Friday, October 24, 2003
Of all the people in the world who understand Texas, it's probably Australians. (sic)
We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people. (Huh?)
-Bush, on his Asia trip
More on that trip:
According to the British and Australian press, it was a ragged trip; Bush upset several nations when he termed Australia 'the sheriff' of Asia. Last I checked, there isn’t supposed to be a hierarchy in southeast Asia, and certainly designating the only anglo-saxon state- though with one heck of a Bush loyalist for prime minister- is bound to unsettle.
The protests were impressive, numbering in the thousands, and there was a scrum inside parliament.
The day might have started as a high-security event staged with US military precision, but nothing could stop it in the end from degenerating into a classic Aussie wing-ding.
John Howard was eventually forced to throw himself, like a human shield, between his honoured visitor, George Bush, and marauding Greens senators as they tried to accost the US President. www.theage.com.au/
More from this site and from www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Rumsfeld Memo: So the Defense Secretary comments that the terror "war" is not going so well, that there is no long-range planning to deal with terrorists. Rumsfeld cites "mixed results" against al-Qaeda, "reasonable progress" tracking down top Iraqis and "somewhat slower progress" in apprehending Taliban leaders. "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
That sounds like admitting failure, no? Yet, the airwaves were full of commentators who noted that they were pleased that Rumsfeld was more honest in this communique than in his usual up-beat public pronouncements. Few and far between are comments that his public comments were misleading, that he should resign as a result of the misleading statements and/or the policy failure.
Still more politicizing… of a poll: Zogby International (zogby.com)in Iraq had conducted the poll, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published their interpretation of the findings. AEI’s and the Administration’s"spin" created a faulty impression of the poll’s results.
Cheney has claimed that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US... hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say "none of the above."
That’s "winning hands down"?
Election Fraud: Back to 2000
I’ve stayed away from this problem area, only because there are so many issues, not because of its relative importance. To get a glimpse of what we’re dealing with or not dealing with, take a look at this report on that most irregular night in Florida, back some 150 weeks. This report comes from Alastair Thompson, award winning New Zealand investigative journalist, at http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.html
Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." -(Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000 ; Page A22)
First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being lopped off the Gore total...
And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong...
What has not been discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that the events that occurred between around midnight and 4am might have been the result not of mistakes but of organised voting fraud.
Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken Clark's memos confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the lines they suggest it is the most likely possibility.
Consider this:
How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night – was really the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts.
Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida?
Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle.
Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a recount.
And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
Venezuela: Plotting?
We know the USA’s history- of fomenting, equipping, facilitating coups in Latin America. So, is it happening anew? An AP report (Christopher Toothaker) reports on the latest denial of our interfering in Venezuela.
Washington's ambassador to Venezuela denied Thursday the CIA was working with Venezuelan dissidents to overthrow President Hugo Chavez as the his allies have alleged. US. Ambassador Charles Shapiro met with the ruling party lawmakers who made the allegations and disputed charges that the Central Intelligence Agency planned to overthrow the government.
"I am sure the charge is not true," he said.
On Wednesday, pro-Chavez lawmaker Nicolas Maduro showed a videotape he claimed was evidence the CIA financing and training dissident military officers and police in espionage and "terrorist" tactics to topple Chavez.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the video showed a private security company, not CIA agents. It also said the U.S. government did not participate in the event.
Played at a news conference at Congress, the video showed three unidentified men speaking in Spanish about making contacts with an unspecified embassy. They discussed "blending in" and changing cars to avoid detection.
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: More reports on Taliban strength
AP/Yahoo.com, etc report major military engagements in southern Afghanistan, which seems to be in response to reports that the Taliban were planning to bring 2,500 guerillas from Pakistan. One sign: a report in the Far Eastern Economic Review quoted intelligence sources as saying that Taliban had bought more than 1,000 motorcycles to be utilized in upcoming activities.
Report on U.S. Environmental Policy
The Guardian (GB) ran a long investigative report by Matthew Engel on "how America is ravaging the planet." The report focused initially on destruction to Carolina’s Outer Banks and then ‘moved on’…
The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069883,00.html
Good News, Bad News Poll
According to a poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 61% of college students approve of the President's job performance, about ten points higher than the general public. The good news is that 87 percent (including 70 percent of Republicans) say "members of the Bush Administration" have been "hiding some things" or "mostly not telling the truth" about the situation in Iraq.
Business News: Same Old…
Today’s NY Times reports (Edmund L. Andrews) that even though Bush had announced that there would be no more tax cuts in the coming year, the House Republicans have fashioned another round.
House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.
According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.
It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade.
The intended beneficiaries are companies that manufacture products in the United States and small businesses. But the definition of manufacturing includes movies, software, oil and gas refining and engineering services. That means the beneficiaries would also include Time Warner, Disney, Microsoft and giant engineering companies like Bechtel and Fluor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/business/24TAX.html?pagewanted=print&position
And, in a gem in Wednesday’s Times, Neela Banerjee wrote of Halliburton’s price gouging.
The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.
Separately, a report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan public policy research arm, warned that the Corps of Engineers might be paying too much to import fuel.
Seems that the Iraqis were paying $.98 a gallon to Turkey, but Halliburton was charging $1.59. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22hal.html
-R
We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people. (Huh?)
-Bush, on his Asia trip
More on that trip:
According to the British and Australian press, it was a ragged trip; Bush upset several nations when he termed Australia 'the sheriff' of Asia. Last I checked, there isn’t supposed to be a hierarchy in southeast Asia, and certainly designating the only anglo-saxon state- though with one heck of a Bush loyalist for prime minister- is bound to unsettle.
The protests were impressive, numbering in the thousands, and there was a scrum inside parliament.
The day might have started as a high-security event staged with US military precision, but nothing could stop it in the end from degenerating into a classic Aussie wing-ding.
John Howard was eventually forced to throw himself, like a human shield, between his honoured visitor, George Bush, and marauding Greens senators as they tried to accost the US President. www.theage.com.au/
More from this site and from www.theaustralian.news.com.au
Rumsfeld Memo: So the Defense Secretary comments that the terror "war" is not going so well, that there is no long-range planning to deal with terrorists. Rumsfeld cites "mixed results" against al-Qaeda, "reasonable progress" tracking down top Iraqis and "somewhat slower progress" in apprehending Taliban leaders. "Is our current situation such that 'the harder we work, the behinder we get"?
That sounds like admitting failure, no? Yet, the airwaves were full of commentators who noted that they were pleased that Rumsfeld was more honest in this communique than in his usual up-beat public pronouncements. Few and far between are comments that his public comments were misleading, that he should resign as a result of the misleading statements and/or the policy failure.
Still more politicizing… of a poll: Zogby International (zogby.com)in Iraq had conducted the poll, and the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) published their interpretation of the findings. AEI’s and the Administration’s"spin" created a faulty impression of the poll’s results.
Cheney has claimed that when asked what kind of government they would like, Iraqis chose "the US... hands down," in fact, the results of the poll are actually quite different. Twenty-three percent of Iraqis say that they would like to model their new government after the US; 17.5 percent would like their model to be Saudi Arabia; 12 percent say Syria, 7 percent say Egypt and 37 percent say "none of the above."
That’s "winning hands down"?
Election Fraud: Back to 2000
I’ve stayed away from this problem area, only because there are so many issues, not because of its relative importance. To get a glimpse of what we’re dealing with or not dealing with, take a look at this report on that most irregular night in Florida, back some 150 weeks. This report comes from Alastair Thompson, award winning New Zealand investigative journalist, at http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0310/S00211.html
Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters." -(Washington Post Sunday, November 12, 2000 ; Page A22)
First there are the 16,022 votes stolen from Gore in Volusia county by the "faulty memory card". Meanwhile over in Brevard County another error - also involving Global Elections System (the predecessor of Diebold) equipment is responsible for a further 4000 votes being lopped off the Gore total...
And it is also worth noting that nobody knows whether the Brevard and Volusia county errors were the only ones in play at this time. These errors were both big ones. They were noticed and corrected on the night. How many smaller vote subtractions could have taken place on the night? Theoretically hundreds. As Dana Milbank's Washington Post report shows it was only because someone noticed the error in Volusia that it was corrected and remarkably the software itself contains no automatic system for rejecting negative vote totals being reported by precincts, events which by definition can only be nefarious and wrong...
What has not been discussed, or even conceived of till now, is that the events that occurred between around midnight and 4am might have been the result not of mistakes but of organised voting fraud.
Yet that is precisely what Talbot Iredale and Ken Clark's memos confirm is a distinct possibility, in fact, reading between the lines they suggest it is the most likely possibility.
Consider this:
How plausible is it that an error such as this - of such magnitude, with no apparent physical explanation, and in one of the few counties still receiving incoming results that late in the night – was really the simple result of a "faulty memory card"?
We also now know, again thanks to the work of Black Box Voting investigators like Washington State's Bev Harris and California's Jim March, that the Diebold vote tallying programme used in several Florida counties, GEMS, is easily hackable, both by outsiders and by insiders.
We do not know what would have happened had a full state-wide recount been undertaken as the efforts to have one were blocked in the courts.
Would they have discovered other counties where unusual events like those discovered in Brevard and Volusia counties?
Is it possible that the original VNS exit polling data was closer to correct than conventional wisdom suggests?
Is it possible that less egregious vote stealing took place in counties all over Florida?
Add into the mix the blatant roll scrubbing in Florida discovered by Greg Palast and exposed in his best-selling book "The Best Democracy Money can buy" and you have a recipe of reasons to reopen a full scale inquiry into the Florida debacle.
Perhaps more importantly. With paper-less touchscreen voting systems in place in many Florida counties come November 2004, should such events occur again, there will be no record with which to conduct a recount.
And the other big mystery of course is this: if someone did try to rig the election returns in Florida in 2000, who was it?
Venezuela: Plotting?
We know the USA’s history- of fomenting, equipping, facilitating coups in Latin America. So, is it happening anew? An AP report (Christopher Toothaker) reports on the latest denial of our interfering in Venezuela.
Washington's ambassador to Venezuela denied Thursday the CIA was working with Venezuelan dissidents to overthrow President Hugo Chavez as the his allies have alleged. US. Ambassador Charles Shapiro met with the ruling party lawmakers who made the allegations and disputed charges that the Central Intelligence Agency planned to overthrow the government.
"I am sure the charge is not true," he said.
On Wednesday, pro-Chavez lawmaker Nicolas Maduro showed a videotape he claimed was evidence the CIA financing and training dissident military officers and police in espionage and "terrorist" tactics to topple Chavez.
The U.S. Embassy said in a statement that the video showed a private security company, not CIA agents. It also said the U.S. government did not participate in the event.
Played at a news conference at Congress, the video showed three unidentified men speaking in Spanish about making contacts with an unspecified embassy. They discussed "blending in" and changing cars to avoid detection.
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: More reports on Taliban strength
AP/Yahoo.com, etc report major military engagements in southern Afghanistan, which seems to be in response to reports that the Taliban were planning to bring 2,500 guerillas from Pakistan. One sign: a report in the Far Eastern Economic Review quoted intelligence sources as saying that Taliban had bought more than 1,000 motorcycles to be utilized in upcoming activities.
Report on U.S. Environmental Policy
The Guardian (GB) ran a long investigative report by Matthew Engel on "how America is ravaging the planet." The report focused initially on destruction to Carolina’s Outer Banks and then ‘moved on’…
The madness of the Outer Banks seems like a symptom of, and a metaphor for, something far broader: the US is in denial about what is, beyond any question, potentially its most dangerous enemy. While millions of words have been written every day for the past two years about the threat from vengeful Islamic terrorists, the threat from a vengeful Nature has been almost wholly ignored. Yet the likelihood of multiple attacks in the future is far more certain.
Earlier this year, just before he was fired as environment minister, Michael Meacher gave a speech in Newcastle, saying: "There is a lot wrong with our world. But it is not as bad as people think. It is actually worse." He listed five threats to the survival of the planet: lack of fresh water, destruction of forest and crop land, global warming, overuse of natural resources and the continuing rise in the population. What Meacher could not say, or he would have been booted out more quickly, was that the US is a world leader in hastening each of these five crises, bringing its gargantuan appetite to the business of ravaging the planet. American politicians do not talk this way. Even Al Gore, supposedly the most committed environmentalist in world politics, kept quiet about the subject when chasing the presidency in 2000.
Those of us without a degree in climatology can have no sensible opinion on the truth about climate change, except to sense that the weather does seem to have become a little weird lately. Yet in America the subject has become politicised, with rightwing commentators decrying global warming as "bogus science". They gloated when it snowed unusually hard in Washington last winter (failing to notice the absence of snow in Alaska).
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1069883,00.html
Good News, Bad News Poll
According to a poll by Harvard’s Institute of Politics, 61% of college students approve of the President's job performance, about ten points higher than the general public. The good news is that 87 percent (including 70 percent of Republicans) say "members of the Bush Administration" have been "hiding some things" or "mostly not telling the truth" about the situation in Iraq.
Business News: Same Old…
Today’s NY Times reports (Edmund L. Andrews) that even though Bush had announced that there would be no more tax cuts in the coming year, the House Republicans have fashioned another round.
House Republican leaders are nearing agreement on a bill to give nearly $60 billion in additional tax breaks to corporations, brushing aside Democratic complaints that the measure would deepen the federal budget deficit.
According to a draft circulated among Republican lawyers, the bill, which is expected to come up for a vote next week at the House Ways and Means Committee, would gradually reduce the corporate tax rate for most companies from 35 to 32 percent.
It would also relax or abolish a number of longstanding tax regulations on foreign profits of American multinationals, a move that Congressional tax analysts say could save companies more than $40 billion in taxes over the next decade.
The intended beneficiaries are companies that manufacture products in the United States and small businesses. But the definition of manufacturing includes movies, software, oil and gas refining and engineering services. That means the beneficiaries would also include Time Warner, Disney, Microsoft and giant engineering companies like Bechtel and Fluor.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/24/business/24TAX.html?pagewanted=print&position
And, in a gem in Wednesday’s Times, Neela Banerjee wrote of Halliburton’s price gouging.
The head of an Iraqi oil agency said yesterday that his group had been trucking in gasoline and other fuel to Iraq for considerably less money than Halliburton, which has so far received more than $700 million from the Army Corps of Engineers to stave off shortages there.
Separately, a report earlier this month by the Congressional Research Service, a nonpartisan public policy research arm, warned that the Corps of Engineers might be paying too much to import fuel.
Seems that the Iraqis were paying $.98 a gallon to Turkey, but Halliburton was charging $1.59. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/22/business/worldbusiness/22hal.html
-R
Wednesday, October 22, 2003
But the time has come for the sheep-like political correctness which has cowed members of this Senate to come to an end.
The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.
Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods - Robert Byrd (D-WVa)
What’s Happening, Iraq: Casualties.
I’m periodically asked about casualties. This comes via the Project on Defense Alternatives which has been investigating hospital and morgue records.
Adding together our estimates of Iraqi noncombatant fatalities (3,750 plus/minus 550) and combatant fatalities (9,200 plus/minus 1,600) yields our estimate for total Iraqi fatalities in the war: 12,950 plus or minus 2,150 (16.5 percent). Rounding this off, our analysis suggests that as few as 11,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war or as many as 15,000. It is likely that approximately 30 percent of the fatalities were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#5.%20Total%20Iraqi%20fatalities%20in%20the%202003
Secrecy / PR re casualties
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post covers the latest attempt to cloak the harsh realities of the Iraq occupation.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.
To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.
In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55816-2003Oct20?language=printer
Typical PR re Iraq:
There are countless examples; this one is not any more dramatic than most, just typical. It comes from the same article in Newsweek (Richard Wolffe, Rod Nordland) cited in the last blog. The article is being cited in NPR reports as well.
Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp
Economic Good News? No, just more deception
You might recall a flurry of budget projections re the budget deficit that raised some eyebrows. During the summer it became clear that the fiscal ’03 year would feature a record-setting deficit. As non-partisan and congressional budget offices predicted deficits close to $400 billion, the Administration “confessed” to a figure of $455 billion. Why would they so assert?
Now, official figures for last year are about $375 billion, and the Administration is claiming that the figure is proof that “the tax cuts are working.” Oh. At least not everyone is buying. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) offered that
We need to find out what kind of shenanigans caused the estimate to be so off, whether OMB deliberately estimated high numbers so everybody could jump for joy this week," Hollings wrote in a letter to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., requesting hearings on the inaccuracy of the administration's July projection.
Hey, we know their tax cuts have worked. Just ask those who attend public universities, which experienced a 14% increase last year, or those who experienced a similar increase in their health insurance premiums, or …
9/11: The 20th Hijacker
In a several step process, the Government has backed away from this assertion. Previously destined to be a poster boy for Ashcroft et al, he apparently will be absolved, i.e. charged with a lesser offense, now that the FBI has concluded he wasn’t involved in the planning of the attacks.
Latest from Seymour Hersh
Hersh is a treasure, and if you’ve been under-informed about our Iraq intelligence fiasco, this’ll do it. The major point of the rich article is that intelligence pros were so upset with the cooking of intelligence that they purposely allowed the Niger story to survive, thinking the White House would catch it and thus understand the pros’ anger. Yet, Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.
Below are highlights with the link to the full text, from the current New Yorker.
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
---------------------
It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and
---------------------------
Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:
Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:
Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”
-R
The Emperor has no clothes. This entire adventure in Iraq has been based on propaganda and manipulation. Eighty-seven billion dollars is too much to pay for the continuation of a war based on falsehoods.
Taking the nation to war based on misleading rhetoric and hyped intelligence is a travesty and a tragedy. It is the most cynical of all cynical acts. It is dangerous to manipulate the truth. It is dangerous because once having lied, it is difficult to ever be believed again. Having misled the American people and stampeded them to war, this administration must now attempt to sustain a policy predicated on falsehoods - Robert Byrd (D-WVa)
What’s Happening, Iraq: Casualties.
I’m periodically asked about casualties. This comes via the Project on Defense Alternatives which has been investigating hospital and morgue records.
Adding together our estimates of Iraqi noncombatant fatalities (3,750 plus/minus 550) and combatant fatalities (9,200 plus/minus 1,600) yields our estimate for total Iraqi fatalities in the war: 12,950 plus or minus 2,150 (16.5 percent). Rounding this off, our analysis suggests that as few as 11,000 Iraqis may have been killed in the war or as many as 15,000. It is likely that approximately 30 percent of the fatalities were noncombatants -- that is: civilians who did not take up arms.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0310rm8.html#5.%20Total%20Iraqi%20fatalities%20in%20the%202003
Secrecy / PR re casualties
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post covers the latest attempt to cloak the harsh realities of the Iraq occupation.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, presidents have worried that their military actions would lose support once the public glimpsed the remains of U.S. soldiers arriving at air bases in flag-draped caskets.
To this problem, the Bush administration has found a simple solution: It has ended the public dissemination of such images by banning news coverage and photography of dead soldiers' homecomings on all military bases.
In March, on the eve of the Iraq war, a directive arrived from the Pentagon at U.S. military bases. "There will be no arrival ceremonies for, or media coverage of, deceased military personnel returning to or departing from Ramstein [Germany] airbase or Dover [Del.] base, to include interim stops," the Defense Department said, referring to the major ports for the returning remains.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A55816-2003Oct20?language=printer
Typical PR re Iraq:
There are countless examples; this one is not any more dramatic than most, just typical. It comes from the same article in Newsweek (Richard Wolffe, Rod Nordland) cited in the last blog. The article is being cited in NPR reports as well.
Yet reporters who covered the war say that some of the Coalition’s achievements are less impressive than they sound. Paul (Jerry) Bremer, the U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, proudly announced the reopening of Iraq’s schools this month, while White House officials point to the opening of Iraq’s 240 hospitals. In fact, many schools were already open in May, once major combat ended, and no major hospital closed during the war.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp
Economic Good News? No, just more deception
You might recall a flurry of budget projections re the budget deficit that raised some eyebrows. During the summer it became clear that the fiscal ’03 year would feature a record-setting deficit. As non-partisan and congressional budget offices predicted deficits close to $400 billion, the Administration “confessed” to a figure of $455 billion. Why would they so assert?
Now, official figures for last year are about $375 billion, and the Administration is claiming that the figure is proof that “the tax cuts are working.” Oh. At least not everyone is buying. Ernest Hollings (D-SC) offered that
We need to find out what kind of shenanigans caused the estimate to be so off, whether OMB deliberately estimated high numbers so everybody could jump for joy this week," Hollings wrote in a letter to Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles, R-Okla., requesting hearings on the inaccuracy of the administration's July projection.
Hey, we know their tax cuts have worked. Just ask those who attend public universities, which experienced a 14% increase last year, or those who experienced a similar increase in their health insurance premiums, or …
9/11: The 20th Hijacker
In a several step process, the Government has backed away from this assertion. Previously destined to be a poster boy for Ashcroft et al, he apparently will be absolved, i.e. charged with a lesser offense, now that the FBI has concluded he wasn’t involved in the planning of the attacks.
Latest from Seymour Hersh
Hersh is a treasure, and if you’ve been under-informed about our Iraq intelligence fiasco, this’ll do it. The major point of the rich article is that intelligence pros were so upset with the cooking of intelligence that they purposely allowed the Niger story to survive, thinking the White House would catch it and thus understand the pros’ anger. Yet, Once the documents were in Washington, they were forwarded by the C.I.A. to the Pentagon, he said. “Everybody knew at every step of the way that they were false—until they got to the Pentagon, where they were believed.
Below are highlights with the link to the full text, from the current New Yorker.
The Administration eventually got its way, a former C.I.A. official said. “The analysts at the C.I.A. were beaten down defending their assessments. And they blame George Tenet”—the C.I.A. director—“for not protecting them. I’ve never seen a government like this.”
---------------------
It was the beginning of what turned out to be a year-long tug-of-war between the C.I.A. and the Vice-President’s office.
As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President’s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq’s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
“It was an unbelievably closed and small group,” the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data. “There’s so much intelligence out there that it’s easy to pick and
---------------------------
Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President’s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. “They got pounded on, day after day,” one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. “Pretty soon you say ‘Fuck it.’” And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
Not all the senior scientists are in captivity, however. Jafar Dhia Jafar, a British-educated physicist who coördinated Iraq’s efforts to make the bomb in the nineteen-eighties, and who had direct access to Saddam Hussein, fled Iraq in early April, before Baghdad fell, and, with the help of his brother, Hamid, the managing director of a large energy company, made his way to the United Arab Emirates. Jafar has refused to return to Baghdad, but he agreed to be debriefed by C.I.A. and British intelligence agents. There were some twenty meetings, involving as many as fifteen American and British experts. The first meeting, on April 11th, began with an urgent question from a C.I.A. officer: “Does Iraq have a nuclear device? The military really want to know. They are extremely worried.” Jafar’s response, according to the notes of an eyewitness, was to laugh. The notes continued:
Jafar insisted that there was not only no bomb, but no W.M.D., period. “The answer was none.” . . . Jafar explained that the Iraqi leadership had set up a new committee after the 91 Gulf war, and after the unscom [United Nations] inspection process was set up. . . and the following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]—“give them everything.”
The notes said that Jafar was then asked, “But this doesn’t mean all W.M.D.? How can you be certain?” His answer was clear: “I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D.”
Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons:
Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional. . . . But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. “No way we could escape the United States.” Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
Jafar had his own explanation, according to the notes, for one of the enduring mysteries of the U.N. inspection process—the six-thousand-warhead discrepancy between the number of chemical weapons thought to have been manufactured by Iraq before 1991 and the number that were accounted for by the U.N. inspection teams. It was this discrepancy which led Western intelligence officials and military planners to make the worst-case assumptions. Jafar told his interrogators that the Iraqi government had simply lied to the United Nations about the number of chemical weapons used against Iran during the brutal Iran-Iraq war in the nineteen-eighties. Iraq, he said, dropped thousands more warheads on the Iranians than it acknowledged. For that reason, Saddam preferred not to account for the weapons at all.
There are always credibility problems with witnesses from a defeated regime, and anyone involved in the creation or concealment of W.M.D.s. would have a motive to deny it. But a strong endorsement of Jafar’s integrity came from an unusual source—Jacques Baute, of the I.A.E.A., who spent much of the past decade locked in a struggle with Jafar and the other W.M.D. scientists and technicians of Iraq. “I don’t believe anybody,” Baute told me, “but, by and large, what he told us after 1995 was pretty accurate.”
-R
Sunday, October 19, 2003
. . The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the haters themselves. I get the feeling that some Democrats had so much hatred for Bush that they had no hatred left over for Saddam… – David Brooks, conservative commentator
Wal-Mart- The Reality
Yes, bargains can be had at Wal-Mart, the #1 of the mammoth stores that have swept our big-car culture. It has 1.4 million employees and pulled in $245 billion in revenues last year. Each week 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores. I’m pleased to be NOT of the 82 percent of American households that bought at least one item there in the past year.
Yet, this “standard” has some notably low standards for our workers. We need to think what this means for those workers and the economy in general.
Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job… wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.
…big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.
"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."
Wal-Mart officials say that their expansion will be a boon for California consumers and that their wages and benefits are competitive. Why else, they ask, would 600,000 workers take jobs at Wal-Mart each year?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/weekinreview/19GREE.html?pagewanted=print&position
Support for Single Payer, Universal Health Care
An AP piece appearing in Newsday (Will Lester) describes growing interest in publicly funded universal health care and a general eagerness to embrace new directions to solve our health care problems.
A sizable majority, 70 percent, said it should be legal for Americans to buy prescription drugs outside the United States, according to the ABC News-Washington Post poll. One in eight respondents said they or someone in their home has done just that. Such purchases can save money but they violate the law.
The poll released Sunday found that more than half of Americans, 54 percent, are dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States while 44 percent are satisfied. That dissatisfaction is 10 percentage points higher than in 2000 and higher than it has been in the past decade when compared with earlier surveys…
The poll found that six in 10 people surveyed say they are worried about being able to afford health insurance in the future. More than one in six said they have no insurance. The government says there were 43.6 million uninsured U.S. residents at some point during 2002, accounting for 15.2 percent of the population.
The poll found that 53 percent of those who are insured say they are worried about losing their insurance because of loss of a job. The percentage of those who have health insurance and are satisfied with the cost, 64 percent, has dropped by 9 percentage points since 1997.
By almost a 2-1 margin in this poll, 62 percent to 32 percent, Americans said they preferred a universal system that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program, as opposed to the current employer-based system.
That support drops significantly, however, if universal coverage would mean a limited choice of doctors or longer waits for non-emergency treatment.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-health-care-opinion,0,7508449,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Culture Wars:
Frank Rich’s Sunday column addressed the emergence of the new permissiveness, epitomized by Arnold S., aspiring actor-politician.
Rush Limbaugh trades cigar boxes stuffed with cash for his fixes of "baby blues" in Palm Beach. Bill Bennett bets everything but the milk money on the slots in sex-drenched Vegas. A Kennedy-by-marriage movie-star-turned-governor freely admits to a "rowdy" past of soundstage gropings in Hollywood.
Ring-a-ding-ding! The Rat Pack is back!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/arts/19RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
With every fiber…
What’s Happening, Iraq: Good news or no news?
It’s requiring more work to determine what is going on in Iraq. Attacks now number 20 a day- up from 15 in late summer- but reports are becoming more occasional. Witness the following from msnbc.com.
Somehow threw a homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.
In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp?cp1=1
Environmental News: The latest Congressional energy plan is likely to protect the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But the Refuge has always been a faint: While environmentalists gloat about their stifling the Administration’s initiative, the Administration focuses elsewhere, with much less fanfare, or uses ANWAR as a concession to win other rounds.
This time 9.4 million acres in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea are ‘on the block.’ Energy companies have bought up 75,000 acres of drilling plots.
Meanwhile, the current Bush administration is focused on a very different kind of solution to America's energy independence concerns: plundering every last oil-and-gas-filled crevice of the United States, no matter how iced-over, far-flung, or short-lived its supply may be. Although Bush's Department of the Interior has had trouble weaseling its way into the Arctic Refuge, it has successfully steamrolled into less controversial but similarly remote, vast, and ecologically sensitive areas of the country
There are, of course, likely environmental side effects: Last spring, a report by the National Academy of Sciences warned that seismic exploration and offshore drilling in the area would threaten endangered bowhead whales as well as the livelihoods of traditional Inupiat hunters. Needless to say, that report was overlooked. http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/printify-2.pl
Health Care Troubles, II
Sunday’s Washington Post (Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty) had a front page study of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t an upbeat assessment.
For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies.
In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.
The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans. Cancer patients receive watered-down drugs. Teenagers overdose on narcotics ordered online. AIDS clinics get fake HIV medicines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44908-2003Oct18?language=printer
October 25 protest in D.C.
It’s been minimally publicized in Boston, yet the Washington Post (Manny Fernandez) led its “C” section with a substantial article on the upcoming demo. It’s a ‘tough call’ for some, torn between more efficient activism in the local area and adding one’s body to a throng that needs to be large so as to make an imprint.
Protesters from more than 135 cities in 38 states are expected to converge on Washington on Saturday, as busloads of antiwar demonstrators return to the capital for the first time since the fall of Baghdad in April.
ANSWER held a national conference in New York in May that drew more than 850 activists, and United for Peace and Justice sponsored a strategy session in suburban Chicago in June that attracted more than 550. The meetings were designed to focus the movement on charting its future, but the period of relative quiet also allowed some to find new strength to carry on.
The listing of cities organizing bus and car caravans posted on ANSWER's Web site reads like a map of much of the United States: Wilmington, Del.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Savannah, Ga.; Asheville, N.C.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Cedar Falls, Iowa; and Milwaukee
Organizers said the rally and march will draw tens of thousands from across the United States and Canada. It is the first event of its kind co-sponsored by two major antiwar coalitions, International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, both of which coordinated some of the country's biggest peace marches this year. The demonstration will coincide with a rally and march in downtown San Francisco.
New York's union representing 200,000 health and human services employees, 1199 SEIU, is providing free bus transportation to Washington for its members and their families. And ANSWER has reserved 65 buses for the New York area alone.
"The antiwar movement is becoming ascendant again; it's rising once more," ANSWER organizer Brian Becker said. "Our demonstration against the occupation on April 12 drew 30,000 people. We will draw substantially more than that for this demonstration."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47080-2003Oct18?language=printer
Democratic Feistiness
Slowly, slowly they’re becoming more assertive. The latest example from today’s Washington Post (Helen Dewar).
Democrats may invoke rules under which they can block formation of future conference committees unless Republicans assure Democrats of broader participation in the negotiations.
"Given the very narrow partisan breakdown in our country and in the Congress, it is critical that the voices of both parties be heard," Daschle told reporters Friday in outlining his plans. In an earlier interview, Daschle said Frist told him he would talk to GOP committee chairmen about "restoring some degree of involvement by Democrats." Frist aides said they did not know what, if any, action Frist intends to take.
Later in the day, after passage of the $87 billion spending package for Iraq and Afghanistan, Daschle agreed to a conference on the bill after receiving assurances of "full participation" for Democrats from Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
Daschle did not say what legislation his party might target, saying decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Democrats could block -- or at least seriously delay -- formation of a conference committee by staging filibusters that would take 60 votes to overcome in the 100-member chamber. That would be a high hurdle for the 51-member GOP majority and a potential threat to any legislation caught up in the last days of a congressional session.
As an alternative to conferences, the House and Senate can amend each other's bills until a consensus is reached, Daschle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46695-2003Oct18?language=printer
State vs Defense Department: Another Potent Illustration
The Sunday NT Times led with this item (Eric Schmitt, Joel Brinkley). A State Department study which warned of post-invasion complications was essentially ignored by the Department of War/Defense.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos…
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said.
-R
Wal-Mart- The Reality
Yes, bargains can be had at Wal-Mart, the #1 of the mammoth stores that have swept our big-car culture. It has 1.4 million employees and pulled in $245 billion in revenues last year. Each week 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores. I’m pleased to be NOT of the 82 percent of American households that bought at least one item there in the past year.
Yet, this “standard” has some notably low standards for our workers. We need to think what this means for those workers and the economy in general.
Its sales clerks average about $8.50 an hour, or about $14,000 a year, while the poverty line for a family of three is $15,060. In California, the unionized stockers and clerks average $17.90 an hour after two years on the job… wages and benefits for Wal-Mart's full-time workers average $10 to $14 per hour less than for unionized supermarket workers.
…big savings for Wal-Mart comes in health care, where Wal-Mart pays 30 percent less for coverage for each insured worker than the industry average. An estimated 40 percent of employees are not covered by its health plan because many cannot afford the premiums or have not worked at Wal-Mart long enough to qualify.
"What this means is, if I'm a Wal-Mart employee and I hurt my hand and go to the emergency room, who's going to pay for it? The taxpayer is," said Mr. Brown, the supermarket executive. "Wal-Mart's fringe benefits are being paid by taxpayers."
Wal-Mart officials say that their expansion will be a boon for California consumers and that their wages and benefits are competitive. Why else, they ask, would 600,000 workers take jobs at Wal-Mart each year?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/weekinreview/19GREE.html?pagewanted=print&position
Support for Single Payer, Universal Health Care
An AP piece appearing in Newsday (Will Lester) describes growing interest in publicly funded universal health care and a general eagerness to embrace new directions to solve our health care problems.
A sizable majority, 70 percent, said it should be legal for Americans to buy prescription drugs outside the United States, according to the ABC News-Washington Post poll. One in eight respondents said they or someone in their home has done just that. Such purchases can save money but they violate the law.
The poll released Sunday found that more than half of Americans, 54 percent, are dissatisfied with the overall quality of health care in the United States while 44 percent are satisfied. That dissatisfaction is 10 percentage points higher than in 2000 and higher than it has been in the past decade when compared with earlier surveys…
The poll found that six in 10 people surveyed say they are worried about being able to afford health insurance in the future. More than one in six said they have no insurance. The government says there were 43.6 million uninsured U.S. residents at some point during 2002, accounting for 15.2 percent of the population.
The poll found that 53 percent of those who are insured say they are worried about losing their insurance because of loss of a job. The percentage of those who have health insurance and are satisfied with the cost, 64 percent, has dropped by 9 percentage points since 1997.
By almost a 2-1 margin in this poll, 62 percent to 32 percent, Americans said they preferred a universal system that would provide coverage to everyone under a government program, as opposed to the current employer-based system.
That support drops significantly, however, if universal coverage would mean a limited choice of doctors or longer waits for non-emergency treatment.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-health-care-opinion,0,7508449,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
Culture Wars:
Frank Rich’s Sunday column addressed the emergence of the new permissiveness, epitomized by Arnold S., aspiring actor-politician.
Rush Limbaugh trades cigar boxes stuffed with cash for his fixes of "baby blues" in Palm Beach. Bill Bennett bets everything but the milk money on the slots in sex-drenched Vegas. A Kennedy-by-marriage movie-star-turned-governor freely admits to a "rowdy" past of soundstage gropings in Hollywood.
Ring-a-ding-ding! The Rat Pack is back!
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/19/arts/19RICH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
With every fiber…
What’s Happening, Iraq: Good news or no news?
It’s requiring more work to determine what is going on in Iraq. Attacks now number 20 a day- up from 15 in late summer- but reports are becoming more occasional. Witness the following from msnbc.com.
Somehow threw a homemade grenade at the Americans, wounding 13 servicemen. According to the Oct. 8 Daily Threat Assessment—the Coalition’s internal casualty report, which was shown to NEWSWEEK—eight soldiers were wounded seriously enough to be evacuated to military hospitals. Yet at a press conference the next day, there was no mention of the attack. Pushed by reporters, U.S. officials would only say the incident was under investigation. It was as if the ambush, and the casualties, had never happened.
In Baghdad, official control over the news is getting tighter. Journalists used to walk freely into the city’s hospitals and the morgue to keep count of the day’s dead and wounded. Now the hospitals have been declared off-limits and morgue officials turn away reporters who aren’t accompanied by a Coalition escort. Iraqi police refer reporters’ questions to American forces; the Americans refer them back to the Iraqis.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/982193.asp?cp1=1
Environmental News: The latest Congressional energy plan is likely to protect the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. But the Refuge has always been a faint: While environmentalists gloat about their stifling the Administration’s initiative, the Administration focuses elsewhere, with much less fanfare, or uses ANWAR as a concession to win other rounds.
This time 9.4 million acres in Alaska’s Beaufort Sea are ‘on the block.’ Energy companies have bought up 75,000 acres of drilling plots.
Meanwhile, the current Bush administration is focused on a very different kind of solution to America's energy independence concerns: plundering every last oil-and-gas-filled crevice of the United States, no matter how iced-over, far-flung, or short-lived its supply may be. Although Bush's Department of the Interior has had trouble weaseling its way into the Arctic Refuge, it has successfully steamrolled into less controversial but similarly remote, vast, and ecologically sensitive areas of the country
There are, of course, likely environmental side effects: Last spring, a report by the National Academy of Sciences warned that seismic exploration and offshore drilling in the area would threaten endangered bowhead whales as well as the livelihoods of traditional Inupiat hunters. Needless to say, that report was overlooked. http://www.gristmagazine.com/cgi-bin/printify-2.pl
Health Care Troubles, II
Sunday’s Washington Post (Gilbert M. Gaul and Mary Pat Flaherty) had a front page study of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry. It wasn’t an upbeat assessment.
For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies.
In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.
The result too often is pharmaceutical roulette for millions of unsuspecting Americans. Cancer patients receive watered-down drugs. Teenagers overdose on narcotics ordered online. AIDS clinics get fake HIV medicines
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44908-2003Oct18?language=printer
October 25 protest in D.C.
It’s been minimally publicized in Boston, yet the Washington Post (Manny Fernandez) led its “C” section with a substantial article on the upcoming demo. It’s a ‘tough call’ for some, torn between more efficient activism in the local area and adding one’s body to a throng that needs to be large so as to make an imprint.
Protesters from more than 135 cities in 38 states are expected to converge on Washington on Saturday, as busloads of antiwar demonstrators return to the capital for the first time since the fall of Baghdad in April.
ANSWER held a national conference in New York in May that drew more than 850 activists, and United for Peace and Justice sponsored a strategy session in suburban Chicago in June that attracted more than 550. The meetings were designed to focus the movement on charting its future, but the period of relative quiet also allowed some to find new strength to carry on.
The listing of cities organizing bus and car caravans posted on ANSWER's Web site reads like a map of much of the United States: Wilmington, Del.; Harrisburg, Pa.; Savannah, Ga.; Asheville, N.C.; Kalamazoo, Mich.; Cedar Falls, Iowa; and Milwaukee
Organizers said the rally and march will draw tens of thousands from across the United States and Canada. It is the first event of its kind co-sponsored by two major antiwar coalitions, International ANSWER and United for Peace and Justice, both of which coordinated some of the country's biggest peace marches this year. The demonstration will coincide with a rally and march in downtown San Francisco.
New York's union representing 200,000 health and human services employees, 1199 SEIU, is providing free bus transportation to Washington for its members and their families. And ANSWER has reserved 65 buses for the New York area alone.
"The antiwar movement is becoming ascendant again; it's rising once more," ANSWER organizer Brian Becker said. "Our demonstration against the occupation on April 12 drew 30,000 people. We will draw substantially more than that for this demonstration."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A47080-2003Oct18?language=printer
Democratic Feistiness
Slowly, slowly they’re becoming more assertive. The latest example from today’s Washington Post (Helen Dewar).
Democrats may invoke rules under which they can block formation of future conference committees unless Republicans assure Democrats of broader participation in the negotiations.
"Given the very narrow partisan breakdown in our country and in the Congress, it is critical that the voices of both parties be heard," Daschle told reporters Friday in outlining his plans. In an earlier interview, Daschle said Frist told him he would talk to GOP committee chairmen about "restoring some degree of involvement by Democrats." Frist aides said they did not know what, if any, action Frist intends to take.
Later in the day, after passage of the $87 billion spending package for Iraq and Afghanistan, Daschle agreed to a conference on the bill after receiving assurances of "full participation" for Democrats from Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).
Daschle did not say what legislation his party might target, saying decisions would be made on a case-by-case basis. Democrats could block -- or at least seriously delay -- formation of a conference committee by staging filibusters that would take 60 votes to overcome in the 100-member chamber. That would be a high hurdle for the 51-member GOP majority and a potential threat to any legislation caught up in the last days of a congressional session.
As an alternative to conferences, the House and Senate can amend each other's bills until a consensus is reached, Daschle said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46695-2003Oct18?language=printer
State vs Defense Department: Another Potent Illustration
The Sunday NT Times led with this item (Eric Schmitt, Joel Brinkley). A State Department study which warned of post-invasion complications was essentially ignored by the Department of War/Defense.
Beginning in April 2002, the State Department project assembled more than 200 Iraqi lawyers, engineers, business people and other experts into 17 working groups to study topics ranging from creating a new justice system to reorganizing the military to revamping the economy.
Their findings included a much more dire assessment of Iraq's dilapidated electrical and water systems than many Pentagon officials assumed. They warned of a society so brutalized by Saddam Hussein's rule that many Iraqis might react coolly to Americans' notion of quickly rebuilding civil society.
Several officials said that many of the findings in the $5 million study were ignored by Pentagon officials until recently, although the Pentagon said they took the findings into account. The work is now being relied on heavily as occupation forces struggle to impose stability in Iraq.
The working group studying transitional justice was eerily prescient in forecasting the widespread looting in the aftermath of the fall of Mr. Hussein's government, caused in part by thousands of criminals set free from prison, and it recommended force to prevent the chaos…
The man overseeing the planning, Tom Warrick, a State Department official, so impressed aides to Jay Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general heading the military's reconstruction office, that they recruited Mr. Warrick to join their team.
George Ward, an aide to General Garner, said the reconstruction office wanted to use Mr. Warrick's knowledge because "we had few experts on Iraq on the staff."
But top Pentagon officials blocked Mr. Warrick's appointment, and much of the project's work was shelved, State Department officials said.
-R
