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
Wednesday, March 03, 2004
Blog Vacation Upcoming: From March 8 to 28 I’ll be out of country and too busy and/or out of reach of internet cafes. At most, some spotty postings possible in the weeks ahead.
Social Security / Medicare
Edmund Andrews’ piece in the NY Times addresses the future crisis that doesn’t have to be.
Some experts contend that even the administration's chilling projections about the looming problems of Social Security seriously understate the problem.
In 2002, two senior economists at the Treasury Department were asked by Paul H. O'Neill, then the Treasury secretary, to come up with a comprehensive estimate of the federal government's long-term fiscal problems. The total, calculated Kent Smetters, then a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, and Jagadessh Gokhale, an economist on loan to the Treasury from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, was an almost unthinkable $44 trillion.
That projection was swiftly disavowed by the administration. Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said the White House never intended to use the study in its official budget forecast. "They were doing what they called an independent paper,'' he said.
Mr. Gokhale, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a policy research group in Washington, recalled matters differently. "At some point, late in the game, it was decided that it wouldn't be in the budget,'' he said. "In my opinion, if they had reported these numbers, they would have gotten a lot of credit.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/business/02retire.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Krugman on Social Security
Back from vacation, he weighs in on the issue, on the Greenspan travesty of bilking the middle and working class in 1983 and urging a further bilking so that we can continue tax cuts for the ultra rich.
There are three lessons in this tale.
First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario — it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.
Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization — the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.
Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system — the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical — continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.
The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/opinion/02KRUG.html
More on Social Security- some still being uploaded- at Fairness in Taxes for Everyone, http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/news.html.
Cheney Weighs In …in his words
If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040302/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney
Growth? Is he out of touch? Is he serious?
Unemployment: Bad News: Didn’t note this last week, that the number of mass layoffs rose sharply in January. The Washington Post (Kirstin Downey) and the Washington Times, the Moonie paper, had it, but they were the exceptions.
More than 2,400 employers across the country reported laying off 50 or more workers in January, the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.
Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher. A total of 239,454 workers lost their jobs in the January layoffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, based on unemployment insurance claims filed with state employment agencies. Among them were 17,544 temporary workers.
The total jobs lost in January was the most since November 2002, when 240,171 workers were let go in groups of 50 or more. Manufacturing workers, particularly in transportation, food processing and retail jobs, were hardest hit. The large layoffs also included 10,876 government workers, most at the state and local levels. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6917-2004Feb25?language=printer
And,
There were more mass layoffs in January in the United States than in any previous January for the nine-years that such records have been kept.
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040226-040956-6165r.htm
Haiti:
Thugs and army folk are in power, rumors/reports of shootings of Aristide supporters, a virtual laissez-faire approach by the UN and U.S. Two takes:
Jeffrey Sachs: The fire this time in Haiti was US-fueled
The Bush administration appears to have succeeded in its long-time goal of toppling Aristide through years of blocking international aid to his impoverished nation
Haiti, once again, is ablaze. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is widely blamed, and he may be toppled soon. Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington -- deliberately, cynically and steadfastly. History will bear this out. In the meantime, political, social, and economic chaos will deepen, and Haiti's impoverished people will suffer.
The Bush administration has been pursuing policies likely to topple Aristide since 2001. The hatred began when Aristide, then a parish priest and democracy campaigner against Haiti's ruthless Duvalier dictatorship, preached liberation theology in the 1980s. Aristide's attacks led US conservatives to brand him as the next Fidel Castro. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/03/01/2003100742
Kerry Speaks Out, Calls for Investigation. A Washington Times report (James Lakely, Tom Carter):
Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry yesterday called for an investigation into statements by former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide that he was kidnapped at gunpoint and removed from power by US Troops over the weekend. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040302-115719-2739r.htm
Seymour Hersh, I: More from the New Yorker piece on Pakistan.
In case you didn’t read the entire article, here’s another excerpt. Not for the faint of heart…
The greatest risk may be not to Musharraf, or to the stability of South Asia, but to the ability of the international nuclear monitoring institutions to do their work. Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point. Husain Haqqani, who was a special assistant to three prime ministers before Musharraf came to power and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, with some pride, that his nation had managed to make the bomb despite American sanctions. But now, he told me, Khan and his colleagues have gone wholesale: “Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A. Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done—the countries, people, and telephone numbers. ‘This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here’s who will miniaturize the warhead. And then go to North Korea and get the damn missile.’” He added, “This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.”
Haqqani depicted Musharraf as truly “on the American side,” in terms of resisting Islamic extremism, but, he said, “he doesn’t know how to be on the American side. The same guys in the I.S.I. who have done this in the last twenty years he expects to be his partners. These are people who’ve done nothing but covert operations: One, screw India. Two, deceive America. Three, expand Pakistan’s influence in the Islamic community. And, four, continue to spread nuclear technology.” He paused. “Musharraf is trying to put out the fire with the help of the people who started the fire,” he said.
“Much of this has been known for decades to the American intelligence community,” Haqqani added. “Sometimes you know things and don’t want to do anything about it. Americans need to know that your government is not only downplaying this but covering it up. You go to bed with our I.S.I. They know how to suck up to you. You let us get away with everything. Why can’t you be more honest? There’s no harm in telling us the truth—‘Look, you’re an ally but a very disturbing ally.’ You have to nip some of these things in the bud.” The former senior American intelligence official was equally blunt. He told me, “Khan was willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges, and the latest in weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world and he’s pardoned—with not a squeak from the White House.” http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040308fa_fact
Whew.
Seymour Hersh, II: A talk in Madison. More from the outspoken treasure.
Hersh also said the U.S. government "wings it" when it comes to Iraq -- no exit strategy is in place, the war has created more terrorists, and no one seems to know where to go from here, according to Hersh.
A civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis after the U.S. leaves Iraq is also inevitable, Hersh said.
Hersh believes American citizens are uninformed about the issues of Iraq. He said the press is not doing the best job of getting the story to the American public.
"The press really doesn't get it," Hersh said.
Hersh said the language barrier between the Iraqi people and the reporters in Iraq presents a major challenge in covering the story of the war.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were also a topic of Hersh's speech. Hersh pointed out that since the invasion of Afghanistan began more than two years ago, the amount of heroin sold by Afghani people is on the rise once again.
Hersh said non-government groups, such as the terrorist group al-Qaeda, could pose a large threat in five to 10 years because it is becoming easier for such groups to obtain weapons of mass destruction. http://www.badgerherald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/02/40441eddd5c6a
WMD (Again!) U.N.: Iraq had no WMD after 1994
Bill Nichols’ USA TODAY piece is the latest to underscore that the UN knew, and the US, which was spying on the UN, knew.
A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994, according to two U.N. diplomats who have seen the document.
The historical review of inspections in Iraq is the first outside study to confirm the recent conclusion by David Kay, the former U.S. chief inspector, that Iraq had no banned weapons before last year's U.S-led invasion. It also goes further than prewar U.N. reports, which said no weapons had been found but noted that Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
The report, to be outlined to the U.N. Security Council as early as Friday, is based on information gathered over more than seven years of U.N. inspections in Iraq before the 2003 war, plus postwar findings discussed publicly by Kay. http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+U.N.%3A+Iraq+had+no+WMD+after+1994&expire=&urlID=9464809&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Firaq%2F2004-03-02-un-wmd_x.htm&partnerID=1660
David Kay to Bush: Come Clean’Julian Borger in the Guardian
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1160842,00.html
9/11 Commission In summary, the Administration has done all it could to thwart the commission. It fought its existence, delayed its start, tried to put Kissinger at its head, tried to limit access to documents and key witnesses, resisted an extension and has circumscribed their personal involvement. Shameful, obscene…and hopefully, politically hurtful.
Two reports fro the Newark Star Ledger (Richard Cohen) which has been diligently following the issue, and the NY Times (Philip Shenon).
Following a commission meeting yesterday, its chairman, Thomas Kean, said the White House is insisting Bush and Cheney will submit only to closed- door interviews of one hour each. Kean also said they want to meet with only him and vice chairman Lee Hamilton, not all 10 members of the panel... Neither Bush and Cheney would be under oath, and much of their testimony might be classified and kept secret." ... http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-13/107829912424100.xml
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and is renewing its request that Mr. Bush's national security adviser testify in public, commission members said Tuesday.
The panel members, interviewed after a private meeting on Tuesday, said the commission had decided for now to reject a White House request that the interview with Mr. Bush be limited to one hour and that the questioners be only the panel's chairman and vice chairman.
The members said the commission had also decided to continue to press the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to reconsider her refusal to testify at a public hearing. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are expected to be asked about how they had reacted to intelligence reports before Sept. 11, 2001, suggesting that Al Qaeda might be planning a large attack. Panel members want to ask Ms. Rice the same questions in public http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/politics/03PANE.html?ei=5007&en=58915a05038b1036&ex=1393650000&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=
‘I Came for the Waters’:
Like Bogart in Casablanca, I thought there were many progressives in Massachusetts. But, based on the votes that Kucinich, the Leader of the Progressive Caucus, received. 4%, I guess I was misinformed.
Matt Taibbi on Kucinich, of the candidate being mocked by sports celebrities, (Wilbon and Kornheiser, below), Jon Stewart and much of the Media- "labeled a lunatic by nearly every 'responsible' press organ in this country and cruelly mocked to a degree that no civil society should allow an honorable man to endure."
Over and over again we have been told, in a million different ways, that a certain kind of idealism is actually childish weakness, and that the only pragmatic way of approaching life upholds force and commerce as the chief engines of social organization. That is why we laugh at people who use words like peace and community but praise as tough, responsible leaders anyone who’s willing to drop the most mother-of-all bombs on defenseless foreign populations. We laugh at a person who uses the word peace for the same reason that we laugh at the person who works as a temp or at McDonald’s: because we’re afraid of being lumped together with him. We’re afraid of being the proverbial punchline to the proverbial Dennis Miller joke about John Lennon and Joanie Baez and that goddamn Cat Stevens song, "Peace Train."
I will never forgive America for what Dennis Kucinich went through this year. Because he has had the audacity to call for an end to all wars, to announce plans for the creation of a Department of Peace, to question the very culture of viciousness and intolerance and crass commercialism that rules our public discourse, he has been labeled a lunatic by nearly every "responsible" press organ in this country and cruelly mocked to a degree that no civil society should allow an honorable man to endure. The New Yorker, that revolting beacon of glib, self-satisfied affluence, runs a cartoon showing Kucinich sweeping to victory in a primary held on Mars. The New York Times first angrily demands that he not waste any more of our time, then actually physically disposes of him after the passing of some self-imposed fictional electoral deadline. Even the more genuinely funny and more intelligent people in American public life–I’m thinking particularly of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon–can’t resist savaging Kucinich whenever they get a chance. All because he’s funny-looking, and because he uses the word peace without kidding. http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=9681
-R
Social Security / Medicare
Edmund Andrews’ piece in the NY Times addresses the future crisis that doesn’t have to be.
Some experts contend that even the administration's chilling projections about the looming problems of Social Security seriously understate the problem.
In 2002, two senior economists at the Treasury Department were asked by Paul H. O'Neill, then the Treasury secretary, to come up with a comprehensive estimate of the federal government's long-term fiscal problems. The total, calculated Kent Smetters, then a deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, and Jagadessh Gokhale, an economist on loan to the Treasury from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, was an almost unthinkable $44 trillion.
That projection was swiftly disavowed by the administration. Rob Nichols, a spokesman for the Treasury Department, said the White House never intended to use the study in its official budget forecast. "They were doing what they called an independent paper,'' he said.
Mr. Gokhale, now a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a policy research group in Washington, recalled matters differently. "At some point, late in the game, it was decided that it wouldn't be in the budget,'' he said. "In my opinion, if they had reported these numbers, they would have gotten a lot of credit.'' http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/business/02retire.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Krugman on Social Security
Back from vacation, he weighs in on the issue, on the Greenspan travesty of bilking the middle and working class in 1983 and urging a further bilking so that we can continue tax cuts for the ultra rich.
There are three lessons in this tale.
First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario — it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.
Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization — the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.
Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system — the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical — continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.
The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/opinion/02KRUG.html
More on Social Security- some still being uploaded- at Fairness in Taxes for Everyone, http://www.fairnessintaxes.org/pages/news.html.
Cheney Weighs In …in his words
If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years, the kind of tax increases that both Kerry and Edwards have talked about, we would not have had the kind of job growth that we've had. http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040302/ap_on_go_pr_wh/cheney
Growth? Is he out of touch? Is he serious?
Unemployment: Bad News: Didn’t note this last week, that the number of mass layoffs rose sharply in January. The Washington Post (Kirstin Downey) and the Washington Times, the Moonie paper, had it, but they were the exceptions.
More than 2,400 employers across the country reported laying off 50 or more workers in January, the third-highest number of so-called mass layoffs since the government became tracking them a decade ago.
Only in December 2000 and December 2002 were the number of large layoffs higher. A total of 239,454 workers lost their jobs in the January layoffs, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported yesterday, based on unemployment insurance claims filed with state employment agencies. Among them were 17,544 temporary workers.
The total jobs lost in January was the most since November 2002, when 240,171 workers were let go in groups of 50 or more. Manufacturing workers, particularly in transportation, food processing and retail jobs, were hardest hit. The large layoffs also included 10,876 government workers, most at the state and local levels. http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6917-2004Feb25?language=printer
And,
There were more mass layoffs in January in the United States than in any previous January for the nine-years that such records have been kept.
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20040226-040956-6165r.htm
Haiti:
Thugs and army folk are in power, rumors/reports of shootings of Aristide supporters, a virtual laissez-faire approach by the UN and U.S. Two takes:
Jeffrey Sachs: The fire this time in Haiti was US-fueled
The Bush administration appears to have succeeded in its long-time goal of toppling Aristide through years of blocking international aid to his impoverished nation
Haiti, once again, is ablaze. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is widely blamed, and he may be toppled soon. Almost nobody, however, understands that today's chaos was made in Washington -- deliberately, cynically and steadfastly. History will bear this out. In the meantime, political, social, and economic chaos will deepen, and Haiti's impoverished people will suffer.
The Bush administration has been pursuing policies likely to topple Aristide since 2001. The hatred began when Aristide, then a parish priest and democracy campaigner against Haiti's ruthless Duvalier dictatorship, preached liberation theology in the 1980s. Aristide's attacks led US conservatives to brand him as the next Fidel Castro. http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/03/01/2003100742
Kerry Speaks Out, Calls for Investigation. A Washington Times report (James Lakely, Tom Carter):
Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry yesterday called for an investigation into statements by former Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide that he was kidnapped at gunpoint and removed from power by US Troops over the weekend. http://washingtontimes.com/national/20040302-115719-2739r.htm
Seymour Hersh, I: More from the New Yorker piece on Pakistan.
In case you didn’t read the entire article, here’s another excerpt. Not for the faint of heart…
The greatest risk may be not to Musharraf, or to the stability of South Asia, but to the ability of the international nuclear monitoring institutions to do their work. Many experts fear that, with Khan’s help, the world has moved closer to a nuclear tipping point. Husain Haqqani, who was a special assistant to three prime ministers before Musharraf came to power and is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, noted, with some pride, that his nation had managed to make the bomb despite American sanctions. But now, he told me, Khan and his colleagues have gone wholesale: “Once they had the bomb, they had a shopping list of what to buy and where. A. Q. Khan can bring a plain piece of paper and show me how to get it done—the countries, people, and telephone numbers. ‘This is the guy in Russia who can get you small quantities of enriched uranium. You in Malaysia will manufacture the stuff. Here’s who will miniaturize the warhead. And then go to North Korea and get the damn missile.’” He added, “This is not a few scientists pocketing money and getting rich. It’s a state policy.”
Haqqani depicted Musharraf as truly “on the American side,” in terms of resisting Islamic extremism, but, he said, “he doesn’t know how to be on the American side. The same guys in the I.S.I. who have done this in the last twenty years he expects to be his partners. These are people who’ve done nothing but covert operations: One, screw India. Two, deceive America. Three, expand Pakistan’s influence in the Islamic community. And, four, continue to spread nuclear technology.” He paused. “Musharraf is trying to put out the fire with the help of the people who started the fire,” he said.
“Much of this has been known for decades to the American intelligence community,” Haqqani added. “Sometimes you know things and don’t want to do anything about it. Americans need to know that your government is not only downplaying this but covering it up. You go to bed with our I.S.I. They know how to suck up to you. You let us get away with everything. Why can’t you be more honest? There’s no harm in telling us the truth—‘Look, you’re an ally but a very disturbing ally.’ You have to nip some of these things in the bud.” The former senior American intelligence official was equally blunt. He told me, “Khan was willing to sell blueprints, centrifuges, and the latest in weaponry. He was the worst nuclear-arms proliferator in the world and he’s pardoned—with not a squeak from the White House.” http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040308fa_fact
Whew.
Seymour Hersh, II: A talk in Madison. More from the outspoken treasure.
Hersh also said the U.S. government "wings it" when it comes to Iraq -- no exit strategy is in place, the war has created more terrorists, and no one seems to know where to go from here, according to Hersh.
A civil war between the Shiites and Sunnis after the U.S. leaves Iraq is also inevitable, Hersh said.
Hersh believes American citizens are uninformed about the issues of Iraq. He said the press is not doing the best job of getting the story to the American public.
"The press really doesn't get it," Hersh said.
Hersh said the language barrier between the Iraqi people and the reporters in Iraq presents a major challenge in covering the story of the war.
The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were also a topic of Hersh's speech. Hersh pointed out that since the invasion of Afghanistan began more than two years ago, the amount of heroin sold by Afghani people is on the rise once again.
Hersh said non-government groups, such as the terrorist group al-Qaeda, could pose a large threat in five to 10 years because it is becoming easier for such groups to obtain weapons of mass destruction. http://www.badgerherald.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/03/02/40441eddd5c6a
WMD (Again!) U.N.: Iraq had no WMD after 1994
Bill Nichols’ USA TODAY piece is the latest to underscore that the UN knew, and the US, which was spying on the UN, knew.
A report from U.N. weapons inspectors to be released today says they now believe there were no weapons of mass destruction of any significance in Iraq after 1994, according to two U.N. diplomats who have seen the document.
The historical review of inspections in Iraq is the first outside study to confirm the recent conclusion by David Kay, the former U.S. chief inspector, that Iraq had no banned weapons before last year's U.S-led invasion. It also goes further than prewar U.N. reports, which said no weapons had been found but noted that Iraq had not fully accounted for weapons it was known to have had at the end of the Gulf War in 1991.
The report, to be outlined to the U.N. Security Council as early as Friday, is based on information gathered over more than seven years of U.N. inspections in Iraq before the 2003 war, plus postwar findings discussed publicly by Kay. http://usatoday.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=USATODAY.com+-+U.N.%3A+Iraq+had+no+WMD+after+1994&expire=&urlID=9464809&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.usatoday.com%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Firaq%2F2004-03-02-un-wmd_x.htm&partnerID=1660
David Kay to Bush: Come Clean’Julian Borger in the Guardian
David Kay, the man who led the CIA's postwar effort to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, has called on the Bush administration to "come clean with the American people" and admit it was wrong about the existence of the weapons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1160842,00.html
9/11 Commission In summary, the Administration has done all it could to thwart the commission. It fought its existence, delayed its start, tried to put Kissinger at its head, tried to limit access to documents and key witnesses, resisted an extension and has circumscribed their personal involvement. Shameful, obscene…and hopefully, politically hurtful.
Two reports fro the Newark Star Ledger (Richard Cohen) which has been diligently following the issue, and the NY Times (Philip Shenon).
Following a commission meeting yesterday, its chairman, Thomas Kean, said the White House is insisting Bush and Cheney will submit only to closed- door interviews of one hour each. Kean also said they want to meet with only him and vice chairman Lee Hamilton, not all 10 members of the panel... Neither Bush and Cheney would be under oath, and much of their testimony might be classified and kept secret." ... http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf?/base/news-13/107829912424100.xml
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is refusing to accept strict conditions from the White House for interviews with President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney and is renewing its request that Mr. Bush's national security adviser testify in public, commission members said Tuesday.
The panel members, interviewed after a private meeting on Tuesday, said the commission had decided for now to reject a White House request that the interview with Mr. Bush be limited to one hour and that the questioners be only the panel's chairman and vice chairman.
The members said the commission had also decided to continue to press the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to reconsider her refusal to testify at a public hearing. Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are expected to be asked about how they had reacted to intelligence reports before Sept. 11, 2001, suggesting that Al Qaeda might be planning a large attack. Panel members want to ask Ms. Rice the same questions in public http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/politics/03PANE.html?ei=5007&en=58915a05038b1036&ex=1393650000&partner=USERLAND&pagewanted=print&position=
‘I Came for the Waters’:
Like Bogart in Casablanca, I thought there were many progressives in Massachusetts. But, based on the votes that Kucinich, the Leader of the Progressive Caucus, received. 4%, I guess I was misinformed.
Matt Taibbi on Kucinich, of the candidate being mocked by sports celebrities, (Wilbon and Kornheiser, below), Jon Stewart and much of the Media- "labeled a lunatic by nearly every 'responsible' press organ in this country and cruelly mocked to a degree that no civil society should allow an honorable man to endure."
Over and over again we have been told, in a million different ways, that a certain kind of idealism is actually childish weakness, and that the only pragmatic way of approaching life upholds force and commerce as the chief engines of social organization. That is why we laugh at people who use words like peace and community but praise as tough, responsible leaders anyone who’s willing to drop the most mother-of-all bombs on defenseless foreign populations. We laugh at a person who uses the word peace for the same reason that we laugh at the person who works as a temp or at McDonald’s: because we’re afraid of being lumped together with him. We’re afraid of being the proverbial punchline to the proverbial Dennis Miller joke about John Lennon and Joanie Baez and that goddamn Cat Stevens song, "Peace Train."
I will never forgive America for what Dennis Kucinich went through this year. Because he has had the audacity to call for an end to all wars, to announce plans for the creation of a Department of Peace, to question the very culture of viciousness and intolerance and crass commercialism that rules our public discourse, he has been labeled a lunatic by nearly every "responsible" press organ in this country and cruelly mocked to a degree that no civil society should allow an honorable man to endure. The New Yorker, that revolting beacon of glib, self-satisfied affluence, runs a cartoon showing Kucinich sweeping to victory in a primary held on Mars. The New York Times first angrily demands that he not waste any more of our time, then actually physically disposes of him after the passing of some self-imposed fictional electoral deadline. Even the more genuinely funny and more intelligent people in American public life–I’m thinking particularly of Tony Kornheiser and Michael Wilbon–can’t resist savaging Kucinich whenever they get a chance. All because he’s funny-looking, and because he uses the word peace without kidding. http://www.nypress.com/print.cfm?content_id=9681
-R
Monday, March 01, 2004
Social Security:
Fortunately, this 20 year old subject is getting some attention. The facts at hand: In 1982-83, Alan Greenspan co-chaired a commission to ensure the solvency of Social Security, The recommendations of the commission were to increase the payroll tax to create a surplus so that we could have ample funds for the boomer retirement. Low and moderate-income people paid the piper. Then we had two tax cuts for the wealthy in the Bush regime, which Greenspan endorsed. Now, he tells Congress that due to the growing deficits, swelled by those tax cuts, we should cut SS benefits.
So: raise payroll taxes on the middle class to create a surplus, then cut taxes on the rich to wipe out the surplus and create a deficit, and then announce that the resulting deficits mean that the Social Security benefits already paid for by the middle class need to be cut.
As the Globe op. ed by Gilbert E. Metcalf put it,
This is breathtaking. Imagine if Congress had come forward in the 1980s with a proposal that recommended cutting Social Security benefits to future retirees while raising taxes on wage income. The monies collected would be used to provide a windfall gain to big estates by eliminating a tax that they had fully expected to have to pay and to cut taxes disproportionately on the income of the rich.
Hard to imagine such a policy, isn't it? But that's what the Social Security Shell Game is doing. http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2004/03/01/fooled_by_the_shell_game/
Pakistan:
The most dangerous country for the United States now is Pakistan, and second is Iran…. We haven’t been this vulnerable since the British burned Washington in 1814. -CIA consultant Robert Galluci.
A report by Jane's Defense Weekly says that despite Pakistan's attempt to portray the sale of its nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, as a rogue operation, it was a government-approved enterprise involving glossy brochures and official approval. http://www.defensetech.org/archives/000797.html
Seymour Hersh has an article on our special ally in the new New Yorker. Hersh reports that the U.S. has agreed to go easy on Pakistan's nuclear black marketeers in exchange for permission to put troops into Pakistan to look for Osama Bin Laden, in an area where, according to a former CIA operative, "Alexander the Great lost an entire division."
A Bush Administration intelligence officer with years of experience in nonproliferation issues told me last month, “One thing we do know is that this was not a rogue operation. Suppose Edward Teller had suddenly decided to spread nuclear technology and equipment around the world. Do you really think he could do that without the government knowing? How do you get missiles from North Korea to Pakistan? Do you think A.Q. shipped all the centrifuges by Federal Express? The military has to be involved, at high levels.” The intelligence officer went on, “We had every opportunity to put a stop to the A. Q. Khan network fifteen years ago. Some of those involved today in the smuggling are the children of those we knew about in the eighties. It’s the second generation now.”
In public, the Bush Administration accepted the pardon at face value. Within hours of Musharraf’s television appearance, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary of State, praised him as “the right man at the right time.” Armitage added that Pakistan had been “very forthright in the last several years with us about proliferation.” http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?fact/040308fa_fact
Haiti: Abduction? And U.S. Credibility
We’re paying the price for a (further) loss of credibility. As Randall Robinson noted in describing Aristed’s alleged abduction, ‘They deny it; (but) there were no wmd’s.’
Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California called Artistide's overthrow the result of a plan, a "preemptive strike," and "regime change." She suspects that Vice President Cheney is calling the shots.
If this was a coup, as it appears it was, it would be the 33rd coup in Haiti's tragic history. Danny Schechter, at www.mediachannel.org, noted that
CNN was asking: "Will the marines bring peace to a troubled land?" Yuk. This, of course, accepts the official story of Aristide's departure and its beneficent rationalization of the intervention at face value. CNN presented the only problem in Haiti as Aristide's armed supporters, not the thugs who the US backed in ousting him.”
Two takes- from Newsday (Ron Howell) and Jeffrey Sachs in the Financial Times:
U.S. political maneuvering behind the ouster
The departure of Haiti's Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a victory for a Bush administration hard-liner who has been long dedicated to Aristide's ouster, U.S. foreign policy analysts say.
That official is Roger Noriega, assistant U.S. secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, whose influence over U.S. policy toward Haiti has increased during the past decade as he climbed the diplomatic ladder in Washington.
"Roger Noriega has been dedicated to ousting Aristide for many, many years, and now he's in a singularly powerful position to accomplish it," Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay, said last week.
White, now president of the Center for International Policy, a think tank in Washington, said Noriega's ascent largely has been attributed to his ties to North Carolina Republican Jesse Helms, an arch-conservative foe of Aristide who had behind-the-scenes influence over policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean before retiring from the Senate two years ago.
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/world/ny-wopol013691845mar01,0,3025257,print.story?coll=ny-worldnews-headlines
Don't fall for Washington's spin on Haiti
The crisis in Haiti is another case of brazen US manipulation of a
small, impoverished country with the truth unexplored by journalists. In
the nearly universal media line on the Haitian revolt, President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was portrayed as an undemocratic leader who
betrayed Haiti's democratic hopes and thereby lost the support of his
erstwhile backers. He "stole" elections and intransigently refused to
address opposition concerns. As a result he had to leave office, which
he did at the insistence of the US and France. Unfortunately, this is a
gravely distorted view.
President George Bush's foreign policy team came into office intent on
toppling Mr Aristide, long reviled by powerful US conservatives such as
former senator Jesse Helms who obsessively saw him as another Fidel
Castro in the Caribbean. Such critics fulminated when President Bill
Clinton restored Mr Aristide to power in 1994, and they succeeded in
getting US troops withdrawn soon afterwards, well before the country
could be stabilised. In terms of help to rebuild Haiti, the US Marines
left behind about eight miles of paved roads and essentially nothing
else. In the meantime, the so-called "opposition", a coterie of rich
Haitians linked to the preceding Duvalier regime and former (and perhaps
current) CIA operatives, worked Washington to lobby against Mr Aristide. http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000195.html
What’s Happening, Venezuela: Patrick Markey’s report of the ongoing tension.
Tens of thousands of supporters of President Hugo Chavez marched on Sunday to protest what they criticized as US meddling and rally support for the leftist leader as he battles an opposition referendum challenge.
"Waving revolutionary flags and "Out with the CIA" and "No to Yankee Invasion" banners, Chavez sympathizers streamed through the capital under the watch of National Guard troops and two military helicopters circling overhead." http://tinyurl.com/26c77
9/11: Update:
Ellis Henican’s account in Newsday summarizes Bush’s alleged support for the commission, amidst ongoing reports that he’ll give his convention speech at Ground Zero.
No one knows exactly why George W. Bush seems so reluctant to let the truth come out. Had someone tried to warn him about an imminent attack? Were there embarrassing predictions in the daily presidential briefing? If Sept. 11 was truly a life-altering experience for the nation, shouldn't all of us know the cold, hard facts?
If you listened only to Bush's rhetoric, you'd think he was a major booster of the inquiry. Indeed, he said he supported the extension.
"We have given extraordinary cooperation," he told Tim Russert a couple of weeks ago. "I want the truth to be known." Bush told Russert on "Meet The Press" that he'd be pleased to testify and was turning over his daily briefing reports.
That's what the president said. Now follow the trail of what he has done.
At first, Bush was opposed to the whole idea of the commission. Under strong pressure from Republicans and Democrats, he ultimately relented. But he never seemed too enthusiastic about the probe.
Commission members wanted the right to subpoena witnesses. The White House opposed that, relenting only when the subpoena rules were tightly limited.
Bush told Russert he'd release those daily-briefing forms. Then, that too was tangled up in restrictions: Only to the chairmen, not to be shared with other members, only summaries. That is still being wrangled out.
Then there was the question of whether Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would testify. Security adviser Condoleezza Rice agreed to speak only briefly, in private and on a weekend. Bush told Russert he'd love to appear. Then he began dragging his feet.
Only in private, he said.
Only with the chairmen.
Only for an hour.
We'll see if it happens at all. http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/nyc-henn0229,0,5014291,print.column?coll=ny-news-columnists
National Guard:
Walter Robinson of the Globe, the reporter on this issue, found that official government web sites were noting that Bush flew F-102 jets for almost 6 years. Fits with Bush the ‘successful businessman’ and ‘owner of a baseball team’, etc. The White House said that "It does not reflect the facts of his service. It will be corrected.” http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/02/28/bush_bio_on_web_inflates_guard_service?mode=PF
Environment: Another strike:
The Environmental Working Group notes that pristine Utah lands are going for a proverbial song… to Bush campaign contributors!
Today 5,000 acres of environmentally sensitive public land in Utah face permanent loss of protection at taxpayer-subsidized auction. A new computer investigation of federal data by the Environmental Working Group (EWG) reveals the size, scope, and locations of this public land giveaway to oil and gas interests. The investigation also identifies some of the corporate players who are benefiting from the sale of these pristine lands at bargain basement prices.
http://www.ewg.org/reports/UT_oil&gas/
-R
