Wednesday, April 14, 2004
Bush Press Conference:
I now recall why I stopped watching president Junior. Witnessing these pathetic performances is so unsettling- an inarticulate, not-very bright fellow who can only repeat the familiar sound bites, is utterly lost when he’s asked something they didn’t prepare him for. The country knows he’s an embarrassment, but can’t openly admit it. Dan Rather says “forceful”, others only note that ‘he won’t be apologizing.’ And, the policies…resolute, stay the course, ‘I have a plan that I will share with the American people…’ (a tad overdue, no?), the familiar, limited repertoire.
How it plays? In a dumbed-down America, some will have their faith reinforced by the repetitive, elementary presentation. But, maybe… just maybe, casualties and lies have done him in.
9/11 Commission:
The blame game. Will anyone be held truly responsible? Don’t hold your breath. Apart from the fact that too many in Washington are signaling that we should ‘look ahead, not at the past,’ we’re far removed from the simple ‘taking responsibility’ for policy failures; many have remarked that JFK owned up to the Bay of Pigs and his popularity went up. But the more usual is for investigations into unseemly or failed policies to fudge who’s at fault. Recall that although Reagan and company were clearly the guilty parties, Reagan and other luminaries got off in the Iran Contra scandal and blame was placed on a controversial colonel (Ollie North) and his boss (John Poindexter); when the Church Commission clearly revealed that the Kennedy brothers had used the CIA and even the Mob in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the final report refused to connect the dots.
Related: John Powers tackles this issue in an illuminating essay on the relationship of the CIA and the presidency in the current NY Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17050
What’s Happening, Iraq: What to do? No one has answers. The craziness of baiting or threatening cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was only the latest mis-step.
Some newly trained Iraqis don’t want to join the battle:
A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.
Our principal ally has its complaints. The Telegraph (Sean Rayment) report about British officers criticizing American commanders.
"Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of `unease and frustration' among the British high command.
The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for `sub-humans.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/11/wtact11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/11/ixnewstop.html
82 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in April (AP)
For American forces in Iraq, these are the deadliest days of the war.
At least 82 U.S. troops were killed in action in the first 12 days of April, more than 560 were wounded and two soldiers were declared missing. At least four American civilians were killed, one contractor was captured by gunmen and six others are missing and feared abducted.
The number wounded so far in April exceeds the total for any other full month of the war by more than 220.
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/special_packages/8421065.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported
(Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn)
At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.
Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmitt admitted on Tuesday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout.
He did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which, across the country may be as high as 900.
At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning $1 000 (about R6 300) a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four American murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6031.htm
Naomi Klein in Baghdad:
For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shias, who believe it's their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on to the privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein's regime. But this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and Shia have seen their neighbourhoods attacked and their religious sites desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient rivalries and join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil war, they are on the verge of building a common front.
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Falluja. "We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. "He has finally united Iraq. Against him." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html
Contractors and Countries with Second Thoughts: Work suspended, security folk contractors, even countries wanting out. One example:
Norway likely out of Iraq
Foreign Minister Jan Petersen was recently enthused by the Norwegian contribution to the rebuilding effort in Iraq. On Tuesday, after meetings at the United Nations in New York he indicated that aid projects in other countries would be a future priority.
Petersen told TV 2 that Norway was in Iraq to bring social stability and help them set up a civil government and rebuild. Petersen said there were no expectations that Norway's contribution there would be long lasting. http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article769844.ece?service=print
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: A familiar warlord continues to call for resisting the Americans.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord named as a terrorist by the U.S., called on Afghans to fight the U.S.-led coalition in the country in a similar uprising to the insurgency in Iraq, the Associated Press said.
Everyone believed that Afghans would be ahead of Iraqis in starting a popular uprising to evict the foreign occupiers,'' AP cited Hekmatyar as saying in a statement obtained by the news agency. Afghans, like Iraqi fighters, ``will choose the way of uprising against the occupiers.'' http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=ae63CbTAROjk&refer=asia#
Next Generation Nukes:
They’re being discussed…and more
No one likes to consider the possibility of nuclear war, especially on Easter Monday. But somebody's got to do it, and that sober duty fell recently to a special task force of the Defense Science Board, which has just recommended useful changes to the U.S. strategic arsenal to fit our post-September 11 world.
First we should note what the task force does not want to change -- the high threshold for use of nuclear weapons. "It is, and will likely remain, American policy to keep the nuclear threshold high and to pursue non-nuclear attack options whenever possible. Nothing in our assessment or recommendations seeks to change that goal," the panel writes. "Nevertheless, in extreme circumstances, the president may have no choice but to turn to nuclear options."
The scenarios the task force envisions aren't, regrettably, all that extreme. High on the list would be eliminating an enemy's WMD before it has a chance to use it on us…
The Defense Science Board, chaired by William Schneider, is a prestigious body whose recommendations are taken seriously and often translated into action.
None of this is likely to go down well with critics in Congress who immediately deem any proposed change in nuclear policy to be provocative. They are already on record as opposing the Bush Administration's push for the development of new low-yield nukes. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108171598453779699,00.html?mod=opinion
Bush Economy: Playing with the Figures
James Surowiecki’s piece in the New Yorker looks at the misrepresenting that is their hallmark.
Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration’s desire to claim that it will have created jobs. And a few weeks ago the Treasury Department put civil servants to work—at Tom DeLay’s request—evaluating a tax proposal identical to John Kerry’s, then issued a press release saying that the proposal would raise taxes on “hardworking individuals.” (Lazy individuals breathed a sigh of relief.)
Politics as usual? Not really. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040419ta_talk_surowiecki
Poll: People prefer balanced budget ...fits with Kerry's inclination...
By almost a 2-1 margin, Americans prefer balancing the nation's budget to cutting taxes, according to an Associated Press poll, even though many believe their overall tax burden has risen despite tax cuts over the past three years.
About six in ten, 61 percent, chose balancing the budget while 36 percent chose tax cuts when they were asked which was more important, according to a poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos Public Affairs.
As the nation's tax deadline of April 15 approaches, people's lukewarm feeling about tax cuts may be influenced by a belief that recent cuts haven't helped them personally.
Half in the poll, 49 percent, said their overall tax burden - including federal, state and local taxes - had gone up over the past three years. That's almost four times the 13 percent in the poll who said their overall taxes had gone down.
Even when it comes to federal taxes, most in the public don't feel their taxes have gone down over the past three years. Twenty-five percent in the poll said their federal taxes had gone up during that time, while 43 percent said they had stayed the same .http://www.csmonitor.com/newsinbrief/brieflies.html#BF15:12:49
What’s to Come for the Economy. David T. Cook of the Christian Science Monitor has a measured account of what the next President will face.
Experts say the next president will face a number of challenging tax policy questions. The issues in question are seldom included in campaign rhetoric, since they involve tough choices, including:
• Inadequate revenue. "Whoever is president will continue to face huge budget deficits. "They cannot solve those by capping spending," says Charles Davenport, senior contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan publisher. The war in Iraq adds to the problem. On NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, "we are going have to ask for more money after the election, and it's going to increase the ... deficit."
• An explosion in the number of middle-income taxpayers paying the Alternative Minimum Tax. The tax was adopted in the late 1960s to make sure the wealthiest Americans paid at least some taxes. "It now affects substantial numbers of middle-income taxpayers and will, absent a change of law, affect more than 30 million taxpayers by 2010," writes IRS taxpayer advocate Nina Olson in her annual report to Congress. The cost of fixing the problem: upwards of $450 billion over the next 10 years, according to figures from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
• A sizable gap between what the government is owed and what it collects. "The tax gap is more than $300 billion in revenue we think we should be collecting and are not," says Peter Orszag of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "Some of that is nonreporting [of income], some of it is aggressive use of tax sheltering."
• A major erosion in corporate tax revenue. Congress's General Accounting Office recently reported that 61 percent of US-owned companies and 71 percent of foreign-owned firms paid no taxes in the US from 1996 to 2000, when profits were booming. Last year, corporate taxes fell to just 7.4 percent of government receipts, versus 20.3 percent 40 years ago.
One reason for falling corporate tax revenues is so called "corporate inversions." In these transactions a new foreign corporation, typically located in a no- or low-tax country, replaces a US company as the parent corporation of the business.
Another factor in the erosion of tax receipts from corporate America is inadequate IRS auditing activity. Face-to-face audits of corporations - where IRS auditors show up at the company's place of business - fell from 15 per 1,000 corporations in 1999 to 7 per 1,000 in 2003, according to data released this week by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearing House. "Government data show that major IRS programs to enforce the tax laws against businesses and corporations are continuing to slump," the study said.
All of the major issues facing the tax system add to ebbing confidence about its fairness, experts say. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0414/p02s02-uspo.h
-R
I now recall why I stopped watching president Junior. Witnessing these pathetic performances is so unsettling- an inarticulate, not-very bright fellow who can only repeat the familiar sound bites, is utterly lost when he’s asked something they didn’t prepare him for. The country knows he’s an embarrassment, but can’t openly admit it. Dan Rather says “forceful”, others only note that ‘he won’t be apologizing.’ And, the policies…resolute, stay the course, ‘I have a plan that I will share with the American people…’ (a tad overdue, no?), the familiar, limited repertoire.
How it plays? In a dumbed-down America, some will have their faith reinforced by the repetitive, elementary presentation. But, maybe… just maybe, casualties and lies have done him in.
9/11 Commission:
The blame game. Will anyone be held truly responsible? Don’t hold your breath. Apart from the fact that too many in Washington are signaling that we should ‘look ahead, not at the past,’ we’re far removed from the simple ‘taking responsibility’ for policy failures; many have remarked that JFK owned up to the Bay of Pigs and his popularity went up. But the more usual is for investigations into unseemly or failed policies to fudge who’s at fault. Recall that although Reagan and company were clearly the guilty parties, Reagan and other luminaries got off in the Iran Contra scandal and blame was placed on a controversial colonel (Ollie North) and his boss (John Poindexter); when the Church Commission clearly revealed that the Kennedy brothers had used the CIA and even the Mob in attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro, the final report refused to connect the dots.
Related: John Powers tackles this issue in an illuminating essay on the relationship of the CIA and the presidency in the current NY Review of Books. http://www.nybooks.com/articles/17050
What’s Happening, Iraq: What to do? No one has answers. The craziness of baiting or threatening cleric Muqtada al-Sadr was only the latest mis-step.
Some newly trained Iraqis don’t want to join the battle:
A battalion of the new Iraqi army refused to go to Fallujah earlier this week to support U.S. Marines battling for control of the city, senior U.S. Army officers here said, disclosing an incident that is casting new doubt on U.S. plans to transfer security matters to Iraqi forces.
Our principal ally has its complaints. The Telegraph (Sean Rayment) report about British officers criticizing American commanders.
"Senior British commanders have condemned American military tactics in Iraq as heavy-handed and disproportionate.
One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of `unease and frustration' among the British high command.
The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for `sub-humans.' http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/11/wtact11.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/04/11/ixnewstop.html
82 U.S. Troops Killed in Iraq in April (AP)
For American forces in Iraq, these are the deadliest days of the war.
At least 82 U.S. troops were killed in action in the first 12 days of April, more than 560 were wounded and two soldiers were declared missing. At least four American civilians were killed, one contractor was captured by gunmen and six others are missing and feared abducted.
The number wounded so far in April exceeds the total for any other full month of the war by more than 220.
http://www.myrtlebeachonline.com/mld/myrtlebeachonline/news/special_packages/8421065.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
Deaths of scores of mercenaries not reported
(Robert Fisk and Patrick Cockburn)
At least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards recruited from the United States, Europe and South Africa and working for American companies - have been killed in the past eight days in Iraq.
Lieutenant-General Mark Kimmitt admitted on Tuesday that "about 70" American and other Western troops had died during the Iraqi insurgency since April 1 but he made no mention of the mercenaries, apparently fearful that the full total of Western dead would have serious political fallout.
He did not give a figure for Iraqi dead, which, across the country may be as high as 900.
At least 18 000 mercenaries, many of them tasked to protect US troops and personnel, are now believed to be in Iraq, some of them earning $1 000 (about R6 300) a day. But their companies rarely acknowledge their losses unless - like the four American murdered and mutilated in Fallujah three weeks ago - their deaths are already public knowledge
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article6031.htm
Naomi Klein in Baghdad:
For months the White House has been making ominous predictions of a civil war breaking out between the majority Shias, who believe it's their turn to rule Iraq, and the minority Sunnis, who want to hold on to the privileges they amassed under Saddam Hussein's regime. But this week the opposite appears to have taken place. Both Sunni and Shia have seen their neighbourhoods attacked and their religious sites desecrated. Up against a shared enemy, they are beginning to bury ancient rivalries and join forces against the occupation. Instead of a civil war, they are on the verge of building a common front.
You could see it at the mosques in Sadr City on Thursday: thousands of Shias lined up to donate blood, destined for Sunnis hurt in the attacks in Falluja. "We should thank Paul Bremer," Salih Ali told me. "He has finally united Iraq. Against him." http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1190300,00.html
Contractors and Countries with Second Thoughts: Work suspended, security folk contractors, even countries wanting out. One example:
Norway likely out of Iraq
Foreign Minister Jan Petersen was recently enthused by the Norwegian contribution to the rebuilding effort in Iraq. On Tuesday, after meetings at the United Nations in New York he indicated that aid projects in other countries would be a future priority.
Petersen told TV 2 that Norway was in Iraq to bring social stability and help them set up a civil government and rebuild. Petersen said there were no expectations that Norway's contribution there would be long lasting. http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article769844.ece?service=print
What’s Happening, Afghanistan: A familiar warlord continues to call for resisting the Americans.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Afghan warlord named as a terrorist by the U.S., called on Afghans to fight the U.S.-led coalition in the country in a similar uprising to the insurgency in Iraq, the Associated Press said.
Everyone believed that Afghans would be ahead of Iraqis in starting a popular uprising to evict the foreign occupiers,'' AP cited Hekmatyar as saying in a statement obtained by the news agency. Afghans, like Iraqi fighters, ``will choose the way of uprising against the occupiers.'' http://quote.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=10000080&sid=ae63CbTAROjk&refer=asia#
Next Generation Nukes:
They’re being discussed…and more
No one likes to consider the possibility of nuclear war, especially on Easter Monday. But somebody's got to do it, and that sober duty fell recently to a special task force of the Defense Science Board, which has just recommended useful changes to the U.S. strategic arsenal to fit our post-September 11 world.
First we should note what the task force does not want to change -- the high threshold for use of nuclear weapons. "It is, and will likely remain, American policy to keep the nuclear threshold high and to pursue non-nuclear attack options whenever possible. Nothing in our assessment or recommendations seeks to change that goal," the panel writes. "Nevertheless, in extreme circumstances, the president may have no choice but to turn to nuclear options."
The scenarios the task force envisions aren't, regrettably, all that extreme. High on the list would be eliminating an enemy's WMD before it has a chance to use it on us…
The Defense Science Board, chaired by William Schneider, is a prestigious body whose recommendations are taken seriously and often translated into action.
None of this is likely to go down well with critics in Congress who immediately deem any proposed change in nuclear policy to be provocative. They are already on record as opposing the Bush Administration's push for the development of new low-yield nukes. http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB108171598453779699,00.html?mod=opinion
Bush Economy: Playing with the Figures
James Surowiecki’s piece in the New Yorker looks at the misrepresenting that is their hallmark.
Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the long-term costs of its tax cuts. It commissioned a report on the aging of the baby boomers, then quashed it because it projected deficits as far as the eye could see. The Administration declined to offer cost estimates or to budget money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A recent report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers included an unaccountably optimistic job-growth forecast, evidently guided by the Administration’s desire to claim that it will have created jobs. And a few weeks ago the Treasury Department put civil servants to work—at Tom DeLay’s request—evaluating a tax proposal identical to John Kerry’s, then issued a press release saying that the proposal would raise taxes on “hardworking individuals.” (Lazy individuals breathed a sigh of relief.)
Politics as usual? Not really. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?040419ta_talk_surowiecki
Poll: People prefer balanced budget ...fits with Kerry's inclination...
By almost a 2-1 margin, Americans prefer balancing the nation's budget to cutting taxes, according to an Associated Press poll, even though many believe their overall tax burden has risen despite tax cuts over the past three years.
About six in ten, 61 percent, chose balancing the budget while 36 percent chose tax cuts when they were asked which was more important, according to a poll conducted for the AP by Ipsos Public Affairs.
As the nation's tax deadline of April 15 approaches, people's lukewarm feeling about tax cuts may be influenced by a belief that recent cuts haven't helped them personally.
Half in the poll, 49 percent, said their overall tax burden - including federal, state and local taxes - had gone up over the past three years. That's almost four times the 13 percent in the poll who said their overall taxes had gone down.
Even when it comes to federal taxes, most in the public don't feel their taxes have gone down over the past three years. Twenty-five percent in the poll said their federal taxes had gone up during that time, while 43 percent said they had stayed the same .http://www.csmonitor.com/newsinbrief/brieflies.html#BF15:12:49
What’s to Come for the Economy. David T. Cook of the Christian Science Monitor has a measured account of what the next President will face.
Experts say the next president will face a number of challenging tax policy questions. The issues in question are seldom included in campaign rhetoric, since they involve tough choices, including:
• Inadequate revenue. "Whoever is president will continue to face huge budget deficits. "They cannot solve those by capping spending," says Charles Davenport, senior contributing editor at Tax Analysts, a nonpartisan publisher. The war in Iraq adds to the problem. On NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Senator John McCain of Arizona said, "we are going have to ask for more money after the election, and it's going to increase the ... deficit."
• An explosion in the number of middle-income taxpayers paying the Alternative Minimum Tax. The tax was adopted in the late 1960s to make sure the wealthiest Americans paid at least some taxes. "It now affects substantial numbers of middle-income taxpayers and will, absent a change of law, affect more than 30 million taxpayers by 2010," writes IRS taxpayer advocate Nina Olson in her annual report to Congress. The cost of fixing the problem: upwards of $450 billion over the next 10 years, according to figures from the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center.
• A sizable gap between what the government is owed and what it collects. "The tax gap is more than $300 billion in revenue we think we should be collecting and are not," says Peter Orszag of the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center. "Some of that is nonreporting [of income], some of it is aggressive use of tax sheltering."
• A major erosion in corporate tax revenue. Congress's General Accounting Office recently reported that 61 percent of US-owned companies and 71 percent of foreign-owned firms paid no taxes in the US from 1996 to 2000, when profits were booming. Last year, corporate taxes fell to just 7.4 percent of government receipts, versus 20.3 percent 40 years ago.
One reason for falling corporate tax revenues is so called "corporate inversions." In these transactions a new foreign corporation, typically located in a no- or low-tax country, replaces a US company as the parent corporation of the business.
Another factor in the erosion of tax receipts from corporate America is inadequate IRS auditing activity. Face-to-face audits of corporations - where IRS auditors show up at the company's place of business - fell from 15 per 1,000 corporations in 1999 to 7 per 1,000 in 2003, according to data released this week by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearing House. "Government data show that major IRS programs to enforce the tax laws against businesses and corporations are continuing to slump," the study said.
All of the major issues facing the tax system add to ebbing confidence about its fairness, experts say. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0414/p02s02-uspo.h
-R
