One bubble burst, then another and another. Enron, Global Crossing, WorldCom. The rectitude of auditors--pop. Faith in corporate CEOs and stock market analysts--pop, pop. The self-righteous prestige of Citigroup and J.P. Morgan Chase--pop and pop again. The largest bubble is the stock market's, and it may not yet be fully deflated. These dizzying events are not an occasion for champagne music because the bursting bubbles have cast millions of Americans into deep personal losses, destroyed trillions of dollars in capital, especially retirement savings, and littered the economic landscape with corporate wreckage. Ex-drinker George W. Bush explained that a "binge" is always followed by the inevitable "hangover." What he did not say is that the "binge" that has just ended with so much pain for the country was the conservative binge.
Economic liberalism prevailed from the New Deal forward but broke down in the late 1960s when it was unable to resolve doctrinal failures including an inability to confront persistent inflation. Now market orthodoxy is coming apart as a result of its own distinctive failures. It can neither explain the economic disorders before us nor remedy them because, in fact, its doctrine of reckless laissez-faire produced them. The bursting bubbles are not accidents or the work of a few larceny-prone executives. They are the consequence of everything the conservative ascendancy sought to achieve--the savagery and injustice of unregulated markets, the blind willfulness of unaccountable corporations.
We will be a long time getting over the conservative "hangover." It may even take some years before politicians and policy thinkers grasp that the old order is fallen. But this season marks a dramatic starting point for thinking anew. Left-liberal progressives have been pinned down in rearguard defensive actions for nearly thirty years, but now they have to learn how to play offense again. Though still marginalized and ignored, progressives will determine how fast the governing ethos can be changed, because the pace will be set largely by the strength of their ideas, their strategic shrewdness and, above all, the depth of their convictions. That may sound fanciful to perennial pessimists, but if you look back at the rise of the conservative orthodoxy, it was not driven by mainstream conservatives or the Republican Party but by those dedicated right-wingers who knew what they believed and believed, most improbably, that their ideas would prevail.
The new agenda falls roughly into three parts, and the first might be described as "restoring the New Deal." That is, the first round of necessary reforms, like the Sarbanes bill already enacted, must basically restore principles and economic assurances that Americans used to enjoy--the protections inherited from the liberal era that were destroyed or severely damaged by right-wing deregulation and corporate corruption of government. Pension funds, for instance, lost horrendously in the stock market collapse and face a potentially explosive crisis because corporate managers gamed the pension savings to inflate company profits. Employees of all kinds deserve a supervisory voice in managing this wealth, but Congress should also ask why corporations are allowed such privileged control over other people's money. Broader reform will confront the disgraceful fact that only half the work force has any pension at all beyond Social Security and set out to create tax incentives and penalties to change this.
Wednesday, August 07, 2002
WITH ALL the corporate and accounting scandals, you may have noticed that Congress is also working on bankruptcy reform legislation. A bill nearly passed last week and will probably be approved when Congress returns in September.
However, this is precisely the wrong kind of reform. It is a measure long sought by the banking industry to make it easier to squeeze money from ordinary individuals who declare bankruptcy after facing personal hard times or being overwhelmed by debt.
Often these are individuals facing catastrophic illnesses or personal financial reverses. Sometimes they are people who ran up too much consumer debt, but in these buying binges the credit card companies are willing coconspirators. They foist credit cards on college kids with no visible means of support save parents. They encourage people to run up debts with multiple cards.
Why? In a low-interest-rate environment, lenders love those 20 percent, Mafia-style interest rates that many consumers foolishly pay, and creditors gladly take the occasional default as a cost of doing business. But in an economic downturn, the credit card companies fear real losses. Hence they want to get tough after the fact. Under the bill written by the financial services industry, consumers who went bankrupt, rather than having a clean slate, would still be liable for a portion of credit card and other debt.
Economists use the term ''moral hazard'' in describing a deal so sweet that it encourages the beneficiary to break the law or to sacrifice ordinary prudence. For example, if a landlord is allowed to insure his rundown building for three times its worth, there is a risk that he may be tempted to set it on fire. The credit card people like to say that easy bankruptcies create a moral hazard for consumers running up excessive debts. But the real moral hazard is the one perpetrated when purveyors of credit throw caution to the winds.
Weirdly, the only thing delaying the passage of this Scrooge legislation is an entirely extraneous controversy about abortion. One version of the bill includes an amendment making it impossible for anti-abortion thugs who damaged clinics or intimidated or harmed individuals to wriggle out of damage awards by declaring personal bankruptcy. The anti-abortion lobby considers this an outrage and has been blocking the bill.
Meanwhile, the corporate guys keep declaring bankruptcy at record rates and for record sums. Even the Archdiocese of Boston is threatening bankruptcy if too many Catholics sexually abused by priests collect settlements.
Does anyone notice a double standard here? The logic of a business bankruptcy is to allow an orderly process so that old debts can be settled at so many cents on the dollar and the viable parts of the business can be rescued. What is galling under the circumstances is that the law allows the same scoundrels who ran the business into the ground to stay in charge of it after fleecing workers, shareholders, and creditors.
not something George W. Bush talks about much -- indeed, it's a fact that has been virtually purged from his official biography -- but for four years in the early 1990s, Bush was a director of a company that ultimately collapsed under the weight of its junk-bond financing and management mistakes.
The privately held company, called Caterair International Inc., was created in 1989 when Marriott Corp. spun off its airline catering business to investors organized by the Washington investment bank the Carlyle Group. If you haven't heard of it, Carlyle is a sleek financial operation that does its deals with help from a roster of former government big shots such as former defense secretary Frank Carlucci, former secretary of state James A. Baker III and even former president George Herbert Walker Bush. As of 2001, a newspaper article pegged Carlyle's value at about $12 billion.
The Caterair deal was a piece of financial engineering known at the time as a "leveraged buyout." It was financed mostly by high-yielding "junk bonds," of the sort pioneered in the 1980s by Michael Milken, who later served jail time for his financial shenanigans.
Carlyle and its investors paid about $570 million for Marriott's In-Flite Services division, which the hotel wanted to sell so it could concentrate on its core business. The investor group was headed by Frederick V. Malek, a Carlyle senior adviser who had served as director of the 1988 Republican convention -- the one that nominated Vice President George H. W. Bush.
Malek resigned in September 1988 as a high-level adviser in the elder Bush's campaign after disclosure that in 1971, at the insistence of his boss, President Nixon, he had compiled a list of Jews at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who, Nixon suspected, were part of "Jewish cabal" that was distorting his economic achievements. Several on the list were later transferred to different jobs, but Malek said he had no role in personnel decisions and denied he had willingly engaged in anti-Semitic conduct, arguing that he had been coerced by Nixon's repeated requests. The Malek flap didn't hurt his friend the vice president, who was elected as the nation's 41st president in November 1988.
It was Malek who suggested that George W. Bush join the Caterair board in 1990, according to a 1991 article in the New York Times. "I thought George W. Bush could make a contribution to Caterair," the Times quoted Malek as saying. "He would be on the board even if his father weren't President."
A March 2001 profile of Carlyle in the Times noted that the investment bank "gave the Bush family a hand in 1990 by putting George W. Bush, who was then struggling to find a career, on the board of a Carlyle subsidiary, Caterair, an airline-catering company."
Bush remained on the Caterair board until May 1994, according to a Sept. 17, 1994, article in the Dallas Morning News. He said he resigned so he could concentrate on his campaign for governor of Texas. The paper reported that Bush had previously disclosed that he owned between 1,000 and 4,000 shares of "stock appreciation rights." What intrigued the Dallas newspaper was that Bush had dropped the Caterair connection from his official campaign résumé in August 1994.
At that time, Caterair was staggering under its huge debt load, and because of unforeseen changes in the airline catering business. The Dallas paper noted at the time that in SEC filings, Caterair had disclosed $263 million in operating losses and writeoffs since its 1989 founding.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres that the continued cycle of terror attack followed by Israeli retaliation must stop, and the Hamas was at the point were it was ready to stop its attacks. Mubarak urged Israel to resume negotiations immediately with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's emissaries.
He added that Arafat himself should not pose a problem for Israel, since the talks would be held between envoys of both sides, and not the leaders themselves.
In a conversation with Israeli correspondents who accompanied Foreign Minister Shimon Peres on a one-day trip to Cairo, Mubarak said that since the Sharon government took power, Israel does not have "a vision, a peace plan or a solution."
The Palestinians would be able to continue their struggle for another 15 years, Mubarak added, saying that their suicide attacks were proving highly effective. The Egyptian president added that while his country does not have a peace plan of its own, he was willing to do everything he could to advance the cause of peace.
Peres told his host that Israel expects Egypt to help work out differences between Israel and the Palestinians and to push forward the Mideast peace process.
"It is impossible for Israel and the Palestinians to overcome the current stalemate without Egypt's help and intervention", Peres said at a joint press conference with Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, after meeting with Mubarak in Cairo.
Peres expressed sympathy with the suffering of the Palestinian people, but blamed the Palestinian Authority for turning down previous peace overtures from Israel and doing little to end Palestinian violence.
Peres and Maher said that their countries had agreed to pursue political negotiations as the only way to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and bring about a just and lasting peace in the Middle East. They also agreed that the conflict could not be resolved militarily, and stressed the need to put an end to the circle of violence and return to the negotiating table.
For his part, Maher said "the Palestinian territories are still being occupied by Israeli forces, which subjects the Palestinian people to closure and humiliation -- a result of actions clearly condemnable and not conducive to a solution of the problem."
"When one speaks about the violence, one should not forget the violence of a strong army using weapons against a civilian population," Maher added. "It is very clear that what has happened to the Palestinians by the Israeli army and sometimes by the (Jewish) settlers is certainly something that we have strongly condemned," he stressed.
ROSARIO, Argentina -- Word spread fast through the vast urban slums ringing Rosario. There was food on the freeway -- and it was still alive.
A cattle truck had overturned near this rusting industrial city, spilling 22 head of prime Angus beef across the wind-swept highway. Some were dead. Most were injured. A few were fine.
A mob moved out from Las Flores, a shantytown of trash heaps and metal shacks boiling over with refugees from the financial collapse of what was once Latin America's wealthiest nation. Within minutes, 600 hungry residents arrived on the scene, wielding machetes and carving knives. Suddenly, according to accounts from some of those present on that March day, a cry went up.
"Kill the cows!" someone yelled. "Take what you can!"
Cattle company workers attempting a salvage operation backed off. And the slaughter began. The scent of blood, death and fresh meat filled the highway. Cows bellowed as they were sloppily diced by groups of men, women and children. Fights broke out for pieces of flesh in bloody tugs of war.
"I looked around at people dragging off cow legs, heads and organs, and I couldn't believe my eyes," said Alberto Banrel, 43, who worked on construction jobs until last January, when the bottom fell out of the economy after Argentina suffered the world's largest debt default ever and a massive currency devaluation.
"And yet there I was, with my own bloody knife and piece of meat," Banrel said. "I felt like we had become a pack of wild animals . . . like piranhas on the Discovery Channel. Our situation has turned us into this."
The desolation of that day, neighbor vs. neighbor over hunks of meat, suggested how profoundly the collapse has altered Argentina. Traditionally proud, Argentines have begun to despair. Talk today is of vanished dignity, of a nation diminished in ways not previously imaginable.
WASHINGTON NORMALLY, consumers of information about the economy pay scant heed to Bush administration officials. In the financial and policy worlds, they have a deserved reputation for ideological blinders, tight political scripts, and poor persuasive skills.
When the jittery country got two tough jolts of disturbing information about the now officially anemic recovery, however, this absence of leadership ability tended to make an upsetting situation worse. The continued inability of President Bush's team to communicate, an inability that begins at the top, is going to make consumers and not just investors even more concerned than the facts would seem to require they be.
The reports, first that the recovery effectively stalled in the second quarter and second that an expected spurt in the number of private sector jobs failed to materialize last month, were each made more disturbing by the atrocious ''analysis'' with which top officials greeted their publication.
With the news that employment gains essentially disappeared during July, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao said the country should take heart from the fact that the unemployment rate ''was essentially unchanged'' and that the number of unemployed Americans who have been out of work for at least 15 weeks declined after more than a year of increases during the recession.
Her statement was absurd, and it will only heighten suspicions that conditions must be serious if Bush advisers go to such silly lengths to fudge the obvious.
There it was, the first Fourth of July after September 11: The majestic swell of a patriotism associated more with the era of the Andrews Sisters than the age of Destiny's Child. The ritual exultations of American values. The worry, yes, that something bad might happen somewhere, but even this concern only enhanced the solemnity of the moment. A splendid time, in other words, to be a president with a 70 percent approval rating.
But the moment was fleeting. For this was the very point at which the spokes starting coming off the wheels for George W. Bush. No Democrat would ever have summoned up the courage or imagination to plan it that way. For that we needed Paul Krugman, the merrily insubordinate New York Times op-ed columnist, who chose July 2 as the iron-hot moment to familiarize Times readers with the now-infamous Harken Energy stock sale.
Many elected Democrats had never even heard of it until the Krugman piece, but that didn't stop them from moving quickly to seize the moment. By July 7, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was on Face the Nation, demanding the release of Securities and Exchange Commission documents relating to Harken and taking, symbolically, an adventurous and important step: The Democrats' first real stab at cutthroat politics post September 11.
Ever since, a lot of the same people who spent eight years trying to pin everything up to homicide on the Clintons have been bawling about the unfairness of it all. But the chief complaint from liberal partisans about the newfound mettle of Daschle and his fellow Democrats is, what on earth took them so long? While it's satisfying to see Democrats playing some offense now, it's a fact that, over the past nine months, the party has been afraid of its own shadow. Let's put it as bluntly as possible: Never in modern American history has a party so failed its core constituents as the Democratic Party has during this period.
This wallflower pose has not been an accident, but a conscious strategy. For months now, Democratic operatives have debated whether to go after Bush personally and drive his poll numbers down to obtain an advantage in the midterm elections. Until recently, Bush stood at 75 percent, 80 percent, even higher. What on earth could Democrats do about numbers like that? They did some polling and found out -- phew! -- that they didn't need to go after Bush's numbers, that the president lacked coattails, that voters in discrete congressional districts and states were unlikely to cast their votes for Congress based on how they felt about Bush. There were internal arguments over this question -- some very much wanted to go after Bush more aggressively and personally -- but the numbers said what they said, and Democratic operatives concluded that they could succeed this fall without the risk of going after the president.
Aug. 6, 2002 | When Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the formation of Operation TIPS, a planned army of tens of millions of American volunteers charged with ferreting out terrorists in their neighborhoods, plenty of pundits questioned whether Americans spying on Americans was a good thing. Very few people asked exactly how it would work, and the Justice Department didn't offer any clues.
To find out, I went to the Citizen Corps Web site, then to the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS) page, and signed up as a volunteer. I quickly discovered that TIPS is having a devilish time getting off the ground. After an initial welcome from the Justice Department, I heard nothing for a month. When I finally called two weeks ago to ask what citizens were supposed to do if they had a terror tip, I was given a phone number I was told had been set up by the FBI.
But instead of getting a hardened G-person when I called, a mellifluous receptionist's voice answered, "America's Most Wanted." A little flummoxed, I said I was expecting to reach the FBI. "Aren't you familiar with the TV program 'America's Most Wanted'?" she asked patiently. "We've been asked to take the FBI's TIPS calls for them."
Has Ashcroft turned his embattled volunteer citizen spy program -- which has been blasted by left and right alike -- over to Fox Broadcasting's "America's Most Wanted"? If so, the connection shouldn't be all that surprising. Ashcroft's Justice Department and John Walsh's popular crime-busters show have been a mutual-admiration society for some time now. Walsh started coaxing ratings out of the 9/11 disaster for Fox TV while the dust was still settling from the twin towers' collapse. Only two days after the attack, Walsh loaded his whole production team onto a bus in Indiana and drove the show to ground zero, where, he claimed, government officials had told him to "help us catch these bastards."
But it's still hard to nail down the exact nature of the relationship between TIPS and "America's Most Wanted." Officials at the Justice Department and Fox Television denied reports of a formal link -- even though their switchboard operators last week were working happily in concert. "TIPS doesn't exist yet," said Linda Monsour, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's Office of Justice Programs, which will oversee Operation TIPS if it gets going this fall as planned. Then Monsour conceded that the Justice Department, which has an $8 million start-up budget for TIPS, had already begun signing up individual volunteers, in advance of the program's ratification by Congress. She wasn't exactly sure how those calls were being handled. But she denied knowing anything about a hotline to the Fox show. "It's probably something I should explore," she said.
"America's Most Wanted" publicist Kim Newport also denied knowing about a formal link between the Justice Department and the TIPS program when interviewed last Friday, but she did acknowledge that the show regularly takes tips from callers about possible terror threats. "We have been taking calls on terrorism," she said. Noting that TIPS is not officially running yet, she mused, "Maybe the Justice Department just turned to us because that's how our program works." Newport says the show turns over all of its terrorism tip calls to the FBI, or to the Postal Inspector's Office if they relate to anthrax threats.
PRESIDENT BUSH still favors partially privatizing Social Security.
Would you believe it?
Can you imagine the hysteria that would sweep through the land if people's Social Security savings had been invested in Wall Street stock, while it's been plummeting? Yet our chief executive - who is consistent if nothing else - is standing by the cockamamie idea.
Another example of government by obsession, this administration's modus operandi.
For example, our fearless leaders continue to plan an invasion of Iraq. Why? Because they're obsessed with Saddam Hussein.
Here we are, still unsure just who is responsible for 9/11 and why, whether our Afghan campaign has really done anything to prevent further atrocities, not even able to track down the probably-homegrown nut shipping anthrax through the mails - and what preoccupies our administration? Iraq, a two-bit backwater, which - no matter how our powers-that-be would love to find a link - has not been tied in with 9/11 in any way. Or with anthrax, either.
Is Saddam a bad guy? You bet he is. So are a lot of the world's leaders, including some we cozy up to, like his neighbors in Saudi Arabia, where most of the 9/11 hijackers hailed from. Is he developing those dreaded "weapons of mass destruction"? Probably. But so are a lot of countries. So, in fact, are we - big time. When it comes to WMDs, you can be sure the United States is way ahead of the rest of the world combined.
But we can't invade ourselves. So let's go invade Iraq. Maybe Americans will forget about the economy going south or an attorney general who's trying to whittle away our rights in front of our eyes.
Wag the dog, anyone?
SAUDI ARABIA is in the process of concluding a special trade deal with Baghdad and is likely to deny the United States access to its military bases for any attack on Iraq, according to diplomatic sources.
The Saudi Government, which was host to 500,000 American troops for Operation Desert Storm in 1991, has been engaged in talks with Iraq that could result in the establishment of a free-trade area between the two countries, the sources said.
The growing rapprochement between Riyadh and Baghdad, at a time when the Pentagon is weighing up the military options for toppling President Saddam Hussein, has underlined the huge changes in the region’s political environment since the previous US-led campaign against Iraq.
Intelligence sources said that the United States had “as good as eliminated Saudi Arabia” as a base for operations against Saddam. The al-Udeid base in Qatar, about 20 miles from the capital, Doha, is being expanded and is expected to be the control centre for US air operations.
The key Iraqi player in the trade talks with the Saudis has been Ezzat Ibrahim al-Douri, deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad. He visited Riyadh earlier this year and met Prince Nayef bin Abd al-Aziz, the Saudi Interior Minister, who, according to diplomatic sources, is in charge of communications between the countries.
The normalisation of relations between Riyadh and Baghdad was illustrated at the Arab League summit in Beirut in March when Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was seen on live television to embrace Ezzat Ibrahim, Saddam’s representative. Saudi Arabia also joined its Arab League partners in a unanimous vote against any US military attack on Iraq.
You've really got to hand it to the neocons: they sure know how to conduct a bang-up propaganda campaign. The leak of a "briefing" to the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which targeted the Saudis as the real locus of world terrorism, is all over the place: not only the Washington Post, but MSNBC, Fox News, the BBC, and out over the wires. The document, labeled "top secret" and "classified," according to Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, is described in the Post:
"A briefing given last month to a top Pentagon advisory board described Saudi Arabia as an enemy of the United States, and recommended that U.S. officials give it an ultimatum to stop backing terrorism or face seizure of its oil fields and its financial assets invested in the United States."
It's refreshing to see that the War Party is finally coming out of the closet, so to speak, with its real aims and ambitions. We knew that all the pious palaver about a "war on terrorism," and the export of "democracy," was just a lot of malarkey, but it's nice to have them come right out and say so. As I said all along, a war against the Saudis and the outright seizure of the Saudi oil fields is what the neocon-Big Oil-Bushian axis of aggression is really gunning for.
It's interesting to see that the conspiracy theory being pushed by the Rand Corp. briefing is quite similar to the vague mishmosh of arbitrary assertions and undocumented accusations circulating in the form of Forbidden Truth, a book by Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, and published by The Nation, which was aptly described by the Los Angeles Times as
"A dense, conspiracy-minded portrait of Saudi-dominated banks, companies and tycoons, all allegedly interconnected, that they maintain have helped fund Bin Laden's holy war."
The point of the book is that the Bush administration was supposedly appeasing the Taliban right up until the last moment: Brisard and Dasquie are essentially saying that the Bushies let 9/11 happen because of a "softness" on the Saudis. "Since the 18th century," Brisard and Dasquie aver, "Saudi Arabia, has been focused on conquering the world."
Tuesday, August 06, 2002
President Bush and other politicians have talked about how scandals like Enron and WorldCom have eroded confidence among investors, but the lasting erosion for the 21st century might involve something that the politicians are ignoring: workers' attitudes.
There's a saying in sports: Winning is a great deodorant. That shoving match a few weeks ago between Barry Bonds and Jeff Kent in the Giants' dugout has pretty much blown over, largely because the team played well afterward. But if Bonds or Kent had gone into a major slump and the team lost 10 games in a row, fans would have been clamoring for one of the stars to be traded.
Many workplaces these days feel like a 10-game losing streak. The economy is down, stress is up, and that light at the end of the tunnel might just be glare from all that sweat on Alan Greenspan's forehead.
History tells us that we won't be in this same losing streak five years from now, but I'm getting more afraid that the stench will linger in many workplaces long after the losing streak ends.
My father was in the generation that rebuilt the country after the Depression. Like many people his age, he worked hard and built a good life for himself, but he didn't have the same optimistic expectations that people in younger generations did. If he had a job that paid the bills, he accepted that,
because he had spent years seeing how ugly the economy could be.
I spent several weeks in Japan in 1986, and saw the same attitude among the people who had rebuilt that country after World War II. Like my father's generation, they could never savor their economic victory because there were always tinges of fear that something could go horribly wrong again.
A fence separated several hundred retired steel workers from the presidential motorcade yesterday as it pulled into Downtown Pittsburgh, but that didn't keep the older folks quiet.
Hoping to get President Bush's attention as he arrived at the Pittsburgh Hilton Hotel and Towers, the retirees gathered in Point State Park, where they waved protest signs and chanted slogans at the behest of young organizers from the United Steelworkers and other unions. They did a repeat performance for TV cameras.
They came from Ohio, West Virginia, Pittsburgh and Aliquippa seeking government help in maintaining their health-care benefits and in propping up the import-battered industry for which they once worked.
"We're here to tell this guy that we need a health care plan like the one he has," said Bobby DeMeo, 71, a retiree from LTV Steel's defunct Pittsburgh Works.
DeMeo, like many in the crowd, lost company-paid health benefits this spring after a debt-laden LTV stopped production and sold its assets in bankruptcy court.
"Since I lost my health care coverage last April, we've already paid $2,900 for prescriptions, doctor visits and health coverage. That's more than one third of our income," said Carol McMahon, whose husband, James, retired from LTV in Aliquippa.
"We're worried about our pensions and health care," said one elderly lady who would give only her first name, Anna. "Social Security too," added one of her friends. "Prescription drugs," yelled another.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 6 (UPI) -- These are the lazy dog day afternoons of August. And as U.S. leaders ponderously deploy the rhetoric of war against Iraq, they unconsciously echo an alarming pattern: At least five times in the past century, the Guns of August have brought indescribable suffering
and grief, terror and death, to the entire world.
World War I broke out at the beginning of August 1914. World War II broke outright after the end of August 1939. North Korea invaded South Korea right
before the beginning of August in 1950. And 40 years later, plus literally only two days, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait.
World War II ended in the middle of an August. But there was a darkly sobering aspect to that too. The first two atomic bombs ever used to destroy cities -- and the only ones so far in history to be used to kill people -- annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the first weeks of August 1945.
It has often been remarked that there is a dark, bitter irony to the fact that huge wars this century have tended to break out in August at the height of the summer vacation season in the Northern Hemisphere. The weather is often idyllic. Millions of families are on holiday in the countryside or by the beach. The governing classes of most major nations take the time to enjoy vacations of their own and often have to be summoned back to the capital when the crisis erupts.
World War II was a looming storm that was anything but unexpected. But World War I was a diabolical bolt from the blue. Until Austria-Hungary, with the enthusiastic backing of German Kaiser Wilhelm II, sent its notorious ultimatum to Serbia in July 1914, no one in Britain, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary or Czarist Russia dreamed of the immense conflagration that was about to destroy their worlds.
The Korean War and the Iraqi conquest of Kuwait that led to the 1991 Gulf War to liberate the emirate the following year both took U.S. policymakers in Washington entirely by surprise.
The left-wing independent journalist I.F. Stone concocted a theory that the U.S. government had actually schemed to bring about the Korean War and
in the following decades his theory became fashionable among the American Left. But the opening of the Soviet archives after the collapse of communism in 1991 exposed this theory once and for all as paranoid fantasy.
Winston Smith, the protagonist of George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," was a rewrite man. His job was to destroy documents that could undermine the government's pretense of infallibility, and replace them with altered versions.
Lately, Winston Smith has gone to Washington. I'm sure that lots of history is being falsified as you read this — there are several three-letter agencies I don't trust at all — but two cases involving the federal budget caught my eye.
First is the "Chicago line." Shortly after Sept. 11, George W. Bush told his budget director that the only valid reasons to break his pledge not to run budget deficits would be if the country experienced recession, war or national emergency. "Lucky me," he said. "I hit the trifecta."
When I first reported this remark, angry readers accused me of inventing it. Mr. Bush, they said, is a decent man who would never imply that the nation's woes had taken him off the hook, let alone make a joke out of it.
Soon afterward, the trifecta story became part of Mr. Bush's standard stump speech. It always gets a roar of appreciative laughter from Republican audiences.
So what's the Chicago line? In his speeches, Mr. Bush claims to have laid out the criteria for running a deficit when visiting Chicago during the 2000 campaign. But there's no evidence that he said anything of the sort during the campaign, in Chicago or anywhere else; certainly none of the reporters who were with him can remember it. (The New Republic, which has tracked the claim, titled one of its pieces "Stop him before he lies again.") In fact, during the campaign his budget promises were unqualified, for good reason. If he had conceded that future surpluses were not guaranteed, voters might have wondered whether it was wise to lock in a 10-year tax cut.
About that 10-year tax cut: It basically takes place in two phases. Phase I, which has mainly happened already, is a smallish tax cut for the middle class. Phase II, which won't be completed until 2010, is a considerably larger cut that goes mostly to the richest 1 percent of taxpayers.
I figure I must be on the short list of those likely to have a file created for, ( or added to), John Ashcroft's TIPS program. I've been receiving suspicious packages from individuals with Arab names, from locations both abroad and domestically. I've also received mail from nations of known terrorist activity. I've been shopping on Ebay, you see, and it's often a rather inexplicable experience.
When Levi's announced they were closing their American manufacturing, I developed a yen for 'authentic old-timey American quality' and by-and-by discovered the existence of Levi's 'Vintage' line of perfect re-creations of their old jeans - the product that made their name, built stout like you wouldn't believe in the original Levi factory on Valencia Street in San Francisco. The only problem with the line is that it was priced like Italian couture. Enter Ebay. Through the mysteries of the marketplace and the magic of the Internet, I've been able to obtain a couple examples of these Levi's at some fraction of suggested retail. The first pair came from a guy in London, and is the 1944 issue of the 501, complete with doughnut-hole buttons with the top one featuring a 'laurel wreath of peace' design that was a standard item on WW2 American clothing. The second came from a fellow in Texas, and is a perfect, crisp, re-issue of the zipper style Levi's I wore as a kid in the 50's. My Mom would wash them once and put them on me wet and then send me out to play, so they would shrink down to my actual size. In honor of the occasion, I washed these once and then went for a motorcycle ride. For whatever reason, both these Levi's came from men with Arab names, and judging from their e-mail's, a less than perfect grasp of the English language.
Some tipster might conclude Al Qaeda scored a container load of Vintage Levi's, and now is selling them to support terrorism, I dunno. But the pair from Texas, at least, came complete with a tag from T.J. Max, so I suspect this was simply somebody with a good eye and some entrepreneurial spirit. As I said, I also received mail from a nation which has experienced terrorist activity, in this case Croatia. The item in question is a postcard sealed in plastic, for which I paid $5, of Dan Gurney sitting on the starting grid in his 1967 F-1 Eagle-Westlake. Dan Gurney was the last American-born driver to win a F-1 race, and that year he did it in a car he built himself in Santa Ana, California. The Eagle was one of the most beautiful race cars ever to turn a wheel, and in 1967, arguably the most competitive year in Grand Prix history, Gurney was the only driver able to compete in a straight fight with the immortal Jimmy Clark in the Lotus 49. There were bumper stickers at the time that said 'Dan Gurney for President,' and hey, we've done a lot worse. Since Gurney lives not 30 miles from me, you'd think you'd be able to find something around here that acknowledged his singular achievement - but no, for this great little picture, my source is Croatia. Go figure.
But you see what I'm getting at - each transaction is completely innocent, and yet my mailman, if instructed to notice 'patterns' of deliveries from 'suspicious' sources, could quite easily decide that I fit the 'profile,' and once you fit the 'profile,' then you can bet your last dollar you're going to get your own file, whatever public statements Ashcroft makes to the contrary. Once you have a file, well, you have a file. Having a file will perforce hurt your ability to gain employment, get credit, find a place to live. You are added to the number of all others who have files, allowing Ashcroft or whomever to stand in front of the microphones and say 'We have hundreds of thousands, (or millions) of so-called Americans who we've linked to support of terrorists! Now is not the time to dither about civil liberties!' And so on.
I saw recently where Albert Einstein had an FBI file, and suffered heavy FBI surveillance, purely on J. Edgar Hoover's contention that Einstein was a 'liberal intellectual.' Well, you could say the same of Thomas Jefferson, I suppose. There's a strain of American Protestant culture, finding voice in the GOP hard-right, that holds that to read too far afield from the Bible is sinful; and so the 'liberal intellectual,' with his many books, is branded a danger to morals and the public safety. Will the cable-guy receive a profile of probable anti-American conspirators that consists of 'lot's of books on display in home'? And speaking specifically to Mr. Ashcroft's concerns, what about art? I've got a Renoir litho, an affordable posthumous print to be sure, of a reclining woman that's, you know, nekid. Too many books and bare bosoms - I'm sure to get a file.
Monday, August 05, 2002
The Bush administration's plan to invade Iraq and install a client regime in Baghdad may be popular in America, but to the outside world it increasingly recalls old-fashioned British imperialism.
If administration hawks studied Iraq's gory history, they would learn it ranks among the most disastrous and tragic creations of Britain's colonial policy, and offers a grim reminder of what George Bush's planned "regime change" in Baghdad may bring.
At the end of World War I, the victorious British and French fell like wolves on the rotting carcass of the defeated Ottoman Empire. After promising Arabs independence, Britain betrayed them, dividing the ex-Ottoman Mideast into weak states run from London. Oil had recently been discovered at either end of the Fertile Crescent: in the north around Mosul in Kurdish tribal territory, and in southern marshes bordering Iran. To secure oil for the Royal Navy, Britain created Iraq and put a puppet king, Faisal, on its throne. Faisal was to have been made king of Syria, but France managed to snatch Syria away from Britain.
Frankenstein state
To form Iraq, Britain knitted together three utterly disparate, mutually hostile regions: Kurdish tribal lands; the Sunni Muslim region around Baghdad, then a small city with a predominantly Jewish and Christian population; and the Shia south. The result was an unstable, artificial, Frankenstein state - a Mideast Yugoslavia.
In 1920, Iraqis rose in revolt against Britain but were crushed. The Royal Air Force routinely bombed, strafed, and even used poison gas against rebellious Kurdish and Shia tribesmen. Nineteen years later, King Ghazi I threatened to invade Kuwait - part of historic Iraq until detached by British oil imperialists. He died soon after in a mysterious car crash, the work, Iraqis said, of British intelligence.
In 1941, Iraqis again rebelled against their British masters, but were crushed by RAF bombers. After World War II, London put a new king, Faisal II, on the throne. But real power was wielded by Britain's man in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nouri as-Said. The U.S. and Britain forced Iraq to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact and sell its oil to the West at give-away prices.
To prevent a coup, the small Iraqi Army was denied ammunition. British troops and the RAF kept Faisal in power. But in July, 1958, a colonel named Kassem convinced Nouri to allow his men a few rounds of ammunition for training. Kassem marched out of Baghdad, turned around, marched back, and stormed the palace. King Faisal II was executed. Nouri as-Said tried to escape, disguised as a woman. He was captured by a mob, castrated and hanged from a lamppost. Kassem ordered British troops out of Iraq, and withdrew from the hated Baghdad Pact.
Col. Kassem turned out to be a murderous lunatic, executing thousands of Iraqis and bombing the Kurds. He threatened to invade Kuwait and was only stopped when Britain massed troops in its protectorate.
Five years later, Kassem was overthrown by Nasserite officers and machine-gunned on national TV. Col. Abdul Salam Aref took power, with discreet help from the CIA and British Intelligence, MI6.
Three years later, Col. Aref was assassinated by a bomb in his helicopter. His brother, Col. Abdul Rahman, took power, but he was overthrown by a cabal of officers from the underground Baath party, led by Gen. Hassan al-Bakir. A young Baath party enforcer named Saddam Hussein played a significant role in the coup, and was said to have had links to the CIA and MI6.
BERLIN: German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer cautioned against a possible US attack on Iraq on Saturday, stressing the need to solve the broader Middle East conflict first.
"I can only warn against talking about or considering a war against Iraq without thinking of the consequences and without a political concept for the whole Middle East," Schroeder told a rally of his Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Hanover.
Fischer expressed a similar position in a television interview to be broadcast on Sunday.
"To talk now of having to push through a change in government in Baghdad with a military intervention, that's a false assessment of priorities," he said.
Schroeder reiterated his view that Germany stood beside the United States after the September 11 attacks, but was not prepared to engage in "adventures".
"Germany is no longer a country where chequebook diplomacy replaces politics," he said on Saturday.
On Tuesday, Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac cautioned that they could not support a US assault on Iraq without a United Nations mandate, which US and British officials argue is not legally necessary.
On Thursday, Baghdad hinted it might let UN inspectors return to investigate its suspected weapons programmes for the first time since 1998 as US President George W Bush reaffirmed his aim of toppling Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Washington said Iraq's offer of talks on arms inspectors did not alter its ultimate goal of seeing Saddam removed from power.
Schroeder hopes to boost support for the SDP in a September election by stressing his opposition to a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, party officials said on Friday.
SPD General Secretary Franz Muentefering said even if Germany were not involved in an attack, a war would do more damage to its sagging economy, adding that the SPD's campaign slogan "We go our own way" also applied to foreign policy.
WASHINGTON -- A group of women who lost their husbands in the collapse of the World Trade Center are beginning to change some minds about the need for an independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks. Their next target: President Bush ( news - web sites).
For months, the president and other administration officials have argued against an independent commission. This week, however, senior White House officials met with three widows spearheading a lobbying campaign.
''They said they have a lot of thinking to do,'' said Kristen Breitweiser, one of the widows who attended the meeting.
White House officials say that a commission isn't the right way to investigate the terrorist attacks. But Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who accompanied the women to the meeting with Jay Lefkowitz, chief of the president's domestic policy council, said he's ''much more hopeful'' than he was previously.
Smith, who represents many Sept. 11 victims' families, last week helped Rep. Tim Roemer, D-Ind., engineer a surprise House vote in favor of an independent panel to investigate the attacks. He credits the unexpected victory to lobbying by family members, who helped to persuade 25 Republicans to support the bill. ''It's hard to look them in the eyes and not get it,'' Smith said.
Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century English political philosopher, felt that the lives of human beings were naturally "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." He maintains that, in order to survive this grim reality, humanity engages in continual warfare, "every one against every one."
Three hundrred years later, in 1949, George Orwell published his chilling, anti-utopian novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four," in which the brutish ruling party of Oceania rules society on the basis of slogans such as "War is Peace." In both Hobbes' "Leviathan" and Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" the frightening image of a never-ending war is evoked.
Enter America's unelected president, George W. Bush, and his "War on Terrorism." This war that Bush presents to the American people is a war that will not be over until he says it is. "The prospect of a war without end," writes historian Howard Zinn, in a March 2002 issue of The Progressive, is unlike the wars of any previous administration. "Indeed," writes Zinn, "presidents have been anxious to assurre the nation that the sacrifices demanded would be finite" with an eventual "light at the end of the tunnel."
With the macho bluster of an Old West lawman -- telling America that Osama bin Laden is "Wanted Dead or Alive" -- Bush says his administration will show no mercy toward anybody who harbors terrorists or plans to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Never mind that presidential brother Jeb Bush is governor of Florida, which has long harbored anti-Castro terrorists who've hijacked aircraft and boats without being charged with any crime. Or perhaps the president might explain why one of Pol Pot's chief terrorists now lives confortably in Mount Vernon, N.Y.
Indeed, George Bush's "War on Terrorism" is in many ways a reincarnation of America's "red scare" of the 1950s. It too was used to justify the growth of a war economy, suspension of democratic rights and the silencing of dissent.