MOUNT RUSHMORE NATIONAL MEMORIAL, S.D. (AP) - With four presidents staring down at him and one potential rival, Tom Daschle, looking on, President Bush ( news - web sites) on Thursday demanded broad authority to oversee the new Homeland Security Department.
"I don't want our hands tied so we cannot do the number one job you expect, which is to protect the homeland," Bush said.
Just off to Bush's right was Daschle, the Senate majority leader who has clashed with Bush on how much flexibility Bush should have over the proposed department's personnel. Daschle, a Democrat who represents South Dakota, is considering challenging Bush in 2004.
The White House invited Daschle to the event, and Bush went out of his way to welcome him in opening remarks. But Bush also shouted at times, and seemed to look directly at Daschle occasionally, as he outlined an agenda that Daschle has frequently bottled up on Capitol Hill.
Friday, August 16, 2002
Wednesday, August 14, 2002
America's leadership
The sacrifices of military members and their families should be rewarded with fair treatment and honesty from their leaders. Now their safety, job security, and retirement benefits are in jeopardy because top leaders are using deployment decisions as mere profit-making vehicles.
Thomas White, as vice chairman of Enron when it allegedly hid $500 million in losses and manipulated the California energy crisis, is secretary of the Army, even after being cited by the Senate Armed Services Committee for violating his signed ethics agreement. That means he used his position for personal gain and compromised his objectivity for military decisions.
Vice President Dick Cheney’s old company, Halliburton, is now the primary recipient of the Pentagon’s rush to build anti-terrorism military bases, costing taxpayers billions. U.S. military construction units could do all of this work for considerably less. This means more money for Cheney’s friends at Halliburton and less work for military personnel.
Commander-in-chief George W. Bush has made certain that former Enron and energy executives profit from defense and homeland security contracts. His own fortune was made through Enron/WorldCom-type accounting tricks and insider trading that have bankrupted companies and robbed people of their retirement savings. The Bush administration planned to invade Afghanistan even without the tragic events of Sept. 11 because Unocal had found the Taliban too uncooperative in its attempts to build an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Karachi.
Now Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld wants to eliminate an entire Army division, even as we are running out of reservists to backfill critical positions. The Bush team also thinks that it’s too costly for disabled veterans to earn their longevity pay in addition to retirement benefits. But it’s minimal when compared to cost-plus contracts for Halliburton.
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and White are a gang of four who have ordered U.S. military members to be put in harm’s way for oil profits and that divisions be consolidated to free up money for private contractors. This administration has overseen a wrecked economy, befriended corporations that robbed their own employees, has tried to put Social Security into a losing stock market, restricted health care for veterans and deployed military members to fatten oil executives’ pockets.
It’s time for leadership the military can trust. It’s time for the gang of four to go!
M.D. Wooldridge
Würzburg, Germany
Friday, August 09, 2002
Last week President Bush "got tough" with alleged corporate crooks—with some of them, anyway. The papers carried photos of John Rigas and his son Timothy being carted off on charges of looting their company, Adelphia. There were also pics of WorldCom bigs Scott Sullivan and David F. Myers in custody. Sullivan was released on a $10 million bond, while Myers was sprung for $2 million, pocket change for guys like them.
Rumors are that the president is having a hissy fit over the unending series of scandals, even considering taking away guilty executives' vacation homes and yachts, just for good measure. Yet of the 10 large corporations that have recently crashed, taking thousands of innocent investors with them, eight still have the responsible players walking the streets, a little poorer perhaps, but in no danger of being arrested.
Meanwhile, the full story of the rape and pillage of America is still unfolding. Last week the Financial Times ran the results of a survey revealing that top execs in the 25 biggest recent corporate collapses had built up fortunes from 1999 through 2001 totaling $3.3 billion. Richest of the rich: Ken Lay of Enron with $247 million and Gary Winnick of Global Crossing with $512 million.
Lay—along with his buds in the executive suite—famously ran Enron into the ground. He ripped off tens of thousands of electricity consumers in California, lying to them, manipulating the so-called free market while hiding the true nature of the corporate business from its stockholders and the government. In cold blood, he ruined the livelihood of thousands of its employees, screwing them out of any sort of "retirement." Surely Lay and the other chieftains at Enron ought to be charged with criminal malfeasance of some sort—fraud, conspiracy under the racketeering laws, obstruction of justice, or perjury, just for starters. Lay happens to be a major Bush family supporter, having financed both presidents' political conquests and acted as the frat brat's confidant on energy policy. Natch, he doesn't get charged with anything.
Beyond the political will to hold people like Lay accountable, we need a mechanism for going after the companies themselves, paving the way for placing them in receivership so they could be managed under public supervision until their acts were cleaned up. There is nothing unusual in this notion. Crooked unions go through it all the time. Corporations should get the same treatment. At the very least, firms with shoddy accounting and other dubious practices should be denied government business. For Enron, federal subsidies and contracts were the lifeblood that let the corrupt operation flourish.
Senior British ministers are privately admitting to growing exasperation across government at the lack of a clear and coherent US policy towards Iraq.
The frustration is understood to extend to senior cabinet ministers and even Sir David Manning, the prime minister's chief foreign policy adviser.
It is said no coherent military or political strategy to oust Saddam Hussein has been presented to Downing Street, even though Britain is supposedly the closest ally of George Bush, the US president.
Anxiety in No 10 has been fuelled by the results of private polling commissioned by Tony Blair which it is understood confirms Mr Bush's spectacular unpopularity among British voters.
The dramatic findings reported by Philip Gould, Mr Blair's pollster, have been kept within a tight circle of senior officials and New Labour insiders who refuse to divulge any details.
But some ministers believe Mr Blair is starting to take unnecessary political flak over supposed hard and fast US decisions when in truth Washington has yet to construct any clear policy towards Iraq.
They believe the prime minister may even have sanctioned the revelation of his private doubts when Jordan's King Abdullah told reporters in Washington last week that Mr Blair had confided in him that he has "tremendous concerns" about an Iraq invasion.
In the twentieth century, Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler and the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin set historical standards for a police state by turning citizen informants against their neighbors, then removing those denounced to secret concentration camps. Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's KGB, respectively, terrorized their populations into meek submission. Personal freedom and liberty lost all meaning in those police states. But now George W. Bush is poised to compete with them as he and his cabinet gear up to create for the United States unprecedented American systems of citizen informers and, for all intents and purposes, concentration camps, under the rubric of national security.
The Bush administration recently charged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to put in place by January 2003 sprawling temporary cities to handle millions of displaced persons. FEMA is the federal agency charged with disaster preparedness. But now it has been ordered to undertake a crash effort to prepare for multiple mass destruction attacks on U.S., reported in a July 2002 story by NewsMax. This is to get ready for nuclear, biological and chemical attacks against U.S. cities, including the possibility of multiple attacks with weapons of mass destruction.
Vendors, contractors and consultants have already notified by FEMA which is preparing to handle the logistics of aiding millions of displaced Americans who are expected to flee from urban areas that may be attacked by terrorist weapons of mass destruction. The Agency is planning to create emergency, makeshift cities that can house hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of Americans fleeing urban homes when their cities are attacked. Ominously, FEMA was given a deadline of about six months to have the major American cities ready to go. The deadline is believed related to making the U.S. prepared for counterattacks when Bush orders a U.S. invasion of Iraq sometime next year.
Meanwhile, the Bush Administration is also poised to recruit millions of United States citizens as homeland informants under the Terrorism Information and Prevention System (TIPS). Plans for the program would use at least 4 per cent of the American population for reporting "suspicious activity." This means, the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the infamous Stasi secret police did in the former East Germany.
Informant systems have tended to be tools of non-democratic states. According to a report by Harvard University's Project on Justice in 1992, the accuracy of informant reports is poor. Often, informants stretch the truth while others simply fabricate their reports. Indeed, denouncing one's neighbor more often was used to settle old personal scores rather than to help one's country.
With the passage earlier this year of Bush's Patriot Act, there is already potential for abusive, large-scale investigations of US citizens, as civil liberties groups have warned us already. The Patriot Act already provides for a person's home to be searched without that person being informed that a search was ever performed, or of any surveillance devices that were implanted. Similarly, TIPS is being launched as part of the so-called war against terrorism, like the Patriot Act was, as a Department of Justice project under Attorney General John Ashcroft.
The Justice Department all but told a federal judge this week to take his legitimate concerns about civil liberties and stuff them in the garbage pail. The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. It took this misguided position to a ludicrous extreme on Tuesday, insisting that the federal courts could not review its determinations.
This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism. The courts must firmly reject the White House's assertion of unchecked powers.
The administration's autocratic approach is unfolding in the case of Yasser Esam Hamdi. Mr. Hamdi, who was born in Baton Rouge, La., to Saudi parents, was captured by the Northern Alliance while fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Mr. Hamdi is being held in a Navy brig in Norfolk, Va., without having been charged with any crime and has been denied permission to see a lawyer. Judge Robert Doumar of the federal district court in Norfolk asked prosecutors to submit documents, including interview notes, so he could assess the claim that Mr. Hamdi is an enemy combatant. On Tuesday the Justice Department refused to hand over the documents, saying the courts had no jurisdiction in the matter.
The Bush administration has framed the dispute as being over the separation of powers and the right of the executive branch to oversee the waging of war. The courts have, in fact, given the political branches considerable leeway where wars are concerned. But declaring American citizens to be enemy combatants, and therefore not entitled to basic constitutional protections, is a clear matter of domestic civil liberties. The courts have an obligation to play an active role in reviewing these determinations.
In the case of Mr. Hamdi, the evidence submitted by prosecutors is thin. The government is relying on a two-page affidavit from a Defense Department adviser that simply gives a brief outline of Mr. Hamdi's alleged actions and declares him a combatant. Given the importance of the rights at stake, Judge Doumar was correct to ask prosecutors to hand over supporting materials so he can satisfy himself that the right decision was made.
“We, as Arabs, condemn what happened to the Jews and would stand with the Jewish people to prevent it from happening again. Yet we want to prevent it not only from happening to them, but from happening to anybody.”
—Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League, speaking at the United Nations conference on racism in Durban, South Africa, Sept. 2.
“The strike is painful, but it may push the American people to ask, ‘Why are the terrorists targeting us?’”
—Faisal Salman, in Al Safir, Sept. 13.
As children all over the world began a new school year this September, two pictures in The New York Times illustrated far better than words the current nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. One showed Israeli children riding to school in an armored truck escorted by Israeli soldiers. The other showed Palestinian girls dressed in school uniforms being confronted by an Israeli soldier holding a machine gun. In this picture the Israeli soldier was not protecting the children but stopping them from entering their school. It was one of 24 schools in Hebron closed by the Israeli army because they were close to Israeli settlements or army outposts and therefore regarded as security threats.
The two contrasting but equally sad situations reflect the fact that Israelis now live in constant fear of suicide bombings, while Palestinians are forced to endure the very conditions that breed violence—restrictions on their every movement, impoverishment, house demolitions, and almost nightly aerial bombardment. Even where children are allowed to attend school they face formidable obstacles, according to a Sept. 1 report by the Palestinian Ministry of Education. Like students at West Bank universities, either they are delayed for hours at army checkpoints or, where roads are blocked by trenches and cement barriers, they must climb over mountains of dirt and rocks to get to class. More than two thousand children injured by Israeli gunfire must grapple with crutches or wheelchairs as well. At least 95 schools have been severely damaged by shell fire. In many areas school principals often have to transport books and supplies on donkeys or horses. One of the most serious blows to the school system is Israel’s continued refusal to turn over the $65 million in tax revenues it owes to the Palestinian Authority, money that is needed to pay teachers.
Education Minister Abu El-Humos has called on the Israelis to end the rocketing and other heavy artillery fire that terrifies, injures, and kills children, and to restore Palestinian revenues, but Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says he has no intention of doing either. Sharon has made it unmistakeably clear that his object is to nullify the Oslo agreements and undo any gains made by the Palestinians since the accords were signed. In an interview with The New York Times on Sept. 7 Sharon outlined peace terms that call for the Palestinians’ unconditional surrender. “Oslo failed,” he said, and declared that once a truce is reached, the two sides will have to work out a whole new set of guidelines.
My beloved son Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians. My tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired son who was always smiling with the innocence of a child and the understanding of an adult. My son. If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for another opportunity.
My beloved son Arik was murdered by a Palestinian. Should the security forces have information of this murderer's whereabouts, and should it turn out that he was surrounded by innocent children and other Palestinian civilians, then - even if the security forces knew that the killer was planning another murderous attack and they now had the choice of curbing a terror attack that would kill innocent Israeli civilians, but at the cost of hitting innocent Palestinians, I would tell the security forces not to seek revenge.
I would rather have the finger that pushes the trigger or the button that drops the bomb tremble before it kills my son's murderer, than for innocent civilians to be killed. I would say to the security forces: do not kill the killer. Rather, bring him before an Israeli court. You are not the judiciary. Your only motivation should not be vengeance, but the prevention of any injury to innocent civilians.
Ethics are not black and white - they are all white. Ethics have to be free of vengefulness and rashness. Every act must be carefully weighed before a decision is made to see whether it meets strict ethical criteria. Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician.
It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a bomb that kills innocent Palestinians. It is blatantly unethical to wreak vengeance upon innocent bystanders.
It is, on the other hand, supremely ethical to prevent the death of any human being. But if such prevention causes the futile death of others, the ethical foundation for such prevention is lost. A nation that cannot draw the line is doomed eventually to apply unethical measures against its own people. The worst in my mind is not what has already happened but what I am sure one day will. And it will - because the political and military leadership does not even have the most basic integrity to say: "we are sorry". We lost sight of our ethics long before the suicide bombings. The breaking point was when we started to control another nation.
in Nevada?
Last June, Adam Jernee died from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a remorselessly fast-moving cancer of the blood. He was 8-years old and had fought the cancer for more than two years of his short life.
Adam and his father lived in Fallon, Nevada. This small ranching town of 8,000 people in the Carson Desert 50 miles east of Reno may have the highest per capita rate of childhood leukemia in the nation. The children of Fallon are more than 100 times more likely to be stricken with leukemia then children elsewhere in country.
Last week, another Fallon child was diagnosed with leukemia. That makes 17 kids from Fallon who have been contracted leukemia since 1997. Adam is the second child to have died within the past year. In September, Stephanie Sands succumbed to the cancer after battling it for two years. She was 21.
Cancer isn't the only problem. Kids and adults in Fallon and surrounding Churchill County are coming down with a myriad of other rare diseases, such as Myelodysplastic Syndrome and aplastic anemia. These diseases also relentlessly attack the bone marrow.
The kinds of cancers and other illnesses that have cropped up in the Fallon area are almost certainly caused by some kind of exposure to toxic chemicals. The source of that poison almost certainly sits a few miles outside the town of Fallon--somewhere on the 240,000-acre Fallon Naval Air Station, one of the Navy's largest bombing ranges, and home of the Top Gun fighter pilot training school.
But good luck to getting the Navy to take responsibility or even look very hard to find out what the problem might be. Years have passed and the Navy has done next to nothing, except deny culpability and try bully anyone who demands answers from naval brass. Apparently the Navy doesn't even care if the cancers are killing children of its own officers. The Navy has known about high levels of cancer among the children of Fallon workers and Navy officers since at least 1991; yet, the Pentagon has done little except try to conceal information on levels of pollution at the base and to stiff-arm investigators.
"Our frustration level is very high," says Brenda Gross, who 6-year old son has been sick with leukemia for two years. "This should have been found and stopped a long time ago. But you can't get anything out of the Navy."
Local residents think they know the answer: jet fuel spills and fuel dumping by Navy aircraft. JP-8 jet fuel, a combination of kerosene and benzene, is a known carcinogen and has been linked to leukemia and other bone marrow diseases.
The Navy has summarily ruled out jet fuel as a cause of the Fallon cancers, but records from the state of Nevada show that the Fallon air base has at least 26 toxic waste sites, 16 of them contaminated by jet fuel. Most of the Fallon area is playa, a dry lakebed over shallow groundwater. According to the Geological Survey, several distinct plumes of jet fuel have entered the water table beneath the air base.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Some members of the nation's largest lawyer group plan to use this week's annual meeting to criticize the Bush administration's handling of the terrorism investigation and business scandals.
They will not see President Bush, who skipped a chance to speak to the American Bar Association and is taking a vacation at his Texas ranch, or hear from Vice President Dick Cheney or any Cabinet member.
The White House and ABA leaders say the president's absence has to do with scheduling, not political differences, although Bush and the group have had rough relations.
The last time the 400,000-member ABA held its annual meeting in Washington was 1985, and President Reagan delivered the welcome speech.
"It looks lot like a snub. There's a bit of arrogance, 'we don't need you guys,'" said Stephen Hess, a political scientist with the Brookings Institution. "It borders on backing away from some opposition views."
White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the president "can't do everything and be everywhere."
The meetings cover subjects that have dominated the executive branch: how the government should handle enemy combatants and immigrants arrested in the Sept. 11 investigation and how investigators can monitor possible terrorists without violating the Constitution.
The ABA may recommend that Congress intervene and stop the administration from denying access to lawyers for immigrants arrested since Sept. 11 and for those declared enemy combatants by the president. Both issues have disturbed civil libertarians.
Britain has strongly advised the United States against attacking Iraq, warning that it risked intensifying the conflicts in Afghanistan, Israel and Kashmir, senior defence and diplomatic sources say.
In a sign of deepening discord between the two allies, British ministers and officials in Whitehall believe that a new war would "contaminate" the other crises."These are issues the Americans appear not to have considered," said one official.
They also have grave reservations about President George Bush's demand for a "regime change" in Baghdad because, London believes, no alternative regime has been identified for such a change to take place. Britain may be lumbered with leading a massive stabilisation force for "up to five years" in an anarchic post-war Iraq, with the prospect of the country being partitioned.
While Britain is certain that Saddam Hussein has acquired some form of chemical and biological weapons capacity since the United Nations weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, ministers have seen no evidence that he can use them in any meaningful way against the West.
America has countered the British worries by maintaining that each conflict in the region can be contained and that it is impractical to wait for every issue to be resolved before taking action against President Saddam, according to the officials.
But while the reservations of Britain, perceived as America's staunchest ally in its "war on terrorism", have prompted some soul-searching among the Pentagon hawks, they have struck a chord at the State Department, where Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, is known to be more cautious about attacking Iraq.
Britain's misgivings emerged yesterday as President Saddam appeared on television to speak out against an invasion. The Iraqi leader's rare public appearance in a grey suit rather than a military uniform, and at a desk spread with white lilies, was calculated to rally international opinion against an American-led assault.
President Saddam declared that any attack by the "forces of evil" Iraqi terminology for the US and Britain would result in them "carrying their coffins back to die in disgraceful failure".
The Saudi press has launched a vitriolic attack on what it describes as Christian fundamentalism in the United States.
One newspaper, al-Watan, said Christian fundamentalism was no less dangerous to international peace and security than other forms of religious extremism.
The newspapers were responding to reports of a Pentagon briefing during which Saudi Arabia was described as the kernel of evil in the Middle East.
Despite the official statements from Washington and Riyadh that relations between the two countries are as good as ever, the anger in the Saudi press reflects a growing unease in Saudi Arabia about the way the kingdom has been portrayed in the United States since the attacks in September last year.
The prime suspect, Osama Bin Laden, is a Saudi dissident, and so were most of the hijackers.
'Dust of hatred'
One newspaper, Watani, said the international media had concentrated only on Muslim fundamentalism, forgetting that Christian fundamentalism was just as dangerous.
The paper said the influence of Christian extremists in America had increased since the attacks on New York and the Pentagon last year.
The paper said Christian fundamentalism in the US was particularly dangerous because it was capable of influencing American foreign policy to further its own interests which, the paper added, were identical with Israeli interests in the Middle East.
Another newspaper, The Saudi Gazette, said Christian fundamentalists in the US were raising what it described as "dust of hatred" about Saudi Arabia, and it called on President Bush to rein in elements whose agenda was to initiate a clash of civilizations.
HOUSTON, Aug. 7 — Desperate to meet a year-end profit target, the Enron Corporation struck a sham energy deal with Merrill Lynch that let Enron book a $60 million profit in the final days of December 1999, according to former Enron executives involved in the transaction.
The executives said that the energy deal, a complex set of gas and power trades, was intended to inflate Enron's profits and drive up its stock price. Enron and Merrill Lynch, they said, agreed that the deal would be canceled after Enron booked the profits; it later was.
By allowing the company to meet its internal profit targets, the power deal unleashed the payment of millions of dollars in bonuses and restricted stock to high-ranking executives, including Kenneth L. Lay, then the chief executive, and Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron's president, former executives said.
"This was absolutely a sham transaction, and it was an 11th hour deal," said one former Enron executive who was briefed on the deal. "We did this deal to get 1999 earnings." This account was confirmed by five other former executives who either worked on the deal or were briefed on it. All the executives insisted on anonymity, concerned either about losing their current jobs or being drawn into the litigation over Enron's collapse.
Merrill Lynch officials said there was nothing improper about the power deal and no prearrangement to cancel it, and one former Enron executive involved in the deal agreed.
"The trades we conducted with Enron were legitimate transactions involving real risk," Merrill said in a statement today. "At no time did Merrill Lynch knowingly assist Enron in misstating revenues."
The Bush administration’s refusal to cooperate with even the most routine and basic congressional requests for information is infuriating members of Congress and violating congressional rights and responsibilities, members charge.
From Democratic liberals like Sen. Barbara Boxer (Calif.), who calls getting a response from the White House “a nightmare,” to Republican conservatives like Rep. Dan Burton (Ind.), who said he had to use “strong-arm tactics” to get what he needed, there has been a rising tide of congressional complaints in both the House and Senate.
Furthermore, the administration is exacerbating the frustration among lawmakers by failing to acknowledge requests for information — even as a courtesy.
A number of lawmakers are threatening to subpoena the administration — an extreme step reserved by lawmakers as a last resort to elicit cooperation on mundane inquiries.
While power struggles between the executive and legislative branches over information are not new, most of those struggles traditionally have been confined to four areas: national defense, law enforcement, foreign policy and the White House.
Since President Bush has been in office, the battle for information between Congress and the White House has spread to other areas such as environmental, educational and science issues, lawmakers say.
David Walker, the controller general of the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, confirmed to The Hill that the current administration has been slower to respond to congressional inquiries than previous administrations.
But by delaying the release of information that could provide ammunition to its critics, the Bush administration has sidestepped a number of draining political confrontations and kept the country focused on the president’s agenda.
For example, the Bush administration has treated some environmental issues with the same level of circumspection previous administrations have reserved for national security.
"We wish to control big business so as to secure among other things good wages for the wage-workers and reasonable prices for the consumers. Wherever in any business the prosperity of the businessman is obtained by lowering the wages of his workmen and charging an excessive price to the consumers we wish to interfere and stop such practices. We will not submit to that kind of prosperity any more than we will submit to prosperity obtained by swindling investors or getting unfair advantages over business rivals."
- Theodore Roosevelt, "We Stand at Armageddon", 1912
The Republican Party has been charging the Democratic Party with practicing class warfare for years, apparently because of policies that tend to favor understanding the plight of and wanting to help those Americans who are less fortunate than others. The understanding of financial diversities within the American public and striving to give a hand up to those in need should be considered an admirable goal by most Americans and not derided as a shortcoming of a political party. Evidence exists that points to a class warfare practiced by the alleged "compassionate conservatives" that is anything but compassionate. In fact, their social and financial policies might better be called repressive towards those less fortunate.
According to the Republicans, the economic and budgetary successes accomplished during the Clinton years should not be credited to his policies or ideals. Rather they claim that those successes were due in large part to the fiscal responsibility practiced by the Republican led Congress. But did they really practice fiscal responsibility?
The Associated Press recently released a study providing evidence that, while they may not have increased pork barrel spending, they certainly took actions that proved financially beneficial to the more affluent suburbs and GOP leaning farm areas.(1) This resulted in an average of $612 million more in federal spending last year in districts represented by Republicans than those represented by Democrats. That directly impacts services not only through more business loans and farm subsidies, but also through fewer public housing grants and food stamps. Spending on child care food programs was cut by eighty percent, public housing grants were all but eliminated, rental housing loans for rural areas and special benefits for coal miners were cut by two-thirds, and the food stamp program was cut by a third.
GOP leaders readily admit that the spending shift was aimed at ensuring that GOP areas received what they term "fairer treatment." Of course everything has a political motivation, but shouldn't the spending of our tax dollars be focused on real need rather than a transparent attempt to buy votes? Sure it should, but in reality nothing will change until the American public pays closer attention and demands that elected officials do what is best for the people. The AP study paints a devastating picture of political party economic priorities and conclusive evidence of the importance of which major party controls Congress.
While both major political parties benefit from campaign contributions from large corporations, the GOP is well known as the party that pushes for policies benefiting corporations over people. The Bush tax cut passed last year is well known for favoring the richest one percent of Americans and large corporations. Indications already exist that the "trickle down" theory is not working. Putting more money back into the hands of the wealthy and the large corporations was supposed to spur investment in industry and more jobs, but last week economic data showed that the expected 75,000 increase in jobs fell far short at just 6,000 jobs.
The death in 1953 of a government scientist, Frank Olson, in a fall from a New York hotel window, is one of the most notorious cases in CIA history.
Only in 1975 did Olson's family learn that the CIA had slipped LSD into his drink, days before his death. President Ford apologized for an experiment gone awry, and promised that the government would reveal everything about the case.
But newly obtained documents show that the Ford administration continued to conceal information about Olson -- particularly his role in some of the CIA's most controversial research of the Cold War, on anthrax and other biological weapons.
The documents show that two of the key officials involved in the decision to withhold that information were White House aides Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, today the nation's vice president and secretary of defense.
``These documents show the lengths to which the government was trying to cover up the truth,'' said the scientist's son, Eric Olson, who gave them to the Mercury News. ``For 22 years there was a coverup. And then, under the guise of revealing everything, there was a new coverup.''
Rumsfeld's office referred questions about the withholding of information to the CIA, where a media officer, Paul Nowack, said CIA activities related to Frank Olson's death were investigated by the Rockefeller Commission as well as subsequent congressional committees.
``The CIA fully cooperated'' in those investigations, he said, and ``tens of thousands of documents were released.'' If anyone has new information, he said, ``they should contact appropriate authorities.''
Eric Olson has contended for years that his father was murdered to cover up his research for the CIA. At a news conference in Maryland today, he will reveal the results of his long inquiry into his father's death.
The new documents do not prove those allegations. But they do show that the White House officials were concerned about any public revelation of Frank Olson's work.
Contrary to the official explanation that Frank Olson was an Army scientist, Olson worked for the CIA, at the special-operations division at Fort Detrick, the Maryland laboratory where biological weapons were tested.
Unlike his predeccessor, Theodore Roosevelt, President George W. Bush has not fought hard enough against corporate wrongdoing. The Republicans often claim the mantle of TR, but on this issue, Bush has failed to do little more than manipulate public opinion.
In the early years of the twentieth century, businesses in the United States were transformed into "big business" as a tidal wave of thousands of companies were merged into large trusts that sought to squelch competition. For instance, the nation's first billion dollar corporation, United States Steel, brought together by financier J.P. Morgan, was a conglomeration of 213 manufacturing companies, including 41 mines, and owned more than 1,000 miles of railroad track and 112 ore ships. As a result, U.S. Steel accounted for 60 percent of the nation's steelmaking output and 43 percent of its pig iron capacity.
In response to this threat, President Theodore Roosevelt responded by waging a very public battle with Corporate America, which had been used to more gentlemanly, behind-the-scenes negotiations between business and government. In 1901, he told Congress that "tremendous and highly complex industrial development" among businesses led to "very serious social problems." In his mind, "The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient."
Sensing the public's anxiety, Roosevelt used his political power to take down several of the most powerful trusts and push through government regulations, unprecedented at the time. In 1902, Roosevelt went after Northern Securities, a railroad trust controlled by Morgan, labeling the financier and those like him, "malefactors of great wealth."
Roosevelt's fight with big business expanded and redefined the power of the presidency, underscoring the government's right to regulate corporations through the establishment of federal agencies and direct intervention. By publicly taking on the responsibility for fighting trusts, Roosevelt also redefined how an activist president could make a difference.
A century later, the United States faces an even greater financial challenge--the loss of faith in big business--as a slew of corporations have either admitted to or are fighting charges of economic wrongdoing. Even worse, the ones left holding the bag have been small investors, who believed the misguided economic numbers delivered by duplicitous executives, and employees of these companies, who have been laid off numbering in the tens of thousands.
Rather than take up the mantle of Roosevelt, which the Republican Party has claimed over the last 100 years, President George W. Bush delivers speech after speech filled with weak jabs and vague proposals, geared more toward public opinion polls than real policymaking, even playing the September 11 card in his initial remarks, claiming, "People of this city are writing one of the greatest chapters in our nation's history, and all Americans are proud of New York." Later, he linked the war on terrorism with the fight for corporate responsibility.
Listing typical positives, including U.S. technology prowess and military power, Bush declared, "The American economy is the most creative and enterprising and productive system ever devised." He did not note, however, that in recent times the vaunted creativity of American capitalism has been used to dupe the system and the public.
Last September, when President Bush declared his war on terrorism, I said that you can't kill your way out of a terrorism problem. I cited the Israelis as an example.
Does anyone want to argue with that? Israel is still wracked with terrorism, despite having reoccupied virtually all of the West Bank and having killed Palestinians at a prodigious rate. Nor have we solved our terrorism problem, even though, for the time being, the terrorists are lying low.
I also said in October that American troops would be in Afghanistan long enough to realize that Afghanistan's summers are as blazing hot as its winters are cold. That was when everyone was celebrating the "short" war. Our troops are still there. Moreover, the Bush administration doesn't have the foggiest notion of how long they will have to stay.
We are in this mess because the Bush administration foreign policy is based on lies. It is based on lies in order to avoid the politically incorrect truth that our problem with terrorism is solely the result of our outrageously unjust policy of blind support of Israel. Neither Bush nor Congress wants to admit this, so they come up with absurd lies that terrorists are jealous of our freedom and wealth.
Really now, do you suppose that a multimillionaire (Osama bin Laden) who chose to live in caves is jealous of American wealth? That makes no sense at all. The Zogby organization, which has emerged as one of the country's most competent polling organizations, recently did extensive face-to-face interviews with a cross section of people in several Arab countries. What did Zogby find?
It found that people in the Arab countries do not hate America or Americans or American culture or democracy. They just hate our foreign policy. As Zogby put it, "It's the policy, stupid."
While I could write 10 columns on the injustices of that policy, one example will suffice: We have inflicted a terrible economic siege and periodic bombings on Iraq in the name of enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions. A former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, said on global television that 500,000 dead Iraqi children were "worth it to enforce the resolutions."
At the same time, the state of Israel stands in open, stick-it-where-the-sun-don't-shine defiance of more than 60 U.N. Security Council resolutions. It is able to do so because the United States refuses to allow any enforcement actions to be taken against Israel.
One expects a certain amount of corner-cutting on both procedures and concern for civil liberties during time of war. That's one of the main reasons some of us prefer to avoid war when at all possible, because we know that government power will grow and citizen liberty will suffer. War, as Randolph Bourne explained so persuasively during World War I (called the Great War at the time, which in retrospect seems tragically naive), war is the health of the State.
In addition, as Robert Higgs, now a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, demonstrated rather convincingly in his classic book, Crisis and Leviathan, increased power and authority taken by States during wartime is never given back in its entirety. Some of the wartime powers recede when the war is over, but at the end of a war the government is noticeably and permanently larger and the scope of citizen freedom is notably smaller than before the war – and soon enough this comes to seem normal. In a long war without visible end, as our esteemed leaders hasten to tell us the war on terror is, one can expect the process to be gradual rather than dramatic, but inexorable.
One of the episodes that illustrates how the process of increasing state power and reduced liberty is occurring during the current war is now being played out in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The decision to bring prisoners/detainees/captives from Afghanistan to the long-time U.S. Naval base there may have been done mainly for convenience, because the facility existed. A more disturbing hypothesis, bolstered by the way the Bush administration has chosen to defend its policies, is that it was chosen to at least some degree so the U.S. Constitution would not have to be a factor in administrative decisions. It might be that Guantanamo was used because it can be a law-free zone.
Thursday, August 08, 2002
Diplomatic china rattled in Washington and cracked in Riyadh yesterday when the Washington Post published a story about a briefing given to a Pentagon advisory group last month. The briefing declared Saudi Arabia an enemy of the United States and advocated that the United States invade the country, seize its oil fields, and confiscate its financial assets unless the Saudis stop supporting the anti-Western terror network.
The Page One story, by Thomas E. Ricks ("Briefing Depicted Saudis as Enemies: Ultimatum Urged To Pentagon Board," Aug. 6), described a 24-slide presentation given by Rand Corp. analyst Laurent Murawiec on July 10, 2002, to the Defense Policy Board, a committee of foreign policy wonks and former government officials that advises the Pentagon on defense issues. Murawiec's PowerPoint scenario, which is reproduced for the first time below, makes him sound like an aspiring Dr. Strangelove.
Just who the hell is Laurent Murawiec? The Post story and its follow-up, also by Ricks, do not explain. The Pentagon and the administration insist that the presentation does not reflect their views in any way. The Rand Corp. acknowledges its association with Murawiec, but likewise disavows any connection with the briefing. (Neither Murawiec nor Rand received money for the briefing, Rand says.) According to Newsday, Defense Policy Board Chairman Richard N. Perle, a former Pentagon official and full-time invade-Iraq hawk, invited Murawiec to brief the group, so Perle can't exactly distance himself from the presentation. But he can do the next best thing—duck reporters' questions. Murawiec also declined reporters' inquiries, including one from Slate.
The first half of Murawiec's presentation reads calmly enough, echoing Fareed Zakaria's Oct. 15, 2001, Newsweek essay about why the Arab world hates the United States. Its tribal, despotic regimes bottle up domestic dissent but indulge the exportation of political anger; intellectually, its people are trapped in the Middle Ages; its institutions lack the tools to deal with 21st-century problems; yadda yadda yadda.