Saturday, March 06, 2004
Blog break: Again, I’ll be away for three weeks and not likely to spend much time in cybernet cafes; At most I'll post a tad. Meanwhile, lots going on.
Unemployment / Flat Economy: 21,000 news jobs, all in the public sector.
Despite the Bush cheerleading-weirdness (“There’s excitement in the economy!”), economists agree that the news is terrible (though terrif for Kerry). As oft-mentioned, the economy needs to produce at least 150,000 jobs each month to keep up with the increasing population. Yet, we haven’t done that in 4 years! So, as I noted previously, while the media trumpet a net loss of just over 2 million jobs during Bush’s term, a healthy economy would have produced 8 million more jobs in the past three years than have been produced. It raises questions, troubling questions. No one has an answer for this changing economic picture. People are just beginning to say that we might have a “structural” problem, that companies are “moving ahead without payroll,” that the number of people dropping out of the labor market is accelerating.
To make political points, let’s note:
* When the last round of tax cuts were passed, they were sold as a jobs program; The Bush administration claimed that if their tax program passed the economy would add an average of 306,000 jobs per month. That would have produced approximately 2,500m000 jobs. 2,200000 more than actually exist.
* When Treasury Secretary Snow was interviewed about the jobs picture, he noted that economic growth would “translate into two million new jobs from the third quarter of this year to the third quarter of next year. That’s an average of about 200,000 new jobs a month ... What gives me confidence? Everything we know about economics and history.”
Yet, the New York Times headline for Robin Toner’s article is Job Data Provides Ammunition for Two Sides in Presidential Race. It’s this kind of “even-handedness” that keeps the Right’s Liars in power. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/campaign/06jobs.html
The more reliable Washington Post noted Job Slump Puts Bush in Bad Light.
Bin Laden: Why Now?
So, now we hear of resources being assigned to the hunt for him, resources that weren’t employed in December, 2001, that were cut back in 2002 as prepping for the Iraq invasion began. The “Northern Alliance” and various tribal chiefs were apparently given the responsibility. Let’s not play dumb. The approaching election undoubtedly influenced the “deal” (see Seymour Hersh’s account in the New Yorker, noted in a previous blog) whereby we look the other way at the pardon for Pakistan’s alleged nuclear renegade scientist in exchange for our encroaching on Pakistan territory to secure the prize of bin Laden before the Fall election.
For more, see Hersh http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040308fa_fact and a CNN account. http://cnn.worldnews.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=CNN.com+-+High-tech+snooping+for+bin+Laden+-+Mar.+4%2C+2004&expire=-1&urlID=9499797&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2004%2FWORLD%2Fasiapcf%2F03%2F04%2Fbinladen.search%2Findex.html&partnerID=2006
Plame Investigation:
It’s getting hotter. The grand jury is seeking Air Force One’s phone records for the week before she was outed in the Robert Novak column. Tom Brune has the details in his Newsday column. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usleak0305,0,3272655,print.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlines
And,
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations.
The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer. http://www.thehill.com/news/030404/mccain.aspx
Meanwhile, in his forthcoming book, (May) former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson will reveal the name of the person he believes leaked his wife's identity as an undercover CIA officer to Novak.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000452274
Outspoken Kerry on the Radio:
Unusually blunt words from Kerry, addressing the all-but-ignored fact that the soldiers in Iraq have been woefully and dangerously under-equipped- Humvees that aren’t armored, inadequate body armor, and the galling practice of insisting that the soldiers themselves had to pay for and secure anything better.
Kerry:
Families should be sending pictures and care packages to Iraq - and the Department of Defense should be sending the body armor. Today, I call on President Bush to support a law now in Congress to reimburse each and every family who had to buy the body armor this Administration failed to provide. This month, I will also be introducing a Military Family Bill of Rights to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
"What we face isn't a question of the budget; it's a question of priorities and values. This Administration has given billions to Halliburton and requested 82 million dollars to protect Iraq's 36 miles of coast line. But they call this basic body armor a `non-priority' item.
Fred Kaplan on RNC distortions re Kerry:
The always thorough and pithy Kaplan lays out the already numerous distortions about Kerry. We in Massachusetts always had numerous complaints about Kerry, but…http://slate.msn.com/id/2096127
Maureen Dowd: Entertaining column, suggesting other winning ads for the Bush-Cheney team.
ON THE SCREEN While the "Pink Panther" music plays, we see a cartoon of the vice president, dressed in an Inspector Clouseau trenchcoat and a false mustache, wandering the desert with a spyglass.
THE SCRIPT "Steely enough to ignore the administration's own intelligence on the absence of W.M.D. and an Al Qaeda connection to Saddam. Farsighted enough to know that one of these decades, the rocks and trash that Iraqis are throwing at American forces will be replaced by flowers and palm fronds."
ON THE SCREEN A doctored photo of John Kerry, his war medals airbrushed out, canoodling with Jane Fonda at an antiwar rally.
THE SCRIPT "After getting four student deferments himself during Vietnam so he could attend to `other priorities,' he's still gritty enough to paint John Kerry as a spineless wimp on Vietnam and Iraq."
ON THE SCREEN A shot of Mr. Cheney driving the Nascar Viagra race car.
THE SCRIPT "Audacious enough to shred the American Constitution, even while he imposes one on Iraq." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/opinion/04DOWD.html?hp
9/11 - Bush Ads
Lots of upset. And FactCheck.org noted that the ads were “"nearly devoid of factual claims for us to check." We found only one clear misstatement in the first batch of television ads from the President’s re-election committee. One ad claims that the recession started the month Bush took office. Economists date the start two month later.” http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=150
The furor you’ve heard about, including the following culled from the many articles, including Newsday, below:
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people. It is unconscionable," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks on the twin towers.
Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, said: "I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty. But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat," he told the New York Daily News.
Firefighter Tommy Fee called the adverts "sick", adding: "The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--attacks-bush-ads0304mar04,0,143901.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
Terrific Outrage re Bush is communicated by the venerable Jimmy Breslin, the Candidate for City Council President of New York City, circa 1969.
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/nyc-bres0306,0,5341970,print.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
Environmental Degrading, ongoing: The New York Times (Andrew C. Revkin) notes the latest reversal by the Administration, ensuring that a nasty chemical stays on the market.
The United States is seeking to make more American farmers and industries exempt from an international ban on methyl bromide, a popular pesticide that damages Earth's protective ozone layer, Bush administration officials said yesterday
It's the first time any country has proposed to reverse the phase-out and increase the production of a chemical that's supposed to be eliminated," said David Doniger, who directs policy on atmosphere issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Administration officials defended the new requests, saying that they were justified under the treaty's clause allowing continuing "critical uses" of the chemical and that the United States remained a leader in curbing the use of ozone-destroying chemicals.
Critics said methyl bromide alternatives were succeeding globally, including flower pasteurization and indoor tobacco growing in artificial media with no pests. Some experts on plants and pests said the few remaining uses of methyl bromide were essential for some farmers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/science/04OZON.html
The Times also captured another Administration choosing industry over the environment, How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A. (CHRISTOPHER DREW and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06LOBB.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Union News: Wal-Martization, Unions Pooling Efforts
The multi-month strike is over; not a good result, though there is some good union developments in the middle of the following article.
But late last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets' responsibility for new workers' health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers' health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. In the words of one union (but not UFCW) leader, the contract is "the beginning of the road to the Wal-Martization of the industry."
Like many of his peers, this union chief is livid at the industry, but he is also angry at the UFCW. For months the union treated the strike not as a national battle but as a regional one. The union did not organize community and consumer support groups that could have rallied against the chains; it was very slow to leverage union pension funds to go after the corporations' finances. In short, the union really had no plan to win the strike if the companies held out -- and since their outlets outside Southern California were unaffected, the companies could hold out better than workers subsisting on meager strike benefits.
In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.
Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn't the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation's most proficient organizing unions (there aren't a lot of them) announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries.
UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there: UNITE fought for 17 years before organizing J.P. Stevens, while HERE's successful strike against the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip -- a strike that ran six years, four months and 10 days without a single worker crossing the picket line -- is the stuff of union legend. But UNITE is situated in an industry that will soon move almost entirely offshore, while HERE, a union in an industry that is anchored in every American city, has more opportunities than it has resources. Their merger creates a powerful force for organizing and upgrading the kind of service-sector jobs that otherwise are being ratcheted downward…
The Wal-Mart political action committee, meanwhile, has abruptly become the largest corporate PAC in the nation, funneling 85 percent of its congressional contributions to Republicans. The battle over the Wal-Martization of America has entered the electoral arena -- one more reason why Kerry has a strong hand in November's presidential election. http://64.4.16.250/cgi in/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=cd39b369afa533fe7c1b1482bed24f01&lat=1078495949&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW2RH059CBD0174672B7593E705226.
Venezuela: Two stories capture the ongoing tension. When will Chavez attain Castro/Allende status?
World oil prices surged yesterday after Venezuela, a major producer, stunned the market with a threat to cut off supply to America. . The benchmark New York light sweet crude contract for delivery next month surged US70 cents ($1.20) to US$36.86 a barrel, the highest since before last year's war in Iraq. . The prices soared after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told some 60,000 cheering supporters on Sunday that he would block US access to Venezuela's oil resources if Washington moved against his government. There have been anti-government protests in Venezuela recently." (http://www.todayonline.com/articles/15317.asp)
Why is he making these threats? Check the following story.
Hugo Chavez Accuses US of Spending Over $1 Million To Help Oust Him
Newly publicized documents show how the National Endowment for Democracy has given over $1 million in projects related to an anti-Chavez referendum and opposition groups. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is accusing the United States of funding these projects to help his opponents attempt to oust him from power. (Democracy Now: http://tinyurl.com/2ufd6)
Finally, though Brian Urquhart’s NY Review of Books essay Hidden Truths (on Hans Blix and The Lies) is not yet on the internet (but will be at http://www.nybooks.com very shortly), it’s intro is a fitting wrap.
The first four years of the twenty-first century have produced enough strange and unsettling developments to haunt a far longer period. They include the September 11 attacks and widespread terrorism by suicide bombing; the descent into savage despair of that well-spring of hatred and violence, the Israeli-Palestinian problem; the opening of a dangerous gulf of misunderstanding between the United States and much of the rest of the world; the growing, and terrifying, threat of nuclear proliferation; and the proclamation by the United States of the policy of preventive and preemptive war and at least one questionable experiment with it. The relative optimism that attended the beginning of the century has largely evaporated.
Time for a break!
-R
Unemployment / Flat Economy: 21,000 news jobs, all in the public sector.
Despite the Bush cheerleading-weirdness (“There’s excitement in the economy!”), economists agree that the news is terrible (though terrif for Kerry). As oft-mentioned, the economy needs to produce at least 150,000 jobs each month to keep up with the increasing population. Yet, we haven’t done that in 4 years! So, as I noted previously, while the media trumpet a net loss of just over 2 million jobs during Bush’s term, a healthy economy would have produced 8 million more jobs in the past three years than have been produced. It raises questions, troubling questions. No one has an answer for this changing economic picture. People are just beginning to say that we might have a “structural” problem, that companies are “moving ahead without payroll,” that the number of people dropping out of the labor market is accelerating.
To make political points, let’s note:
* When the last round of tax cuts were passed, they were sold as a jobs program; The Bush administration claimed that if their tax program passed the economy would add an average of 306,000 jobs per month. That would have produced approximately 2,500m000 jobs. 2,200000 more than actually exist.
* When Treasury Secretary Snow was interviewed about the jobs picture, he noted that economic growth would “translate into two million new jobs from the third quarter of this year to the third quarter of next year. That’s an average of about 200,000 new jobs a month ... What gives me confidence? Everything we know about economics and history.”
Yet, the New York Times headline for Robin Toner’s article is Job Data Provides Ammunition for Two Sides in Presidential Race. It’s this kind of “even-handedness” that keeps the Right’s Liars in power. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/campaign/06jobs.html
The more reliable Washington Post noted Job Slump Puts Bush in Bad Light.
Bin Laden: Why Now?
So, now we hear of resources being assigned to the hunt for him, resources that weren’t employed in December, 2001, that were cut back in 2002 as prepping for the Iraq invasion began. The “Northern Alliance” and various tribal chiefs were apparently given the responsibility. Let’s not play dumb. The approaching election undoubtedly influenced the “deal” (see Seymour Hersh’s account in the New Yorker, noted in a previous blog) whereby we look the other way at the pardon for Pakistan’s alleged nuclear renegade scientist in exchange for our encroaching on Pakistan territory to secure the prize of bin Laden before the Fall election.
For more, see Hersh http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040308fa_fact and a CNN account. http://cnn.worldnews.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=CNN.com+-+High-tech+snooping+for+bin+Laden+-+Mar.+4%2C+2004&expire=-1&urlID=9499797&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cnn.com%2F2004%2FWORLD%2Fasiapcf%2F03%2F04%2Fbinladen.search%2Findex.html&partnerID=2006
Plame Investigation:
It’s getting hotter. The grand jury is seeking Air Force One’s phone records for the week before she was outed in the Robert Novak column. Tom Brune has the details in his Newsday column. http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usleak0305,0,3272655,print.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlines
And,
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is pushing the White House to give subpoena power to the independent commission President Bush created last month to investigate intelligence operations.
The administration has turned him down, but the senator is refusing to take no for an answer. http://www.thehill.com/news/030404/mccain.aspx
Meanwhile, in his forthcoming book, (May) former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson will reveal the name of the person he believes leaked his wife's identity as an undercover CIA officer to Novak.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000452274
Outspoken Kerry on the Radio:
Unusually blunt words from Kerry, addressing the all-but-ignored fact that the soldiers in Iraq have been woefully and dangerously under-equipped- Humvees that aren’t armored, inadequate body armor, and the galling practice of insisting that the soldiers themselves had to pay for and secure anything better.
Kerry:
Families should be sending pictures and care packages to Iraq - and the Department of Defense should be sending the body armor. Today, I call on President Bush to support a law now in Congress to reimburse each and every family who had to buy the body armor this Administration failed to provide. This month, I will also be introducing a Military Family Bill of Rights to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
"What we face isn't a question of the budget; it's a question of priorities and values. This Administration has given billions to Halliburton and requested 82 million dollars to protect Iraq's 36 miles of coast line. But they call this basic body armor a `non-priority' item.
Fred Kaplan on RNC distortions re Kerry:
The always thorough and pithy Kaplan lays out the already numerous distortions about Kerry. We in Massachusetts always had numerous complaints about Kerry, but…http://slate.msn.com/id/2096127
Maureen Dowd: Entertaining column, suggesting other winning ads for the Bush-Cheney team.
ON THE SCREEN While the "Pink Panther" music plays, we see a cartoon of the vice president, dressed in an Inspector Clouseau trenchcoat and a false mustache, wandering the desert with a spyglass.
THE SCRIPT "Steely enough to ignore the administration's own intelligence on the absence of W.M.D. and an Al Qaeda connection to Saddam. Farsighted enough to know that one of these decades, the rocks and trash that Iraqis are throwing at American forces will be replaced by flowers and palm fronds."
ON THE SCREEN A doctored photo of John Kerry, his war medals airbrushed out, canoodling with Jane Fonda at an antiwar rally.
THE SCRIPT "After getting four student deferments himself during Vietnam so he could attend to `other priorities,' he's still gritty enough to paint John Kerry as a spineless wimp on Vietnam and Iraq."
ON THE SCREEN A shot of Mr. Cheney driving the Nascar Viagra race car.
THE SCRIPT "Audacious enough to shred the American Constitution, even while he imposes one on Iraq." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/opinion/04DOWD.html?hp
9/11 - Bush Ads
Lots of upset. And FactCheck.org noted that the ads were “"nearly devoid of factual claims for us to check." We found only one clear misstatement in the first batch of television ads from the President’s re-election committee. One ad claims that the recession started the month Bush took office. Economists date the start two month later.” http://www.factcheck.org/article.aspx?docID=150
The furor you’ve heard about, including the following culled from the many articles, including Newsday, below:
"It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people. It is unconscionable," said Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the attacks on the twin towers.
Tom Roger, whose daughter was a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, said: "I would be less offended if he showed a picture of himself in front of the Statue of Liberty. But to show the horror of 9/11 in the background, that's just some advertising agency's attempt to grab people by the throat," he told the New York Daily News.
Firefighter Tommy Fee called the adverts "sick", adding: "The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics."
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--attacks-bush-ads0304mar04,0,143901.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire
Terrific Outrage re Bush is communicated by the venerable Jimmy Breslin, the Candidate for City Council President of New York City, circa 1969.
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/nyc-bres0306,0,5341970,print.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
Environmental Degrading, ongoing: The New York Times (Andrew C. Revkin) notes the latest reversal by the Administration, ensuring that a nasty chemical stays on the market.
The United States is seeking to make more American farmers and industries exempt from an international ban on methyl bromide, a popular pesticide that damages Earth's protective ozone layer, Bush administration officials said yesterday
It's the first time any country has proposed to reverse the phase-out and increase the production of a chemical that's supposed to be eliminated," said David Doniger, who directs policy on atmosphere issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Administration officials defended the new requests, saying that they were justified under the treaty's clause allowing continuing "critical uses" of the chemical and that the United States remained a leader in curbing the use of ozone-destroying chemicals.
Critics said methyl bromide alternatives were succeeding globally, including flower pasteurization and indoor tobacco growing in artificial media with no pests. Some experts on plants and pests said the few remaining uses of methyl bromide were essential for some farmers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/04/science/04OZON.html
The Times also captured another Administration choosing industry over the environment, How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A. (CHRISTOPHER DREW and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr)
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/06/politics/06LOBB.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Union News: Wal-Martization, Unions Pooling Efforts
The multi-month strike is over; not a good result, though there is some good union developments in the middle of the following article.
But late last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets' responsibility for new workers' health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers' health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. In the words of one union (but not UFCW) leader, the contract is "the beginning of the road to the Wal-Martization of the industry."
Like many of his peers, this union chief is livid at the industry, but he is also angry at the UFCW. For months the union treated the strike not as a national battle but as a regional one. The union did not organize community and consumer support groups that could have rallied against the chains; it was very slow to leverage union pension funds to go after the corporations' finances. In short, the union really had no plan to win the strike if the companies held out -- and since their outlets outside Southern California were unaffected, the companies could hold out better than workers subsisting on meager strike benefits.
In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career.
Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn't the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation's most proficient organizing unions (there aren't a lot of them) announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries.
UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there: UNITE fought for 17 years before organizing J.P. Stevens, while HERE's successful strike against the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip -- a strike that ran six years, four months and 10 days without a single worker crossing the picket line -- is the stuff of union legend. But UNITE is situated in an industry that will soon move almost entirely offshore, while HERE, a union in an industry that is anchored in every American city, has more opportunities than it has resources. Their merger creates a powerful force for organizing and upgrading the kind of service-sector jobs that otherwise are being ratcheted downward…
The Wal-Mart political action committee, meanwhile, has abruptly become the largest corporate PAC in the nation, funneling 85 percent of its congressional contributions to Republicans. The battle over the Wal-Martization of America has entered the electoral arena -- one more reason why Kerry has a strong hand in November's presidential election. http://64.4.16.250/cgi in/linkrd?_lang=EN&lah=cd39b369afa533fe7c1b1482bed24f01&lat=1078495949&hm___action=http%3a%2f%2fletters%2ewashingtonpost%2ecom%2fW2RH059CBD0174672B7593E705226.
Venezuela: Two stories capture the ongoing tension. When will Chavez attain Castro/Allende status?
World oil prices surged yesterday after Venezuela, a major producer, stunned the market with a threat to cut off supply to America. . The benchmark New York light sweet crude contract for delivery next month surged US70 cents ($1.20) to US$36.86 a barrel, the highest since before last year's war in Iraq. . The prices soared after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez told some 60,000 cheering supporters on Sunday that he would block US access to Venezuela's oil resources if Washington moved against his government. There have been anti-government protests in Venezuela recently." (http://www.todayonline.com/articles/15317.asp)
Why is he making these threats? Check the following story.
Hugo Chavez Accuses US of Spending Over $1 Million To Help Oust Him
Newly publicized documents show how the National Endowment for Democracy has given over $1 million in projects related to an anti-Chavez referendum and opposition groups. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is accusing the United States of funding these projects to help his opponents attempt to oust him from power. (Democracy Now: http://tinyurl.com/2ufd6)
Finally, though Brian Urquhart’s NY Review of Books essay Hidden Truths (on Hans Blix and The Lies) is not yet on the internet (but will be at http://www.nybooks.com very shortly), it’s intro is a fitting wrap.
The first four years of the twenty-first century have produced enough strange and unsettling developments to haunt a far longer period. They include the September 11 attacks and widespread terrorism by suicide bombing; the descent into savage despair of that well-spring of hatred and violence, the Israeli-Palestinian problem; the opening of a dangerous gulf of misunderstanding between the United States and much of the rest of the world; the growing, and terrifying, threat of nuclear proliferation; and the proclamation by the United States of the policy of preventive and preemptive war and at least one questionable experiment with it. The relative optimism that attended the beginning of the century has largely evaporated.
Time for a break!
-R
