Sudarsan Raghavan December 26, 2012 WA Today http://www.mail-archive.com/sustainablelorgbiofuel@lists.sustainablelists.org/msg78167.html Reporter's Notebook: Ali Ismail Abbas, Iraqi Boy Hit by American Missile 10 Years Later By RON CLAIBORNE Dec. 29, 2012 http://abcnews.go.com/International/ali-ismail-abbas-iraqi-boy-hit-american-missile/story?id=18085462#.UOAgrNx91i8 --0-- http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article33462.htm US Kills 12 Civilians and Destroys a Community Anatomy of an Air Attack Gone Wrong By Letta Tayler December 29, 2012 FP -- SANAA, Yemen - The villagers who rushed to the road, cutting through rocky fields in central Yemen, found the dead strewn around a burning sport utility vehicle. The bodies were dusted with white powder -- flour and sugar, the witnesses said -- that the victims were bringing home from market when the aircraft attacked. A torched woman clutched her daughter in a lifeless embrace. Four severed heads littered the pavement. The bodies were charred like coal. I could not recognize the faces, said Ahmed al-Sabooli, 22, a farmer whose parents and 10-year-old sister were among the dead. Then I recognized my mother because she was still holding my sister in her lap. That is when I cried. Quoting unnamed Yemeni officials, local and international media initially described the victims of the Sept. 2 airstrike in al-Bayda governorate as al Qaeda militants. After relatives of the victims threatened to bring the charred bodies to the president, Yemen's official news agency issued a brief statement admitting the awful truth: The strike was an accident that killed 12 civilians. Three were children. Nearly four months later, that terse admission remains the only official word on the botched attack. A Washington Post article, published on Dec. 24, reports that U.S. officials in Washington, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter, said it was a Defense Department aircraft, either a drone or a fixed-wing airplane, that fired on the vehicle. But the people of al-Bayda still have received no official word as to who was responsible for the deaths -- the United States, which in the past year has accelerated its covert targeted-killing program against Yemeni-based al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula; or the Yemeni government, whose new president, Abd al-Rab Mansur al-Hadi, was installed with Washington's help. The information blackout on terrorism-related killings is not limited to al-Bayda. The United States has revealed only the barest details of its 400 estimated strikes on alleged militant targets in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia over the past decade. The attacks, carried out by the CIA and the Pentagon with unmanned aerial vehicles (drones), manned warplanes, and cruise missiles, have reportedly killed at least 2,800 people, according to sources such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) in London. Yet in most cases, Washington refuses to even confirm or deny any role in the strikes, much less acknowledge whether any civilians were killed. With the United States leading the way on obfuscation, allies such as Yemen have no qualms about following suit, leaving no one accountable when attacks kill the wrong people. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration is reportedly drafting new rules on targeted killings, the majority of which have been conducted on his watch. But though these new rules might include more oversight, it's likely that the program will remain shrouded in secrecy. For the people of al-Bayda, just a pinprick on the map of innocents lost to the war on terror, policy changes without more transparency mean nothing. During a trip to Yemen for Human Rights Watch in October, I spoke with four people, including Sabooli, who witnessed the al-Bayda attack. The witnesses drove 10 hours round-trip to see me in Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, after Human Rights Watch decided it was too dangerous for me to travel to al-Bayda, an area outside the government's control with a known al Qaeda presence and a reputation for kidnappings. Without visiting the scene of the attack, we were unable to determine what kind of aircraft carried out the strike and whether it dropped a bomb or fired missiles. But the witnesses provided some important clues, including the presence of what they said were drones, during the attack. Only the United States is known to operate drones in Yemen, home to what Washington calls al Qaeda's most active affiliate. The attack took place near Radda, a hilltop city roughly 100 miles southeast of Sanaa. For more than a year, drones had been circling day and
[Biofuel] Presenting America's Top Ten Greediest of 2012
http://truth-out.org/news/item/13607-presenting-americas-top-ten-greediest-of-2012 Presenting America's Top Ten Greediest of 2012 Saturday, 29 December 2012 09:54 By Sam Pizzigati, Too Much | News Analysis Some of today's greediest are running giant multinational corporations. Some are just running their mouths. Their stories remind us just how much needs to change, economically and politically, in the year ahead. The essence of greed? Simple. Greed amounts to taking more than you need when you already have enough - and others don't. Who among us, by this yardstick, rate as our greediest? Those greediest would be those who have the wherewithal to take whatever they want - and deny others the basics they need. We abound in these greedy. Most of them wear power suits and dart in and out of the executive suites that sit high atop America's most elegant corporate towers. Year in and year out, these greedy grab ungodly rewards for their own labor - and deny their employees anything close to decent compensation for theirs. The Institute for Policy Studies weekly on excess and inequality, Too Much, has been compiling lists of America's most greedy grabbers since the Great Recession first hit in 2008. This fifth annual Too Much list of our greediest showcases those ten deep pockets who've done the most in 2012 to subvert the decency we all like to call, at this time of year, the holiday spirit. 10. Jack Welch: Comforting Comfortables An oversized ego can be a terrible thing to waste. Jack Welch, the retired General Electric CEO, is doing his best not to waste a bit of his - and pick up a few extras pennies in the process. Welch, the super CEO of the 1990s, has become a regular on the corporate chattering circuit since he retired in 2001. He collects a sweet $150,000 per appearance. Not that Welch needs any more money. He left GE with a retirement package worth over $400 million and now divides his time between très chic abodes in Manhattan, Nantucket, and Florida's North Palm Beach, lapping up luxury while he plots his next moves to protect plutocracy. Welch particularly enjoys going after Warren Buffett, the billionaire who publicly acknowledges that he and his fellow rich don't pay nearly enough in taxes. Countered Welch earlier this year: I don't feel undertaxed in any way at all. Some had hoped that Welch's retirement would end the actual social damage he could wreak. A reasonable hope. At General Electric, Welch had the power to do everything from nuke 100,000 GE worker jobs to foul the Hudson River with toxic waste. Without that power, what damage could he do? Plenty, turns out. Much of that damage comes from the wealth of tax-dodging expertise Welch bequeathed his successors at General Electric. In the decade since 2001, one report released this year revealed, GE paid only 1.8 percent of its $80.2 billion overall profits in federal income taxes. 9. Jamie Dimon: Pounding Reformers The European Union has just taken a fairly significant step toward limiting excessive banker compensation. Under proposed new rules up for a vote early in 2013, European bankers won't be able to pocket bonuses greater than twice their straight salary. Better not try that in the United States, Jamie Dimon - America's highest-paid bank CEO in 2011 - warned last week. Any limits on Wall Street pay, JPMorgan Chase CEO Dimon intoned, will end freedom as we know it. If you don't want a free society, Dimon pronounced, then start dictating what compensation can be. And besides, the JPMorgan chief added, any attempt to limit pay would chase talent out of America's financial system. The banking business, he explained, simply cannot run on second-rate talent. For his own presumably first-rate talent, Dimon pulled in $23.1 million in 2011, up 11 percent over 2010. The highlight of his first-rate stewardship: JPMorgan suffered a $2 billion trading loss after a bank management blunder that Dimon admitted this past spring he could not publicly defend. That admission left some observers wondering how much the bank would have lost with a second-rate talent in charge. Dimon hasn't let JPMorgan's debacle with risky trades slow his charge against the Dodd-Frank Act, the legislation enacted in 2010 to rein in risky trading after the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. Wall Street's intense opposition to Dodd-Frank, with Dimon a key ringleader, has so far kept the bulk of the legislation unenforced. 8. Wilbur Ross: Exploiting the Bankrupt Remember the bank bailout? Private equity kingpin Wilbur Ross surely does. He spent a chunk of the past year trolling for windfalls on the busted-bank landscape - and found a hot prospect in Ohio. In October, he cut a deal to pick up the troubled First Place Financial at just $45 million. U.S. Treasury officials balked at the deal. The bank, they complained to the courts, had borrowed $72.9 million from the federal bailout
