The Empire 698

Only $4.2 Billion To Buy This Election?

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

This, from the Washington Post’s conservative pundit George Will:

Total spending by parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt, but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Proctor & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its last fiscal year.

Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads — no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law. Is it, however, worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy — determining who should make and administer the laws — much less than they spend on potato chips, $7.1 billion a year?

In a word, Mr. Will, yes.
The number of dollars spent isn’t the issue; it’s the lopsidedness of where the dollars come from. Even if the total were only $1000, democracy would be endangered if $980 came from large corporations and wealthy individuals. The trend is clear and worrisome: The great bulk of campaign money is coming from a narrower and narrower circle of moneyed interests.
Anyone who doubts the corrupting effect has not been paying attention. Our elected representatives have been acutely sensitive to the needs of Wall Street bankers, hedge-fund managers, and the executives of big pharma, big oil, and the largest health insurance companies. This is not because these individuals and interests are particularly worthy or specially deserving. It is because they are effectively bribing elected officials with their donations. Such donations are not made out of charitable impulse. They are calculated investments no less carefully considered than investments in particular shares of stock. They are shares in our democracy.
Why $4.2 billion and not ten times that amount? Because the high-rolling political investors don’t need to spend a dollar more in order to exert overwhelming influence.
This figure, by the way, leaves out the tens of billions of dollars dedicated to lobbying, lawyering, and public relations — all of which deliver specific legislative outcomes the campaign money fuels. The economy of Washington, D.C. depends on this gigantic flow of funds (supporting the polished facades of refurbished hotels, fancy restaurants, trendy bistros, office complexes of glass and polished wood, well-appointed condos, hotels with marble-floored lobbies and thick rugs, restaurants serving $75 steaks and offering $400 magnums of vintage French wine.) Washington’s seven suburban counties are listed by the Census Bureau as among the nation’s twenty with the highest per-capital incomes.
Failing to include this larger apparatus in an estimate for how much money now greases the legislative skids is analogous to estimating the cost of private transportation in America by what’s purchased at the gas pump without mentioning automobiles, roads, and bridges.
Indeed, a full accounting of the cost of the flow of money into our political system would also include the carnage and roadkill in its path — the public’s increasing cynicism about democracy, and America’s decreasing capacity to do what most of its citizens desperately need.

http://robertreich.org/post/1419481402

The Empire 697

Uit een destijds geheime nota van een van de belangrijkste naoorlogse westerse beleidsbepalers, te weten George Kennan die als hoofd van het Planningbureau van het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken de architect was van de naoorlogse westerse containment politiek, vier decennia lang de hoeksteen van de Amerikaanse buitenlandse politiek tegenover de Sovjet Unie. Kennan schreef:

Wij hebben ongeveer 50 procent van de rijkdommen in de wereld, maar slechts 6,3 procent van haar bevolking… In deze omstandigheden zullen we niet in staat zijn te voorkomen dat wij het voorwerp worden van jaloezie en haat. Onze werkelijke taak in het komende tijdperk is om een netwerk van betrekkingen op te bouwen die ons in staat stelt deze positie van ongelijkheid te handhaven… Daartoe zullen we alle sentimentaliteit en dagdromen opzij moeten zetten en dient onze aandacht overal geconcentreerd te zijn op onze directe nationale doelstellingen… We moeten ophouden te spreken over vage en… imaginaire doelstellingen als mensenrechten, het verhogen van de levensstandaard, en democratisering. De dag is niet veraf dat we in pure machtsconcepten moeten handelen. Hoe minder we daarbij gehinderd worden door idealistische slogans, des te beter het is.

Philip Slater in Pursuit of Loneliness:

If you assume scarcity, then the knowledge that others want what you want leads with some logic to preparations for defense, and ultimately (since the best defense is offense) for attack

Dit verklaart het feit dat het Westen, onder aanvoering van de VS, sinds 1945 talloze oorlogen voerde en nog steeds voert.

Chris Floyd 4

Manufacturing Mayhem in Mexico: From Nixon to NAFTA and Beyond

Posted: 27 Oct 2010 11:58 PM PDT

B
en Ehrenreich at the London Review of Books has written one of the best  articles on the current situation in Mexico that I have seen. Thousands of people are dying there, caught up in a sinister nexus where all the main players -- drug cartels, their officials backers (and servants), the various Drug Warriors on both sides of the border, the corporations profiteering from the Drug War, the august and respectable financial institutions who move the money for both the cartels and their official antagonists, and the American and Mexican politicians who happily game the murderous system for their own cynical advantage -- are reaping huge rewards, while a whole society is being destroyed.

As Ehrenreich points out in the succinct but detailed historical background he provides, the current Drug War-fueled destruction is just part and parcel of a larger assault on the underpinning of Mexican society -- a wider campaign that includes brutal economic war, and the relentless militarization of society on both sides of the border. On the U.S. side, it is again a thoroughly bipartisan affair, ranging from Richard Nixon to Clinton's NAFTA and beyond.

Unfortunately, the article is not one of those that LRB makes available to non-subscribers every month. Fortunately, your correspondent happens to be a subscriber, so below are some extensive excerpts from Ehreneich's superb piece.

There have been more than 2000 killings in Juárez so far this year. ... The violence is dizzying, all the more so because so little light has been shed on it by the press, either in Mexico or abroad. Most accounts stick to the official narrative: the bloodshed is simply the result of heightened competition between drug cartels for control of profitable smuggling routes, and of the military battling it out with the bad guys. The dead are generally identified only as ‘pistoleros’ or ‘sicarios’; their killers as ‘armed commandos’. The most basic facts are left unspecified: body counts, names, places, dates. ... The government, the opposition, the cartels and the various factions within all of them spread disinformation as a matter of policy, which means that political gossip tends to revolve around who stands to profit from which distortion. To make things more complicated, there is a great deal at stake for Mexico’s powerful neighbour to the north. The two most pernicious strands of contemporary American politics – nativism and the all-encompassing discourse of ‘security’ – feed into the notion that Mexico is slipping into anarchy.

Horrific though it is, the violence is neither inexplicable nor entirely senseless. It is the result of a struggle over drug distribution in which a remarkable number of players have come to have a deep investment: not only the narcos, but their ostensible opponents on both sides of the international border and of the hazier divide separating legality from criminality. Drugs are an old business in Mexico. Farmers in the remote high sierra of the western state of Sinaloa have been growing opium poppies since the late 19th century – and marijuana long before that – but smuggling did not become a viable enterprise until the US created an illicit market by regulating the use of opiates in 1914. Then, as now, drugs flowed one way: north. The American appetite for forbidden intoxicants grew quickly in the second half of the last century. As the US market expanded, so did the smuggling industry that serviced it. Until the early 1970s the smugglers were subordinate to the local politicians and military and police commanders under whose protection they were permitted to operate, and who in turn took their place in a chain of command that rose all the way to the presidency.

This arrangement ran smoothly until marijuana’s newfound popularity led Richard Nixon to declare a ‘war on drugs’ and to begin putting pressure on the Mexican government to staunch the flow. Even then, other motives were concealed beneath the American government’s apparent concern for the health of its citizens: Nixon’s chief of staff recorded in his diary that in the course of a briefing on drug enforcement in 1969, the president had ‘emphasised … that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognises this while not appearing to.’ That year, Nixon ordered a massive policing effort on the Mexican border called Operation Intercept. Relatively little contraband was found and Mexico was furious about the crackdown, but the US administration considered it a success. Gordon Liddy, then the co-chair of Nixon’s narcotics task force, would later write: ‘It was an exercise in international extortion, pure, simple and effective, designed to bend Mexico to our will.’ It worked: the next anti-drug effort was called Operation Co-operation. Seven years later, with logistical help from the US, Mexico launched its first major military operation against the drug trade. Operation Condor, led by a general who had taken part in the massacre of students at Tlatelolco in 1968 and the anti-guerrilla campaigns of the 1970s Dirty War, dislodged hundreds of peasants from the western sierras. Complaints of torture by federal troops abounded.

n the 1980s a massive expansion of the cocaine market in the States coincided with the growth of leftist guerrilla movements in Central and South America. Under the cover of the drug war, Reagan took on both at once. In 1986, he signed a directive that linked narco-trafficking to ‘insurgent groups’ and ‘terrorist cells’ abroad, and declared the narcotics trade a threat to national security. The effect was to militarise the war on drugs, converting what had once been a matter for domestic law enforcement into an instrument of foreign policy.

At the same time, and not coincidentally, Mexico was undergoing a shift to neoliberalism under the presidencies of Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas, both of whom were educated, or partially educated, in the US. The smuggling business, too, was about to take a neoliberal turn. It had consolidated in the 1980s under one man, Miguel Angel Félix Gallardo. Known as El Padrino, or the Godfather, Félix Gallardo emerged from the old system: he was a former policeman and chief bodyguard to the governor of Sinaloa. When a US Drug Enforcement Agency officer working undercover in Mexico was kidnapped and killed, the first Bush administration pushed hard for Félix Gallardo’s arrest. Negotiations for the trade pact that would later be known as the North American Free Trade Agreement were underway and Salinas wanted to keep the Americans happy, so in 1989, Félix Gallardo was arrested. But Félix Gallardo had seen what was coming and by then he had divided up his empire, distributing the most valued smuggling routes, or plazas, to trusted lieutenants. Just as Salinas was breaking up and privatising hundreds of state-owned industries, so Félix Gallardo was breaking up his domain, effectively creating what are now the Tijuana and Sinaloa cartels.

...In 1993 and 1994, US immigration officials began pouring resources into securing the border at two major urban crossing sites – between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, and between San Diego and Tijuana. Perversely, this helped the cartels seal their monopolies on the trade. ‘Borders breed smuggling,’ the sociologist Fernando Escalante explains: ‘A closed border breeds organised smuggling. It favours cartels, it favours organised crime.’

Now the Economic War experienced a great "surge" under those fightin' progressives, NAFTA-men Bill Clinton and Al Gore:

The broader effects of NAFTA and the reforms that accompanied it were more diffuse and far more destructive. A constitutional amendment passed as a precondition for the trade pact did away with the legislation that since the 1930s had forbidden the private sale of communally held farmland. Now cheap and highly subsidised American corn flooded the Mexican market. Local farmers were unable to compete: 1.1 million small farmers and 1.4 million others dependent on the agricultural sector lost their livelihoods. Campesinos left ancestral holdings, forced into the uncertainties of migrancy, both within Mexico and abroad. Villages were left almost abandoned. In a few short years, extraordinary wealth was concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority while the dream of an agrarian republic that had sustained the country for most of the 20th century collapsed. The anticipated shift to export-oriented manufacturing was a failure. Few of the promised jobs in the foreign-owned assembly plants known as maquiladoras materialised. The ones that did soon vanished as companies pursued still cheaper labour in China.

As a result of the "reforms" of the progressive duo, almost a third of the Mexican people have been forced into penurious, petty hustling and scrabbling to eke out an existence on the margins of modernity:

Nearly 30 per cent of the population now works in the informal economy – washing car windows on street corners, selling tacos, sodas, DVDs. Cuts to education have helped create a new class of young people: the 7.5 million so-called ninis who aren’t in school and don’t have jobs (‘ni estudian ni trabajan’). The minimum wage has lost two thirds of its buying power and nearly half the population lives in poverty. In his book on the epidemic of murders of young women in Ciudad Juárez, Huesos en el desierto (‘Bones in the Desert’, 2002), González Rodríguez wrote of the vast new class of the uprooted and excluded, poor migrants from the countryside who now find themselves wandering in a ‘vertiginous universe of technology and productivity, merchandise and calculation’.

In the 1990s, "neoliberals" -- i.e., ball-crushing boardroom Bolsheviks committed to the crony capitalism known laughingly as "free trade" -- took power in Mexico, with predictable 'shock doctrine' results:

Between 1989 and 1999, the National Action Party (the PAN), which represented the socially conservative transnational elite that had profited most from the PRI’s economic policies, won the governorships of eight states, including the border states in which the most important drug trafficking routes were situated. By 2000, when the PAN won the presidency with the election of the former Coca-Cola executive Vicente Fox, the old networks of political patronage that had contained and controlled the drug smuggling industry were in disarray. The cartel leaders broke free from the system that had kept them in check. The old arrangement was turned on its head. Traffickers had once worked for the police and the politicians: now the police and politicians were working for them.

The democratic renaissance prophesied by Fox’s allies delivered little. Corruption persisted. The transformation of the economy along neoliberal lines continued, but without even the tattered remnants of the PRI paternalism that had for almost a century redistributed some small portion of the nation’s wealth in exchange for votes and obedience. Now the market alone would rule, and the millions it left behind would have no option but to adjust to the new realities. ‘The campesinos,’ Fox’s finance secretary announced in 2003, ‘will have to transform themselves into industrial workers or true business people.’ Many have done precisely that – either in factories, fields and kitchens north of the border, or in the precarious employ of the drug cartels.

The current president, Felipe Calderon, took power in a disputed Bush-like election, with a similarly farcical "recount" process: "The electoral tribunal ordered a partial recount, declared Calderón the winner and promptly destroyed the ballots." Then, like Bush, he proceeded to seize upon a convenient "crisis" -- the post-NAFTA cartel conflicts -- to militarize the situation and shore up his own illegitimate power:

Less than a fortnight later, Calderón called on the military once again, this time ordering 6500 troops to his home state of Michoacán to stem the rising violence there. The drug war was for him what the war on terror had been for George W. Bush. Like Bush, he lacked legitimacy in the eyes of at least half the population: the drug war ‘allowed him the tools he needed in order to govern’. Over the next two years, he would send 45,000 troops – a quarter of Mexico’s armed forces – to the northern border, the south-western state of Guerrero, and the so-called Golden Triangle, the mountainous poppy-growing regions of Sinaloa, Durango and Chihuahua. For most of the last century, the Mexican military had been almost unique in Latin America in keeping a respectful distance from civil institutions and from the US. Calderón changed that. In 2008, the two countries launched the Merida Initiative: Mexico accepted $1.3 billion in counter-narcotics funding from the US and an unprecedented level of military co-operation was established.

Ehrenreich then makes a key point -- an insight that holds true not only for Mexico, but in virtually every case around the world where conflicts, disputes -- and political and corporate agendas -- have been militarized:

Everywhere the military has visited, the bloodshed has grown much worse.

Militarizing a situation guarantees there will be indiscriminate killing, enormous destruction, economic ruin, social collapse, degradation of infrastructure, the spread of disease, and massive, pervasive corruption. This is what you are knowingly perpetrating every time you militarize a situation. It invariably makes the situation worse -- unless, of course, bloodshed, ruin and corruption are, in fact, your goals.

Ehrenreich goes on:

Between December 2006 – when Calderón took office and sent out the first troops – and July 2010, more than 28,000 Mexicans were murdered. The president has insisted that 90 per cent of the victims were cartel members, although only 5 per cent of the murders have been investigated, much less solved. In the first four years of his term, Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission received 4035 complaints alleging abuses by the armed forces – more than it had received in the previous 15 years – including allegations of murder, torture and rape. Because the military is charged with investigating itself, such abuses invariably go unpunished. And ‘because writing or saying what the military is up to could result in serious injury or death,’ the American journalist Charles Bowden notes in Murder City, his recent book about Juárez, few of the more serious abuses are ever reported.[*] At least 31 reporters have been killed or disappeared since 2006.

Ah, but of course now we have another progressive in the White House -- a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, no less, an heir to Martin Luther King and Aung San Suu Kyi. Surely now, things will change, we will take a new direction, away from the obviously failed policies of the past. Yes? No.

Calderón, unfazed, has promised to keep the troops on the streets until the end of his six-year term. His support from the north has been unflagging. Obama has proposed extending the Merida Initiative, and has requested an additional $310 million for 2011. His administration appears to situate Mexico within the discourse of failing states battling insurgencies and requiring American help. It’s a bad fit – the cartels are not revolutionary cells so much as organisations of global capital – but the rhetoric provides a domestic pretext for folding Mexico into US security protocols. Carlos Pascual, the new US ambassador to Mexico, last summer confidently proposed ‘a new role’ for the Mexican military in Juárez, one consistent with counter-insurgency tactics employed by the US across the globe: they would secure the perimeter of five-block-square ‘safe zones’, and push that perimeter outward block by block.

Ehrenreich's conclusion is bleak indeed -- worthy of Cormac McCarthy -- but, one fears, all too accurate:

Whatever shape it takes, the war on drugs continues to be even more profitable than the drug trade itself. All the killing keeps prices per gram high, so the cartels do fine, as do the legions of sicarios and the funeral directors they help to feed. The bankers who launder the money also win, as do the businessmen into whose enterprises the newly laundered funds are funnelled. The American weapons manufacturers stand to do nicely, as do the US security consultants and military contractors who will deposit almost all of the Merida funds into their own accounts, and who can expect to make billions more from the militarisation of the border on the American side: someone has to make the helicopters, the cameras, the night-vision goggles, the motion sensors, the unmanned drones, as well as build the private prisons that hold the migrants. Finally politicians too stand to gain, not only Calderón and the PRIistas who are likely to profit from his failure in 2012, but the Americans who have sponsored him: the agile ones who can leverage campaign contributions from the contractors, the populists who win votes by shouting about the barbarian hordes advancing through the Arizona desert, the moderates who get re-elected term after term by expounding in even tones about the need for something called ‘comprehensive border security’. The killing is therefore unlikely to stop.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/articles/1-latest-news/2039-manufacturing-mayhem-in-mexico-from-nixon-to-nafta-and-beyond.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed:+empire_burlesque+(Empire+Burlesque+-+Chris+Floyd) 

Het Neoliberale Kabinet 2

Over de bezuinigingsplannen van de regering:

If you empty a sack of money into a crowd, the greediest will get the most, and no matter how many nipples a government puts out for the poor, it always seems to find a middle-class mouth fastened around every one.


Wat overblijft is socialisme voor de rijken, want daar wordt nooit op bezuinigd!

Femke Halsema. Oef. 10

Femke Halsema is boos op Ferry Mingelen   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjKsUnd6xLA

Kijkt u eens goed hoe politiek cynisme botst op journalistiek cynisme. Let vooral ook op het gelaat van Koenders.

Peter van Walsum Oud-Diplomaat 23

 Vorige week woensdag beweerde de oud-diplomaat Peter van Walsum ondermeer het volgende in de NRC:

Aanval op Iran is ophanden

Iran 

 VS vinden ingreep minder erg dan Iraanse kernbom

Medio augustus van dit jaar schatte de Amerikaanse regering dat het nog 'rond een jaar of misschien langer' zou duren eer Iran over een kernwapen zou beschikken. Dat betekent dat binnen zo'n tien maanden knopen zullen moeten worden doorgehakt. In Washington wordt steeds vaker, ook uit de mond van vooraanstaande Democraten, gehoord dat een militaire ingreep in Iran minder erg is dan een nucleair bewapend Iran... Behalve in het onwaarschijnlijke geval dat de sinds eind december 2006 stapsgewijs verscherpte sancties Iran alsnog tot andere gedachten brengen, lijkt het bijna onvermijdelijk dat in de loop van 2011 ten minste door de Verenigde Staten militair zal worden ingegrepen.

http://stanvanhoucke.blogspot.com/2010/10/peter-van-walsum-21.html

Laat we de logica gebruiken bij het analyseren van deze bewering. Allereerst dit:

lijkt het bijna onvermijdelijk dat in de loop van 2011 ten minste door de Verenigde Staten militair zal worden ingegrepen.

Lijkt bijna onvermijdelijk? Dat is tweemaal een vaagheid. Dit is wartaal. Iets is onvermijdelijk of is het niet. Lijkt bijna onvermijdelijk is een tegenstrijdigheid. Bovendien gaat Van Walsum ervan uit dat ook al zou een Amerikaanse gewelddadige aanval illegaal zijn, Nederland er toch 'beter aan [zou[ doen zich vast te verdiepen in de vraag of die interventie Nederlands politieke steun verdient.' En wat bedoelt hij met de woorden 'ten minste'? Het kan niet anders dan dat hij bedoelt dat het 'bijna onvermijdelijk [lijkt]' dat de kernwapenstaat Israel in strijd met het internationaal recht Iran aanvalt. Waarom zou Nederland een 'Joodse' kernwapenstaat moeten steunen tegen een Iraanse staat dat nog steeds geen kernwapens bezit? In concreto: Van Walsum is net als in het geval van de illegale Amerikaanse inval in Irak voorstander van het schenden van het internationaal recht. Hij gebruikt voor dit verkapte pleidooi voor de inzet van grof geweld onder andere deze argumentatie: 

Medio augustus van dit jaar schatte de Amerikaanse regering dat het nog 'rond een jaar of misschien langer' zou duren eer Iran over een kernwapen zou beschikken. Dat betekent dat binnen zo'n tien maanden knopen zullen moeten worden doorgehakt.

Opnieuw, laten we de logica op deze bewering loslaten. We hebben hier te maken met een schatting dat 'rond een jaar of misschien langer... Iran over een kernwapen zou beschikken.' Let u op: 'zou' dus. Dan: 'rond een jaar of misschien langer', ook de tijdsduur is dus onzeker. Ondanks al deze onzekerheden is zijn stellige conclusie: 

Dat betekent dat binnen zo'n tien maanden knopen zullen moeten worden doorgehakt.

Dat kan dus niet. Deze bewering is op teveel onzekerheden gebouwd om legitiem te kunnen zijn. Zowel Van Walsum als de NRC hebben dit niet door, of verzwijgen het. 

Dan dit: 

Nederland zou er beter aan doen zich vast te verdiepen in de vraag of die interventie Nederlands politieke steun verdient.

Allereerst is het begrip 'interventie' onjuist voor een besluit dat naar alle waarschijnlijkheid volgens Van Walsum zelf illegaal zal zijn, aangezien hij schrijft: 

Russische èn Chinese steun voor een daartoe machtigende Veiligheidsraadsresolutie lijkt nauwelijks denkbaar, dus de interventie zal hoogstwaarschijnlijk plaatsvinden zonder mandaat van de Veiligheidsraad.

Het zal dus geen 'interventie' zijn, maar een oorlogsmisdaad, een agressieoorlog die zoals we weten tijdens de Neurenbergse Processen illegaal is verklaard. Waarom noemt Peter Van Walsum een agressieoorlog een 'interventie'? De reden is simpel, net als Wilders en elke modale boef heeft Van Walsum lak aan het recht zodra het hem niet uitkomt. Het recht is slechts instrumenteel voor dit slag mensen, alleen als men er zelf beter van wordt kan het recht gehandhaafd blijven. De vraag is nu: waar berust deze barbaarse mentaliteit van de Van Walsum's in de wereld precies op?

Daarover meer in een volgend stukje. 

The Empire 696

Senate Procures Influx of Millionaires
By Jennifer Yachnin
Roll Call Staff
Oct. 28, 2010, 12 a.m.


The Senate’s famed “millionaires club” is becoming a little crowded.

According to a Roll Call analysis of Senate financial disclosure forms filed in 2010, more than half of the chamber’s membership, 54 lawmakers, reported a minimum net worth of more than $1 million. Another four Senators fell short of that mark by less than $100,000.

In addition, more than half of the Senate’s membership saw their individual fortunes grow in 2009, the period covered by their most recent disclosure reports.

Those increases are reflected in the chamber’s combined minimum wealth, which increased to more than $680 million in 2009, or more than 4 percent higher than the previous year.

Roll Call’s analysis of Senators’ wealth is based solely on the information lawmakers provide in their annual reports. The minimum value of all liabilities is subtracted from the minimum value for all assets.

Among the Senators who tallied the largest percentage increases in wealth in 2009, several lawmakers benefited from inheritances.

Sen. John Cornyn reported four new investment funds and a retirement account valued at a combined $96,000, inherited from his mother, Gale. The additional funds increased his minimum net worth 550 percent, to at least $130,000.

Despite his significant percentage increase, the Texas Republican is among the 10 poorest Senators, tied with Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) in 90th place.

Sen. Sherrod Brown saw his bottom line increase to $370,000, nearly 429 percent over the minimum net worth of $70,000 he disclosed in his previous report.

That increase results from an uptick in the value of the Ohio Democrat’s investment in the Mansfield, Ohio-based Brownlea Farm, which rose to at least $250,000. He had previously valued his investment in his family farm, which he first began reporting in 1995, at $15,000.

According to his office, Brown’s family had the farm reappraised in 2009 following the death of his mother. An amendment Brown filed in May states he should have previously reported his share of the farm at the higher value.

Along with another amendment Brown filed in March reevaluating his investment in his state’s pension plan, the Ohio Senator’s minimum net worth for 2008 would have been reported at $384,000.

His current $370,000 net worth places him 77th among his colleagues, tied with Sen. Dick Lugar (R-Ind.).

Sen. Jeff Sessions, whose mother also died in 2009, reported an increased value in several properties, noting in his report that the parcels are being appraised as part of his mother’s estate.

The Alabama Republican reported the value of the largest asset, 1,100 acres of timberland, at $1 million to $5 million.

He also reported 500 acres of farmland in Wilcox County, Ala., valued at $500,000 to $1 million. He previously reported a half-interest in the same property, valuing it at $250,000 to $500,000. The report also lists three other tracts of Alabama timberland comprising another 63 acres.

Sessions’ minimum net worth increased 124 percent from $1 million to at least $2.24 million in 2009. He is now the 33rd wealthiest Member of the Senate, tied with Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.).

Both Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) also reported gains of at least 100 percent — catapulting both lawmakers out of the red after each reported a negative net worth the previous calendar year.

Baucus no longer reports a $100,000 line of credit from Sun Trust Bank, increasing his net worth to about $10,000.

Stabenow likewise dropped a $15,000 revolving line of credit from a Lansing, Mich.-based credit union, which brings her reported net worth to $0. She reports no assets and no liabilities.

It is possible that both Senators are worth significantly more, however.

While lawmakers are required to disclose their personal finances annually, the forms allow Senators to report their assets and liabilities in wide ranges, providing a sometimes imprecise summary of each lawmaker’s fiscal state.

The financial disclosure process also shields certain assets from public view, including primary or secondary residences that do not produce income, as well as artwork, antiques or other collectibles not held for investment purposes. Payments from federal retirement accounts and Social Security also are exempt from the reporting requirements.

Such exemptions likely account for the more than 43 percent drop in wealth Sen. Amy Klobuchar reported in 2009.

The Minnesota Democrat, who claimed about $300,00 in 2008, reported transferring assets from four private 401(k) retirement accounts to the government’s Thrift Savings Plan, which Senators are not required to report.

As Roll Call reported in its 50 Richest Members of Congress survey in September, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) remains the wealthiest lawmaker, with $188.37 million. Another 21 Senators also are among the richest Members.

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.) ranks as the poorest Member of Congress in 2009, despite the fact that he likely is among the richest.

Like most lawmakers, Kohl uses only the broad reporting categories required in the financial disclosure forms to provide information on his finances. Those forms limit the greatest minimum value of an asset to “over $50 million.”

On the forms, Kohl places the value of his NBA franchise, the Milwaukee Bucks, in the more than $50 million category. Forbes estimated in December that the team is worth $254 million.

But with the NBA franchise contributing only $50 million to Kohl’s wealth, according to the form, and liabilities related to the team counted elsewhere at $115 million, Kohl’s minimum net worth on financial disclosures settles at negative $4.64 million.

http://www.rollcall.com/issues/56_42/news/51039-1.html?type=aggregate_friendly