Thursday, December 04, 2003
"[The] elimination of Saddam and his dynasty may demoralize pro-regime insurgents but may actually embolden anti-regime and anti-US insurgents who may have held back in the past...because of the barely submerged fears that the regime could come back." - Ahmed S. Hashim, "The Sunni Insurgency in Iraq," Middle East Institute Policy Brief, August 15, 2003
What’s Happening, Iraq:
I include the above quote to remind us that the U.S. has few options in Iraq, that even the death of Saddam will not be helpful. An excellent summary of our position was in the current issue of the NY Review of Books. (Mark Danner)
The United States fields by far the most powerful military in the world, spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and as I write a relative handful of lightly armed insurgents, numbering in the tens of thousands or perhaps less, using the classic techniques of guerrilla warfare and suicide terrorism, are well on the way toward defeating it.
Behind these attacks…one can see a rather methodical intention to sever, one by one, with patience, care, and precision, the fragile lines that still tie the occupation authority to the rest of the world. Suicide bombers struck at the countries that supported the Americans in the war (Jordan), that support the occupation with troops (Italy) or professed a willingness to do so (Turkey). They struck at the heart of an "international community" that could, with increased involvement, help give the occupation both legitimacy (the United Nations) and material help in rebuilding the country (the Red Cross). Finally they repeatedly struck at Iraqis collaborating with occupation authorities, whether as members of the American-selected Governing Council (several of whom lived in the Baghdad Hotel) or as policemen trained and paid by Americans.
By striking at the Jordanians, the bombers helped to ensure that no Arab country will contribute troops to support the occupation. By striking at the Turks, they helped force them to withdraw their controversial offer to send soldiers. By striking at the United Nations and the Red Cross, they not only forced the members of those two critical institutions to flee the country but led most other nongovernmental organizations, who would have been central to supplying expertise and resources to rebuilding Iraq, to leave as well. And by striking at the homes of several members of the Governing Council (wounding one member and, in a separate incident, assassinating another), they forced those officials to join the Americans behind their isolating wall of security, further separating them from Iraqis and underlining their utter political reliance on the Americans.
_______________________________
In May, in an astonishing decision that still has not been adequately explained, American administrator L. Paul Bremer vastly increased the number of willing Iraqi foot soldiers by abruptly dissolving the regular Iraqi army, which had been established by King Faisal I in 1921, and thereby sent out into bitter shame and unemployment 350,000 of those young Iraqis who were well trained, well armed, and deeply angry at the Americans. Add to these a million or so tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, including rockets and missiles, readily available in more than a hundred mostly unguarded arms depots around the country, as well as vast amounts of money stockpiled during thirty-five years in power (notably on March 18, when Saddam sent three tractor trailers to the Central Bank and relieved it of more than a billion dollars in cash), and you have the makings of a well-manned, well-funded insurgency.
________________________________
All of this is another way of saying that if security is the fault line running beneath political development in Iraq, then politics is the fault line running beneath security. By now the failures in planning and execution that have dogged the occupation—the lack of military police, the refusal to provide security in the capital, the dissolution of the Iraqi army—are well known. All have originated in Washington, many born of struggles between the leading departments of government, principally the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, which the White House has never managed to resolve. (The most obvious product of these struggles was the President's decision, barely two months before the invasion, to discard the year of occupation planning by the State Department and shift control to the Pentagon, which proved itself wholly unprepared to take on the task.) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16862
2004 Election: Ralph Nader. Nader is reportedly leaning towards running. Though a supporter in 2000, I emailed his exploratory committee, urging him not to run this time. If you want to weigh in, it’s info@naderexplore04.org
Speaking of 2004, another group that’s trying to make a name for itself (and I guess I’m helping) is the New Democrat Network. The NDN professes to be embracing new tactics and advocating a different structure for the Democratic party. Their agenda is both unapologetically centrist and with few specifics. Its Board and Advisory group are heavy on the DLC-Clinton graduates, but it professes to be new and different. You can check it out at http://www.newdem.org/agenda/
2004 Elections: Will They Be Held?: It’s a fantasy that must be acknowledged. Apparently more ’names’ are doing just that. David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank, shared his concerns in the Washington Post Outlook Section. Rothkopf, described how a terrorist campaign of suicide bombings during the election campaign could lead to a full-scale military mobilization. “History suggests that striking during major elections is an effective tool for terrorist groups.” He added: “Recently, I co-chaired a meeting hosted by CNBC of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues. Almost three-quarters of them said it was likely the United States would see a major terrorist strike before the end of 2004. A similar number predicted that the assault would be greater than those of 9/11 and might well involve weapons of mass destruction. It was the sense of the group that such an attack was likely to generate additional support for President Bush.” Thanks, Dave!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5269-2003Nov21.html
And, in an interview in Cigar Aficionado, (John O. Edwards), General Tommy Franks comments that a well-timed terrorist attack could not only affect the elections; it could result in replacing the Constitution with a military government. “It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world—it may be in the United States of America—that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.” http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml
Latest publicized environmental outrage
You probably heard/saw. The basics from the Washington Post (Eric Pianin)
The Bush administration is working to undo regulations that would force power plants to sharply reduce mercury emissions and other toxic pollutants, according to a government document and interviews with officials.
The Nov. 26 document makes the case that the Environmental Protection Agency, under President Bill Clinton, misread the Clean Air Act's requirements and that there are less onerous ways to reduce the emissions.
Now, the White House and EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt are considering rescinding a December 2000 EPA ruling, which concluded that mercury emissions are a public health menace that requires power plants to meet a "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) standard to sharply reduce toxic pollutants.
Last night Leavitt confirmed that the EPA is considering reversing the Clinton administration's finding in favor of a more flexible enforcement system.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29807-2003Dec2.html
Guantanamo: The Guardian’s James Meek has been ‘all over’ it. He spent a month talking to former inmates. :First:
A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.
And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098618,00.html
And
Yet the testimony of those former detainees, together with rare scraps of information from censored mail, official statements and the odd comment from guards and others who have been inside, overlaps into a coherent portrait. In the almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened to hold people seized by the US in what the Bush administration has designated "the war on terror", it has settled from a rough and ready, occasionally brutal place of confinement into a full-grown mongrel of international law, where all the harshness of the punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners, unmitigated by any of the legal rights US prisoners enjoy. To this is added the mentally corrosive threat, alien to the US constitution, of infinite confinement, without court or appeal, on the whim of a single man - the president of the US. The question, "What is Guantanamo really like?", has all the appeal of the unknown. But inside it lurks a darker question, with all the implications for freedom in America and beyond that its answer contains: "What is Guantanamo?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098604,00.html
Reality of the “economy”
We’ll continue to get “official” statistics and reports that largely reassure us that the economy is rebounding, aiding the Bush re-election effort. The reality, of course, you have to dig for. That’s called journalism…which is the endeavor practiced by Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice who hung out in rural Illinois.
Unemployment around here has increased by half in the last three years. In Rockford, it approaches 12 percent. Factories are closing as production is shipped off overseas. (The mantra of "high tech" is unlikely to impress Rockford; one of the most wrenching recent production shutdowns was at the plant that produced a motor for the Segway scooter.) "Service jobs" have replaced some of the work. But where they materialize, with rotten hours, pay, and benefits, they end up destroying families instead of saving them. And it makes these people livid, because it all seems so stupid and unavoidable.
It would sound like socialism if it weren't coming out of the mouths of Republicans. "The generation of people that are running corporations today," Eric explains, "all they give a da n about is what happens in the next 90 days to their stock price and when that window is going to be when they're going to jump out and pull that parachute—who cares what happens five years from now?" He's not talking about protectionism. He's talking about creating an economy that can survive the next generation. "Running a company based on shareholder wealth is a collapsible scheme! It's a short-term scheme! It's not a sustainable scheme."
Don offers an example: "What happened to the tax rebates? Everyone went to Wal-Mart and got a DVD that was made in China, which created no jobs. Thus: a jobless recovery." http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=2f1f99b25a13f0b5fbf3e996c28ce8ae&lat=1070493739&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2evillagevoice%2ecom%2fissues%2f0349%2fperlstein%2ephp ll
Unemployment claims rose slightly; which should keep the official rate fairly flat. And the workers? Aside from the Wal-Mart folk at the lower end, the comfortable- not the very rich- are busy giving away some of their comforts. For example, the Delta pilots’ union has offered a 9% cut in wages to help the airline get its costs closer to those of rival carriers, marking a sign of “progress” in contract talks.
Good-bye New Deal? It’s one way to describe what the Right’s goal of transferring much of the country’s wealth to a tiny sliver of the population and their corporations. Here’s some meaty passages from a fine essay by Jeff Madrick, again from the NY Review of Books.
Over the last twenty-five years, the attitude that government is often more an impediment to economic growth and social justice than a necessity has taken an ever-deeper hold in America. It is fair to say that a battle to determine the future of America's traditional welfare state is now underway. Always more modest than in Europe, the American "safety net" includes Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, Medicare, poverty relief programs like welfare and Medicaid, industry regulations, and at least some support for unionization.
Most of these programs were started during the New Deal and were expanded in succeeding decades. They were painstakingly enacted into law in the face of constant opposition from political opponents and private vested interests. Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, they have been under effective attack. Reagan narrowed the coverage of unemployment insurance significantly and made benefits taxable. He refused to raise the minimum wage, even when consumer prices were rising rapidly. He cut back welfare programs, eliminated several hundred thousand public service jobs, deregulated industries, and weakened unions.
Even under the Democratic president Bill Clinton, as the economist Robert Pollin points out, total expenditures of the federal government fell from 21.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1992 to 18.1 percent in 2000. Military cutbacks made up a large part of this reduction but there were also substantial cuts, as a percentage of GDP, in transportation, education, and welfare. Clinton was constantly battling a Republican Congress intent on further reductions and eliminating some social programs outright, as well as partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare. But his own preference was for a Third Way that would be less dependent on government to guarantee social welfare. One of his proudest achievements was the dismantling of the old federal welfare program by placing time limits on benefits and imposing work requirements to qualify for them.
During his presidency, Clinton himself considered partially privatizing Social Security, which essentially meant that government would no longer guarantee full benefits when people retire. Rather, workers would be responsible for investing part of their payroll taxes in individual retirement accounts. Judging by his recent eagerness to place the blame for such scandals as Enron on Republicans in Congress, Clinton also seems to have forgotten how much he deregulated the financial industry himself.
George Bush has vowed to cut back the new welfare program still further. He has resisted the extension of unemployment insurance in the worst job market since the Depression. He has refused to propose full funding for his own federal education legislation, the much-publicized No Child Left Behind plan. Most important, he has cut taxes so deeply that the nation will be unable to pay for adequate new social programs, and very likely for existing ones. second term for President Bush, plus continued control of both houses of Congress by the Republicans, would likely mean that Social Security and Medicare would be privatized—as Bush promised in his first presidential campaign. We can also expect that Bush will strongly advocate providing private vouchers for education and reducing the regulation of many industries, ranging from natural gas to telecommunications. One has to wonder how conscious the nation has been of the piecemeal but steady destruction of the commitments to social welfare that the US governments have made beginning a century ago. Many think of these programs as the nation's greatest political achievement. It is true, however, that the nation has become less trusting of government and more parsimonious about social spending Tax deductions for corporate pension and health care benefits alone result in lost federal tax revenues of $200 billion a year. But only about 16 percent of workers with earnings in the bottom quintile of the nation—the lowest 20 percent—receive pension benefits, and only 24 percent receive health benefits. By contrast, some 50 percent of workers in the third quintile receive pension benefits and 60 percent health benefits. In the top quintile, roughly 70 percent of workers receive pension and health benefits. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16854
Domestic Terrorism, No Coverage
One has to go to the more obscure net addresses to find out about this chemical weapons issue in east Texas. These are from 3 weeks ago, yet still there has been no coverage by the major networks or newspapers. First from November 13, the Tyler Morning Telegraph (Anne Wright)
A Tyler man linked to anti-government and white supremacist groups pleaded guilty Thursday to possessing the chemical weapon sodium cyanide, and his female companion admitted to possessing a cache of illegal weapons.
In a plea bargain between his attorney and the government, William Krar, 62, admitted in Tyler federal court to possession of sodium cyanide and other chemicals for the purpose of creating a dangerous weapon.
FBI agents, tipped off last year by a cross-country mailout, raided a Noonday storage facility, where they found the chemicals and numerous firearms, as well as literature detailing the use of sodium cyanide to make a chemical weapon…
In May 2003, white supremacists in Texas were caught with a sodium cyanide bomb, other bombs, illegal weapons, hate literature, fake I.D., and chemicals, including hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. In mid-November, three people pleaded guilty to related charges, while seized documents indicate that there are other co-conspirators at large. The feds have served "hundreds of subpoenas across the country," and the plot has been included in the President's daily intelligence briefings.
But most of us have never heard about it. The only media that saw fit to report about this terrorist plot within the US were a few newspapers and TV stations in Texas. The Web-based news outlet WorldNetDaily ran a story about it, but Google News shows that there hasn't been a word in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or any other big media outlet. Why have the media decided that this is a non-story? It's hard to say, but we can say with certainty that if Muslims had been caught with these weapons of mass destruction, fake I.D., gas masks, and books on making explosives, it would've been front-page news for days.
--------------And, 3 days later from CBS 11 in Dallas/Fort Worth (Robert Riggs):
Federal authorities this year mounted one of the most extensive investigations of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing, CBS 11 has learned.
Three people linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area. http://www.thememoryhole.org/terror/tyler-terror.htm
Dean: Zogby and American Research Group polls have Dean holding his 39-42% in New Hampshire while Kerry continues to fade, now more than 25% points behind..
NY Times Letters to the Editor on Krugman column
My last blog had excerpts of Krugman’s column about Diebold, Inc. and touch screen voting machines. These letters are examples of what is often the most pithy and well-written section of the Times.
Election Scandals
To the Editor:
Re "Hack the Vote," by Paul Krugman (column, Dec. 2):
Mine is a voice from the belly of the beast (Palm Beach County, Fla.) who is not sure whether she voted for Al Gore or Patrick J. Buchanan in 2000.
My county now has touch-screen voting without a paper trail, and I am terrified of a hacking scandal in 2004 — here or elsewhere — that will make pregnant chads look like simple artifacts of the Neanderthal age.
The bill of Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, to mandate a paper trail would at least give hope for accurate recounts and should be enacted immediately. This is a national emergency.
REBECCA SCHLAM LUTTO
West Palm Beach, Fla., Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman's concerns about the integrity of the Diebold touch-screen voting machines ("Hack the Vote," column, Dec. 2) give rise to a larger question: Is our political system truly democratic if many elections are compromised by vote-count anomalies and voting machines that are built without appropriate safeguards?
Until every American's vote is counted by an indisputably accurate and verifiable process, we will be a democracy in spirit, but not necessarily in practice.
DAVID ALEXANDER
Powell, Ohio, Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman ("Hack the Vote," column, Dec. 2) warns against the danger of computerized voting machines, but the real danger is the new, federally mandated computerization of voter rolls.
As he mentions, the disaster in Florida in 2000 was the wrongful disenfranchisement of voters.
Katherine Harris's office, using a computerized database with known faults, misidentified these citizens as felons, then purged them from voter registries.
Last year, with little fanfare and less scrutiny, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which effectively orders all states to buy the computerized voting machines that Mr. Krugman rightly dreads. Worse, the law requires all states to computerize their voter rolls and purge those lists of suspect voters, à la Florida.
Heaven help us when President Bush and Congress tell us that they are going to "help" us vote.
GREG PALAST
New York, Dec. 2, 2003
The writer, an investigative reporter, is the author of a book about the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida in the 2000 election.
In California last month, Kevin Shelley, the secretary of state, mandated that all electronic voting machines be equipped with a paper trail. But one element of his decision that, strangely, is not discussed in the news media is that his requirement does not begin to take effect until July 2005, more than half a year after the 2004 presidential election, and the full implementation not until July 2006.
Why does it take two and a half years to do such a simple upgrade?
It is a chilling thought indeed to contemplate casting a ballot on a machine that will not allow a recount.
Asking a machine to recount itself without a separate paper trail is meaningless. It is especially so when the chief executive of the company that sells the electronic voting machines ambiguously declares that he is committed to deliver electoral votes to the president next year.
CHOL W. KIM
Los Angeles, Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman (column, Dec. 2) cites Diebold Inc. and its hackable, paper-record-less, touch-screen voting machines as a potential threat to the credibility of American democracy.
It may come as a surprise, but the credibility of your democracy is already being questioned in much of the rest of the world.
We've seen dubious redistricting schemes and the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.
Your democracy has already changed from a shining example to an object lesson in how quickly and easily democracy can be damaged.
DANA OWEN STILL
North Vancouver, British Columbia
Dec. 2, 2003
-R
What’s Happening, Iraq:
I include the above quote to remind us that the U.S. has few options in Iraq, that even the death of Saddam will not be helpful. An excellent summary of our position was in the current issue of the NY Review of Books. (Mark Danner)
The United States fields by far the most powerful military in the world, spending more on defense than the rest of the world combined, and as I write a relative handful of lightly armed insurgents, numbering in the tens of thousands or perhaps less, using the classic techniques of guerrilla warfare and suicide terrorism, are well on the way toward defeating it.
Behind these attacks…one can see a rather methodical intention to sever, one by one, with patience, care, and precision, the fragile lines that still tie the occupation authority to the rest of the world. Suicide bombers struck at the countries that supported the Americans in the war (Jordan), that support the occupation with troops (Italy) or professed a willingness to do so (Turkey). They struck at the heart of an "international community" that could, with increased involvement, help give the occupation both legitimacy (the United Nations) and material help in rebuilding the country (the Red Cross). Finally they repeatedly struck at Iraqis collaborating with occupation authorities, whether as members of the American-selected Governing Council (several of whom lived in the Baghdad Hotel) or as policemen trained and paid by Americans.
By striking at the Jordanians, the bombers helped to ensure that no Arab country will contribute troops to support the occupation. By striking at the Turks, they helped force them to withdraw their controversial offer to send soldiers. By striking at the United Nations and the Red Cross, they not only forced the members of those two critical institutions to flee the country but led most other nongovernmental organizations, who would have been central to supplying expertise and resources to rebuilding Iraq, to leave as well. And by striking at the homes of several members of the Governing Council (wounding one member and, in a separate incident, assassinating another), they forced those officials to join the Americans behind their isolating wall of security, further separating them from Iraqis and underlining their utter political reliance on the Americans.
_______________________________
In May, in an astonishing decision that still has not been adequately explained, American administrator L. Paul Bremer vastly increased the number of willing Iraqi foot soldiers by abruptly dissolving the regular Iraqi army, which had been established by King Faisal I in 1921, and thereby sent out into bitter shame and unemployment 350,000 of those young Iraqis who were well trained, well armed, and deeply angry at the Americans. Add to these a million or so tons of weapons and munitions of all sorts, including rockets and missiles, readily available in more than a hundred mostly unguarded arms depots around the country, as well as vast amounts of money stockpiled during thirty-five years in power (notably on March 18, when Saddam sent three tractor trailers to the Central Bank and relieved it of more than a billion dollars in cash), and you have the makings of a well-manned, well-funded insurgency.
________________________________
All of this is another way of saying that if security is the fault line running beneath political development in Iraq, then politics is the fault line running beneath security. By now the failures in planning and execution that have dogged the occupation—the lack of military police, the refusal to provide security in the capital, the dissolution of the Iraqi army—are well known. All have originated in Washington, many born of struggles between the leading departments of government, principally the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon, which the White House has never managed to resolve. (The most obvious product of these struggles was the President's decision, barely two months before the invasion, to discard the year of occupation planning by the State Department and shift control to the Pentagon, which proved itself wholly unprepared to take on the task.) http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16862
2004 Election: Ralph Nader. Nader is reportedly leaning towards running. Though a supporter in 2000, I emailed his exploratory committee, urging him not to run this time. If you want to weigh in, it’s info@naderexplore04.org
Speaking of 2004, another group that’s trying to make a name for itself (and I guess I’m helping) is the New Democrat Network. The NDN professes to be embracing new tactics and advocating a different structure for the Democratic party. Their agenda is both unapologetically centrist and with few specifics. Its Board and Advisory group are heavy on the DLC-Clinton graduates, but it professes to be new and different. You can check it out at http://www.newdem.org/agenda/
2004 Elections: Will They Be Held?: It’s a fantasy that must be acknowledged. Apparently more ’names’ are doing just that. David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton administration official now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank, shared his concerns in the Washington Post Outlook Section. Rothkopf, described how a terrorist campaign of suicide bombings during the election campaign could lead to a full-scale military mobilization. “History suggests that striking during major elections is an effective tool for terrorist groups.” He added: “Recently, I co-chaired a meeting hosted by CNBC of more than 200 senior business and government executives, many of whom are specialists in security and terrorism related issues. Almost three-quarters of them said it was likely the United States would see a major terrorist strike before the end of 2004. A similar number predicted that the assault would be greater than those of 9/11 and might well involve weapons of mass destruction. It was the sense of the group that such an attack was likely to generate additional support for President Bush.” Thanks, Dave!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5269-2003Nov21.html
And, in an interview in Cigar Aficionado, (John O. Edwards), General Tommy Franks comments that a well-timed terrorist attack could not only affect the elections; it could result in replacing the Constitution with a military government. “It means the potential of a weapon of mass destruction and a terrorist, massive, casualty-producing event somewhere in the Western world—it may be in the United States of America—that causes our population to question our own Constitution and to begin to militarize our country in order to avoid a repeat of another mass, casualty-producing event. Which in fact, then begins to unravel the fabric of our Constitution. Two steps, very, very important.” http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/20/185048.shtml
Latest publicized environmental outrage
You probably heard/saw. The basics from the Washington Post (Eric Pianin)
The Bush administration is working to undo regulations that would force power plants to sharply reduce mercury emissions and other toxic pollutants, according to a government document and interviews with officials.
The Nov. 26 document makes the case that the Environmental Protection Agency, under President Bill Clinton, misread the Clean Air Act's requirements and that there are less onerous ways to reduce the emissions.
Now, the White House and EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt are considering rescinding a December 2000 EPA ruling, which concluded that mercury emissions are a public health menace that requires power plants to meet a "maximum achievable control technology" (MACT) standard to sharply reduce toxic pollutants.
Last night Leavitt confirmed that the EPA is considering reversing the Clinton administration's finding in favor of a more flexible enforcement system.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29807-2003Dec2.html
Guantanamo: The Guardian’s James Meek has been ‘all over’ it. He spent a month talking to former inmates. :First:
A team of military lawyers recruited to defend alleged terrorists held by the US at Guantanamo Bay was dismissed by the Pentagon after some of its members rebelled against the unfair way the trials have been designed, the Guardian has learned.
And some members of the new legal defence team remain deeply unhappy with the trials - known as "military commissions" - believing them to be slanted towards the prosecution and an affront to modern US military justice. http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098618,00.html
And
Yet the testimony of those former detainees, together with rare scraps of information from censored mail, official statements and the odd comment from guards and others who have been inside, overlaps into a coherent portrait. In the almost two years since the Guantanamo prison camp opened to hold people seized by the US in what the Bush administration has designated "the war on terror", it has settled from a rough and ready, occasionally brutal place of confinement into a full-grown mongrel of international law, where all the harshness of the punitive US prison system is visited on foreigners, unmitigated by any of the legal rights US prisoners enjoy. To this is added the mentally corrosive threat, alien to the US constitution, of infinite confinement, without court or appeal, on the whim of a single man - the president of the US. The question, "What is Guantanamo really like?", has all the appeal of the unknown. But inside it lurks a darker question, with all the implications for freedom in America and beyond that its answer contains: "What is Guantanamo?"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1098604,00.html
Reality of the “economy”
We’ll continue to get “official” statistics and reports that largely reassure us that the economy is rebounding, aiding the Bush re-election effort. The reality, of course, you have to dig for. That’s called journalism…which is the endeavor practiced by Rick Perlstein of the Village Voice who hung out in rural Illinois.
Unemployment around here has increased by half in the last three years. In Rockford, it approaches 12 percent. Factories are closing as production is shipped off overseas. (The mantra of "high tech" is unlikely to impress Rockford; one of the most wrenching recent production shutdowns was at the plant that produced a motor for the Segway scooter.) "Service jobs" have replaced some of the work. But where they materialize, with rotten hours, pay, and benefits, they end up destroying families instead of saving them. And it makes these people livid, because it all seems so stupid and unavoidable.
It would sound like socialism if it weren't coming out of the mouths of Republicans. "The generation of people that are running corporations today," Eric explains, "all they give a da n about is what happens in the next 90 days to their stock price and when that window is going to be when they're going to jump out and pull that parachute—who cares what happens five years from now?" He's not talking about protectionism. He's talking about creating an economy that can survive the next generation. "Running a company based on shareholder wealth is a collapsible scheme! It's a short-term scheme! It's not a sustainable scheme."
Don offers an example: "What happened to the tax rebates? Everyone went to Wal-Mart and got a DVD that was made in China, which created no jobs. Thus: a jobless recovery." http://64.4.16.250/cgi-bin/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=2f1f99b25a13f0b5fbf3e996c28ce8ae&lat=1070493739&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fwww%2evillagevoice%2ecom%2fissues%2f0349%2fperlstein%2ephp ll
Unemployment claims rose slightly; which should keep the official rate fairly flat. And the workers? Aside from the Wal-Mart folk at the lower end, the comfortable- not the very rich- are busy giving away some of their comforts. For example, the Delta pilots’ union has offered a 9% cut in wages to help the airline get its costs closer to those of rival carriers, marking a sign of “progress” in contract talks.
Good-bye New Deal? It’s one way to describe what the Right’s goal of transferring much of the country’s wealth to a tiny sliver of the population and their corporations. Here’s some meaty passages from a fine essay by Jeff Madrick, again from the NY Review of Books.
Over the last twenty-five years, the attitude that government is often more an impediment to economic growth and social justice than a necessity has taken an ever-deeper hold in America. It is fair to say that a battle to determine the future of America's traditional welfare state is now underway. Always more modest than in Europe, the American "safety net" includes Social Security, unemployment insurance, a minimum wage, Medicare, poverty relief programs like welfare and Medicaid, industry regulations, and at least some support for unionization.
Most of these programs were started during the New Deal and were expanded in succeeding decades. They were painstakingly enacted into law in the face of constant opposition from political opponents and private vested interests. Since Ronald Reagan's presidency, they have been under effective attack. Reagan narrowed the coverage of unemployment insurance significantly and made benefits taxable. He refused to raise the minimum wage, even when consumer prices were rising rapidly. He cut back welfare programs, eliminated several hundred thousand public service jobs, deregulated industries, and weakened unions.
Even under the Democratic president Bill Clinton, as the economist Robert Pollin points out, total expenditures of the federal government fell from 21.9 percent of the Gross Domestic Product in 1992 to 18.1 percent in 2000. Military cutbacks made up a large part of this reduction but there were also substantial cuts, as a percentage of GDP, in transportation, education, and welfare. Clinton was constantly battling a Republican Congress intent on further reductions and eliminating some social programs outright, as well as partially privatizing Social Security and Medicare. But his own preference was for a Third Way that would be less dependent on government to guarantee social welfare. One of his proudest achievements was the dismantling of the old federal welfare program by placing time limits on benefits and imposing work requirements to qualify for them.
During his presidency, Clinton himself considered partially privatizing Social Security, which essentially meant that government would no longer guarantee full benefits when people retire. Rather, workers would be responsible for investing part of their payroll taxes in individual retirement accounts. Judging by his recent eagerness to place the blame for such scandals as Enron on Republicans in Congress, Clinton also seems to have forgotten how much he deregulated the financial industry himself.
George Bush has vowed to cut back the new welfare program still further. He has resisted the extension of unemployment insurance in the worst job market since the Depression. He has refused to propose full funding for his own federal education legislation, the much-publicized No Child Left Behind plan. Most important, he has cut taxes so deeply that the nation will be unable to pay for adequate new social programs, and very likely for existing ones. second term for President Bush, plus continued control of both houses of Congress by the Republicans, would likely mean that Social Security and Medicare would be privatized—as Bush promised in his first presidential campaign. We can also expect that Bush will strongly advocate providing private vouchers for education and reducing the regulation of many industries, ranging from natural gas to telecommunications. One has to wonder how conscious the nation has been of the piecemeal but steady destruction of the commitments to social welfare that the US governments have made beginning a century ago. Many think of these programs as the nation's greatest political achievement. It is true, however, that the nation has become less trusting of government and more parsimonious about social spending Tax deductions for corporate pension and health care benefits alone result in lost federal tax revenues of $200 billion a year. But only about 16 percent of workers with earnings in the bottom quintile of the nation—the lowest 20 percent—receive pension benefits, and only 24 percent receive health benefits. By contrast, some 50 percent of workers in the third quintile receive pension benefits and 60 percent health benefits. In the top quintile, roughly 70 percent of workers receive pension and health benefits. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16854
Domestic Terrorism, No Coverage
One has to go to the more obscure net addresses to find out about this chemical weapons issue in east Texas. These are from 3 weeks ago, yet still there has been no coverage by the major networks or newspapers. First from November 13, the Tyler Morning Telegraph (Anne Wright)
A Tyler man linked to anti-government and white supremacist groups pleaded guilty Thursday to possessing the chemical weapon sodium cyanide, and his female companion admitted to possessing a cache of illegal weapons.
In a plea bargain between his attorney and the government, William Krar, 62, admitted in Tyler federal court to possession of sodium cyanide and other chemicals for the purpose of creating a dangerous weapon.
FBI agents, tipped off last year by a cross-country mailout, raided a Noonday storage facility, where they found the chemicals and numerous firearms, as well as literature detailing the use of sodium cyanide to make a chemical weapon…
In May 2003, white supremacists in Texas were caught with a sodium cyanide bomb, other bombs, illegal weapons, hate literature, fake I.D., and chemicals, including hydrochloric acid and nitric acid. In mid-November, three people pleaded guilty to related charges, while seized documents indicate that there are other co-conspirators at large. The feds have served "hundreds of subpoenas across the country," and the plot has been included in the President's daily intelligence briefings.
But most of us have never heard about it. The only media that saw fit to report about this terrorist plot within the US were a few newspapers and TV stations in Texas. The Web-based news outlet WorldNetDaily ran a story about it, but Google News shows that there hasn't been a word in the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, or any other big media outlet. Why have the media decided that this is a non-story? It's hard to say, but we can say with certainty that if Muslims had been caught with these weapons of mass destruction, fake I.D., gas masks, and books on making explosives, it would've been front-page news for days.
--------------And, 3 days later from CBS 11 in Dallas/Fort Worth (Robert Riggs):
Federal authorities this year mounted one of the most extensive investigations of domestic terrorism since the Oklahoma City bombing, CBS 11 has learned.
Three people linked to white supremacist and anti-government groups are in custody. At least one weapon of mass destruction - a sodium cyanide bomb capable of delivering a deadly gas cloud - has been seized in the Tyler area. http://www.thememoryhole.org/terror/tyler-terror.htm
Dean: Zogby and American Research Group polls have Dean holding his 39-42% in New Hampshire while Kerry continues to fade, now more than 25% points behind..
NY Times Letters to the Editor on Krugman column
My last blog had excerpts of Krugman’s column about Diebold, Inc. and touch screen voting machines. These letters are examples of what is often the most pithy and well-written section of the Times.
Election Scandals
To the Editor:
Re "Hack the Vote," by Paul Krugman (column, Dec. 2):
Mine is a voice from the belly of the beast (Palm Beach County, Fla.) who is not sure whether she voted for Al Gore or Patrick J. Buchanan in 2000.
My county now has touch-screen voting without a paper trail, and I am terrified of a hacking scandal in 2004 — here or elsewhere — that will make pregnant chads look like simple artifacts of the Neanderthal age.
The bill of Representative Rush Holt, Democrat of New Jersey, to mandate a paper trail would at least give hope for accurate recounts and should be enacted immediately. This is a national emergency.
REBECCA SCHLAM LUTTO
West Palm Beach, Fla., Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman's concerns about the integrity of the Diebold touch-screen voting machines ("Hack the Vote," column, Dec. 2) give rise to a larger question: Is our political system truly democratic if many elections are compromised by vote-count anomalies and voting machines that are built without appropriate safeguards?
Until every American's vote is counted by an indisputably accurate and verifiable process, we will be a democracy in spirit, but not necessarily in practice.
DAVID ALEXANDER
Powell, Ohio, Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman ("Hack the Vote," column, Dec. 2) warns against the danger of computerized voting machines, but the real danger is the new, federally mandated computerization of voter rolls.
As he mentions, the disaster in Florida in 2000 was the wrongful disenfranchisement of voters.
Katherine Harris's office, using a computerized database with known faults, misidentified these citizens as felons, then purged them from voter registries.
Last year, with little fanfare and less scrutiny, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which effectively orders all states to buy the computerized voting machines that Mr. Krugman rightly dreads. Worse, the law requires all states to computerize their voter rolls and purge those lists of suspect voters, à la Florida.
Heaven help us when President Bush and Congress tell us that they are going to "help" us vote.
GREG PALAST
New York, Dec. 2, 2003
The writer, an investigative reporter, is the author of a book about the disenfranchisement of black voters in Florida in the 2000 election.
In California last month, Kevin Shelley, the secretary of state, mandated that all electronic voting machines be equipped with a paper trail. But one element of his decision that, strangely, is not discussed in the news media is that his requirement does not begin to take effect until July 2005, more than half a year after the 2004 presidential election, and the full implementation not until July 2006.
Why does it take two and a half years to do such a simple upgrade?
It is a chilling thought indeed to contemplate casting a ballot on a machine that will not allow a recount.
Asking a machine to recount itself without a separate paper trail is meaningless. It is especially so when the chief executive of the company that sells the electronic voting machines ambiguously declares that he is committed to deliver electoral votes to the president next year.
CHOL W. KIM
Los Angeles, Dec. 2, 2003
Paul Krugman (column, Dec. 2) cites Diebold Inc. and its hackable, paper-record-less, touch-screen voting machines as a potential threat to the credibility of American democracy.
It may come as a surprise, but the credibility of your democracy is already being questioned in much of the rest of the world.
We've seen dubious redistricting schemes and the disenfranchisement of eligible voters.
Your democracy has already changed from a shining example to an object lesson in how quickly and easily democracy can be damaged.
DANA OWEN STILL
North Vancouver, British Columbia
Dec. 2, 2003
-R
