Saturday, December 06, 2003
What really makes me wonder whether this republic can be saved, however, is the downward spiral in governance, the hijacking of public policy by private interests.- Paul Krugman, NY Times, 12/5
Kucinich ad He’s been dismissed as a candidate, which may be a further incentive to produce this awfully powerful campaign ad. So those with a minute- and sound- click here: http://www.kucinich.us/dk.html
Voting Machine issue- Edwards signs on
Candidate Edwards raised the visibility of the voting machine issue by calling on the Bush campaign to return $100,000 in donations by Diebold Election Systems. In a Florida speech Edwards also criticized the machines themselves. Referring to the confusing Florida ballots from the 2000 election, Edwards noted, “We now have touch screen voting machines that some people think are just as bad as a butterfly ballot." http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/7424855.htm
9/11 Comission Families are nervous with their fiercest advocate, Max Cleland, about to leave the commission. Cleland’s repeatedly cited the stonewalling of the commission as it tries to secure documents from the Administration. From the NY Times (Philip Shenon):
He has also criticized the commission's leadership for accepting a deal with the White House that will give only three members of the panel access to Oval Office intelligence briefings that were given to Mr. Bush in the weeks before the attacks. The commission and the White House have defended the agreement, saying it will allow the panel's representatives to see a full range of intelligence reports.
In an interview last month, Mr. Cleland said that the commission had "gotten off to a slow start" and that the agreement with the White House for access to the intelligence briefings was the final proof for him that "this commission will be compromised in its final report."
"We have limited access for a limited number of commissioners to a limited number of these Presidential Daily Briefings," Mr. Cleland said of the intelligence reports prepared for Mr. Bush each morning. "All of the commissioners should have had full access to all of the documents, and that will be the fatal flaw in the commission's report." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/national/05TERR.html
Krugman- forget excerpts; here’s the article:
One thing you have to say about George W. Bush: he's got a great sense of humor. At a recent fund-raiser, according to The Associated Press, he described eliminating weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and ensuring the solvency of Medicare as some of his administration's accomplishments.
Then came the punch line: "I came to this office to solve problems and not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." He must have had them rolling in the aisles.
In the early months of the Bush administration, one often heard that "the grown-ups are back in charge." But if being a grown-up means planning for the future — in fact, if it means anything beyond marital fidelity — then this is the least grown-up administration in American history. It governs like there's no tomorrow.
Nothing in our national experience prepared us for the spectacle of a government launching a war, increasing farm subsidies and establishing an expensive new Medicare entitlement — and not only failing to come up with a plan to pay for all this spending in the face of budget deficits, but cutting taxes at the same time.
Recent good economic news doesn't change the verdict. These aren't temporary measures aimed at getting the economy back on its feet; they're permanent drains on the budget. Serious estimates show a long-term budget gap, even with a recovery, of at least 25 percent of federal spending. That is, the federal government — including Medicare, which Mr. Bush has given new responsibilities without new resources — is nowhere near solvent.
Then there's international trade policy. Here's how the steel story looks from Europe: the administration imposed an illegal tariff for domestic political reasons, then changed its mind when threatened with retaliatory tariffs focused on likely swing states. So the U.S. has squandered its credibility: it is now seen as a nation that honors promises only when it's politically convenient.
What really makes me wonder whether this republic can be saved, however, is the downward spiral in governance, the hijacking of public policy by private interests.
The new Medicare bill is a huge subsidy for drug and insurance companies, coupled with a small benefit for retirees. In comparison, the energy bill — which stalled last month, but will come back — has a sort of purity: it barely even pretends to be anything other than corporate welfare. Did you hear about the subsidy that will help Shreveport get its first Hooters restaurant?
And it's not just legislation: hardly a day goes by without an administrative decision that just happens to confer huge benefits on favored corporations, at the public's expense. For example, last month the Internal Revenue Service dropped its efforts to crack down on the synfuel tax break — a famously abused measure that was supposed to encourage the production of alternative fuels, but has ended up giving companies billions in tax credits for spraying coal with a bit of diesel oil. The I.R.S. denies charges by Bill Henck, one of its own lawyers, that it buckled under political pressure. Coincidentally, according to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Henck has suddenly found himself among the tiny minority of taxpayers facing an I.R.S. audit.
Awhile back, George Akerlof, the Nobel laureate in economics, described what's happening to public policy as "a form of looting." Some scoffed at the time, but now even publications like The Economist, which has consistently made excuses for the administration, are sounding the alarm.
To be fair, the looting is a partly bipartisan affair. More than a few Democrats threw their support behind the Medicare bill, the energy bill or both. But the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress are leading the looting party. What are they thinking?
The prevailing theory among grown-up Republicans — yes, they still exist — seems to be that Mr. Bush is simply doing whatever it takes to win the next election. After that, he'll put the political operatives in their place, bring in the policy experts and finally get down to the business of running the country.
But I think they're in denial. Everything we know suggests that Mr. Bush's people have given as little thought to running America after the election as they gave to running Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. And they will have no idea what to do when things fall apart. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/opinion/05KRUG.html
Unemployment: It’s not a good sign that so few jobs were created in the past month even if the unemployment numbers officially went down. [Analysts don’t want to emphasize how many are off the rolls- not counted, but now the “long-term unemployed.] Economists had predicted more jobs would be created this month and the Administration has been on record as saying each month would produce over 300,000 new jobs if the tax cuts were passed, not the 57,000 that were created. As noted before, we need almost 200,000 new jobs each month just to absorb the growing (potential) work force. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107063102778604700,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Since the recession ended 24 months ago in November 2001, 726,000 jobs have disappeared, a 0.6% contraction. This is the first time since monthly job statistics began in 1939 that there has not been positive growth in jobs for two years after a recession ended. Two years into the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, jobs had grown by 1.3%. http://www.jobwatch.org/
Dean: Pro and Con: Molly Ivins vs Nick Kristof Dean is solidifying his lead; a deadlocked convention- which turns to Gore or Hillary R.C.- seems to be the only way to stop him. So, let’s debate the fundamentals:
Molly:
No one has been waiting with bated breath for me to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential candidates, but I have, and you might be interested in how I got there. I'm for Howard Dean -- because he's going to win.
For a while, I fretted over Dean being angry, or at least appealing to the political anger that is normally manipulated by right-wing radio jocks. Anger makes liberals uncomfortable: We prefer peace, reason and gentle persuasion. Beloveds, it is way past time for us to get mad -- social, economic and political justice are being perverted by the Bush administration.
Dean gives a hell of a speech -- even if you're Republican, you should go and hear him just for the experience. But I fretted about Dean on TV -- TV is so important. How could anyone poker up on Margaret Carlson of PBS, not one of the world's toughest interviewers? But then I saw Dean laugh his way through a Chris Matthews interview (which he should have done with Tim Russert, who was hell-bent on gotcha questions), and I know the guy can take care of himself. So he fights back if you get in his face -- that's not all bad.
I know, he's even less of a liberal than Bill Clinton was, but I don't think Dean is a moderate centrist. I think he's a fighting centrist. And folks, I think we have got ourselves a winner here. http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/national/ivins/story/7896598p-8835083c.html
Kristof:
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Mr. Dean on many issues, and I admire his willingness to oppose our Iraq invasion from the beginning. But shiny-eyed teenagers who distribute leaflets for him in places like Yamhill County are going to get very cold stares — and end up heartbroken.
If the Democrats are serious about governing, they should remember the words of one of their nominees, Adlai Stevenson. After one of his typically brilliant campaign speeches, someone shouted out to Stevenson from the crowd that he had the votes of all thinking Americans.
Stevenson shouted back, saying that wasn't enough: "I need a majority!http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/06/opinion/06KRIS.html
Bush and Tony Soprano:
Huh? Let me explain. One technique employed by Tony S. (season 2) is the “bust-out”- the planned bankruptcy of Dave Scatino’s sporting goods store whereby Tony and associate Richie Aprile looted Dave’s goods and Dave wound up broke and without a store.
Why do I mention this? Josh Marshall, of talkingpointsmemo.org notices that the Bushites are doing the same thing- looting the country without regard for the country (Dave), focused only on their short-term gain. From his The Hill story.
Like the decision to game the Medicare bill around the 2004 election, just about everything the administration has done in the last 30 months has been done with little thought to the medium-term, let alone the long-term, consequences.
Where to start? There’s the rapid run-up in the deficit we’ve noted, repeated instances of breaking political precedents for short-term political gain — like the unprecedented decision to re-redistrict congressional maps in Texas and Colorado — and then of course there’s foreign policy, where decades-old alliances have been wrecked and our military capacities have been vastly diminished all to make way for the invasion of Iraq, which — in case you haven’t noticed — isn’t going so well.
Taken together, almost everything we’ve seen since early 2001 points to a decision to rush through as many political goodies as possible and secure as much political power as possible as soon as possible, with little regard for picking up the pieces.
And that suggests an analogy.
What we’re seeing in Washington today has an uncomfortable resemblance to what, in mafia lingo, is called a bust-out.
It goes something like this.
Say you’re a gambler and I’m a mobster. I’ve lent you lots of money. But now you can’t cover your debt. I could pursue the matter through your kneecaps or toss you out of an office window, but instead I take a more constructive approach.
You own a shoe store. I take it over your operation, order everything under the sun and fence all the merchandise for as much money as I can get as quickly as I can. I run out every line of credit you have and generally squeeze the place of every dollar I can get out of it. And then when I can’t squeeze anymore, I torch the place and collect on the insurance money.
Sure, it’s not the most sustainable business model. But I have my money back, and what happens to you is your problem.
http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/120303.aspx
-R
Kucinich ad He’s been dismissed as a candidate, which may be a further incentive to produce this awfully powerful campaign ad. So those with a minute- and sound- click here: http://www.kucinich.us/dk.html
Voting Machine issue- Edwards signs on
Candidate Edwards raised the visibility of the voting machine issue by calling on the Bush campaign to return $100,000 in donations by Diebold Election Systems. In a Florida speech Edwards also criticized the machines themselves. Referring to the confusing Florida ballots from the 2000 election, Edwards noted, “We now have touch screen voting machines that some people think are just as bad as a butterfly ballot." http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/7424855.htm
9/11 Comission Families are nervous with their fiercest advocate, Max Cleland, about to leave the commission. Cleland’s repeatedly cited the stonewalling of the commission as it tries to secure documents from the Administration. From the NY Times (Philip Shenon):
He has also criticized the commission's leadership for accepting a deal with the White House that will give only three members of the panel access to Oval Office intelligence briefings that were given to Mr. Bush in the weeks before the attacks. The commission and the White House have defended the agreement, saying it will allow the panel's representatives to see a full range of intelligence reports.
In an interview last month, Mr. Cleland said that the commission had "gotten off to a slow start" and that the agreement with the White House for access to the intelligence briefings was the final proof for him that "this commission will be compromised in its final report."
"We have limited access for a limited number of commissioners to a limited number of these Presidential Daily Briefings," Mr. Cleland said of the intelligence reports prepared for Mr. Bush each morning. "All of the commissioners should have had full access to all of the documents, and that will be the fatal flaw in the commission's report." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/national/05TERR.html
Krugman- forget excerpts; here’s the article:
One thing you have to say about George W. Bush: he's got a great sense of humor. At a recent fund-raiser, according to The Associated Press, he described eliminating weapons of mass destruction from Iraq and ensuring the solvency of Medicare as some of his administration's accomplishments.
Then came the punch line: "I came to this office to solve problems and not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." He must have had them rolling in the aisles.
In the early months of the Bush administration, one often heard that "the grown-ups are back in charge." But if being a grown-up means planning for the future — in fact, if it means anything beyond marital fidelity — then this is the least grown-up administration in American history. It governs like there's no tomorrow.
Nothing in our national experience prepared us for the spectacle of a government launching a war, increasing farm subsidies and establishing an expensive new Medicare entitlement — and not only failing to come up with a plan to pay for all this spending in the face of budget deficits, but cutting taxes at the same time.
Recent good economic news doesn't change the verdict. These aren't temporary measures aimed at getting the economy back on its feet; they're permanent drains on the budget. Serious estimates show a long-term budget gap, even with a recovery, of at least 25 percent of federal spending. That is, the federal government — including Medicare, which Mr. Bush has given new responsibilities without new resources — is nowhere near solvent.
Then there's international trade policy. Here's how the steel story looks from Europe: the administration imposed an illegal tariff for domestic political reasons, then changed its mind when threatened with retaliatory tariffs focused on likely swing states. So the U.S. has squandered its credibility: it is now seen as a nation that honors promises only when it's politically convenient.
What really makes me wonder whether this republic can be saved, however, is the downward spiral in governance, the hijacking of public policy by private interests.
The new Medicare bill is a huge subsidy for drug and insurance companies, coupled with a small benefit for retirees. In comparison, the energy bill — which stalled last month, but will come back — has a sort of purity: it barely even pretends to be anything other than corporate welfare. Did you hear about the subsidy that will help Shreveport get its first Hooters restaurant?
And it's not just legislation: hardly a day goes by without an administrative decision that just happens to confer huge benefits on favored corporations, at the public's expense. For example, last month the Internal Revenue Service dropped its efforts to crack down on the synfuel tax break — a famously abused measure that was supposed to encourage the production of alternative fuels, but has ended up giving companies billions in tax credits for spraying coal with a bit of diesel oil. The I.R.S. denies charges by Bill Henck, one of its own lawyers, that it buckled under political pressure. Coincidentally, according to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Henck has suddenly found himself among the tiny minority of taxpayers facing an I.R.S. audit.
Awhile back, George Akerlof, the Nobel laureate in economics, described what's happening to public policy as "a form of looting." Some scoffed at the time, but now even publications like The Economist, which has consistently made excuses for the administration, are sounding the alarm.
To be fair, the looting is a partly bipartisan affair. More than a few Democrats threw their support behind the Medicare bill, the energy bill or both. But the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress are leading the looting party. What are they thinking?
The prevailing theory among grown-up Republicans — yes, they still exist — seems to be that Mr. Bush is simply doing whatever it takes to win the next election. After that, he'll put the political operatives in their place, bring in the policy experts and finally get down to the business of running the country.
But I think they're in denial. Everything we know suggests that Mr. Bush's people have given as little thought to running America after the election as they gave to running Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. And they will have no idea what to do when things fall apart. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/opinion/05KRUG.html
Unemployment: It’s not a good sign that so few jobs were created in the past month even if the unemployment numbers officially went down. [Analysts don’t want to emphasize how many are off the rolls- not counted, but now the “long-term unemployed.] Economists had predicted more jobs would be created this month and the Administration has been on record as saying each month would produce over 300,000 new jobs if the tax cuts were passed, not the 57,000 that were created. As noted before, we need almost 200,000 new jobs each month just to absorb the growing (potential) work force. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107063102778604700,00.html?mod=home_whats_news_us
Since the recession ended 24 months ago in November 2001, 726,000 jobs have disappeared, a 0.6% contraction. This is the first time since monthly job statistics began in 1939 that there has not been positive growth in jobs for two years after a recession ended. Two years into the "jobless recovery" of the early 1990s, jobs had grown by 1.3%. http://www.jobwatch.org/
Dean: Pro and Con: Molly Ivins vs Nick Kristof Dean is solidifying his lead; a deadlocked convention- which turns to Gore or Hillary R.C.- seems to be the only way to stop him. So, let’s debate the fundamentals:
Molly:
No one has been waiting with bated breath for me to make up my mind about the Democratic presidential candidates, but I have, and you might be interested in how I got there. I'm for Howard Dean -- because he's going to win.
For a while, I fretted over Dean being angry, or at least appealing to the political anger that is normally manipulated by right-wing radio jocks. Anger makes liberals uncomfortable: We prefer peace, reason and gentle persuasion. Beloveds, it is way past time for us to get mad -- social, economic and political justice are being perverted by the Bush administration.
Dean gives a hell of a speech -- even if you're Republican, you should go and hear him just for the experience. But I fretted about Dean on TV -- TV is so important. How could anyone poker up on Margaret Carlson of PBS, not one of the world's toughest interviewers? But then I saw Dean laugh his way through a Chris Matthews interview (which he should have done with Tim Russert, who was hell-bent on gotcha questions), and I know the guy can take care of himself. So he fights back if you get in his face -- that's not all bad.
I know, he's even less of a liberal than Bill Clinton was, but I don't think Dean is a moderate centrist. I think he's a fighting centrist. And folks, I think we have got ourselves a winner here. http://www.sacbee.com/content/opinion/national/ivins/story/7896598p-8835083c.html
Kristof:
Don't get me wrong. I agree with Mr. Dean on many issues, and I admire his willingness to oppose our Iraq invasion from the beginning. But shiny-eyed teenagers who distribute leaflets for him in places like Yamhill County are going to get very cold stares — and end up heartbroken.
If the Democrats are serious about governing, they should remember the words of one of their nominees, Adlai Stevenson. After one of his typically brilliant campaign speeches, someone shouted out to Stevenson from the crowd that he had the votes of all thinking Americans.
Stevenson shouted back, saying that wasn't enough: "I need a majority!http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/06/opinion/06KRIS.html
Bush and Tony Soprano:
Huh? Let me explain. One technique employed by Tony S. (season 2) is the “bust-out”- the planned bankruptcy of Dave Scatino’s sporting goods store whereby Tony and associate Richie Aprile looted Dave’s goods and Dave wound up broke and without a store.
Why do I mention this? Josh Marshall, of talkingpointsmemo.org notices that the Bushites are doing the same thing- looting the country without regard for the country (Dave), focused only on their short-term gain. From his The Hill story.
Like the decision to game the Medicare bill around the 2004 election, just about everything the administration has done in the last 30 months has been done with little thought to the medium-term, let alone the long-term, consequences.
Where to start? There’s the rapid run-up in the deficit we’ve noted, repeated instances of breaking political precedents for short-term political gain — like the unprecedented decision to re-redistrict congressional maps in Texas and Colorado — and then of course there’s foreign policy, where decades-old alliances have been wrecked and our military capacities have been vastly diminished all to make way for the invasion of Iraq, which — in case you haven’t noticed — isn’t going so well.
Taken together, almost everything we’ve seen since early 2001 points to a decision to rush through as many political goodies as possible and secure as much political power as possible as soon as possible, with little regard for picking up the pieces.
And that suggests an analogy.
What we’re seeing in Washington today has an uncomfortable resemblance to what, in mafia lingo, is called a bust-out.
It goes something like this.
Say you’re a gambler and I’m a mobster. I’ve lent you lots of money. But now you can’t cover your debt. I could pursue the matter through your kneecaps or toss you out of an office window, but instead I take a more constructive approach.
You own a shoe store. I take it over your operation, order everything under the sun and fence all the merchandise for as much money as I can get as quickly as I can. I run out every line of credit you have and generally squeeze the place of every dollar I can get out of it. And then when I can’t squeeze anymore, I torch the place and collect on the insurance money.
Sure, it’s not the most sustainable business model. But I have my money back, and what happens to you is your problem.
http://www.hillnews.com/marshall/120303.aspx
-R
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
Tuesday, December 02, 2003
It’s Bush’s job, after all, to lead us into disastrous foreign-policy adventures and then try to sugarcoat them with mawkish, grandstanding publicity stunts. No one should be upset with the president for doing his job. What we should be upset about is the national press corps behaving like p.r. agents, which is what happened last week. –Matt Taibbi, New York Press http://www.nypress.com/16/49/news&columns/cage.cfm
So Many Issues… I can understand why some bloggers have given it up. I’m trying to limit the subjects, really.
Krugman, on voting machines
Excerpts from today’s, for those who don’t look at the NY Times. This issue is a biggie, yet is too often lost amidst the multitude of issues. It should be of major interest, in view of Florida, 2000 and the stakes at hand.
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell — who says that he wasn't talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
______
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.
_____
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html
The Samarra Aftermath:
The stories clash- It seems likely that there were too many civilian casualties as a direct result of the US army’s use of ‘overwhelming force’, i.e. blasting any and all buildings near where fire seemed to be originating. Amongst the lessons of this: the opposition is feeling more audacious, not content to merely snipe and set off bombs; Lots of questions and contradictions are noted at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3257460.stm
One simple comment is that these attackers may have been criminals released by Saddam prior to the invasion. After all, it seemed to be a robbery, attacking a convoy that was transporting huge amounts of cash.
An informed word on Samarra and the resistance at hand comes from B. Raman of the Asian Times. Many of my posts come from the Asian Times, as it’s of uniformly high quality.
Before the US-led invasion, Iraq had no jihadi terrorists. Some Palestinians belonging to outfits such as the Abu Nidal Organization and members of the anti-Iran Mujahideen-e-Khalq, to whom Saddam had given shelter, were terrorists, but not of the jihadi kind.
Since the occupation of Iraq, the country is swarming with jihadis - more indigenous (about 6,000) than foreign (about 320) - who have been waging a two-front jihad against the occupation troops - the jihad of the indigenous resistance fighters, who are not terrorists, and that of the foreign mujahideen, who are. The Iraqi resistance fighters have been attacking American troops and their Iraqi collaborators. The foreign mujahideen have been targeting nationals of countries that have been collaborating with the US and international organizations. There is so far no evidence of a common mastermind guiding the activities of the indigenous and the external.
The jihad of the indigenous fighters has been targeted and well planned, avoiding innocent Iraqi civilian casualties. They are well organized and seem to have better intelligence than the American troops. If the US version that the Iraqi attack on an American escort party at Samarra on November 30 was because that party was escorting a vehicle carrying large quantities of newly-printed currency notes is correct, the fact that the Iraqi fighters had advance knowledge of this would show the kind of moles they have in the setup of the occupational forces. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL03Ak02.html
So, what do we do? Raman suggests we do as we’re doing in Afghanistan – ally with the former opponent:
…the US has no other alternative but to dump these quislings, rehabilitate the intellectuals and the ruling elite of the former ruling Ba'ath Party and seek their leadership and cooperation in its efforts to defeat the jihadi terrorists and reconstruct the Iraqi civil society that it has destroyed.
Re-Ba'athification of Iraq is the only solution to the dilemma confronting the US and other occupying powers. There is no other viable option.
Last, Best word on the Bush Thanksgiving p.r. move I’m fond of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, 11PM, EST, Comedy Central. The first ten minutes is the best comedy on t.v.. A sample, for those who actually click on these links: http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/ds/
WMD: Lest we forget-- wmd, Valerie Plame, the phony nuclear threat. Just a reminder.
George Monbiot on Oil The Guardian’s stellar journalist gives us his thoughts on the tie that binds (and drains, inflames, etc.)
We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses.
The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.
In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4809694-103677,00.html
Bush and Trade Looks like the Cheney-Rove folk got Junior in trouble. He is stuck with a sorry choice- to either alienate key electoral states (Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania) by going back on his word and lifting the steel tariffs or he can recommence a trade war with Europe by going back on “his” weekend decision. Either way the Administration looks bad. The Charlestown Gazette pitches in on the former solution to the dilemma. http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2003120141
As word spread Monday that Bush is preparing to revoke the tariffs, Sen. Jay Rockefeller accused the president of turning his back on American workers to appease foreign companies. The sources said Bush's aides concluded they could not run the risk that the European Union would carry out its threat to impose sanctions on orange juice and other citrus products from Florida, motorcycles, farm machinery, textiles, shoes, and other products.
Afghanistan: Only bad news. From the LA Times’ Sonni Efron:
Security in large areas of Afghanistan has so deteriorated that U.S. and U.N. officials fear that plans to hold presidential elections in June may be in jeopardy.
In an apparent strategy to obstruct the political process that is key to democratizing Afghanistan, Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents have been killing and threatening not only Westerners but also Afghans who "collaborate" with them.
Some of the tactics echo the intimidation being practiced by insurgents in Iraq. Taliban forces have, for example, left leaflets threatening to cut off the nose of anyone who participates in Afghanistan's constitutional assembly, or loya jirga, this month.
Under the Bonn agreement brokered after the Taliban was ousted in late 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion, the United Nations is in charge of reshaping Afghanistan politically, including supervising the constitutional process and registering voters.
But violence has worsened dramatically in the last six months. A U.N. refugee worker was killed last month, bringing the number of aid workers slain since March to at least 13. At least five of Afghanistan's 32 provinces are virtually off-limits to foreigners, aid workers said.
U.N., U.S. and other Western officials fear that unless voters in rural areas can participate in the presidential election, the resulting government will not be seen as legitimate. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan2dec02,1,4053226.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Recruiting for the Taliban: A fascinating account of how it’s done. Seems like one needs to merely drop by the local madrassa, the Saudi-financed Islamic religious schools in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam. From the Asian Times (Massoud Ansari)
In every madrassa in Balochistan there are one or two Taliban recruiters," says a local politician in Quetta, requesting not to be identified. "If you want to sign on for jihad, the easiest thing is to stay at one of these madrassas and someone will for sure contact you. These recruiters keep a vigil on your activities, and once they realize that you are a genuine fighter, they will certainly talk to you and put you in touch with the Taliban commanders."
So the madrassas, from where the Taliban originally emerged, are once again serving as a means of their revival. Even Karzai recently lashed out at the Pakistani religious clergy for their support of Taliban resurgents. Karzai in particular mentioned the Shaldara madrassa in Quetta, run by the Jamait-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI)-backed member of the National Assembly, Maulana Noor Mohammed, and called it a headquarters of the Taliban. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EK26Df03.html
Guantanamo: Time magazine weighs in (Nancy Gibbs, Viveca Novak)
The base is a prison, and a jewelry box. "You can't be too careful protecting this enormously valuable intelligence trove," says Army General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the joint task force that runs the detainee operation on the 45-sq.-mi. base. And so there are constant perimeter patrols by infantry squads in full battle gear, and visitors get turned inside out before they're allowed anywhere near the cellblocks. Getting out legally doesn't seem much easier. The detainees—660 suspects from 44 countries, scooped up in the war on terrorism—cannot challenge their arrests or plead their cases or even talk to a lawyer, because the U.S. government denies that they have those rights.
They are not U.S. citizens, and the base, while under total U.S. control, is not on American soil; since 1903, it has been leased from Cuba for 2,000 gold coins a year, now valued at $4,085, in perpetuity.
That leaves one last exit strategy when desperation takes hold. According to military officials, there have been 32 suicide attempts in 18 months, at least one of which left a man in a coma. .http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,552060,00.html
Dumbed Down America: The more you know, the smarter you are. It’s true.
Jeff Cohen of FAIR (fair.org) tells us what we knew to be true:
While most of us who pay attention know who was and who wasn't behind 9/11, others get their news on the fly -- basically headlines and banners. But even Americans who say they're paying attention, at least to TV, are highly misinformed. A massive University of Maryland study found that most who get their news from commercial TV held at least one of three fundamental "misperceptions": that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11, that WMDs had been found in Iraq or that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Not unexpectedly, Fox News viewers were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all three questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1201-13.htm
Kucinich: Many of us who voted for Nader would not do so this year. Besides, during these months we’re supposed to pick the person we think is best, not the ‘practical’ candidate, i.e. the one who the Democratic Leadership Council wants us to vote for. Oh. That means progressives should vote for Dennis, the admired chair of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.
Kucinich is all over the media this week, trying to tell people to vote their beliefs. On ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday, he pleaded,
"I can bring Greens into the process. Those are a few percentage points. I can bring members of the Natural Law Party on sustainability issues; Reform Party members on trade issues; Libertarians on the Patriot Act and those issues. I'm the person, I think, who has the broadest appeal."
He also said he has the broadest base of support among the Democratic candidates, and that the selection of the nominee will not occur until the convention.
USA Patriot author has second thoughts
Looking at the case of Jose Padilla, dirty bomb plot suspect made him queasy. From Richard Schmitt of the LA Times:
Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.
The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.
In an interview, Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the Padilla case was not within his line of authority when he was in the department, but that he began to think about the issue later, and came to the conclusion that the administration's case was "unsustainable."
Another top former Justice Department official, Michael Chertoff, who headed the department's criminal division, has said he believed the government should reconsider how it designates enemy combatants.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice30nov30,1,5074199.story?coll=la-home-headlines
A foreign Observer of our free-spending ways:
The Observer/Guardian’s William Keegan, a “senior economics commentator,” offers that we’re in trouble. Then again, we knew that, and that the Administration wants us to be in trouble.
There is something very special about Republican administrations, is there not? In theory, and before they are elected, they believe in balanced budgets and sound money - or "sound money and lots of it" as people used to quip during the 1980s heyday of Milton Friedman's monetarism.
In practice they let everything go haywire. Now some observers have suggested to me that there is no problem: after all, wasn't President Ronald Reagan criticised during the 1980s for the twin deficits (budget and balance of payments) but didn't the US and world economy thrive?
The answer is: up to a point. The fact of the matter is that the borrowing spree on which the US administration has embarked makes the Reagan balance of payments deficits look like child's play…
My conclusion is that we could be on the verge of a big currency and economic crisis, and the stock markets may have lost touch with the foreign exchange markets. http://www.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,12498,1098229,00.html
-R
So Many Issues… I can understand why some bloggers have given it up. I’m trying to limit the subjects, really.
Krugman, on voting machines
Excerpts from today’s, for those who don’t look at the NY Times. This issue is a biggie, yet is too often lost amidst the multitude of issues. It should be of major interest, in view of Florida, 2000 and the stakes at hand.
Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell — who says that he wasn't talking about his business operations — happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States.
For example, Georgia — where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections — relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail.
______
What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects.
_____
The point is that you don't have to believe in a central conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system to manipulate election results. Why expose them to temptation?
I'll discuss what to do in a future column. But let's be clear: the credibility of U.S. democracy may be at stake
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html
The Samarra Aftermath:
The stories clash- It seems likely that there were too many civilian casualties as a direct result of the US army’s use of ‘overwhelming force’, i.e. blasting any and all buildings near where fire seemed to be originating. Amongst the lessons of this: the opposition is feeling more audacious, not content to merely snipe and set off bombs; Lots of questions and contradictions are noted at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3257460.stm
One simple comment is that these attackers may have been criminals released by Saddam prior to the invasion. After all, it seemed to be a robbery, attacking a convoy that was transporting huge amounts of cash.
An informed word on Samarra and the resistance at hand comes from B. Raman of the Asian Times. Many of my posts come from the Asian Times, as it’s of uniformly high quality.
Before the US-led invasion, Iraq had no jihadi terrorists. Some Palestinians belonging to outfits such as the Abu Nidal Organization and members of the anti-Iran Mujahideen-e-Khalq, to whom Saddam had given shelter, were terrorists, but not of the jihadi kind.
Since the occupation of Iraq, the country is swarming with jihadis - more indigenous (about 6,000) than foreign (about 320) - who have been waging a two-front jihad against the occupation troops - the jihad of the indigenous resistance fighters, who are not terrorists, and that of the foreign mujahideen, who are. The Iraqi resistance fighters have been attacking American troops and their Iraqi collaborators. The foreign mujahideen have been targeting nationals of countries that have been collaborating with the US and international organizations. There is so far no evidence of a common mastermind guiding the activities of the indigenous and the external.
The jihad of the indigenous fighters has been targeted and well planned, avoiding innocent Iraqi civilian casualties. They are well organized and seem to have better intelligence than the American troops. If the US version that the Iraqi attack on an American escort party at Samarra on November 30 was because that party was escorting a vehicle carrying large quantities of newly-printed currency notes is correct, the fact that the Iraqi fighters had advance knowledge of this would show the kind of moles they have in the setup of the occupational forces. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/EL03Ak02.html
So, what do we do? Raman suggests we do as we’re doing in Afghanistan – ally with the former opponent:
…the US has no other alternative but to dump these quislings, rehabilitate the intellectuals and the ruling elite of the former ruling Ba'ath Party and seek their leadership and cooperation in its efforts to defeat the jihadi terrorists and reconstruct the Iraqi civil society that it has destroyed.
Re-Ba'athification of Iraq is the only solution to the dilemma confronting the US and other occupying powers. There is no other viable option.
Last, Best word on the Bush Thanksgiving p.r. move I’m fond of Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show, 11PM, EST, Comedy Central. The first ten minutes is the best comedy on t.v.. A sample, for those who actually click on these links: http://www.comedycentral.com/tv_shows/ds/
WMD: Lest we forget-- wmd, Valerie Plame, the phony nuclear threat. Just a reminder.
George Monbiot on Oil The Guardian’s stellar journalist gives us his thoughts on the tie that binds (and drains, inflames, etc.)
We seem, in other words, to be in trouble. Either we lay hands on every available source of fossil fuel, in which case we fry the planet and civilisation collapses, or we run out, and civilisation collapses.
The only rational response to both the impending end of the oil age and the menace of global warming is to redesign our cities, our farming and our lives. But this cannot happen without massive political pressure, and our problem is that no one ever rioted for austerity. People tend to take to the streets because they want to consume more, not less. Given a choice between a new set of matching tableware and the survival of humanity, I suspect that most people would choose the tableware.
In view of all this, the notion that the war with Iraq had nothing to do with oil is simply preposterous. http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4809694-103677,00.html
Bush and Trade Looks like the Cheney-Rove folk got Junior in trouble. He is stuck with a sorry choice- to either alienate key electoral states (Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania) by going back on his word and lifting the steel tariffs or he can recommence a trade war with Europe by going back on “his” weekend decision. Either way the Administration looks bad. The Charlestown Gazette pitches in on the former solution to the dilemma. http://www.wvgazette.com/section/News/2003120141
As word spread Monday that Bush is preparing to revoke the tariffs, Sen. Jay Rockefeller accused the president of turning his back on American workers to appease foreign companies. The sources said Bush's aides concluded they could not run the risk that the European Union would carry out its threat to impose sanctions on orange juice and other citrus products from Florida, motorcycles, farm machinery, textiles, shoes, and other products.
Afghanistan: Only bad news. From the LA Times’ Sonni Efron:
Security in large areas of Afghanistan has so deteriorated that U.S. and U.N. officials fear that plans to hold presidential elections in June may be in jeopardy.
In an apparent strategy to obstruct the political process that is key to democratizing Afghanistan, Taliban and Al Qaeda insurgents have been killing and threatening not only Westerners but also Afghans who "collaborate" with them.
Some of the tactics echo the intimidation being practiced by insurgents in Iraq. Taliban forces have, for example, left leaflets threatening to cut off the nose of anyone who participates in Afghanistan's constitutional assembly, or loya jirga, this month.
Under the Bonn agreement brokered after the Taliban was ousted in late 2001 by a U.S.-led invasion, the United Nations is in charge of reshaping Afghanistan politically, including supervising the constitutional process and registering voters.
But violence has worsened dramatically in the last six months. A U.N. refugee worker was killed last month, bringing the number of aid workers slain since March to at least 13. At least five of Afghanistan's 32 provinces are virtually off-limits to foreigners, aid workers said.
U.N., U.S. and other Western officials fear that unless voters in rural areas can participate in the presidential election, the resulting government will not be seen as legitimate. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan2dec02,1,4053226.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Recruiting for the Taliban: A fascinating account of how it’s done. Seems like one needs to merely drop by the local madrassa, the Saudi-financed Islamic religious schools in Pakistan that teach Wahhabism, a particularly austere and rigid form of Islam. From the Asian Times (Massoud Ansari)
In every madrassa in Balochistan there are one or two Taliban recruiters," says a local politician in Quetta, requesting not to be identified. "If you want to sign on for jihad, the easiest thing is to stay at one of these madrassas and someone will for sure contact you. These recruiters keep a vigil on your activities, and once they realize that you are a genuine fighter, they will certainly talk to you and put you in touch with the Taliban commanders."
So the madrassas, from where the Taliban originally emerged, are once again serving as a means of their revival. Even Karzai recently lashed out at the Pakistani religious clergy for their support of Taliban resurgents. Karzai in particular mentioned the Shaldara madrassa in Quetta, run by the Jamait-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI)-backed member of the National Assembly, Maulana Noor Mohammed, and called it a headquarters of the Taliban. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/EK26Df03.html
Guantanamo: Time magazine weighs in (Nancy Gibbs, Viveca Novak)
The base is a prison, and a jewelry box. "You can't be too careful protecting this enormously valuable intelligence trove," says Army General Geoffrey Miller, commander of the joint task force that runs the detainee operation on the 45-sq.-mi. base. And so there are constant perimeter patrols by infantry squads in full battle gear, and visitors get turned inside out before they're allowed anywhere near the cellblocks. Getting out legally doesn't seem much easier. The detainees—660 suspects from 44 countries, scooped up in the war on terrorism—cannot challenge their arrests or plead their cases or even talk to a lawyer, because the U.S. government denies that they have those rights.
They are not U.S. citizens, and the base, while under total U.S. control, is not on American soil; since 1903, it has been leased from Cuba for 2,000 gold coins a year, now valued at $4,085, in perpetuity.
That leaves one last exit strategy when desperation takes hold. According to military officials, there have been 32 suicide attempts in 18 months, at least one of which left a man in a coma. .http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,552060,00.html
Dumbed Down America: The more you know, the smarter you are. It’s true.
Jeff Cohen of FAIR (fair.org) tells us what we knew to be true:
While most of us who pay attention know who was and who wasn't behind 9/11, others get their news on the fly -- basically headlines and banners. But even Americans who say they're paying attention, at least to TV, are highly misinformed. A massive University of Maryland study found that most who get their news from commercial TV held at least one of three fundamental "misperceptions": that Iraq had been directly linked to 9/11, that WMDs had been found in Iraq or that world opinion supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
Not unexpectedly, Fox News viewers were the most misled. But strong majorities of CBS, ABC, NBC and CNN viewers were also confused on at least one of these points. Among those informed on all three questions, only 23 percent supported Bush's war. http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1201-13.htm
Kucinich: Many of us who voted for Nader would not do so this year. Besides, during these months we’re supposed to pick the person we think is best, not the ‘practical’ candidate, i.e. the one who the Democratic Leadership Council wants us to vote for. Oh. That means progressives should vote for Dennis, the admired chair of the Progressive Caucus in Congress.
Kucinich is all over the media this week, trying to tell people to vote their beliefs. On ABC's "This Week With George Stephanopoulos" on Sunday, he pleaded,
"I can bring Greens into the process. Those are a few percentage points. I can bring members of the Natural Law Party on sustainability issues; Reform Party members on trade issues; Libertarians on the Patriot Act and those issues. I'm the person, I think, who has the broadest appeal."
He also said he has the broadest base of support among the Democratic candidates, and that the selection of the nominee will not occur until the convention.
USA Patriot author has second thoughts
Looking at the case of Jose Padilla, dirty bomb plot suspect made him queasy. From Richard Schmitt of the LA Times:
Viet Dinh, who until May headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy, said in a series of recent speeches and in an interview with The Times that he thought the government's detention of Padilla was flawed and unlikely to survive court review.
The principal intellectual force behind the Patriot Act, the terror-fighting law enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Dinh has steadfastly defended the Justice Department's anti-terrorism efforts against charges that they have led to civil-rights abuses of immigrants and others. While the Patriot Act does not speak to the issue of enemy combatants, his remarks still caught some observers by surprise.
In an interview, Dinh, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the Padilla case was not within his line of authority when he was in the department, but that he began to think about the issue later, and came to the conclusion that the administration's case was "unsustainable."
Another top former Justice Department official, Michael Chertoff, who headed the department's criminal division, has said he believed the government should reconsider how it designates enemy combatants.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-justice30nov30,1,5074199.story?coll=la-home-headlines
A foreign Observer of our free-spending ways:
The Observer/Guardian’s William Keegan, a “senior economics commentator,” offers that we’re in trouble. Then again, we knew that, and that the Administration wants us to be in trouble.
There is something very special about Republican administrations, is there not? In theory, and before they are elected, they believe in balanced budgets and sound money - or "sound money and lots of it" as people used to quip during the 1980s heyday of Milton Friedman's monetarism.
In practice they let everything go haywire. Now some observers have suggested to me that there is no problem: after all, wasn't President Ronald Reagan criticised during the 1980s for the twin deficits (budget and balance of payments) but didn't the US and world economy thrive?
The answer is: up to a point. The fact of the matter is that the borrowing spree on which the US administration has embarked makes the Reagan balance of payments deficits look like child's play…
My conclusion is that we could be on the verge of a big currency and economic crisis, and the stock markets may have lost touch with the foreign exchange markets. http://www.guardian.co.uk/economicdispatch/story/0,12498,1098229,00.html
-R
Sunday, November 30, 2003
William Greider on Dean:
The always lucid Grieder hits the proverbial nail. Dean’s appeal to progressives and moderates is that he’s outside of the establishment, he fights back, he’s done wonders with the internet and he is- at least for now- less tied to the wishes of contributors. I’m grabbed by the bluntness which serves to strengthen the voice of the other candidates and the rest of us, to counter our collective timidity.
The governor has shown flashes of the same bluntness in his prime-time campaigning. Last summer, he told a revealing story on himself--a conversation with Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and Wall Street's main money guy for Democrats. Rubin had warned that unless Dean stopped attacking NAFTA and the multinationals for the migration of US jobs, he couldn't raise contributions for him from the financial sector. As Dean told it, "I said, 'Bob, tell me what your solution is.' He said, 'I'll have to get back to you.' I haven't heard from him." What I like so much about the story is that powerful, influential Bob Rubin pokes Dean in the chest, and he pokes him back. Then Dean discloses the exchange to the Washington Post.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1126-13.htm http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&s=greider
What’s Happening, Iraq:
A top judge in Great Britain condemned the detention of “terror” suspects at Guantanamo. It is most unusual for British judges to speak on hot political issues.
"The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials," Lord Steyn continued. "The answer can be given quite shortly. It is a resounding 'no'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3238624.stm
Attacks widen: Spanish intelligence officials, Japanese diplomats, Korean and Colombian “contractors”, as well as U.S. deaths. Not surprisingly, Vietnam-era body count claims emerged, i.e. ‘we killed more of them than… The picking off of other foreign workers/soldiers continues to drain the will of our ambivalent allies. Notably, at least two of these attacks had postscripts of local Iraqis celebrating and chanting pro-Saddam slogans. The attacks have limited the political gain that Bush accrued from his Thanksgiving “bravery” that bumped Hillary’s previously planned trip to page 3. Some sympathetic commentators actually commended Bush’s courage for slipping in and out of the air hanger. I was hoping at least some of them would have commented on how this is not how Karl Rove imagined it- probably more like a parading through Baghdad with crowds singing his praises. Interestingly, Clinton stayed overnight, traveled between the airport and another base. Guess that makes her qualify for a purple heart.
Meanwhile, the political situation worsened. Plans for our handing over power a.s.a.p. had to be recalibrated after being rejected by Iraqi politicos, especially Grand Ayatolah Ali Sistani who’s kyboshed two plans. Sistani seems to have emerged as the one dictating policy, not the U.S. and its appointed Governing Council.
Economic News:
The Sunday NY Times was loaded. Austan Goolsbee explains one of the ways the depth of the recession has been minimized and its unemployed undercounted. The latter is a long-standing problem. The U.S. undercounts its unemployed, leaving out the long-term unemployed who are off the rolls and ignores those that found a part time job to replace a full-time one. Here Goolsbee focuses on those on disability.
The reality is that we didn't have a mild recession. Jobs-wise, we had a deep one.
The government reported that annual unemployment during this recession peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment rate has been low only because government programs, especially Social Security disability, have effectively been buying people off the unemployment rolls and reclassifying them as "not in the labor force."
In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified from "not in the labor force" to "employed" in order to reduce the unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.
Research by the economists David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mark Duggan at the University of Maryland shows that once Congress began loosening the standards to qualify for disability payments in the late 1980's and early 1990's, people who would normally be counted as unemployed started moving in record numbers into the disability system — a kind of invisible unemployment. Almost all of the increase came from hard-to-verify disabilities like back pain and mental disorders. As the rolls swelled, the meaning of the official unemployment rate changed as millions of people were left out. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/opinion/30GOOL.html
Louis Uchitelle’s regular column looks at the short-term stimulus and the intermediate term drain on the economy resulting from the Bush tax cuts.
Lauding the Bush tax cuts isn't easy. They have turned a comfortable budget surplus into a constraining deficit, and they are enriching the wealthy far more than families with only five-figure incomes.
The one mitigating factor is stimulus. The tax cuts are helping to revive the economy by putting more spending money into people's pockets. But even that will soon backfire.
The stimulus is at its peak right now. During the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, the nation's taxpayers pocketed $117 billion, mainly from rebates and from reductions in paycheck withholding as lower tax rates went into effect. That $117 billion, which is the portion of the tax cut going only to individuals and not to companies, rises to $200 billion in the current fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office reports.
Most of the windfall from both fiscal years is packed into the 12 months that started last summer and will end next summer
By this reckoning, the Bush tax cuts will not do much to lift the economy. The $117 billion in fiscal 2003 gives birth to only $40 billion in effective stimulus. Much more of the cuts, perhaps every nickel, would have been spent if the money had been channeled to the states instead, to pay the salaries of teachers who were fired to balance budgets. The economy surged in the third quarter, but as Mr. Slemrod notes, "the tax cuts were not a major part of that growth.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/opinion/30GOOL.html
And with mutual fund scandals in the news, Gretchen Morgenson helpfully looks at another way mutual fund investors lose their money.
It has not been easy for investors to fathom exactly what they are paying in fund fees. In fund prospectuses, the fees charged to investors are stated as a percentage of assets.
At around 1 percent a year, these costs look positively benign.
In dollar terms, however, the fees are staggering. And when the managers receiving them turn in a woeful performance, as has been the case recently more often than not, the fees represent an enormous and troubling transfer of wealth from hard-working individuals to some seriously fat cats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/business/yourmoney/30watch.html
Meanwhile, the Republican House continues to try to feed their wealthy and corporate sponsors by looking to extend more than a dozen tax breaks that would expire at the end of the year while showing no inclination to extend the temporary federal program to help the long-term unemployed which would provide additional benefits beyond the regular state-funded benefits. Tom Delay rules! http://www.cbpp.org/11-25-03ui.htm
Molly Ivins summarizes the Energy and Medicare Bills: Better than her usual (excellent) columns, Ivins provides some pearls. From the Fort Worth Star Telegram
According to Public Citizen, pharmaceutical companies have given $44 million since 1999 -- 78 percent to Republicans, 22 percent to Democrats -- and have spent millions more hiring an army of lobbyists that physically outnumbers the 535 members of Congress.
The Health Reform Program of Boston University estimates that of the bill's $400 billion price tag, $139 billion will go to increase drug company profits over eight years -- a 38 percent increase in what is already the world's most profitable industry.
But forget about the Medicare bill -- it won't take effect until 2006 anyway, so you won't even notice what it does 'til then. Regard the even more amazing energy bill.
In case you haven't been keeping up (and you do have to race to keep up), there is a gasoline additive called MTBE that has polluted ground water across the country. So naturally the Republicans have put in a provision that would limit the liability of the manufacturers of MTBE -- that means you can't sue them for ruining the water -- and the bill would give the companies up to $2 billion in federal aid.
Congratulations! That means you, the users of MTBE-polluted water across the nation, will get to pay for cleaning it up.
This is an amazing energy bill because it will not (A) reduce our dependence on foreign oil; (B) provide significant new energy sources; (C) create many jobs; (D) improve the grid system so we won't have more blackouts; (E) promote energy efficiency or conservation; or (F) do anything about global warming.
But -- it will give at least $20 billion in subsides to fossil fuel companies. Those poor li'l oil, gas, coal and nuclear companies like Exxon Mobil and General Electric need our help. This is compassionate conservatism.
We would, of course, tell you who wrote this abomination, except Dick Cheney, who headed the task force, doesn't think any of us should know, and the Republicans who have been working on it for months met in secret. Democrats were not even admitted to the committee meetings.
The environmental groups are still going through it, finding new horrors hidden away.
Greenwire reports: "Section 349 would remove the discretion of the Interior Department to deny applications to drill amid onshore and offshore lands -- upon receiving an application to drill in a leased area, the department would have 10 days to determine whether additional information is required to grant a permit. Once the information is provided, the department must approve the application regardless of whether drilling would damage the environment."
I like that.
The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that the bill will roll back environmental protections to boost oil and gas drilling on American's last remaining wild lands and open spaces.
It also will eliminate consumer protections and subsidize construction of new nuclear plants that most Americans don't want, and it will exempt polluters from laws that ensure clear water and healthy air. A provision seriously weakening the Clean Air Act was inserted behind closed doors.http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/7362899.htm
Republican Hardball: A textbook case. This is a description of how they do business, a reminder that we must fight back with equal fervor. What’s unusual about this example is that it comes from Robert Novak, the conservative columnist most recently in the news for his printing the name of CIA Valerie Plame (remember her?) in his column. Full text at http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak27.html
During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.
Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat…
AND:
Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures. Major contributors warned Rep. Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called Rep. Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him.
Intense pressure, including a call from the president, was put on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney. As speaker of the Florida House, he was a stalwart for Bush in his state's 2000 vote recount. He is the Class of 2002's contact with the House leadership, marking him as a future party leader. But now, in those early morning hours, Feeney was told a ''no'' vote would delay his ascent into leadership by three years -- maybe more.
-R
The always lucid Grieder hits the proverbial nail. Dean’s appeal to progressives and moderates is that he’s outside of the establishment, he fights back, he’s done wonders with the internet and he is- at least for now- less tied to the wishes of contributors. I’m grabbed by the bluntness which serves to strengthen the voice of the other candidates and the rest of us, to counter our collective timidity.
The governor has shown flashes of the same bluntness in his prime-time campaigning. Last summer, he told a revealing story on himself--a conversation with Robert Rubin, the former Treasury Secretary and Wall Street's main money guy for Democrats. Rubin had warned that unless Dean stopped attacking NAFTA and the multinationals for the migration of US jobs, he couldn't raise contributions for him from the financial sector. As Dean told it, "I said, 'Bob, tell me what your solution is.' He said, 'I'll have to get back to you.' I haven't heard from him." What I like so much about the story is that powerful, influential Bob Rubin pokes Dean in the chest, and he pokes him back. Then Dean discloses the exchange to the Washington Post.
http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1126-13.htm http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20031215&s=greider
What’s Happening, Iraq:
A top judge in Great Britain condemned the detention of “terror” suspects at Guantanamo. It is most unusual for British judges to speak on hot political issues.
"The question is whether the quality of justice envisaged for the prisoners at Guantanamo Bay complies with the minimum international standards for the conduct of fair trials," Lord Steyn continued. "The answer can be given quite shortly. It is a resounding 'no'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/3238624.stm
Attacks widen: Spanish intelligence officials, Japanese diplomats, Korean and Colombian “contractors”, as well as U.S. deaths. Not surprisingly, Vietnam-era body count claims emerged, i.e. ‘we killed more of them than… The picking off of other foreign workers/soldiers continues to drain the will of our ambivalent allies. Notably, at least two of these attacks had postscripts of local Iraqis celebrating and chanting pro-Saddam slogans. The attacks have limited the political gain that Bush accrued from his Thanksgiving “bravery” that bumped Hillary’s previously planned trip to page 3. Some sympathetic commentators actually commended Bush’s courage for slipping in and out of the air hanger. I was hoping at least some of them would have commented on how this is not how Karl Rove imagined it- probably more like a parading through Baghdad with crowds singing his praises. Interestingly, Clinton stayed overnight, traveled between the airport and another base. Guess that makes her qualify for a purple heart.
Meanwhile, the political situation worsened. Plans for our handing over power a.s.a.p. had to be recalibrated after being rejected by Iraqi politicos, especially Grand Ayatolah Ali Sistani who’s kyboshed two plans. Sistani seems to have emerged as the one dictating policy, not the U.S. and its appointed Governing Council.
Economic News:
The Sunday NY Times was loaded. Austan Goolsbee explains one of the ways the depth of the recession has been minimized and its unemployed undercounted. The latter is a long-standing problem. The U.S. undercounts its unemployed, leaving out the long-term unemployed who are off the rolls and ignores those that found a part time job to replace a full-time one. Here Goolsbee focuses on those on disability.
The reality is that we didn't have a mild recession. Jobs-wise, we had a deep one.
The government reported that annual unemployment during this recession peaked at only around 6 percent, compared with more than 7 percent in 1992 and more than 9 percent in 1982. But the unemployment rate has been low only because government programs, especially Social Security disability, have effectively been buying people off the unemployment rolls and reclassifying them as "not in the labor force."
In other words, the government has cooked the books. It has been a more subtle manipulation than the one during the Reagan administration, when people serving in the military were reclassified from "not in the labor force" to "employed" in order to reduce the unemployment rate. Nonetheless, the impact has been the same.
Research by the economists David Autor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Mark Duggan at the University of Maryland shows that once Congress began loosening the standards to qualify for disability payments in the late 1980's and early 1990's, people who would normally be counted as unemployed started moving in record numbers into the disability system — a kind of invisible unemployment. Almost all of the increase came from hard-to-verify disabilities like back pain and mental disorders. As the rolls swelled, the meaning of the official unemployment rate changed as millions of people were left out. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/opinion/30GOOL.html
Louis Uchitelle’s regular column looks at the short-term stimulus and the intermediate term drain on the economy resulting from the Bush tax cuts.
Lauding the Bush tax cuts isn't easy. They have turned a comfortable budget surplus into a constraining deficit, and they are enriching the wealthy far more than families with only five-figure incomes.
The one mitigating factor is stimulus. The tax cuts are helping to revive the economy by putting more spending money into people's pockets. But even that will soon backfire.
The stimulus is at its peak right now. During the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, the nation's taxpayers pocketed $117 billion, mainly from rebates and from reductions in paycheck withholding as lower tax rates went into effect. That $117 billion, which is the portion of the tax cut going only to individuals and not to companies, rises to $200 billion in the current fiscal year, the Congressional Budget Office reports.
Most of the windfall from both fiscal years is packed into the 12 months that started last summer and will end next summer
By this reckoning, the Bush tax cuts will not do much to lift the economy. The $117 billion in fiscal 2003 gives birth to only $40 billion in effective stimulus. Much more of the cuts, perhaps every nickel, would have been spent if the money had been channeled to the states instead, to pay the salaries of teachers who were fired to balance budgets. The economy surged in the third quarter, but as Mr. Slemrod notes, "the tax cuts were not a major part of that growth.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/opinion/30GOOL.html
And with mutual fund scandals in the news, Gretchen Morgenson helpfully looks at another way mutual fund investors lose their money.
It has not been easy for investors to fathom exactly what they are paying in fund fees. In fund prospectuses, the fees charged to investors are stated as a percentage of assets.
At around 1 percent a year, these costs look positively benign.
In dollar terms, however, the fees are staggering. And when the managers receiving them turn in a woeful performance, as has been the case recently more often than not, the fees represent an enormous and troubling transfer of wealth from hard-working individuals to some seriously fat cats.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/business/yourmoney/30watch.html
Meanwhile, the Republican House continues to try to feed their wealthy and corporate sponsors by looking to extend more than a dozen tax breaks that would expire at the end of the year while showing no inclination to extend the temporary federal program to help the long-term unemployed which would provide additional benefits beyond the regular state-funded benefits. Tom Delay rules! http://www.cbpp.org/11-25-03ui.htm
Molly Ivins summarizes the Energy and Medicare Bills: Better than her usual (excellent) columns, Ivins provides some pearls. From the Fort Worth Star Telegram
According to Public Citizen, pharmaceutical companies have given $44 million since 1999 -- 78 percent to Republicans, 22 percent to Democrats -- and have spent millions more hiring an army of lobbyists that physically outnumbers the 535 members of Congress.
The Health Reform Program of Boston University estimates that of the bill's $400 billion price tag, $139 billion will go to increase drug company profits over eight years -- a 38 percent increase in what is already the world's most profitable industry.
But forget about the Medicare bill -- it won't take effect until 2006 anyway, so you won't even notice what it does 'til then. Regard the even more amazing energy bill.
In case you haven't been keeping up (and you do have to race to keep up), there is a gasoline additive called MTBE that has polluted ground water across the country. So naturally the Republicans have put in a provision that would limit the liability of the manufacturers of MTBE -- that means you can't sue them for ruining the water -- and the bill would give the companies up to $2 billion in federal aid.
Congratulations! That means you, the users of MTBE-polluted water across the nation, will get to pay for cleaning it up.
This is an amazing energy bill because it will not (A) reduce our dependence on foreign oil; (B) provide significant new energy sources; (C) create many jobs; (D) improve the grid system so we won't have more blackouts; (E) promote energy efficiency or conservation; or (F) do anything about global warming.
But -- it will give at least $20 billion in subsides to fossil fuel companies. Those poor li'l oil, gas, coal and nuclear companies like Exxon Mobil and General Electric need our help. This is compassionate conservatism.
We would, of course, tell you who wrote this abomination, except Dick Cheney, who headed the task force, doesn't think any of us should know, and the Republicans who have been working on it for months met in secret. Democrats were not even admitted to the committee meetings.
The environmental groups are still going through it, finding new horrors hidden away.
Greenwire reports: "Section 349 would remove the discretion of the Interior Department to deny applications to drill amid onshore and offshore lands -- upon receiving an application to drill in a leased area, the department would have 10 days to determine whether additional information is required to grant a permit. Once the information is provided, the department must approve the application regardless of whether drilling would damage the environment."
I like that.
The Natural Resources Defense Council reports that the bill will roll back environmental protections to boost oil and gas drilling on American's last remaining wild lands and open spaces.
It also will eliminate consumer protections and subsidize construction of new nuclear plants that most Americans don't want, and it will exempt polluters from laws that ensure clear water and healthy air. A provision seriously weakening the Clean Air Act was inserted behind closed doors.http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/opinion/7362899.htm
Republican Hardball: A textbook case. This is a description of how they do business, a reminder that we must fight back with equal fervor. What’s unusual about this example is that it comes from Robert Novak, the conservative columnist most recently in the news for his printing the name of CIA Valerie Plame (remember her?) in his column. Full text at http://www.suntimes.com/output/novak/cst-edt-novak27.html
During 14 years in the Michigan Legislature and 11 years in Congress, Rep. Nick Smith had never experienced anything like it. House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson, in the wee hours last Saturday morning, pressed him to vote for the Medicare bill. But Smith refused. Then things got personal.
Smith, self term-limited, is leaving Congress. His lawyer son Brad is one of five Republicans seeking to replace him from a GOP district in Michigan's southern tier. On the House floor, Nick Smith was told business interests would give his son $100,000 in return for his father's vote. When he still declined, fellow Republican House members told him they would make sure Brad Smith never came to Congress. After Nick Smith voted no and the bill passed, Duke Cunningham of California and other Republicans taunted him that his son was dead meat…
AND:
Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures. Major contributors warned Rep. Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called Rep. Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him.
Intense pressure, including a call from the president, was put on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney. As speaker of the Florida House, he was a stalwart for Bush in his state's 2000 vote recount. He is the Class of 2002's contact with the House leadership, marking him as a future party leader. But now, in those early morning hours, Feeney was told a ''no'' vote would delay his ascent into leadership by three years -- maybe more.
-R
