This Can't Be Happening!

June 29, 2005

Bush's Biggest Lie

On first hearing, it was a toss-up which was the biggest lie in Bush's speech to the special forces troops at Ft. Bragg Tuesday evening: that we are winning the war in Iraq, that we are there to fight terrorism, or that we are "bringing liberty" to the people of Iraq.

Clearly the whole purpose of the address, which was televised nationally, was to try to staunch the hemorrhaging of public support for a war begun with lies that has so far cost almost 1800 American soldiers' lives, that has no end in sight, and that we clearly are losing.

The lie that the war was begun to combat terrorism is so ridiculous at this point it doesn't need discussion. Even the administration has conceded that Iraq had nothing to do with international terrorism prior to the invasion, and to the extent that there is an international terrorist focus on Iraq today it was created by the U.S. invasion and occupation of that country.

My choice for biggest lie is the "bringing liberty" claim.

All you really need to do to recognize the absurdity of this claim is to note that this week the U.S. announced plans to construct new prisons in Iraq for an anticipated 16,000 prisoners.

New prisons! 16,000 prisoners! This is our contribution to democracy? And note that these are American prisons we are talking about. American prisons in a supposedly "sovereign" Iraq!

They must have the American model of "democracy" in mind here. We are, after all, a country that keeps over 2 million people behind bars at any given time, many of whom are being held for years or even decades for non-violent offenses. We are also a country that, in all but a handful of states, bars anyone who has been in jail for a felony or class III misdemeanor from ever participating again in the election process--we permanently terminate their citizenship rights, that is.

The so-called democracy we are allegedly bringing to Iraq at the point of our guns, cannons, gunships and bombs (which have already killed upwards of 100,000 civilians and leveled entire cities), is currently little more than a bunch of Shi'ia and Kurdish officials elected last January by voters who were in many cases bribed or coerced into voting, who now meet in the Green Zone of Baghdad under the armed protection of the U.S. military. It is a "government" whose members daily have to pass through checkpoints manned by American troops who frisk them each day as if they were potential terrorists.

Some democracy. In the old days we called such puppet regimes colonies or, more recently, client states.

Bush also contradicted himself in his speech, saying that the war in Iraq was the main front in his so-called War on Terror. Trying, rather patheticaslly, to sound like Winston Churchill in the dark days of World War II, he claimed America had brought the war on terror to Iraq, and vowed "…we will fight them there, we will fight them across the world, and we will stay in the fight until the fight is won."

But Iraqis themselves are understandably asking just who invited the U.S. to bring 140,000 heavily-armed troops to their country to turn the place into a front in this war on terror.

The whole "Vietnamization" plan for developing an Iraqi army to take over the fighting and dying from American troops is a mockery of any democratic ideal. The army being trained by the U.S. is not described as something to protect and defend Iraq; it is being described as something that will "take over the fighting from the U.S. military." It is simply a way of cutting U.S. casualties and making Iraqis die for American interests.

And the president and his supporters call this bringing liberty to Iraq.

The biggest giveaway that this whole claim about bringing liberty to Iraq is a fraud is what Bush did not say. Though many people, even in his own party, have been urging it, at no point in his speech did the president declare that the U.S. had no interest in staying in Iraq permanently. In fact, of course, exactly the opposite is true: as Iraqis well know, the Pentagon is quietly constructing permanent bases and airfields in the country, with plans to the place a major U.S. imperial outpost.

Liberty is pretty easy to define. It means people running their own country and having all the freedoms we enumerate in our Bill of Rights.

The U.S. is bringing no such thing to Iraq.

That was the biggest lie, among many, in the Bush address.
=========================

June 28, 2005

What Was He Thinking?

With President Bush, it's a bit like those old Clairol ads. You find yourself asking, "Does he or doesn't he?" But instead of using hair coloring, your're wondering if he thinks before he opens his pretzel trap.

Iran's recent election is a case in point. Right on the eve of the first round of voting, when it looked like the most mainstream, secularist candidate, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani would win against several other much more conservative candidates, Bush jumped into the voting, calling the Iranian election a sham, and urging Iranians to vote for Rafsanjani.

At that point, a very predictable thing happened in a country that has suffered mightily over the years thanks to a CIA-backed coup that overthrew its elected democratic government and installed the hated Shah Reza Pahlevi--people who had not intended to vote came out enmasse, and handed a victory to the most anti-American candidate on the ballot, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the pro-cleric mayor of Tehran.

Of course there were many reasons for people to vote for Ahmadinejad, who among other things promised both a better economy than the reformist current president Mohammed Khatami had delivered, and a restoration of Iran's greatness. But certainly no small number of Iranian voters were brought out and encouraged to vote for Ahmadinejad by anger at Bush for his interference in their election and for his slight of their country.

On its face, this was a truly stoopid move by Bush. But I wonder. Was he being stupid like a fox?

We know the president wants another war. The one in Iraq is going badly, and he'd clearly like another one to divert attention from the mess he created there. Iran would be just fine for that purpose--especially if he confined his attacks against Iran to just aerial bombardment..

And what better way to get a war going against Iran than to get the most anti-American candidate possible elected to the country's presidency?

I hope I'm wrong, but this administration is so craven, and it is in such political hot water in Iraq, that I'm quite ready to believe this was all stage managed--if not by Bush himself, then by his coterie of neocon advisers.
===========================

June 27, 2005

Virtual Citizens, Virtual Government

There was a remarkable article in the New York Times on June 27. It had a remarkable headline too: "Some in G.O.P. Call on Bush to Focus on Governing."

The piece went on to quote Republicans, both named (Newt Gingrich) and unnamed, as saying that the Bush administration has been in a "permanent campaign" mode, aimed at energizing right-wingers, instead of governing and trying to pass legislation--which of course requires working out compromises in Congress.

This is really quite an admission.

Isn't "governing" what people elect a president to do? Especially with a war on?

After all, during the campaign, candidates spend most of their time telling voters how they would govern, and what they would do to run the country if elected. Bush certainly did that.

Now it turns out that even his own backers in Congress don't think he has been doing much governing; that rather, he is just running a permanent campaign aimed at attacking critics and winning the hearts of his "base."

Of course we knew this. The war in Iraq is not governing; it has been a gigantic, unprecedentedly costly campaign stunt from the get go. The Social Security wrecking campaign is not governing; it's a campaign theme. Ditto "No Child Left Behind," which has been all talk and rules, and no money or program.

What we have in the Bush White House is in fact virtual government--all image and showmanship, but no action.

That's not to say nothing is going on. What Bush and his gang are doing is systematically bankrupting and looting the country and handing the ripped off proceeds to corporations and the wealth in a way David Stockman could only dream of.

Of course, the White House has been able to get away with this deadly charade in part thanks to the fact that the Democratic Party has been pretty much a virtual opposition. Its leading lights for the most part agree with much of the Republican agenda--free trade, endless war in Iraq, US imperial power in general, throwing money at the Pentagon, cutting taxes for corporations, etc., etc.

What it all boils down to, I guess, is that we are living in a virtual democracy. In the end, the blame has to lie with America's virtual citizens, who are content to get their news and information from a virtual newsmedia, and who are content--that minority who still bother to cast votes--to accept and act on the shallow and manipulative campaign tactics and feel-good lies of the two major parties' candidates.
==========================

June 25, 2005

Supreme Court Liberals Endorse Government Theft

The liberal/centrist faction of the US Supreme Court, headed by Justice John Paul Stevens, and including Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Anthony Kennedy, has given liberalism in a bad name with the court’s latest 5-4 ruling approving of the theft of homes and stores in New London by city leaders anxious to give their land over to a developer who promises to build a toney riverfront complex.

Cities have long had the power of eminent domain to tear down allegedly "blighted" neighborhoods, evicting the residents, in order to replace them with trendier propertie--a process euphemistically called urban renewal. The process is inherently controversial and prone to corruption, as Justice Clarence Thomas noted in a dissent to the current court ruling, and is often little more than "minority removal." It has frequently left whole downtowns looking like bombed out areas. But at least up to now, a finding of blight or compelling public need, such as a highway route or a subway, had to be demonstrated before someone’s property could be snatched away from them at condemnation prices.

No more.

In their ruling (which could have been penned by Donald Trump), the Stevens majority decided that simply asserting the goal of economic development would provide adequate grounds for a government to legally drive people out of their homes.

As Justice Stevens wrote in his majority opinion in the case, "Promoting economic development is a traditional and long accepted function of government," adding, "Clearly, there is no basis for exempting economic development from our traditionally broad understanding of public purpose."

That shameless bit of legal sophistry glosses over a huge chasm, however.

It's one thing to say that promoting economic development has long been an accepted function of government. Indeed, many would argue that it is one of the primary functions of government at any level. But how government goes about that is another question.

Converting the downtown of Philadelphia to greenhouses for growing opium poppies would produce far more revenue and "economic development" than the Center City office towers filled with lawyers and bankers currently produce, but I doubt that most Philadelphians would support such a plan. Likewise, tearing down 20-30 of the pretentious mansions in Philadelphia's Main Line to put in a few big casinos would also produce more tax revenue for the city, but I don't see that happening either.

Yet Stevens moves right from this commonplace statement about the role of government to saying there is "no basis" for disputing that a simple assertion that a project will lead to "economic development" should empower government to rip the heart out of any functioning community it wants.

This is really just another way of saying if the majority of people in a community--or a well-connected developer--want to run roughshod over one part of that community, they have only to declare that they can find a way to make more money out of those people's property by evicting them, tearing down their homes, and building something else.

If this isn’t tyranny, I don't know what is. If this isn't an open invitation for powerful economic interests to buy their way into virtually any neighborhood they want, flatten it, and construct huge shopping malls, hotels and casinos, I don't know what is.

I happen to know the Ft. Trumble neighborhood in New London that is about to be razed, having grown up not too many miles away, and having studied at Connecticut College in New London.Far from being a blighted locale, it is rather a long-standing working-class community of houses and stores, some of them second-generation businesses.

What is about to happen to them, thanks to the Supreme Court's majority, is legalized grand larceny.

I don't often find myself hailing the views of Clarence Thomas or Sandra Day O'Connor, but both were on the right side on this case, along with Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

As O'Connor wrote, "Who among us can say she already makes the most productive or attractive use of her property?" She added, "The specter of condemnation hangs over all property." O'Connor warned, "The government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more."

If this is what a liberal court does, maybe we need another conservative justice on the court.
=========================

June 24, 2005

If Congress Has It's Way, This Site Could Be Cause for Arrest--Yours and Mine

Warren Apel, a civil libertarian, has produced a website, The Burning Flag Page, which does an excellent job of explaining the threat to liberty that is posed by the Congressional move to ban flag-burning. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

As he notes, the proper way to dispose of old, worn-out US flags, including those little things handed out as party favors or displayed from car windows, is burning--something Boy Scout troops often do as a public service. In other words, burning the flag itself is not a crime. It's what the person who burns one is "thinking" at the time of the act. So what Congress is attempting to do with the Flag Amendment, is to make thinking certain things a crime, punishable by prison.

If you'd like to see what this means, just go to www.esquilax.com/flag/ where a sequence of clicks will allow you to virtually burn a virtual US flag. Be careful what you think as you perform those steps. If the bill now in Congress passes and is signed into law, thinking the wrong thing could land you--and me--in jail.

My own perspective on this is the result of my having lived for over a year in the People's Republic of China, a country where flags are nearly as ubiquitous as they are in the U.S., and where desecration of the flag is a severly punishable offense. Living in China, I never thought I'd see the day that my own country would sink to this level of jingoism and thought control.

As the child of two WW II veterans and the grandson of a Silver Star recipient from WW I, I understand the pain that burning the flag in protest might cause to some who put their lives on the line defending America, or to their relatives. But the answer is not to adopt the totalitarian tactics of a nation like China; it is to honor the high-minded thoughts of the founders of this nation, who made it clear in the First Amendment of the Constitution that Congress would take no action limiting freedom of speech.

===========================

June 22, 2005

Who Needs Big Bird?

The latest battle over funding for the Public Broadcasting Corporation really should be a defining moment for liberals and leftists--especially those with a little spare change in their wallets or pocketbooks.

Anyone who is genuinely on the left should have no problem watching right-wingers in Congress slash or even eliminate the tax subsidy for PBS and NPR. Both outfits long ago ceased to be alternative media resources. If anything, they have been contributing to the right's agenda by offering up such pabulum in the guise of liberal culture and news.

The truth is, we'd be better of if they both either went under or became just another pair of right-wing mouthpieces. That might force people who are sick of being lied to to go out and find real sources of progressive news and culture.

Jim Lehrer and Juan Williams might have to go and find real jobs.

Of course, there's always the possibility--remote, I grant--that if PBS and NPR were yanked off the government teat, and forced to go to their viewers and listeners for all their operating budget needs, they might actually listen to what their dwindling audience base has been saying: that they have lost their way and need to be edgier in their cultural programming--maybe bringing back indie documentaries and maybe covering the news from something other than a white male, pro-corporate perspective. Maybe NPR would stop acting like a long-winded version of the commercial news stations.

Nah. It's a pipedream. Any outfit that can take dirty money to burnish the reputation of the likes of an Archer-Daniels Midland or a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is not going to become a beacon of progressivism.

Let them go to sink or swim in their own swamp of mediocrity and compromised integrity.

Just ignore the panicked appeals of MoveOn and other breathless liberal groups. The kids'll get by just fine without Big Bird and Telly Monster teaching them how to have 30-second attention spans along with their ABCs.

Your money would be much better spent buying your kids books at your local independent bookstore, going to live concerts or buying yourself a subscription to Counterpunch or In These Times (or even a This Can’t Be Happening! T-shirt).
============================

June 20, 2005

Dems Trot Out the Old Relics Again for Next White House Run

Here we go again.

It's still three years before the next presidential campaign, and already we’re seeing the same old Democratic Party relics dragged out of their offices, spiffed up with new hairdos, and paraded before the media as Great White Hopes.

The latest such fossil to be put on display is Sen. Joe Biden, a man whose last foray into presidential politics in 1988 fizzled out when he had to admit that his speeches were plagiarized. But tha''s not Biden’s worst fault--only his most pathetic. This is a guy who, as a senator from Delaware, has for decades dutifully done the bidding of the du Pont chemical company, a virtual feudal overlord of the state of Delaware and one of the great poisoners of the nation's air, water, and labor relations.

He has also, in the Senate, dutifully protected Delaware's position as a kind of domestic Cayman Islands, a place corporations can hide their corporate headquarters, using handy mail drop boxes in the Wilmington post office in place of real offices, so as to duck shareholder suits, hide profits from other states’ tax authorities, and make investigation of their activities by regulators and journalists the more difficult.

Biden, in his role as senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has also been a loyal defender of American imperial overreach, dutifully voting for the trumped up invasion of Iraq, and for the Patriot Act and other measures introduced by the Bush administration in the name of its phony War on Terror.

Just imagine Biden and Senate colleague Hillary Clinton, another Democratic Leadership Council relic being improbably touted as something fresh and new, vying in the primaries with each other for the party's presidential nomination by arguing which of them would take a tougher line in Iraq, or offer the most far-reaching free trade agreement with Latin America or Asia.

It's a dismal picture, and bodes well for continued Republican dominance in Washington.

The one bright spot I see is the outspokenness of Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold, who has on more than one occasion let slip that he might be interested in a run for the White House. Feingold, who just won re-election handily in 2004 after being the only member of the U.S. Senate to oppose the North American Free Trade Act AND the Patriot Act and the War in Iraq, stands out in a sorry party and a sorry legislative branch as a genuine progressive politician and principled oppositionist, and at the same time demonstrates that someone with those positions on the key issues of the day can win against the forces of reaction and empire.

While Feingold has not announced plans to run for the White House in 2008, his office is widely publicizing his forceful denunciations of current efforts to renew the Patriot Act and to make it even more threatening to civil liberties than ever--denunciations that stand in stark contrast to the weak positions on war and civil liberties of such presidential wannabes as Biden and Clinton--and that clearly indicate an intent to raise his national name recognition.

We're still a long way from presidential primary season, but with the likes of Biden and Clinton already in the game, and with even John Kerry purportedly contemplating another run, one can only hope that someone like Feingold will decide to go for it too.

Otherwise the prospects for 2008 are too grim to think about.

June 17, 2005
Time to Schaivo the Brain-Dead US Media

I've heard some lame excuses, but what we're hearing from American editors as to why they took a month to start letting Americans know about the Downing Street memoranda is beyond pathetic.

These are the memos that are all over the British media, documenting the lying and duplicity of Bush crew in secretly planning to go to war against Iraq as early as the fall of 2001 or spring of 2002, while pretending to be seeking a peaceful solution. USA Today's senior foreign assignment editor, Jim Cox, was quoted in an article in his own paper saying he didn't run the memos because he "couldn’t get a verifiable copy" of the initial memo, written by Richard Dearlove, the head of British intelligence and presented to Tony Blair.

Couldn’t get a copy? Puhleez! It was published by Rupert Murdoch's Times of London! One of USA Today's British correspondents could have walked into the Times' offices and photocopied that paper’s copy—or the one at the BBC. What a joke! Whoever leaked it to the British media would have been dying to leak it to a major US outfit.

When I used to work in daily newspapers, I had city editors who would have skewered me or any reporter on a spike for trying to make such a limp excuse for not obtaining an important document in a story.

Many editors blame AP, as if the only way they can do a story these days is if they can pull it off the wire! And AP's editor simply says his organization "dropped the ball" in not running stories on the memoranda (there is more than one surfacing now in the British media, all pointing to the clear fact that the Bush administration was going to war behind the public's back and manufacturing the evidence to convince us of the need to invade). If a pro ball player dropped this important a ball, he'd be sent back to the farm team.

Some editors were just dishonest. The Philadelphia Inquirer, a once proud investigative reporting venue that has become an entertainment rag afraid of its own shadow, actually ignored a decent early report on the Downing Street memo and its import written by the bureau chief of Knight-Ridder’s Washington bureau (the paper wasn’t alone among K-R chain papers in ducking the story). The N.Y. Times has yet to make the information in the memos a page-one piece in their own right, preferring grudging inside thumb-suckers.

From my vantage point, I'd say the tradition of investigative reporting, perhaqps even reporting in the broadest sense, in the American corporate media can now be called dead, killed by a bunch of careerist cowards in editorial positions who are afraid challenging government authority is bad for business and for promotion prospects. As with poor Terri Schiavo, the most charitable thing viewers and readers can do at this point is to pull the plug and stop trying to learn anything of use from these dinosaurs.

It's time for people to turn to the alternative media and the Internet for their information. All the corporate media is good for now is movie listings and comics (newspapers) and lame sitcoms (TV) best watched as a form of anesthetic.
=============================

June 15, 2000

Bush and Conservatives on Retirement: Work 'Til You Die

While President Bush is still hustling his private investment account assault on Social Security, other conservative politicians, headed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), are attacking the retirement system and American workers from another direction.

I remember back in my 20s, staying in the home of a family where the father worked for General Electric, up in western Massachusetts. He had been at his job as a production worker for some 35 years, and by then was about 60. A powerful guy with bulging forearms who loved farming, he had problems with his weight, his legs and his blood pressure, all of which conditions were clearly at least in part a result of the type of job he had at the GE plant, which required a lot of intermittent heavy lifting, but also a lot of sitting around.

He had already had one minor heart attack and also suffered from joint ailments and a back condition, and was always saying that even if he made it through to retirement, he would probably be too sick to enjoy it.

Sadly, this is the lot of many American workers.

It's true that the life expectancy of Americans has been rising, and that many people--especially those who take care of their health through exercise, adequate sleep, timely medical care and good diet--can expect to live not just into their 80s but even into their 90s and on to 100. It's also true that some of those people can expect to lead active, productive lives right up until the day they die. But the statistics on aging are deceptive. Life-expectancy figures are grossly misleading, for example, because they rise not just when people live longer, but when fewer children or infants die--which is the part of the life cycle where the biggest health gains have been made.

Besides, millions of Americans don't have the money or time to join a health club and tens of millions don't have the health insurance to needed to obtain quality medical care. And while people are indeed living longer in America, they aren't necessarily staying healthy. Many of those who live long enough to collect a retirement check will by that time be crippled by strokes, heart conditions, joint ailments, cancers, etc.--often the result of working conditions they’ve been forced to put up with for years by their employers.

For these workers to have to wait past 65 to start collecting their retirement checks is a travesty and a betrayal, particularly when the've already been paying into a system that was promising them an earlier release from their indenture.

There is, let's face it, no logic or virtue in an economic system which, having produced the richest society in the history of the human race, now tells us we have to work harder and longer, instead of having more time to relax and enjoy our lives, or to do something creative and life-affirming.

Just recently I was with a group of people and the conversation turned to France. When one guy mentioned how proud the French are of their culture, another immediately blurted out, "Yeah--they’re so proud of their 35-hour week. They have a doomed economy."

Just what is so bad about a 35-hour week? Or a 4-day week? People used to say the same thing about reformers who were demanding a 40-hour, 5-day week, too, a century ago. And what's so bad about early retirement? If productivity is rising, as the economists insist it is always doing, which means each worker is producing more goods and services, then shouldn't the workweek be shortening, and the retirement age be moving forward, not back?

Besides, if parents retire earlier, that means more jobs for their kids, which should be a good thing.

As usual, the dominant conservative power structure has it backwards. It is wrong to be making Americans spend more hours per week and more years of their lives chained to the job. No one's saying that a person who wants to work should be forced out of a job, but we should be making it possible for people to retire earlier, not later--especially those who have the backbreaking or body-poisoning jobs that are threatening their chance to have a retirement at all.
=====================

June 10, 2005

How Can You Tell a Bolivian Indian from an Ordinary American?

What is the difference between an Indian in Bolivia, and a middle-class wage-earner in America?

Answer: The Bolivian Indian knows where her or his interests lie, recognizes that the leading political parties are thieves and agents of international and domestic corporate interests out to rob them, and joins with thousands of like-minded comrades to take to the streets and drive the crooks and charlatans from power, using everything from sticks to sticks of dynamite. The American, in contrast, is easily snookered by politicians who use "wedge issues" like abortion, gay marriage, defense against "terror," or posting of the 10 Commandments on public buildings to get her or him to vote against her or his own real interests.

Result: Bolivia has just seen a corrupt president driven from power and his would be successors deterred (so far) from replacing him, and is on the edge of a possible revolutionary transformation, all over the issue of whether the country's sizeable natural gas reserves should be opened to plunder by international oil companies. The U.S. meanwhile, has recently opened fragile artic wilderness (and native lands) to drilling, and continues to despoil other ecologically fragile areas, particularly in coastal waters, is about to approve yet another "free trade" pact that will massively shift jobs out of the country, and is robbing workers of pension benefits while simultaneously planning the gutting of the public Social Security system--all with scarcely an organized protest from the public. Congress even passed a repeal of the estate tax, which only fell on people with assets of over $1.6 million ($3.2 for a family)! And the public cheers.

What explains this huge difference in political awareness and political action in the face of clear threats by the rich and powerful to the welfare of the majority?

I would suggest that it is the collapse of community in the U.S.

In Bolivia, as in many developing countries, the ordinary people, whether Aymara, mestizo or whatever, often without even access to televisions, have a strong sense of community. They meet routinely and naturally in social settings—street markets, plazas, churches, and at festivals—where their common experiences and concerns are discussed.

Americans are increasingly atomized and connected to each other only through the mediation of mass electronic entertainment vehicles, which convey the official version of reality. We travel to and from our places of work in isolated automobiles, from inside which we view other vehicles and their drivers primarily as obstacles and rivals whose only significance to us is that they interfere with our ability to get to our destination. At work, we operate in neofeudal settings that discourage open discourse and that punish free speech, and that have attacked and largely destroyed any sense of collective action by virtually legislating trade unions out of existence.

Meanwhile in our communities, most of us live in single-home isolation, with green barriers or even high fences separating us from our neighbors, attending churches that, while providing some limited sense of community, at the same time increasingly act more to divide us--one church from the other (or from non-churchgoers)—than they do to unite us. In those few settings were we might be in close contact with others—at the supermarket or the gym—we plug earphones in our ears and tune in the radio or our ipods so we don’t need to relate to others except for commercial transactions.

Little wonder that we are all strangers in our own neighborhoods, and that we are all fighting--and mostly losing--our individual struggles for survival while Bolivia's Aymara are marching enmasse to defend their rights.
=========================

June 8, 2005

US Media Shamed by Brit Journalist at Blair/Bush Press Conference

At this point, it seems almost pointless to say it, but once again, the corporate media in America have been exposed as a cowardly mass of toadies who cannot bring themselves to publish or air anything remotely critical of the administration unless compelled to do so by cattle prods...or a reporter from a foreign news organization.

The current example of this pathetic behavior is the page one treatment finally accorded--after a fashion--to the damning memorandum delivered to British PM Tony Blair back in the summer of 2002 by his chief of intelligence, informing him of a meeting with U.S. officials, where he learned that the US planned to invade Iraq, and that the reasons for doing so, and the intelligence would be "fixed" to justify the action.

Although this devastating memo surfaced in the UK over a month ago, and has been the lead story in Britain for some time, where it has thoroughly destroyed whatever credibility the prime minister still had, it has been largely buried in the U.S. media if it was mentioned at all, and in every case it has been presented not as evidence of President Bush's criminal behavior in lying to the American public to create a war, but as a problem for Blair.

Now, thanks to Blair's visit to Bush, and to the presence of less deferential British journalists at a joint White House press conference--instead of the usual White House press corps stenographers and TV airheads--Bush was forced to address the question of the memorandum, and the American media were forced to mention it. (The New York Times did so on page 7, the Philadelphia Inquirer, for the first time, on page 1). The question was asked by a Reuters reporter, Steve Holland.

Even so, the subsequent articles were cast, embarrassingly, as reaction pieces, with headlines like the one in the NY Times ("Bush and Blair Deny `Fixed' Iraq Reports"). In the case of papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer, this embarrassment was compounded. Inquirer readers might have been pardoned for being perplexed at reading a page one story headlined "`02 memo on Iraq is rebutted." It reads like a classic second-day follow-up story, but how would a reader know what the "`02 memo" reference meant, since there was no first story about the memo.

Bush himself chose not to respond directly to Holland's question, which was whether the `02 memorandum presented to Blair was "an accurate reflection of what happened" at the White House. Instead, Bush said that the memo was "not credible "because of how it had surfaced--in the middle of Blair's re-election campaign.

This was a ludicrous position to take, since it implies the memo itself is of dubious origin. In fact, both Blair and the memo's author have long since vouched for its authenticity and accuracy, so the issue is not its credibility as a document, but whether what it reported was an accurate account of what actually happened at meetings between White House officials and British intelligence in 2002.

Blair--no doubt trying to save his own ass back home where such a lame answer would be fodder for more bad press--came quickly to Bush's defense, saying, "No, the facts were not being fixed, in any shape or form at all." It was an assertion that anyone who has been following events for the past two years knows to be totally bogus and desperate, and which is being laughed down in Britain, but apparently it was good enough for the tame media here.
NY Times, which claims it is trying to improve its shoddy reporting standards, didn't bother to go to a Democratic or anti-war source for a comment on the Blair and Bush responses to the Holland question.

It is hardly an edifying moment for the American media.

Caught red-handed trying to deep-six an important story about White House lying and about a secret campaign to get the U.S. into a war with Iraq, the corporate U.S. media have finally had to at least report to the public about a memorandum that exposes this crime. The strategy now will be to help the White House deny everything, with the Big Lie. (Those who would like to see how much of the U.S. media covered this story can go to: Afterdowningstreet.org)

I guess that's got to be judged a step forward.
==============================

June 5, 2005

No (US) Port in a Storm (If You're French)

Talk about fair-weather friends!
===================

When nine French fighter jets and a weather plane from a French carrier taking part in a joint exercise with Canadian Naval forces in the Atlantic off New Jersey ran perilously low on fuel last Friday because of a freak storm that prevented them from returning to their ship, they figured, no problem, they'd land at McGuire AF Base in southern New Jersey.

No dice, the Francophobe U.S. military told them. According to Noel Clay, a State Department spokesmanquoted in the Philadelphia Inquirer, they were denied landing rights at the facility. Faced with the choice of ditching their planes or finding an alternative landing site, the French pilots managed to get landing permission (reportedly with the help of the more Francophile State Department) at the commercial airfield in Atlantic City, though this necessitated delaying and rerouting several commercial flights because of the number of planes that were coming in at once. (Maybe Secretary of State Condi Rice was worried she'd have trouble buying her French designer clothing if she didn't step in.)

No national American media mentioned this stunning--and potentially life-threatening--breach of basic air etiquite by the U.S. military. Even the Inquirer, which did report on the incident, failed to go to the Pentagon and ask the obvious question: Why were ten planes from a European ally denied emergency landing rights at a fully equipped and ready U.S. Airforce base when they were in danger of crashing from lack of fuel?

It boggles the mind to think that this could have been Pentagon pique at France for having refused to go along with the Bush Iraq War plan, but one is hard-pressed to come up with an alternative explanation. Even Soviet planes, at the height of the Cold War, weren't turned away in emergencies. And this was an ally.

At least the people of Atlantic City were gracious hosts to the plucky French pilots. One wonders what the American reaction would be if a French military airport turned away American pilots in similar circumstances...

Ironically, the US and France just reached an agreement that will allow the Space Shuttle to make an emergency landing if necessary at a French military airbase near Marseille.
===================

June 3, 2005

We Need More Anonymous Sources, Not Fewer

The voluntary outing of Mark Felt as the "Deep Throat" of Watergate fame puts into relief the current White House's cynical attack on journalists' use of anonymous sources. Without Felt, the Washington Post's investigation of the Nixon White House would have died away, Nixon would likely have finished his second term, and we probably would never have learned about COINTELPRO.

The Felt story also should shame the corporate media, which has been caving in to this White House pressure, with the announcement of new stricter rules and promises to limit the use of such sources in the future at many news organizations.

As an investigative reporter who has made frequent use of anonymous sources throughout my career, let me put it bluntly--if Americans want a press that functions even minimally as a watchdog on corruption and abuse of power, they'd better get comfortable with anonymous sources. Toss them over the side and the news will be little more than official press releases (about what it has become, as a matter of fact).

Nixon lovers, like Pat Buchanan, the late dark lord's former speechwriter, are blasting Felt, saying if he the erstwhile number two man at the FBI had evidence of illegal behavior by the White House he should have reported it to the Justice Department or to his boss, not to a reporter.

Excuse me, but is Buchanan expecting us to seriously believe that Attorney General John Mitchell, or FBI Director Patrick Gray, both later convicted of being feloniously involved in the cover-up of Nixon's crimes, would have done anything with such information besides sacking Felt and burying his story? Well, that and destroying his reputation?

That, after all, is what the Nixon administration MO was. Remember the Nixon "Enemies List"? If someone was seen as a threat, like Daniel Ellsberg for example, he went on the list. Then you broke into his psychiatrist's office and looked for damaging evidence to leak to the public. Or you sent some of that secret army of dirty tricksters--an army that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein say one source tallied at 50, but which a source I know--an anonymous source who was one of them--says numbered in the hundreds--and you messed them up somehow.

We see the same thing happening today, of course. This administration is at least as vicious as the Nixon White House was at destroying its enemies. Just look at the Valerie Plame outing case.

If anything, the cowardly corporate media, which can't even bring itself to report openly on the damning memorandum to British PM Tony Blair detailing in 2002 how the Bush administration planned to "fix" the evidence about terror links and WMDs to create a pretext for an invasion of Iraq, needs to round up more anonymous sources to report honestly about this most devious and corrupt of governments.

"The New York Times can't say the president is lying," Elizabeth Bumiller famously said at a public forum on covering the campaign. I'm sure that journalists and editors at the other major news outlets, print and electronic, would say the same thing if they were honest. How far we have come from the early 1970s, when a young Dan Rather could imply just such a thing at a presidential press conference.

The reason the public has such a low opinion of the media today is not that the media use anonymous sources. It's because the media don't tell the truth. The reading and viewing public are savvy enough about advertising and marketing to recognize that most of what they're getting in the "news hole" is just more of the same--official handouts from corporations and government officials, carefully packaged reports aimed at supporting advertisers, and entertainment filler.

If the media gave them red meat, in the form of hard-hitting investigative reports that looked at what government is really doing, how the war in Iraq is really going and how we got there in the first place, what is really happening to the environment, and how we are all being gouged by a tax system that gives away the store to the rich and corporations, you can bet they'd have a higher opinion of them, even if many of those stories relied on unnamed sources.

I'm not saying reporters should take shortcuts and not even try to get sources to go on the record, but let's face it--you cannot expect people with knowledge about wrongdoing to put their jobs and lives in jeopardy just to get a story out. If you want to know about those things--many of which can be life-and-death matters of public interest --you've got to accept that the information will be provided by an anonymous source.

The Bush White House knows this, and that's why it is coming down so hard on stories that use such sources.

They want to nip any chance of a return to Watergate-era journalism in the bud.

=================================

June 1, 2005

Memorial Day Week: One to Remember

The news this past week has been especially hard to believe.

First we learned, courtesy of Edmunds, the car magazine, that the Bush administration has decided to equip the occupation forces in Iraq with Chrysler minivans, in place of GM's Humvee gas hogs. This is a low blow to General Motors, which only days earlier saw its bonds reduced to junk status by the ratings agencies largely because of the company's moronically short-sighted decision to focus on gas-guzzling SUVs…like the Hummer.

It's more than a little ironic that Bush--a guy who has spent his oil-stained career mocking those who call for federal laws to mandate better gas mileage from Detroit automakers--would make a major purchase decision (we're talking about a 25,000- vehicle order here) based upon fuel economy. It's also worth noting that these Pentagon-bound Chrysler minivans will all be made in Canada, while the Humvee is made in the good old USA.

I'm not sure what the opinion of the troops is on this one. There have been complaints all along that the Humvees were inadequately armored to protect against RPGs, AK-47s and IEDs, but if the government-ordered minivans are anything like my own Chrysler minivan, which is a piece of tin that gets dented by the slightest kicked-up pebble, we can expect the American casualty rate to soar when these babies start rolling along Iraqi roads. (Judging from my own experience with Chrysler products, I hope the Pentagon also buys the extended warranty on these babies; my trans went after just 30,000 miles.)

Then we have the new crackdown in Baghdad--you know, the one that the Iraqi government announced four days ahead of the launch date. What was that all about? Clearly the Iraqi military and police wanted to make sure everyone who might be shooting at them got well out of the way beforehand. Even so, the U.S. military managed to botch the job by immediately going out and arresting, not insurgents, but a leading Sunni imam. And not just any imam, but a man who heads of one of the political parties the U.S. has supposedly been trying to coax into participating in the puppet government of Iraq. This is the kind of tactical brilliance that has turned what was supposed to be a quick war of liberation into a bitter quagmire. You almost have to think US Ambassador John Negroponte is channeling the incredibly inept L. Paul Bremer.

This was followed by news that many if not most of the prisoners at Guantanamo, far from being captured in battle, were in fact sold to US forces by Afghan warlords and other nefarious traffickers. If there were doubts about the guilt of these alleged "terror suspects" before, it should now be totally clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the U.S. has committed a huge mistake in incarcerating these people. U.S. officials, true to form, have been quick to deny that they paid for the captives, but already, these denials have been undermined by testimony from people involved in the deals, who are reporting that millions of dollars were shipped over to Afghanistan in the weeks after 9-11 to pay to those willing to turn over suspects.

The problem with this strategy, obviously, is that in a land composed of rival tribes and warring factions, there is no way to verify whether someone who is handed over to you for $25,000 in cash is a genuine Al Qaeda or Taliban member, or just some unlucky goatherd or loser at cards. America’s heroes--the camouflage-clad goons at Bagram Airbase and other grisly detention centers--apparently found that the solution to this dilemma was to beat the crap out of the suspects until they either died or admitted they were evildoers, at which point they were shipped to Guantanamo. (Back in the days of the Salem witch trials, they had a similarly reliable approach: tie a suspected witch to a board and put her underwater. If she lived, she was a witch. If she died, she was innocent.)

Now George Bush and his major domo at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, are scoffing at the claims by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch that Guantanamo is nothing but an American Gulag, but this new news about the buying of captives makes the parallel all the more likely.

Meanwhile, we had the dismal spectacle of George Bush the Lesser himself, speaking at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, saying that the sacrifices of American troops--over 1750 of whom he has sent to an early grave so far in Iraq--must be honored by America "staying the course."

I guess by that he means having American troops on endlessly extended tours of duty drive around an increasingly hostile and explosive Iraq in gold-colored (!) Chrysler minivans, while Sunnis and Shiites in what's left of a bombed-out and economically raped and ravaged Iraq take pot shots and them and battle each other for years to come.

You think it can’t get more outrageous, and then the DiscoveryTimes Channel weighs in Monday with a documentary on the pilgrimage to Mecca titled The Hajj: Journey of a Lifetime. The sponsor? A toilet bowl cleaner.

All that was missing was a companion ad for toilet paper featuring quotations from the Quran.

Does somebody script this stuff?

===============================

May 27, 2005

Whigged Out: The Democrats Have Become a Vestigial Opposition Party

This focus by Democrats in Congress on judicial appointments and on the appointment of John Bolton as U.N. ambassador is just a pathetic sideshow. In the end all that sound and fury signifies nothing.

The Democratic leadership struts around boasting that it "saved" the filibuster and the right to challenge a likely reactionary appointment to the Supreme Court. That same leadership works mightily to delay the almost certain appointment of Bolton to the UN post. But where were these noble guardians of Democratic values when the White House and its Republican backers in Congress pushed the new bankruptcy bill, which makes it harder for people overcome by debt after losing a job or being hit by a family medical disaster to start over?

Where were they when the oil lobbyists and their White House cronies came in with a plan to open up the ANWR area on the North Slop of Alaska to oil exploration?

Where were they when the latest $83 billion Iraq occupation supplemental funding bill came up for a vote, and with the long-dreaded national “Real ID” bill attached?

All these reactionary measures passed with wide margins, meaning they received broad Democratic support in both houses of Congress.

Increasingly, what we have in Congress is a vestigial opposition party. It’s sort of like the appendix attached to our intestines: most of the time, we don’t even know it’s there--just when it gets inflamed--and in fact, we're better off without it.

Outside of Congress there is a majority of the American public that now realizes that the Iraq war is a disaster and that wants the troops home NOW.

Outside of Congress, there is a majority of Americans who believe that healthcare should be a right, and that national healthcare for all is a great idea.

Outside Congress, there is a campaign underway to help Marines and GIs who were tricked into fighting an illegal war to get out of the services that betrayed them and now force them to kill or be killed.

Outside Congress, there are local campaigns to help immigrants caught up in the government's cruel net and forced into exile for a traffic stop, leaving behind American-born children or spouses.

Outside of Congress a huge swath of the country--Red and Blue states included--has voted for ordinances or resolutions that make their jurisdictions "PATRIOT Act -free zones" and that even instruct state and local law enforcement authorities not to cooperate with federal requests for information which they believe to be out of line with the Bill of Rights.

You would''t know any of this to watch what passes for an opposition in Congress these days.

Apparently it's politically safe to stand up and say you don’t like John Bolton or Priscilla Owen, but not to stand up and say that the banks and credit card agencies are rapacious usurers--modern loan sharks--that a national ID is big step towards totalitarianism, or that funding for a criminal war is in itself a criminal act--or even that it's time to bring the troops home.

We're seeing compromise where there should be none--on the filibuster issue, on the PATRIOT Act, and no doubt on Social Security "reform."

But there is such bold intransigence on John Bolton.

If this is the best we can get from the Democrats we elect and send to Congress, it's time to turn to a third party and let the Democratic Party go the way of the Whigs...or of a burst appendix.

==============================

May 24, 2005

The Evil Curse of Bipartisanship

When a wolf and a fox agree on a modus vivendi, the rabbits and woodchucks had better be on their guard.

The same is true about the March 23 agreement reached by 14 "moderate" Democratic and Republican Senators which undermined the looming confrontation between Senate Democrats and Republicans over the issue of judicial appointments and the filibuster.

Anytime you have someone like Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), a cheerleader for the War on Iraq, a stalwart backer of the worst Zionist excesses of the Israeli state, and a man who even endorsed former Attorney General John Ashcroft's horrific Operation TIPS citizen spy scheme, lining up with Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a guy who headed up the House impeachment campaign against President Bill Clinton, a staunch conservative in moderate clothing (like his over-rated colleague John McCain) who opposes abortion rights and boasts a 5% rating from the League of Conservation Voters, progressives need to worry.

And what's with this fear of political polarization anyhow? It's really nothing but a media creation.

Newspaper editors and pundits love to talk about the need for "bi-partisanship" and cooperation as though such comity were an unambiguous public good. Yet it is precisely such bipartisanship that brought us the war in Iraq, the Patriot Act, the North American Free Trade Act, welfare cutbacks, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the new anti-bankruptcy law, and which threaten to bring us a mortally weakened Social Security "reform," and who knows? Maybe a war on Iran or Syria.

And for once, the Democrats had a good, militant plan--a shut down of the Senate. Ordinary Americans, and especially progressives, should have been fine with that: A shut-down Senate would mean a Senate that couldn't pass Bush's troglodyte social agenda, couldn't pass more tax handouts to corporations and the rich, couldn't pass a Central American Free Trade bill, couldn't pass rapine environmental bills. No wonder the Republicans were upset.

Sure, if the Democrats took a hard-line confrontational approach to the dominant Republicans in House and Senate they'd eventually lose on a lot of things, including the appointment of judges with right-wing agendas. But by standing for principle, Democrats would be paving the way for serious election campaigns on important issues in 2006 and 2008. They'd be rallying the electorate to fight back against the Republican-led campaign to drag the country backwards to the 19th century in economic, environmental and social policy.

But instead of going with militancy and sticking it to the conservatives, people like Lieberman and Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE) are paving the way for further electoral defeats for Democrats in the coming election cycles.

By lining up with Republicans on compromises that end up selling out principle (the filibuster agreement will result in the approval, with Democratic acquiescence, of several truly dreadful new appellate judges), Democrats confuse and demoralize their potential electoral base.

By demonstrating that Democrats are no better than Republicans--indeed no different from Republicans--they turn elections into nothing but issueless personal popularity contests, in which most citizens have little or no interest. In fact, their bipartisanship may actually be helping Republicans, because at least those so-called "moderate" Republicans like Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) or Olympia Snowe (R-ME) or John McCain (R-AZ) are showing the spine to buck their President and party leadership in reaching agreement with so-called moderate Democrats.

All the so-called moderate Democrats are showing is political cowardice and lack of principle.

The idea that this kind of Democratic sell-out would be happening when the president is being viewed by a majority of the public as inept, untrustworthy, stupid and politically out of touch, is both astonishing and depressing.

As one Republican operative told the New York Times, the only reason the opposition isn't having a field day these days in Congress is because "the Democratic Party is brain dead."

Bipartisanship: a morphine drip for the terminally politically doomed.
=======================

May 20, 2005

The Black Helicopters and the GOP

It's always been an article of faith on the "loony" right that the black helicopters of the Jewish-United Nations fascist government would arrive to take over America and turn it into a hellish police state through the machinations of the liberal Democrats. Who would have thought that it would be the conservative Republicans who would be waving the landing lights to direct the troop planes to the gate?

But there it is.

In four short years, following the 9/11 attacks, we have moved a long way down a very dark and dead-end alley.

Couple that with the Bush/Cheney-sanctioned policies of rendition, where people are kidnapped by government agents and whisked away on unmarked planes to other nations like Syria and Egypt where torture and extra-judicial killings are routine, and torture (see Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, etc.), and you have the very real threat of American citizens like all of us being disappeared, just they way they did it for years (under American instruction and direction) in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Argentina and Chile.

In communities across this land where believers in Islam dwell--both immigrants and native-born citizens--there is these days a permanent state of terror, as FBI, ATF, Secret Service and other nefarious federal agents slink around grabbing people from their homes, interrogating others, hauling off computers and files, leveling trumped-up charges, and threatening people into becoming unwilling informants on their neighbors--all, with no sense of irony, in the name of fighting "terror."

Thousands of decent, hard-working immigrants have been snatched from their families (many of whom are American citizens, and often young children) and shipped off to home countries to face arrest and torture and, in some documented cases, death, with no access to hearings. We never learn about most of them. The government doesn't have to tell us they've been taken. Even their own families are often left in the dark.

Citizens who try to exercise their First Amendment right to protest the actions of this president and vice president are herded into fenced in "free-speech zone" holding pens, or arrested and jailed, often after first being beaten or maced, on orders of the Secret Service. Others have been blacklisted and barred from events because they had the temerity to wear an anti-Bush T-shirt or to paste an anti-war bumper sticker on their car.

Now the Republican leadership in Congress has quietly pushed through a law establishing a national identity card which Wired magazine says will be enable the government to set up a computerized data bank on every citizen, telling authorities where we've been, where we are, who we've meet, what we buy, what our political affiliations are, what web sites we visit and a whole lot of other stuff.

And they're pushing ahead, at urging from the White House, with a new and improved Patriot Act that continues to define terror as anything that interferes with the business of the state (including a simple act of protest), and that in the name of fighting that loosely defined evil, will essentially eliminate the Fourth Amendment protection against illegal search and seizure, giving the administration the power to spy and obtain records on virtually anyone without even going to a judge for a "probable cause" warrant.

Not content with that, the right is also stuffing the courts with judges who don't give a damn about any of those old rights and freedoms--who think state power is just dandy.

That's what this fight over the filibuster is all about--getting rid of judges who take the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution with its hoary concerns about separation of powers seriously--and of course paving the way for "Justice" Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas to assume the post of Chief Justice. Sadly, while they are leading the parade, the Republicans are not alone in this march to fascism and a 21st-Century police-state tyranny. They've been doing it with the willing connivance of a number of conservative Democrats, including the likes of Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Diane Feinstein (this is hardly a complete list). And the way was paved, of course, by anti-Democratic police-state measures introduced earlier by the Clinton administration. They've also had the help of a somnolent corporate media and a blissfully ignorant public caught up in "American Idol" and the Jackson trial or whatever the latest entertainment diversion might be.

I used to think that right-wing warnings about jackbooted agents of the federal government landing in black Cobra gunships and storming our homes in dead of night were the fevered ravings of lunatics, but no more.

With this push to stack the courts, create a computerized national ID card, equate protest with support for terrorism, and make citizenship a revocable privilege, comes official government promotion of an intolerant, medieval Christian fundamentalism which provides the whole thing with an ideological gloss that makes any outrage not just permissible, but "God’s will."

Still, it's surprising to see the right turning off the lights of liberty, after all those years of warnings about liberal Democrats and the dreaded "nanny" state.

===================

May 19, 2005

Feingold, Only Senator to Oppose PATRIOT Act in '01, Condemns Intelligence Committee Scheme

Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI), the only senator with the guts and sense of democratic principle to vote against the USA PATRIOT Act when it was first put to Congress six weeks after 9-11, has blasted the attempt by the White House, with the connivance of Sen. Pat Roberts, (R-KS) to introduce an even worse version of the bill in secret in the Senate Intelligence Committee Roberts chairs.

While the pusillanimous Democratic members of the Intelligence Committee cower in silence about the attempt to end run Senate Judiciary Committee hearings on renewal of the PATRIOT Act, their colleague Feingold says, "The Senate should not begin its consideration of the PATRIOT Act with a secret review, of a secret bill, concerning a law that often operates in secret."

He adds, "Any bill to reauthorize, fix, or expand the PATRIOT Act, which has caused such controversy around the country almost from the day it was enacted in 2001, should be debated in the light of day, not behind closed doors. The Senate must respect the principle of open government, so deeply rooted in my own state of Wisconsin, because this bill directly implicates the civil liberties of all Americans."

While Feingold deserves the praise of all civil libertarians right and left for his bold statement, it is a sad commentary on the state of American democracy that his is almost a lone voice. Certainly there is not even a pale echo from the seven Democratic poobahs on the Intelligence Committee.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again here: Feingold for President in '08!
=======================

May 17, 2005
FLASH! Senate Intelligence Commitee tries end-run around Judiciary Committee in Maneuver to Pass Even Worse PATRIOT Act

In a stunning slap at the democratic legislative process, the Senate Intelligence Committee, headed by Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kansas), has suddenly and quietly scheduled a closed-door session for this Thursday to mark up its version of a renewed USA PATRIOT ACT, the frankenstein legacy of former Attorney General John Ashcroft and his then assistant Michael Chertoff (now secretary of Homeland Security).

The controversial act, many provisions of which seriously undermine basic Constitutional rights and protections, was just being examined in hearings by the Senate Judiciary Committee headed by Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), where it came under heavy criticism from both right and left. Both the Intelligence and Judiciary committees have jurisdiction over the act, but the Judiciary committee, with its open hearings, was widely seen as having primacy.

Critics of some of the act's provisions, such as the notorious library records provision, which allows federal agents, or local law enforcement authorities working for them, to inspect the patron or customer records of libraries, video stores and bookstores, without a warrant and without notification, or the sneak-and-peek provision, which lets federal agents spy and surveil on people without later notifying them, carry a "sunset provision," which means if they are not renewed this year, they would expire.

The administration has been arguing for renewal or for making the provisions permanent, but a coalition of conservative and liberal groups calling itself Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, has expressed hopes of convincing a majority of the Judiciary Committees of both House and Senate to modify those and several other rights-threatening measures in the PATRIOT Act before sending the renewal legislation to the full Congress in June.

This surprise move by the Intelligence Committee, which is packed with senators from both parties who have not been particularly friendly to civil libertarians, appears to be an end run by supporters of the White House.

Says Lisa Graves, intelligence lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union, "This is an effort by the administration to get everything they want. It is an outrage." Graves says the move suggests that the administration and its congressional backers fear that they could lose in the Judiciary Committee, and are hoping to present the bill they want as a fait accompli and then call anyone who tries to weaken it "soft on terror."

"This is a radical bill," Graves says of the Intelligence Committee work-in-progress. She says her sources tell her that besides making the controversial sunset provisions of the PATRIOT Act permanent, the Intelligence Committee version of the revised act would greatly expand one of its most dangerous provisions, the administrative subpoena. "It would allow administrative subpoenas for virtually anything held by a third party, such as bank or phone or medical records, with only the merest unsubstantiated hint of a foreign connection." Equally troubling, she says, the Intelligence Committee version of the bill would strip out a current bar on using warrantless administrative subpoenas in cases that involved primarily protected First Amendment activities, such as legitimate political protest.

"I guess now we'll have to see whether the people on the Judiciary Committee will have the political courage to stand up to this," says Graves.

While the Intelligence Committee's plan for a closed-door mark-up of the bill is a clear affront to democracy and to the Bill of Rights, it is in keeping with the history of the PATRIOT Act, which was drawn up--reportedly at the direction of Chertoff, who was then in charge of terrorism issues at the Justice Department--in the weeks after the 9-11 attacks, and then passed by Congress with no committee hearings and virtually no discussion. Although no member of Congress even had time to read the mammoth 362-page bill, it passed in the Senate with only one dissenting vote--cast by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin)--and then passed in the House by a lopsided 357-66 margin.

Given this broad cross-party popular opposition to the Act, it will be interesting to see how the full House and Senate vote on whatever PATRIOT Act renewal bill is ultimately presented out to them.

Unlike the Intelligence Committee session this Thursday, their votes will be in public.

Anyone concerned about this end run around the clear desires of the American public concerning the Patriot Act and its threat to our civil liberties should call all members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to demand an end to the hearing, or failing that, to demand that it be open to the press and public.
=============

May 17, 2005

Isikoff and Rather: Different Strokes for Different Folks

The latest journalistic scandal, this one at Newsweek, says much more about the hypocrisy and double standards of the White House, the right-wing punditry and the establishment media than it does about a faded weekly holding of the Washington Post Company and a reporter who made his name stalking Bill Clinton girlfriends.

First of all, consider the similarities between Isikoff's story and the story CBS’s "60 Minutes" ran last fall about Bush’s questionable National Guard service. In both cases, a piece of evidence was called into question--in the Newsweek case a claim by an unnamed source, in the CBS case a document. But in both cases, the central allegations were still probably correct. In the case of Bush's Guard non-service, a secretary to the man who is alleged to have written the disputed memo says she remembers typing essentially that same thing, even if the memo itself was retyped by someone later, and that she also remembers her boss making the claims in it about Bush's having gone AWOL. In the current story, the source is only saying that he is not certain the statement about a Koran being flushed in a toilet appears in a Pentagon report on Guantanamo, not that the incident, or others like it, didn't happen.

In fact, lost in the current media uproar (just as Bush's non-service in the Guard was lost in the uproar about CBS's story), is the fact that there are multiple sources, including released Guantanamo inmates and, most recently, a Guantanamo interogator, who confirm that volumes of the Koran have been treated with deliberate disrespect by Guantanamo guards. (An interrogator has told the New York Times piles of Korans were dumped on the floor in a heap in front of prisoners.)

The Bush administration and right-wing pundits are making a big deal out of Newsweek and reporter Michael Isikoff's use of an unnamed source in this story--a grand irony given how the White House itself makes use of unnamed sources on a routine basis to get its stories out (and how it makes reliance on unnamed sources necessary by its uniquely secretive denial of journalistic access to places like Guantanamo and by its record of punishment of those in government or the military who do talk out of turn to the press) . The problem with Isikoff's story is not so much that he relied on an unnamed source as that his source backtracked on his initial claim.

The really outrageous thing though, is how the White House and Pentagon are acting as if the Newsweek story has been the cause of the anti-American rioting in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other Muslim countries. This is just silly. The article may have been a trigger, or a rallying cry, but the cause of that rioting is the long-simmering and mounting rage across the Middle East and South Asia at a callous disregard for the people of those countries by U.S. forces, as witness the massive destruction and indiscriminate killing of locals along with enemy fighters during the latest U.S. assault in eastern Iraq and the repeated "accidental" bombings of civilians in Afghanistan by U.S. forces. The cause of the rioting is also the documented record of religious abuse of Muslim prisoners, which has included the smearing of fake menstrual blood on inmate victims, the wrapping of inmates in Israeli flags, etc., and the attacks on and destruction of mosques, etc.

Indeed, I suspect one reason the U.S. government has been so slow to release the hundreds of captives held at Guantanamo who were clearly picked up in error or because of false charges leveled by people trying to get back at them for one grievance or another, is that the government knows those hundreds of people will return to their homes with gruesome tales of abuse--religious and otherwise--that will fuel a global explosion of anti-U.S. political action and calls for violent retaliation.

If the White House wanted to improve its standing in the Muslim world, it would have long ago had President Bush take a public hard line in denouncing such outrageous behavior by American troops and prison guards. No such denouncement has been made by our Christian president, who apparently has not been told during his conversations with God that this might be a good idea. No effort has been made to go up the chain of command to punish those responsible for that behavior, either.

Finally, I note how different has been the treatment accorded to Isikoff and to CBS reporter Dan Rather, both of whom had similar problems with their sources. Isikoff, a darling of the right because of his role in exposing the Clinton-Lewinsky liaison, is being portrayed more as a victim than a villain, even by the White House (which of course owes its initial election "win" in no small part to Isikoff's investigative journalism work, anonymous sources and all), while Rather, long a target of right-wing rage, was hounded out of his job.

While we're on hypocrisy, check out Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, which today, as its headline over a story blasting Newsweek, used the headline "Holy Shiite!" One has to presume that this equation of the Shi’ia religion with turds will do America no more good in the Muslim world than did Newsweek’s report on the Guantanamo trashing of the Koran.
======================

May 13, 2005

Googling for Fun Can Produce Depressing Results

Just for fun, try googling some of the most important stories of the day. The results present a sorry picture of timid or outright biased media in the U.S.

On May 12, I googled "MI6 and memo" and found loads of articles about the memo that had surfaced two weeks earlier (reported on in Counterpunch by Ray McGovern on May 5) proving that President Bush & Co. had planned to invade Iraq back in July 2002 and intended to "fix" the "intelligence and facts" to fit the policy. My search revealed articles all over the British press, the Sydney Morning Herald had it in Australia--even China Daily, the heavily censored party organ of the Chinese Communist Party, had I! Not the corporate U.S. media, though, where this explosive story was hard to find. Even the N.Y. Times, which ran a reference to it, did so tucked into a piece on the British election headlined "For Blair, Iraq Issue Just Won’t Go Away." For the country's newspaper of record, it appears, the only interesting thing is how this memo from Britain's spy chief raises question about Blair's credibility. The fact that it proves Bush orchestrated a war was not worth mentioning.

Googling "John Conyers and Iraq" shows that even the dramatic news that Rep. John Conyers and 87 other House members have written a letter to the White House demanding answers from Bush about the British memo have failed to make it into the mainstream American media. That search turns up lots of stories, but they're all in the alternative media. Imagine if this had been a story about 88 members of Congress demanding that Clinton answer questions about Whitewater. Would the media have blacked it out?

I also googled "real wages fall" and found a number of foreign articles, including a big one in the British Financial Times, detailing how U.S. wages in constant dollars have fallen by about 1 percent in 2005, and that since the fourth quarter of 2004, have fallen at the fastest rate in 15 years. Those statistics come from the US. Labor Department, but they've nonetheless gone largely unreported in the mainstream media here, which instead reported the meaningless news that employment rose marginally in the past month (unmentioned in most of those mindless recitations of government PR is the reality that despite several years of "recovery," there are still 22,000 fewer jobs in the U.S. than there were back in 2001 before the last recession began.

The alternative media in the U.S.--both print and internet-based--have played a critical role in forcing what amounts to our "government-run" media--CNN, Fox, NY Times, Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, etc.--to report honestly. By May 12, the LA Times was belatedly reporting the British memo scandal, and no doubt eventually the news about falling wages will slip more generally into mainstream discussion, but it remains true that the news media on which most Americans rely for their information are ducking the important stories and, when they do cover them, are tucking them into inner pages.

The public knows it is being deceived. Newspaper readership and TV news viewership are falling precipitously, to the dismay of publishers and media executives.

A few days ago, in an effort to revive its sullied reputation, the New York Times ran an announcement telling readers the steps it was taking to improve its credibility. Among those steps was going to more religious figures as sources! The Times and the rest of the establishment media would do better just reporting straight on what is really going on for a change. A simple question like, "What's happening to real wages?" asked at a Labor Department briefing on the latest job figures, or a question about the MI6 memo at a presidential press briefing, or a question by an imbedded reporter about how the military knows that the 100 slain "insurgents" were really all combatants, would go do much more for the restoration of public confidence in the media than the opinions of a bunch of priests and ministers. (It is nothing short of pathetic that many important stories, from election fraud to torture scandals and social security fear-mongering by the administration, are being covered in the Times by editorial writers and columnists, not by the paper’s reporters.)

But the Times is hardly alone in its cowardice and mendacity. I recently called an editor of a mid-sized suburban newspaper to find out why a story critical of President Bush had been killed at the last minute. This editor confirmed that the executive editor, a Bush backer, had killed it for political reasons but that the editor could not say this on the record. It's a sorry commentary on the profession that this kind of hidden political interference is allowed to pass by people who should be willing to put their principles on the line even at the risk of losing a paycheck.
=====================

May 9, 2005

Economists on China: Silence of the Scams

Economists, particularly economists right and center, love to sound off about the alleged wonders of the market.

There is one area, however, where they are remarkably silent, and that is China.

If free markets are the sine qua non of success, and the heavy hand of government is fatally stifling of progress and development, how to explain the astonishing decades of seemingly endless 8 and 9 percent annual growth rates that China has experienced over the last two decades?

Sure, you could say China is experimenting with capitalism, but anyone who has been to China, or invested in China (I spent six years living in China and Hong Kong and reported extensively on its business, politics and economy for Business Week and other publications) knows that most of the big decisions about what gets invested and where are made by politicians--and by that I mean Communist Party authoritarians--in Beijing and the provinces.

The allocation of capital by the state banking system is done almost exclusively on the basis of personal connections or br>

It's not oil sheiks or even oil executives (though they're certainly raking in the dough!); it's Bush economic policy, stupid.
=================
<

April 6, 2005
Bush's Road Trip: Potemkin Town Meetings and a Potemkin Opposition

President Bush claims he's holding "conversations" all around the country on his plans to "reform" or "save" Social Security. These purported dialogues with the public take place at gatherings which the president likes to characterize as "town meetings."

Now as a native of Connecticut, a New England state that prides itself for its town meeting form of local government, and as a reporter who got his start covering such exercises in real people's government, I have to say that I know town meetings and Mr. Bush, those events you're hosting are not town meetings.

Real town meetings, a form of direct democracy developed by the colonists in New England in reaction to the old European model of representative or appointive government that featured mayors and counselors, tend to be pretty freewheeling and rambunctious affairs, where any citizen can attend, speak out on an issue from the floor, and vote on the issue at hand.

As I wrote in an article in Counterpunch two months ago, when I tried to go to one of those Bush "town meetings" that was staged at a community college a couple miles from my house, I found myself turned away by Republican Party goons barring the entrance--something that would never happen at a real town meeting. It turned out that, as with all the president's "public" meetings on this issue, you have to have a ticket to get in, and those tickets are being handed out only by Republican members of Congress.

No wonder the crowds seem so friendly on TV!

What I'm really surprised at, though, is how passive the Democrats in Congresss have been about this road show charade.

The Huckster-in-Chief, after all, is traveling the country not as a candidate for office, but as the President of the United States. He's making this tour at taxpayer expense, and he's holding his meetings in public buildings--in my case at an auditorium belonging to the Montgomery County Community College. But he's only talking to Republicans. Even people with tickets are being turned away if it appears they may have contrarian ideas, like several people who arrived at one such event in Colorado with tickets, but with a bumper sticker on their car saying "No Blood for Oil." The president's GOP security goons apparently aren't just blocking the doors; they're spying in the parking lot, too.

Why aren't Democratic senators and representatives screaming bloody murder at this scam?

I asked my local representative, the recently elected Democratic Rep. Alyson Schwartz, when she led a teach-in on Social Security at Temple University (a teach-in at which she, astonishingly, accepted the bogus 2041 date being touted by Bush as the day Social Security will go bust).

"Shouldn't you Congressional Democrats be screaming about not being offered tickets to distribute at these presidential events?" I asked her.

"Well I guess maybe we should be," she agreed.

That was over a week ago.

I still haven't heard a word of complaint about it from either Rep. Schwartz or from other members of the so-called opposition in Congress.

Why are these people, who are supposed to be the opposition, so quiet? If Congresswoman Schwartz, for example, had stood outside the auditorium at Montco Community College decrying the inability of her Democratic constituents to get into the building and "dialogue" with the president, maybe the somnolent TV reporters who didn't even notice or remark on the packing of the hall would have actually reported on the president's deceit.

Instead, we got reports that evening about how supportive the public seems to be of the president, and how worried people at the event seemed to be about the viability of the Social Security system.

President Bush is a hypocrite of the first order in calling for democracy in the Islamic world and the states of the former Soviet Union while he creates a Potemkin democracy for himself to operate in. But the Democrats who assist him in this stage management effort by remaining silent as they and their constituents are shut out of the debate are perhaps even worse.

They have become a Potemkin opposition.

=============================

April 5, 2005
Grassroots Resistance Movement Against USA PATRIOT Act Grows

According to records maintained by an organization called the Bill of Rights Defense Committee , as of April of this year, 372 towns, cities and counties, and five of the 50 states, have passed laws in one way or another declaring themselves to be "Patriot Act free zones."

These states and communities, which collectively include 57 million people, or nearly a quarter of the U.S. population, are as diverse politically as they could possibly be. The states, for example, include Alaska, Montana and Maine, all staunchly or moderately conservative and Republican, and Vermont and Hawaii, both liberal and Democratic. Communities which have passed such ordinances are similarly diverse, ranging from ultra-liberal San Francisco and Cambridge to ultra-conservative Dallas and Savannah.

Most of the laws and ordinances that have been passed are quite similar, and instruct local and state law enforcement authorities not to cooperate with federal agents and orders which they consider to be unconstitutional--for example warrantless searches of library borrowing records, or the turning over of undocumented aliens to the INS--a remarkable affront and challenge to federal authority. Some, like Alaska's resolution, go further and instruct the state's congressional delegation to work actively to repeal those sections of the PATRIOT Act which are deemed threats to liberty and the Bill of Rights.

The message is clear. Despite all the efforts by the Bush Administration and its Congressional cheerleaders and PATRIOT Act supporters like Republican Representative Tom Delay and Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman to scare Americans into surrendering their liberties in the name of the so-called War on Terror, the broad public is not convinced, and is more concerned about government threats to liberty than about some terrorist armed with mythical weapons of mass destruction.

The Bill of Rights Defense Committee, as well as organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Friends Committee on National Legislation, have done a good job of spreading the word about resistance to the USA PATRIOT Act. The BRDC in particular has helped by making a model ordinance or resolution available and by offering organizing tips and instructions , based upon experience, for those who wish to have their communities added to this movement of resistance.

Opponents of the PATRIOT Act should also be contacting their congressional representatives, as the issue is now before Congress, to demand an end to the law. The Act (drawn up with no hearings, reportedly by Chertoff, who at the time was Ashcroft's right hand man in charge of terrorist prosecutions), and passed in October, 2001, almost without opposition and no discussion by both houses of congress, came with a time limit, which expires this year. If it is not renewed, its provisions will automatically expire. But the administration is pushing hard for renewal of the measure, and even has plans to come back with measures which would go even further in chipping away traditional civil liberties and legal protections.

The grassroots campaign to oppose the USA PATRIOT Act is a remarkable effort, particularly given the way it has been virtually ignored by the mainstream corporate media. Its primary focus on local organizing, rather than directly on Congress, is also a model for political struggle in an era when there is no effective opposition party in Washington, as is its ability to unite people of diverse and antagonistic political perspectives.

=================================

March 31, 2005
News Media in Anguish Over Schiavo Death

Fifteen years of lingering torment have finally ended for Terri Schiavo.

Pity the news industry.

There will be a period of decompression now as the necrophiliac media struggles to drag this story out as long as they can with stories on the autopsy, interviews with politicians still trying (like the ghoulish Rick Santorum who raced to her bedside trying to get on TV while there was still time) to ride Schiavo's bedsheets to public renown, and of course "investigations" into the continuing family strife over funeral arrangements. But eventually this story, like Schiavo herself, will pass.

Then the big dilemma confronting the American media will be: How do we fill up this massive news hole?

They can't focus on the war in Iraq because that would mean reporting on death and mayhem and advertisers, who are happy to be sandwiched between shots of a drooling patient and praying fanatics, don't like having their ads and commercials placed in that kind of grim setting. Dying white women and ranting Christians are one thing; dying Arabs and fanatic Muslim protesters are another.

They can't focus on the Social Security story because doing an honest job of it, besides being a MEGO thing, would put them on a collision course with the president. After all, it's getting pretty hard to avoid pointing out that the president's privatization scheme has nothing at all to do with the alleged Social Security funding crisis, except to make it worse, or to avoid noting that those crowds of enthusiastic supporters on his marketing tour are pre-vetted (you have to get a ticket from the local Republican Senate or House member), and bussed in.

Lord knows they can't report about the budget deficit or the shaky dollar.

Fortunately, there's always Michael Jackson, whose pedophilia trial at least has the potential to become a new OJ-like event, even if there is no Johnny Cochrane any more to liven things up. I'm just waiting for a reenactment of the famous glove scene, only this time around featuring what the Brits call a sheath. "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," Jackson's attorney could tell the jury, as Michael tries to put it on for the court.

But absent such a dramatic moment, how much Michael Jackson can viewers take?

No, something has to come along quick to help news executives out here.

Another war would be just the thing, with all those great free Pentagon visuals of aircraft takeoffs and landings, and those lovely nighttime bomb burst displays. Unfortunately there's no military left to spare for an attack on Syria or North Korea or Cuba, and no targets left in Iraq.

Nature was kind enough to deliver another massive Indonesian earthquake, but people are tired of that story. Seen one, you've seen 'em all, and besides, there was no tsunami.

I guess they'll just have to hope for another celebrity murder or a terrorist attack. I can't see anything else that will keep viewers on the tube until prime time.

===============================

Marth 28, 2005
China's U.S. Human Rights Report is Ugly, But It's No "Caricature"

The New York Times was almost apoplectic Sunday over a human rights "report card" issued by China's Foreign Affairs Department on the United States.

That report, a response to the annual report on China's human rights situation issued by the U.S. State Department, called attention to a number of areas where the U.S. is in violation of universally accepted norms of behavior.

Having lived for two years in China--a fascist-style military dictatorship where the law is simply another tool of repression for those in authority, and where people are routinely locked up, tortured, deprived of their livelihood and even their lives for such transgressions as posting comments on a website, protesting a corrupt boss or conducting prayer services in a private home, and a place where perceptions of America can be pretty bizarre--I was expecting something comic after reading in the Times that the report on the U.S. "approaches caricature."

In fact, putting aside whom it was doing the talking, the report was pretty damned accurate, and devastating.

American society is characterized by rampant violent crimes, severe infringement of people's rights by law enforcement departments and lack of guarantee of the right to life, liberty and security, the Chinese report said, noting that in addition to the threats from uniformed law enforcement, some 31,000 Americans were killed by firearms last year. The report also noted America's record two million prison inmates, and the fact that three times that many are on parole or probation.

Caricature? Hardly. The number of people being jailed in the U.S. is a national scandal, particularly considering the percentage who are black and Latino, and the fact that most are there for non-violent offenses. And no surprise there: Nearly every time I am on the road and see a car pulled over by a trooper, I discover that the driver is black. Unless blacks are uniquely prone to speeding, there is an epidemic of racial profiling, and it's not limited to highways.

American democracy is manipulated by the rich and malpractice is common, the report continues, noting that elections in the U.S. are "in fact a contest of money." Really. Can anyone honestly call this a caricature? I remember when I was teaching a group of journalism graduate students in Shanghai, I received my mail ballot from home, which at the time was a small town in upstate New York. I was happy to receive it because I wanted to show it to my class, where the students were anxious to see first-hand how American democracy works. Imagine my chagrin when I opened the envelope and saw that the ballot was composed entirely of single candidates for each post. Republicans so dominated the upstate region that no one bothered to run against them for any town or county post! "These look just like our ballots!" the students said in amazement. Nor in our current red state/blue state polity, are things much different across most of the country, where campaign funding laws, or the lack thereof, make incumbency virtually a guarantee of re-election.

In the area of economic rights, the Chinese report said poverty, hunger and homelessness "haunt the world's richest country." Here I'd have to disagree. While the figure they used (from the U.S. Census Bureau--36 million living in poverty--is correct, it is hardly a condition that "haunts" the majority living above the poverty line, since our derelict corporate media don't cover the poverty beat, and our economically segregated communities make it easy for people to ignore the suffering in the midst of plenty. Still, noting that a sixth of the nation lives in poverty is no caricature. It's a fact.

Racial discrimination? The report says it permeates every aspect of society, while the new post 9-11 homeland security regulations especially target ethnic minorities, foreigners and immigrants. Does anyone want to challenge the accuracy of that depiction?

As for the rights of women and children, the report called attention to the deplorable rate of rapes and sexual abuse, with some 400,000 children forced into prostitution and sexual abuse. This ugly reality, while also true for China, cannot be brushed aside here.

Finally the Chinese report addressed the abuse of foreigners by U.S. authorities, noting the scandalous violations of the rights of prisoners of war, the history of invasions and unprovoked military assaults on other nations, and the estimated 100,000 civilian deaths in Iraq.

For my part, I was surprised the Chinese report didn't go further, to mention the failure of the U.S. to abide by international law in allowing foreigners arrested on serious criminal charges in the U.S., including murder, to contact their embassies, the shameful inadequacy of funding for schools in poor communities, the dumping of toxic waste and the siting of pollution-causing power plants in low-income communities, and the theft of private property through improper use of eminent domain and draconian drug laws, the unconscionably high percentage of minorities on American death rows, as well as other abuses.

China is one of the world's prime human rights offenders, but that ugly reality should not prevent us from looking honestly into the mirror that it has held up to our own society and government.

If anything is a caricature, it is the article on the Chinese report, in which The Times appears as a caricature of real independent journalism.

===========================

March 26, 2005
US Iran Policy: Newton's Law of Threat and Response At Work

According to a report by the Associated Press, U.S. officials are "concerned" that Iran is reportedly buying and stockpiling high-tech small arms weapons as well as heavier equipment such as tanks, cruise missiles, etc.

Well duh!

Way down in the piece it mentions that the U.S. continues to leave open the possibility, raised by President Bush himself, of attacking Iran over its alleged efforts to produce enriched uranium which could be used to make nuclear weapons.

Now, if you go around threatening to invade a nation--especially a nation where you already have a record of having overthrown one government and of having sent in an airborne assault force--and especially if you have just invaded another country, one that is a neighbor of the nation you are now threatening--shouldn't you expect that that nation will be preparing for your attack?

A government that did not take steps to prepare for such a threatened invasion would be derelict in the extreme.

Which should have us citizens in the U.S. asking questions about just what the hell our own belligerent government is trying to do here.

Arguably, the reason Iran is working at providing itself with a nuclear capability is precisely because it feels threatened by the U.S., and has noticed that those countries that have nuclear weapons--Israel, Russia, India, Pakistan, China, and North Korea--seem to get treated a lot better by the U.S. than countries like Syria, Iraq and Vietnam, which don't.

As well, arguably Iran could see making trouble on the sly in neighboring Iraq, where the entire U.S. military is now tied down battling a growing insurgency, as its best insurance against being invaded or attacked, since as long as the U.S. is so over-extended there, it would be unlikely to start yet another war with a much larger and more politically unified nation.

If the goal of the U.S. were to enhance the security of the Middle East region, to stabilize and rebuild Iraq, and to enhance the safety of Americans and of American interests, one would think it would be trying to reach some kind of modus vivendi with Iran, as it has done with China and Russia, so as to lesson the perceived need of the Iranians to enhance their military capabilities and screw with Iraq.

That, however, is not what the U.S. is doing. Instead it is blustering, making threats, and acting outraged at efforts made by Iran to protect itself, all of which can only have the effect of making the Iranians even more nervous and anxious to prepare for the worst.

One would almost think that the U.S. was trying to provoke Iran.

Whatever the neo-con lunatics are thinking over there in the White House basement, the Pentagon and the State Department with regard to Iran, they are certainly operating on a huge double standard.

Here at home, we're told that we need to consider voiding the nuclear test-ban treaty so our scientists can develop new theater nuclear weapons, like bunker-busting mini-nukes. We're told that we should be developing space-based weapons systems that could destroy armies from space without warning. We're told that we should spend billions developing robot warriors so that we can go off into the Third World killing at will without having to sacrifice our own soldiers. But when China, which spends less on its entire military than the U.S. spends on a single weapon system, increases its military spending, the American government starts screaming bloody murder.

We offer almost state-of-the-art F-16 fighter-bombers, capable of delivering nuclear bombs, to Pakistan, a military dictatorship that has the bomb and that is in a simmering, decades-long border conflict with its nuclear neighbor India--an incredibly dangerous provocation--and then cry foul when Ukraine sells a few cruise missiles to Iran, which doesn't even have nukes at this point.

It wouldn't be so bad if the U.S. media would at least point out the hypocrisy of all this, but that's not what happens. All we get are the reports of alleged bad, threatening behavior by other countries, not the astonishing provocations of our own regime.

===============================

March 25, 2005
Even U.S. corporations like Canada's national health plan

News that General Motors is planning on trying to force its unionized workers to agree to a give-back of health benefits--possibly including having to contribute for the first time to their insurance premiums and for coverage of their families--raises an interesting and potentially embarrassing political question.

For the same General Motors (like Ford and Chrysler) has for years been shifting production from Michigan and other venues to Ontario, across the Detroit River, to take advantage of Canada's national health program, which virtually eliminates health care from the cost of production. For GM, the difference is about $1500 per vehicle produced.

The interesting thing is that while GM, like all American corporations, insists that a Canadian-style single-payer health system, where everyone in the country gets free physician and hospital care, and where hospitals and doctors are paid by the government, is a bad idea, and not workable, over the border they and the other big auto makers, along with other U.S. corporations, are saying something entirely different.

Consider this letter, sent two years ago by GM Canada's CEO Michael Grimaldi, and co-signed by Canadian Autoworkers Union president Buzz Hargrove, to a Crown Commission considering reforms of Canada's 35-year-old national health program.

"The public health care system significantly reduces total labour costs for automobile manufacturing firms, compared to their cost of equivalent private insurance services purchased by U.S.-based automakers," Grimaldi wrote. "These health insurance savings can amount to several dollars per hour worked. Publicly funded healthcare thus accounts for a significant portion of Canada's overall labour cost advantage in auto assembly, versus the U.S., which in turn has been a significant factor in maintaining and attracting new auto investment in Canada."

The auto company CEO and his union counterpart went on to tell the commission that it was "vitally important that the publicly funded health care system be preserved and renewed, on the existing principles of universality, accessibility, portability, comprehensiveness and public administration." They went further though, calling not just for preservation but for an "updated range of services," including prescription drugs and home care services.

CEOs of the Canadian units of Ford and DaimlerChrysler wrote similar letters to the commission, not only endorsing the national health system, but like GM Canada urging increased funding and expanded coverage.

They were joined by most of Canada's largest employers, 30 of whom banded together into a lobbying organization called the Employer Committee on Health Care-Ontario (ECHO).

How can it be that the same corporations that recognize--when they are in Canada--the bottom-line logic of a national health system that makes healthcare a right and that spreads the costs of caring for the whole citizenry across the whole population by financing it through public taxation, can be so opposed to introduction of such a system here at home?

One answer is ideology. The idea of having the government take over an industry that represents about 15 percent of the U.S. economy gives U.S. corporate executives the willies. Moreover, many U.S. corporations that may not be primarily in the business of health care, nonetheless own health care subsidiaries, and thus have an inherent interest in preserving those business units' profits.

That said, it is nothing short of hypocritical, and probably also stupid from a business perspective, for corporate America to be backing the insurance industry's intransigent and self-serving opposition to national healthcare.

Bill and Hillary Clinton, who came to the White House after a campaign that focused on the health care crisis, almost single-handedly destroyed the chance for America to join the rest of the modern in making healthcare a right by establishing a national medical program back in the mid 1990s. Cravenly inviting the insurance industry to the table and insisting that any plan must be administered through the insurance industry--a group of vultures if there ever was one--they doomed their effort to failure as its costs inevitably soared through the roof.

It's time for progressives to forget that sorry sell-out chapter and to bring the demand for a national health system back to the front of the domestic agenda. With health care inflation--and insurance industry profits--continuing to soar, even the business lobby may soon have to start rethinking its hidebound ideological opposition to a national health care model, as health coverage from employees--currently running at an average $6779 per worker--wipes out profits.

Back in 1970, a year before Canada switched over from an employer-based, insurance company-administered health system like that in the U.S. to a national single-payer model, both countries were devoting about 7 percent of GDP to health care. Today, Canada devotes 9.1 percent of GDP to health care, while the U.S. devotes 15.1 percent of GDP to health care. Meanwhile, Canada boasts better health statistics (life expectancy, infant mortality, etc.), and everyone there is fully covered, even for catastrophic illnesses like cancer or AIDS. In the U.S., some 15 percent of people have no insurance coverage at all, medical costs are the leading cause of bankruptcy, and the tens of millions covered by Medicaid must endure long waits and often get only minimal care when they do get it at all. Even the elderly, who come the closest to having state-funded health care, because of funding cutbacks, are paying more out of pocket today (in constant dollars) than they did in 1965 before Medicare existed.

The Canadian system is often attacked by conservatives in the U.S. for allegedly having long waits for treatments, and for driving many Canadians across the border for such things as MRI scans. In fact, however, polls repeatedly show that Canadians love their national health system, and keep voting for candidates who back it. Moreover, Canadians say that U.S. criticisms of their system are gross exaggerations. The numbers of people seeking U.S. medical treatment are tiny, and most Canadians report that they get treated immediately in their hospital ERs. Left unsaid by U.S. critics, too, is the reality that waiting times for many Americans seeking treatment in hospital ERs, or trying to get a specialist appointment--for example for an OB-GYN visit or an annual physical--can also be interminable, while many are finding that necessary treatments are simply rejected by their insurance carriers. (For every story of a Canadian who had to come to the U.S. to get treated, there are probably 10 stories of Americans turned away by hospital emergency rooms after wallet biopsies failed to locate an insurance card.)

While the rest of the modern world has long since adopted policies that make healthcare a right of citizenship, available to all, the U.S. has continued to make it a matter of income and, to some extent luck. Where most modern societies have the state play the key role in providing health care, in the U.S., the main provider of health insurance is the employer, and increasingly employers are shucking that responsibility.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported--on its business page instead of its front page, where the story belonged--that the percentage of companies that pay 100 percent of their employees' insurance premiums had "plummeted" over the last four years, from 29 percent to only 17 percent, while the percentage providing full benefits for family members had been halved from 11 percent in 2000 to only 6 percent last year.

Worse yet, even more employers are dropping employee insurance benefits altogether, and at an accelerating rate. Between 1991 and 2000, according to Brian Klepper, director of the Center for Practical Health Reform, the number of jobs that provided no health insurance coverage rose at an annual rate of 2.4 percent. But since 2001, the number of such jobs without health benefits has been climbing almost twice as fast, at a 4.5 percent clip. Before long, he suggests, health care benefits will be the exception, not the rule.

We should not have to wait until things get that ugly. With polls consistently showing that a majority of Americans support a Canadian-style health plan, and that a majority of Americans believe that basic health care is a right, it is past time for a renewed political drive to make it happen.

====================

March 23, 2005
An Administration Snow Job on Social Security

With Bush's Social Security wrecking scheme on the ropes in the face of widespread public distrust of his intentions and his "facts," the inevitable scare stories are now coming out of the politically manipulated Social Security Administration itself.

The latest--the economic equivalent of those reports about mobile germ and chemical warfare factories in Iraq that surfaced in the drive toward an invasion of Iraq--is a new report from the Security Trust Fund Board of Trustees, claiming that things have somehow gotten worse and that the Fund will face "insolvency" in 2041, a year earlier than an earlier Social Security projection had claimed. As well, the date at which the Administration predicted that Social Security would have to start drawing down the accumulated Trust Fund would be moved forward a year to 2017.

This scare story comes, oddly, after predictions by the same agency's actuaries only a few months ago that relatively robust economic performance had actually pushed those two dates back a few years.

The whole scare story, which was loudly trumpeted by the Associated Press with a misleading headline screaming "Social Security Set to Go Broke in 2041," is a political scam. The Trust Fund Board is chaired by Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow, a political charlatan who immediately grabbed the opportunity to claim that the new projection meant that absent some major reform of the system, either payroll taxes would have to be raised 3.5 percent or benefits would have to be cut by 22 percent.

Left unsaid both by Snow and by the AP is that the latest prediction is based upon a wholly unreasonable forecast for U.S. economic growth over the next decade and the next four decades. In order to arrive at such a dire projection for the fund, Snow and the board assumed an average economic growth rate for the U.S. economy of just 1.8 percent, which would be almost half the economy's average growth rate for most of this century and by far the lowest rate of growth in the nation's history.

If the economy were to grow even marginally faster than that--at say 2 percent per year--over the next four decades, there would in fact be no shortfall in the fund.

Unfortunately, for the ratings-driven corporate media, reporting this kind of desperate scare story is like reporting on an approaching snow storm--the scarier they can make the news the better. Never mind that the storm will likely peter out in flurries or rain, never mind that the U.S. economy is much stronger than political hacks like Snow are pretending it is--the point is to get readers and viewers to hooked.

If it were true that the economy were going to grow that glacially--and if the administration really believed that prediction--it would have to concede that its four years of outrageous tax cuts and massive deficits, all of which they had claimed would stimulate the economy, have been a colossal failure. How to explain why record tax cuts will produce a record slow growth in the U.S. economy over the next two generations?

Put aside the question of whether tax cuts do or do not stimulate economic growth. Put aside too the claim about "insolvency," which of course cannot happen to a government that prints the money. The point is that if the U.S. economy is in for such a prolonged doldrums, which would inevitably be accompanied by massive unemployment, there are more pressing concerns than rescuing Security forty years from now. We'd better start doing something to prepare for a much earlier crisis.

But in fact, the projection is a lie. Just ask Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, which just raised interest rates a quarter of a percent and warned of further rises--not the kind of economic braking action you'd expect if the nation were headed for a ditch. (An economist on the Fed staff tells me the historic U.S. economic growth rate over the past decade or more has been closer to 3-3.5 percent. He says that with productivity increasing at above 2 percent per year--a prospect not likely to change in the foreseeable future--and with the labor force growing at over 1 percent a year--that rate is unlikely to fall much.)

Nobody in the economic forecasting business, and certainly nobody in the investment community, where people bet their fortunes on predicting the direction of the economy, anticipates such a prolonged slump in growth.

Nor should anyone who is counting on Social Security for their retirement.

Besides, Snow is wrong even regarding his warnings about the implications of a slump. If it turns out that at some point there were going to be a shortfall in Social Security funding, there are other answers besides raising the payroll tax on workers or slashing benefits for retirees. The simplest is raising the payroll tax on the wealthy, who currently only pay it on the first $90,000 of income. The tax could also be applied to unearned investment income, which currently pays nothing into the Social Security fund. Best of all, there is another option that has never been discussed: changing the formula that has employer and employee each pay 50 percent of the tax. There is nothing magic about that ratio, after all; it was simply how the system started out in 1935. It could just as easily be shifted so that employers paid 70 percent and employees paid 30 percent, or even to a 90/10 formula, where employers would foot 90 percent of the bill.

Then we could raise the employer tax rate by a few percent without hurting workers' paychecks at all. After all, over the last decade, corporate taxes have been slashed. Corporations and their shareholders would hardly notice a rise of a few percent in their payroll tax bill, which would not even bring most companies back up to the corporate tax rate they were paying in 1990.

Snow's new "wolf" cry notwithstanding, there is no worsening Social Security crisis.

There is no crisis at all.

And it's time that progressives in Congress, and journalists in the mainstream media, started pointing this out loudly and clearly.

Meanwhile, expect more scare stories from an increasingly desperate administration.

====================================

March 21, 2005
Saving Schiavo While Killing the News

The weekend second anniversary of the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was marked by demonstrations large and small around the globe, but here in the U.S., where there were demonstrations and marches in over 725 communities, you could be forgiven for not knowing anything was happening. In the corporate media, the front pages and TV news programs were dominated by a demonstration of 30 religious fundamentalists opposed to the removal of a feeding tube from the brain-dead Terri Schiavo.

Who had time or space for reports on tens of thousands of noisome protesters in New York, London, Ankara or Tokyo? Who had time to pause and reflect on two years of a war that never should have happened in the first place, that has taken over 100,000 civilian lives, and that has killed over 1500 American soldiers?

The New York Times, which promotes itself as the nation's newspaper of record, limited its coverage of the global and national anti-war protests to two inside photos and a short caption on Sunday, which focused more on a small demonstration by two dozen people in Times Square than on a large march and demonstration that began in Harlem, continued to Central Park, and ended up at the mayor's house. (The Times Square event, a block from the paper's offices, was a cheaper assignment, I guess, and had the advantage of touting the paper's name for free.) The paper's "Week in Review" shamelessly ignored the protests completely.

CNN ignored the anti-war protests completely too, likewise preferring to blow its daily news budget Saturday and Sunday on the Shiavo flap and the sad tale of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl, allegedly by a paroled sex offender.

Most outrageously, no major media covered the remarkable 4500-person protest in Fayetteville, North Carolina outside Ft. Bragg, which featured large numbers of former military personnel marching against the war, including Camilo Mejia, recently released from 9 months in a military brig for desertion from his army unit (he courageously refused to return to Iraq after doing one tour there, saying it was an illegal, immoral war of aggression).

Apparently, like Congress, where Democrats and Republicans alike have spent more time fulminating over and interfering in the issue of when to let poor Schiavo die than on the matter of providing another $82 billion in funding for the ongoing slaughter of innocents in Iraq, the corporate media feel that the sad plight of one lone brain-dead woman on a feeding tube is more important than the lives of 150,000 U.S. servicemen and 30 million Arabs and Kurds.

In Philadelphia, where several hundred demonstrators from a variety of organizations marched in a cold rain on Sunday from a historic Quaker meeting house to the city's Federal Courthouse opposite Independence Hall, the city's main media outlet, the Philadelphia Inquirer, following the Times' lead, limited coverage of the event in its Monday edition to an inside page of the Local News section. Ironically, the biggest headline on page one was "March On"--not about the protests but rather about the weekend NCAA playoff victories of the Villanova men's and Temple University women's basketball teams. The other banner headline in the Inquirer's Monday edition was about Congress approving the Schiavo bill, while below the fold was an article--belied by the reality of the ignored protests--headlined "Iraq war fades from student activists' focus."

Yeah, right.

It should more appropriately have said, "Coverage of Iraq war protests fade from editors' focus," but then that would have implied that editors at the Inquirer, CNN and the Times and other mainstream media organizations had paid attention to anti-war protests before, which was certainly not the case.

Even the massive rallies and marches by hundreds of thousands of people on the eve of the war and during its early days received scant and grudging coverage in the mainstream media.

Still, the deliberate burying of news about mounting opposition to the war--as evidenced by demonstrations across the country and around the globe this past weekend--represents a new low in the supine complicity of the mass media in supporting Washington's and Wall Street's imperial agenda.

Faced with a government that has ignored public protests, seemingly with impunity, and with a media that simply blacks out information that it deems to be outside the narrow confines of legitimate political discourse, it is easy to give in to discouragement and frustration, as many have. But perhaps things are not as bad as they seem. The decentralized protests of the weekend, while they didn't make the evening news or the morning papers, were visible and had impact in the hundreds of cities and communities in which they took place. The alternative media continue to have a growing presence and influence. And somehow, polls show that a majority of Americans now agree that the war was a mistake and that the U.S. should leave Iraq, so the message is getting through.

The challenge: converting that broad sentiment against the war into political action.

====================================

March 18, 2005

Congress on Steroids! See No-Nonsense Representatives Get Tough with Witnesses!

If you watched or read about the Congressional hearings yesterday conducted by the House Government Reform Committee, you'd have thought Congress was a real legislature, with bulldog representatives willing to stop at nothing to get at the truth.

There was Rep. Chris Shays (R-Conn.), saying it "boggles the mind," that a witness would provide Congress with false information.

There was Rep. Patrick McHenry, angrily demanding that a witness stop fudging and give a straight-up "yes or no" answer.

Even the Democrats got into the act, with Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Maryland) sounding for all the world like a pugnacious Senate Watergate committee member or like Richard Nixon on the old House Un-American Activities Committee as he demanded of a witness who was refusing to answer a tough question, "Are you taking the Fifth?"

All this toughness, and what was the issue at hand? The latest $82-billion funding request for the war in Iraq? The CIA's extraordinary rendition kidnapping and torture of terror suspects? The Bush Social Security wrecking scheme? The White House propaganda strategy of producing and sending out fake "news" videos to local TV stations around the country?

No, this was the House hearing into steroid use by baseball players.

The toughness displayed by the representatives on the Government Reform Committee at this silly hearing into an issue that has almost no impact whatsoever on the lives of average Americans contrasted markedly with the way the Senate Armed Services Committee, on the same day, handled its hearing into the CIA's torture policies since 2001.

There CIA director Porter Goss, a former House member himself, was treated with utmost politeness and decorum, and was allowed to fudge answers, or not answer questions at all.

Goss wasn't challenged by panel members from either party when he assured his Senate questioners that the CIA uses no "techniques" that would be "in any way against the law" or that would be "considered torture." No one followed up by asking him who was interpreting the law for him (the new Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, after all, did a bang-up job as White House Counsel, advising the president that the law allowed torture, and the hell with the Geneva Conventions).

When Goss was asked about CIA tactics prior to the present moment, and whether torture might have been used by the agency in the aftermath of 2001, he was allowed to say simply "I am not able to tell you that."

No one pressed him further to ask whether he was, in effect, "taking the Fifth" on the spy agency's behalf.

With the Republican Party firmly in control of both houses of Congress, and with Democrats selling out on everything from oil drilling on Alaska's north slope to providing more funds for Bush's war in Iraq, the one useful thing to come out of the baseball steroid hearings was a reminder of what Congress could be if its members actually took their job even half seriously.

======================================

March 16, 2005

The Incredible Shrinking Coalition of the Willing: Ciao Italy

Remember George Bush's Coalition of the Willing?

It was always a con job. Some of the "members," like Costa Rica, weren't even members at all. Others, like Spain, Italy and the U.K., were there despite overwhelming opposition from their own people. Other countries, like those of Central Europe and Central America, were bribed and coerced into "joining."

Well, now even the sort of willing are leaving this sinking ship.

Take Italy. After having one of its secret service men blown away in a hail of American bullets at a "mobile roadblock" set up to protect new U.S. Spy Czar John Negroponte, Italy is finally heeding the wishes of its people and pulling out all of its 3000 troops.

Italians were outraged that the car carrying the security officer, which had just successfully rescued a female Italian journalist who had been held hostage by Iraqi gangsters for a month, was blasted by U.S. forces in a hail of machine gun fire that wounded three, including the rescued hostage herself.

Spain pulled out of the coalition last year after its involvement in Bush's invasion of Iraq led to an Al Qaeda terror bombing of the Madrid train station and ultimately to the defeat of the incumbent conservative government, which had been a big Bush backer.

More recently, some of the other bigger "partners" in the coalition (meaning those that were coerced or cojoled into contributing a few hundred to a few thousand troops out of the 150,000 total) have been quitting too. Ukraine, fresh off a popular election that finally ousted a corrupt Soviet-era kleptocracy, announced a few days ago that it is bringing home its 1500 soldiers from Iraq. Poland already said it is pulling out its 1700 troops, and Holland has completed its pullout of all 1700 soldiers.

Once Italy's troops are gone, the only countries left in Bush's grand coalition with more than 900-troop commitments will be South Korea (3600) and Britain (8000). Twelve other members of the so-called coalition, including Thailand, Honduras and Hungary, already quit some time ago.

The remaining members of this grand alliance--a total of 18 countries including Georgia, El Salvador, Albania and Estonia--will be contributing a grand total among them of 4826 soldiers, most of whom, like of Korea's contingent, are actually non-combatants. The military powerhouses among this elite group are Denmark (530), Japan (550), Bulgaria (450), which itself is considering withdrawal, and Australia (300).

At this rate, it won't be long before even Macedonia (34) and Kazakhstan (27) abandon us, and then what?

And of course, with Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and the Ukraine gone, the big question is: with the Coalition of the Willing crumbling like this, can Britain be far behind?

Then it would be just the U.S. and the Iraqi puppet regime standing tall against the forces of evil.

If this is winning the war on terrorism, I wonder what losing looks like.

==================================

John Walker Lindh in US captivity in Afghanistan
captivelindh.jpg
He was kept taped this way for over a week ina dark, unheated steel box (AP photo).

March 14, 2005

Edit Free John Walker Lindh!

Now that it's clear and admitted publicly that the U.S. military was brutally torturing people in Afghanistan, to the point of killing some captives in the process, it's time to demand that John Walker Lindh, the young man jailed for 20 years for being what the wretched ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft called an "American Taliban," be freed.

Lindh, you may recall, was captured near the end of the major fighting in Afghanistan, and was being roughly interrogated in a yard among hundreds of captive Taliban fighters when his treatment at the hands of a CIA agent sparked a bloody and suicidal uprising among his co-captors.

It didn't help Lindh’s situation that the agent who was interrogating him--who knew he was an American kid--was killed in the uprising.

We know now that Lindh's claim that he was tortured into making a false confession to being a member of Al Qaeda bent on attacking his homeland was the truth. The military unit that was handling American captives where he was taken at Baghram Airbase (and that was responsible for keeping him duct-taped to a stretcher in a dark and unheated metal shipping container for over a week, with a leg wound untreated), was a torture unit, and is actually the very unit that was later moved to Abu Ghraib to bring its special skills to bear there. We know too, as I wrote in an article in the Nation, that it was our new Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, then in charge of terror prosecutions at the so-called Justice Department, who arranged to have him gagged for an astonishing 20 years in return for having more serious charges against him dropped.

Lindh in fact was in Afghanistan for all of four weeks when 9-11 happened, and had gone there not to fight America, but to fight the Afghan warlords who were still harassing the Taliban with the help of Russia, which had been brutalizing Afghans for years (indeed at the time Lindh went to Afghanistan, America was cutting financial deals with the Taliban government). He may have been a foolish young man, but he was no traitor to America --just a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time--and except for a confession that was extracted from him under torture conditions in Afghanistan, where he was being held in secret and in denial of his basic right to an attorney, there is no evidence whatsoever to the contrary.

Where is the member of Congress with the guts to introduce a member's bill demanding clemency for Lindh?

Lindh himself can do nothing. The gag order inflicted on him by Chertoff makes it illegal for him to say anything about what happened to him in Afghanistan while he was being held captive by American troops, and he rightly fears that if he says anything in defiance of that order, he will lose any hope of early release on good behavior later on. Even his parents and his attorneys have to fear that their lobbying on his behalf could end up hurting his chances of eventual early parole. This is the ugly purpose behind Chertoff's shameless and calculating gag order (certainly at this point no one could argue that Lindh could have anything to say that could damage national security!).

But we in the anti-war movement, we who support the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and basic decency in the face of the proto-fascists in the Bush administration who are justifying every assault on those things in the name of fighting terrorism, can and should demand his immediate exoneration and release.

This is not just a matter of basic justice and common decency. It's a matter of getting the truth out about what Bush's and Rumsfeld's wretched minions were really doing in our name over there in Afghanistan.

This imprisoned young man has an important story to tell, and we all need to hear it.

Free John Walker Lindh!
=================================

March 12, 2005

Fascist Dictatorship is Here Already--On the Job

There is a delicious irony in the rapid fall from grace and power of Harry Stonecipher, CEO at scandal-plagued Boeing Corp., who was fired by the board of directors after his affair with a junior executive was exposed.

What brought the company's chief executive low was the company's invasive email monitoring program, which allowed security personnel to keep tabs on every employee's email messages. Of course, that monitoring was supposed only to nail low-level workers, but someone got hold of some love notes being exchanged between Stonechipher and his paramour, Debra Peabody, a manager of office operations, and spilled the beans.

Apparently such intra-office liaisons are considered taboo under the company's official "Code of Conduct," and are considered "embarrassing" to the corporation. This was apparently viewed as a much more serious transgression (he was gone in 10 days!), than the overseeing of a massive government contract fraud by Stonecipher's predecessor, Boeing CEO Phil Condit, who hung on for months of truly embarrassing investigation and bad press until finally being forced out in 2003. (One must assume that the company's vaunted Code doesn't say much about defrauding the taxpayer.)

What this latest little incident highlights is the degree to which all American workers have come under the jackboot of a fascist-like corporate culture that wants absolute control over what we say, do and think on, and even off, the job.

The very notion that a relationship between two people who work at the same institution could be "embarrassing" and grounds for dismissal is an outrage. The idea that their harmless private communications on the company's email system would be monitored and then made public is equally outrageous.

And let's face it, this is the environment in which at least 25 percent of American workers reportedly now labor (a percentage that is rising every year). Some 17 percent of American companies report that they dismissed workers last year for "improper" use of the company’s internet and email system. Most of these victims were caught by automated spy systems installed to monitor employee email. Even universities are now monitoring employee email--including the mail of professors who are supposed to have academic freedom.

Phones too, are subject to monitoring.

We grow up hearing about the glories of America's Bill of Rights and especially of the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech and association, but the ugly truth is that those freedoms only apply to that narrow sliver of waking time when we are at home or commuting to or from work. During the most important part of the average person's day--those eight or nine hours when she or he is at work--there is no such freedom at all. What you say, wear, or maybe even think, and whom you choose to hang with, can mean the end of job or career. On most jobs, you have to wear certain things and at some even say certain things (like a company cheer!) on pain of losing your job.

And it gets worse. A new trend in which companies are telling employees that if they smoke, even at home, they can be terminated, heralds a brave new world where corporations will begin setting all kinds of behavioral rules for employees to follow off the job if they want to keep it. How far off are we from a time when going to a demonstration on one’s free time can be grounds for firing?

Wait a minute, the San Francisco Chronicle did just that last year to one of its columnists. We're there already!

My question is, why aren't we freedom-loving Americans raising holy hell about this trampling of our rights? Where’s the outrage at our being treated like the citizens of China, Saudi Arabia or Burma on the job?

Forget Jesus. What would Thomas Jefferson say about the new corporate rules of behavior and the new monitoring of workers' private communications and private lives?

================================

March 10, 2005

America the Magical Kingdom

Just back from a long weekend at the Disney World reality show, where my wife and I spent the weekend trailing our 11-year-old son around Walt's sterile and contrived alternate universe, I find the U.S. media hard at work trying to produce the same kind of world of illusion as one finds on display in the Magic Kingdom.

Double standards (if one can even use the word standard in connection with the media today) are on full display.

Take Lebanon. While tens and even hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathering in America is a story that can be buried on inside pages (as the N.Y. Times did in the case of the first big New York march against the Iraq War), or in many cases not covered at all (at least unless a few of them behave violently or react assertively to police provocation) , a few thousand, or even a few hundred stylishly Western-clad young Lebanese protesting against America's enemy of the week, Syria, get full-bore coverage. When is the last time we've seen a U.S. protest on the cover of Time or Newsweek? Yet there were those fresh-faced young Lebanese, gracing the fronts of both magazines on display in the airport newsstand. A little embarrassing when half a million Lebanese who back Syria's role in their country take to the streets a few days later, and the pro-Syria prime minister, who was pressured to resign last week, is brought back, but hey, who's paying attention to what happened last week?

In Iraq, it's the same story. The insurgency continues to grow, with attacks on the Abu-Ghraib torture center in the Green Zone getting so bad that the U.S. has decided to move its "high-value" prisoner/victims to a jail in the center of the Baghdad airport, where there is a wider perimeter of control, Yet all the American media can talk about is how dramatic the new democratic developments in Iraq are, with liberal columnists even suggesting that Bush is being proven right in invading Iraq. It's as though a tide of democracy had already swept the Middle East, though at this point, not one authoritian government has shown signs of foundering, much less toppling. Of course, there are some things that are hard to ignore or paper over. The killing, by nervous and trigger-happy American troops, of a Bulgarian "coalition" soldier, the Italian secret service rescuer of an Italian journalist, and the body guards of an Iraqi government official, all in the space of a few days, have made it abundantly clear that the U.S. occupation force, far from defending democracy, is slaughtering civilians in Iraq at an alarming rate.

Even the business press, usually a bit more inclined to realism, is in on the fantasy game, breathlessly reporting that the Dow Jones Industrial Average is closing back in on the 11,000 mark, while ignoring or downplaying the larger reality that the U.S. dollar is a balloon of hot air, waiting only for the arrival of a pin to send it crashing to the floor, dragging the DOW and the rest of those indices with it. As a private banking money manager on the seat behind me on my plane to Florida confided, the smart money in America these days is pulling out of equities and investing in commodities—copper, oil and gold—aware that the collapse of paper assets, real estate and the dollar itself is just a matter of time.

Whatever else one may say about him, Walt Disney was a shrewd marketeer. He saw early on that what Americans crave is happy fantasies, where the scares are contrived and predictable, and good always triumphs in the end. It's an approach that neatly meshes with Bush's good-vs.-evil foreign policy propaganda, and that the media (inclulding Disney's own ABC), all eager for easy handouts and good visuals, are happy to disseminate.

And like those pricey tickets to Disney World, Americans seem to be buying it in bulk.
================================

Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Greenspan: Why Is Anyone Still Listening to This Partisan Hack?

Any Democrat who still offers praise for Alan Greenspan after his latest propaganda supporting the Bush attack on Social Security should be dumped by the party and voters alike.

Greenspan has always been a Republican agent at the Federal Reserve, even in the Clinton years, but his support for private Social Security funds, and his latest warning that cuts in benefits for retirees need to be considered are both scientifically unjustified and unsupported, and politically craven, especially coming from a man who himself is already collecting the maximum Social Security benefit and who stands to walk away with a $100,000/year federal pension on top of that when he finally retires as Reserve Board chairman.

Democrats in Congress have largely gone along with the charade that the reserve board chairman is above politics and that his deliberately chimerical statements on interest rates and fiscal and monetary policy are received wisdom.

In fact, Greenspan contributed mightily to the collapse of the stock market following the popping of the Internet bubble, by failing to act to limit stock speculation in the mid and late 1990s--something he could have easily done without even touching interest rates, by simply increasing margin requirements on investors.

His pronouncements on the financial stability of the Social Security system are no more prescient or sound than his economic forecasting skills, which have been repeatedly found wanting.

It is probably worth remembering that when Greenspan left his private career as owner of a pension management firm, Townsend Greenspan, and went into government service, he left a company run into the ground because of his poor investment advice and market forecasting abilities. By the time he left, Townsend Greenspan had lost all its clients, who had all sought more capable advisers with better records.

American workers should remember all this when they read news reports quoting Greenspan as saying that the Social Security system cannot be expected to pay promised benefits to future retirees.

=============================

February 28, 2005

Forget Compromising on Social Security. First Let's End Employer Theft of Workers' Pensions

With President Bush's Social Security wrecking scheme running into trouble both among a skeptical public that no longer trusts him, and a Republican Congress that is worried about the costs--$2 trillion in new government borrowing just to finance the so-called private accounts--the compromisers in both parties are pulling out another bad idea: voluntary private accounts which would be financed by extra payroll deductions.

Unless such accounts were heavily subsidized by the government--for example by a refundable tax credit for low-income workers (an idea that has as much chance of passage as George McGovern's idea of providing each family with a $1000 tax credit)--all this would be is another windfall for the well-to-do.

Where on earth do these phony populists think struggling working people are going to get that extra cash? They are already working as hard as they can and aren't even making it from paycheck to paycheck (consumer debt is rising steadily, as are personal bankruptcies, though Republicans may have solved this latter problem by making personal bankruptcies harder to obtain, and much more punitive). As it is, most people don't have IRAs or 401Ks--those tax-deferred retirement accounts that we're all supposed to be investing in for our retirement. They simply don't have the extra income to put into them. Upper income people love them of course. They can take their extra cash and shelter as much of it as they want from taxes by putting it into these tax-deferred havens where they won't owe anything on the money until they withdraw it in their dotage, when their income tax rates will presumably be much lower. (Besides, if you're already in the lowest tax bracket, there's not much advantage in setting aside money that could even end up being taxes at a higher rate later if income taxes go up over time, as they generally do.)

The proposed new add-on Social Security funds, as proposed, would be the same kind of raw deal--great for those who have the money to contribute, but useless for the rest of us.

If Congress really cared about the welfare of low-income retirees, they'd pass legislation requiring all employers to offer pension plans and to contribute to them, and they'd pass legislation outlawing "vesting" periods, so that even if you worked at a job for a day or a week, the money that was contributed to your pension fund would be yours, to go with you to your next job. This is how it works, for example, with teachers' retirement funds. There is no vesting period, and if a teacher moves to a new school after even a semester of teaching, the fund just moves along with her or him.

Most workers, however, who statistics show end up changing jobs in this new economy sooner than every five years, end up being ripped off of their pensions. They and the employer contribute to a fund from day one, but since it routinely takes five, seven, or at some jobs even 10 years to be "vested," if the employee leaves or is terminated before that time, the employer contribution is forfeited entirely. This is, to put the matter bluntly, theft. The worker takes a job in part on the basis of that pension contribution, which is presented as part of her or his remuneration package, but then if the job ends, either because the worker finds something better, or because the employer is downsizing, automating, or has been bought out, the money is lost.

Back when most workers got jobs for life, fair or not, vesting might have at least had some justification as a way of securing employee loyalty and reducing turnover, but in today's economy, there is no such thing. Employers lay off workers at the drop of a hat, often just to avoid having to pay raises, companies shut down operations and shift them overseas without a thought of their workers, and workers, their wages battered, have to move from job to job just to get a better pay deal.

Making these two pension law changes alone would go a long way towards providing the old-age retirement security that Bush and the Republicans and conservative Democrats so anxious to “reform” Social Security claim they want, and at no cost to the government or the taxpayer.

Instead of playing footsie with Bush and the Republican Congress over the idea of some compromise on Social Security, Democrats should leave Social Security alone and push hard for legislation that would expand private pensions and end the legalized corporate theft called "vesting." It’s an issue the labor movement should get behind too--one that would benefit not just unionized workers, but all workers.

=================================

February 24, 2005

The Peace Movement Needs to be More Militant, But Don't Write Off the Democratic Party Entirely

First a mea culpa. I was one of those who, on this site, urged leftists, once John Kerry had won the Democratic nomination, to support his candidacy, albeit from an outspokenly critical stance. It was a stomach-churning exercise, and I'm still on a regimen of Tums trying to recover, but there it is.

My reasoning was that we are witnessing a threat to the country’s democratic system and traditional civil liberties--in the form of revocation of much of the Bill of Rights, manipulation and fraud in elections, and packing of the federal courts, as well as a general expansion of police state activity--that is so profound that even a waffling, sell-out conservative tool of corporate interests like Kerry would be better than continuation of the Bush neo-con cabal in the White House. In making this argument, I had in mind the historical failure of the left in Germany to unite in opposition to the rise of fascism there during the waning years of the Weimar Republic.

I still believe this is the correct analysis, that the danger of a neo-fascist America is real, and that the third-party approach of wholly rejecting the Democratic Party, advocated by some on the left, is incorrect. At the same time, I agree with Sharon Smith, who yesterday in Counterpunch criticized most of the anti-war movement for its passivity during the final months of the campaign, in the interest of electing the avowedly pro-war Kerry.

I never argued that the left and the anti-war movement should give Kerry a free pass (it was incredible that during the huge protest march in New York City against the RNC and the war on Aug. 29 last year, there was no organized criticism of Kerry and his pro-war views). Rather, I said he should be hammered all the way to Election Day for his reactionary positions--particularly his preposterous support of the war. That is what the peace movement, for the most part, failed to do, and it is why Kerry never had to move away from his pathetic, illogical and self-defeating call for even more troops in Iraq.

Now that the election is over, I agree with Smith all the more that the peace movement needs to adopt a more militant oppositional stance against not just the Iraq War but against the whole neocon imperialist adventure. I would go further and say that the left needs to take an independent, protest-based stance on all the major issues--Social Security, health care, labor rights, free trade, education, etc.

There is a tremendous, largely unexpressed and under-appreciated anti-corporate, anti-war sentiment in the country that has nowhere to turn politically, because of the cowardice and compromising of the Democratic Party, and the only way to tap into and develop that base is through militant organizing outside of that party.

After all, there was no opposition party with an anti-war position during the early years of the Indochina War. The Democrats were the War Party and controlled both the White House and the Congress, and the Republicans, then the opposition party in Congress, were also pro-war. The opposition at that time was all in the street. As that opposition grew, elements within the Democratic Party turned to it for support, leading first to the Eugene McCarthy campaign in 1968 and eventually to the presidential candidacy of George McGovern in 1972.

Looking towards the off-year congressional elections of 2006, I would argue that the peace movement, as well as the rest of the progressive, left movement, should unite in supporting, and even putting forward, primary candidates to challenge those Democrats facing re-election who are failing to oppose the war, or who are colluding with Republicans and the president in putting forward a reactionary domestic agenda.

No Democrats who are pro-war should get the support of the left in the general election in 2006, and in fact, at the level of congressional campaigns, third-party candidates should be supported when they are running against reactionary Democrats. At the same time, the left should be ready to support those Democratic candidates who are solidly anti-war, or who are solidly progressive on other key issues. (After all, even that brilliant revolutionary Mao Zedong, in the first essay in his Collected Works penned in 1926, begins by posing the rhetorical question, "Who are our enemies and who are our friends? This is the most important of revolutionary questions.")

==================================

February 23, 2005
If These Chickens Come Home to Roost, We're Dead Ducks

Talk about your roosting chickens!

While the U.S. government spends hundreds of billions of dollars on the much ballyhooed "War on Terror," creating vast secret intelligence networks, organizing a whole new government department, and reassigning resources and personnel from basic police work to anti-terror functions, while Interpol cooks up scare stories about Al Qaeda improbably developing sophisticated biological weapons that would allegedly be able to kill millions of people, nature is handing would be terrorists the ultimate weapon:

Sick chicks.

To cause the collapse of western economies and spread fear and panic among the populations of post-industrial societies--most notably America where the health system, especially for the poor and working poor, is in near collapse--all a terrorist has to do is to smuggle a bunch of flu-infected eggs from Vietnam or Thailand into the target nations, hatch out the chicks, and release them into commercial poultry farms.

The first result of this low-tech gem warfare would be a financial disaster for agricultural economies.

Then would come the inevitable health crisis, as the Asian bird flu first becomes endemic to Europe and North America, and then begins crossing the species barrier to mammals and ultimately to humans, as it is already starting to do in Asia.

The World Health Organization has been monitoring the bird flu crisis in Asia for several years now, watching as, with each new annual outbreak, it jumps more easily from bird to human. Over the past year, the H5N1 virus-based disease, which has a 72 percent fatality rate, has killed 45 people--apparently all of whom contracted the disease directly from exposure to chickens. This is a much higher number than a year ago, indicating that the virus is gradually mutating into forms that can make the jump from bird to mammal more easily. The real danger comes when a mutated version manages to infect a human and then become transmittable from human to human.

Because the bird flu virus is of a type that humans have not developed any immunity to, this development would likely lead to a pandemic, in which millions would die.

The recent corporate fiasco involving the failure to produce adequate flu vaccine for this current flu season should not make people sanguine about the likelihood of a competent response to such a crisis.

Instead of spending all those billions on the nightmare fantasies being hatched in the fevered minds of this administration’s neo-con cabal and their police apparatchiks, the U.S. should be spending whatever it takes to help the poor countries in Asia combat the disease there with medical help, farm development aid, and general economic aid.

The U.S. should also be diverting a big chunk of those squandered anti-terror dollars to reviving health care in poor regions and neighborhoods of America, where health clinics, hospital ERs and primary care physicians and pediatricians have all been vanishing, if they ever existed.

As a nurse who works in homeless shelters and county lockups in a large U.S. city writes, "I have been watching with horror the disintegration of the health care system in this country. Imagine this scenario: Nameless terrorist smuggles nasty disease (or bird flu if it becomes human to human transmissable) into slum area of New York, Los Angeles or any other large city. The inhabitants have no health insurance and no money for doctors, and would be very unlikely to seek medical care for what they think is just 'the flu'--at least not for three or four days. They also would probably continue to go to work as , if they have a job at all, don't probably don't get sick leave. I leave you to imagine the effect of someone with an airborne disease travelling and working in a densely populated inner city for as many days as they can until they collapse."

The real terrifying thing is that according to the WHO, a bird flu pandemic is likely to strike even without an assist from some egg-toting, globe-trotting extremist. The government's inattention to this global medical threat, and to the general health of the public, makes the country a sitting duck.
================================
February 19, 2005
Where are all the resignations of editors at local news outlets which ran Bush propaganda?

Okay, so we know now that the Bush administration has been using all kinds of devious means to push propaganda on the American public--fake news generated by the Pentagon for overseas, and ultimately, courtesy of blowback, U.S. consumption, fake news reports by fake reporters peddled to local TV stations, bought reporters and syndicated columnists paid to shill for the administration's policies, and even fake reporters salted into the White House press corps to ask puffball questions if the president or press secretary start getting too much heat.

But why is this all happening? Surely the Bush administration isn't the first to push its story out there. And sure, the administration should take some of the blame for this Soviet-style manipulation of public opinion.

But what about the media?

This column already made the point that if the White House press corps were doing its job and asking tough, probing questions, James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, would have stood out like a stallion with a hard-on--er, excuse me, a sore thumb.

But what about the "Karen and Mike Show," those fake "news reports" by fake reporters which were sent directly to local TV stations across the country by the DEA and the Department of Health and Human Services, where they were often aired without question as local reports on administration activities. Do local news shows have so little concern about the content and veracity of their programs that they would just run a report by a reporter they don’t even know without fact-checking it and checking on the credentials of the reporter? Of course not! They had to know that the reports they were broadcasting were from government agencies and were nothing but blatant propaganda. This is the video equivalent of publishing press releases verbatim.

And what self-respecting newspaper would do that?

Oops! Lots of newspapers do that--and not just government press releases. They publish corporate press releases verbatim, too. Just scan the business pages of the New York Times.

So where are the mass resignations of editors of the news outlets that ran the reports by "Karen Ryan" and "Mike Morris," or whoever they are, the journalistic poseurs from the Bush administration who fobbed off their television reports on the public? I haven't heard of a single firing or resignation.

Then, of course, there’s Fox TV, which hasn't met a government press release or calculated leak that it didn't believe and rush onto the air, unworried about its veracity. Nobody's resigning in disgrace from Fox. Why bother--the whole operation is a running disgrace. And CNN is not much better.

The real culprit in this massive propaganda scam, though, has to be the public, which seems to take little interest in actively evaluating the news it is being spoon-fed. Unlike people of the former Soviet Union, or of China, who developed a completely cynical view of the media in those two nations, and who long ago learned how to weed out the occasional truth from between the lines of lies and misrepresentations, the American public is almost completely passive and gullible, accepting the garbage that passes for news each day as the gospel truth.

At least the Soviet Union had its samizdat press, and China has its xiaodau xiaoxi (grapevine).

How do average, ordinary Americans get the truth?

Do we even want to hear it?
=====================================
February 17, 2005
Nominating a Liar and Killer to Head America's new KGB

The nomination by President George Bush of John Negroponte for the new post of director of national intelligence, in charge of overseeing all the burgeoning intelligence operations of the United States, is both obscene and predictable.

Negroponte, currently the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and, unofficially, the head of the U.S. occupation of that country, is a career foreign service officer on paper, but in fact a veteran CIA operative responsible for some of the agency's blackest crimes of murder and torture in Central America during that region's dark days of civil war, revolution and counter-revolution in the later part of the 20th Century.

As U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, Negroponte played a key role in organizing the military repression in that poorest of Latin American nations, and in creating and running the so-called Contras, the U.S-organized military operation to undermine and overthrow the elected Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

What makes Negroponte the perfect candidate to be America’s KGB chief is his refined cover. He has the Republicans on the Republican-dominated Intelligence Committee in his pocket anyhow, and as a career diplomat, urbane and fluent in five languages, he also appeals to the mushy national security state Democrats like John Rockefeller (D-W. VA), Evan Bayh (D-Indiana), Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), who will be asked to join in rubber-stamping his nomination. If his appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, during hearings on his nomination for the post of ambassador to Iraq is any indication, he will breeze through this next "test.' Democratic Senators Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Joseph Biden (D-Del.) gushed over him at those earlier hearings, and didn't ask anything about his role in promoting death squad activities or in covering up human rights abuses in Central America, which included the murders of several dozen priests and nuns.

Americans concerned about our vanishing civil liberties, and about the expanded use of official state terrorism against American citizens and resident aliens since 9/11 should be concerned about this appointment, however. The new intelligence chief will be responsible for overseeing the nation’s vast $100-billion spying operation and its ballooning, largely secret budget.

This man's record is worse than not encouraging--it's downright terrifying.

Negroponte deliberately falsified State Department human rights reports every year of his ambassadorship in Honduras. According to the Maryknoll Order, many U.S. missionaries and other religious activists were murdered in that country in the 1970s and especially the early 1980s by CIA-trained Honduran soldiers of the so-called Battalion 3-16, whose operations they claim Negroponte oversaw, or "at best overlooked."

Even The New York Times, which has rarely met a covert operation it didn't support, credits Negroponte with "carrying out the covert strategy of the Reagan administration to crush the Sandinista government in Nicaragua"--an effort which the paper fails to note was illegal, and which ultimately included the trading of guns for drugs on CIA-financed aircraft. Negroponte helped with this massively corrupt and illegal war effort of the Reagan administration even after it had been expressly banned by the U.S. Congress.

One would think that kind of insult to the Congress would elicit at least some opposition to Negroponte’s appointment, but not a word about it came up during his ambassadorship hearings (Sen. Dodd actually said, "I happen to feel he's a very fine Foreign Service officer and has done a tremendous job in many places."), and it seems unlikely he’ll be asked about it this time around.

Come to think of it, that's probably about the way members of the Communist Party Central Committee probably responded to each new appointment to head the U.S.S.R.'s intelligence apparatus...
==================================
February 16, 2005
Will Dean Make a Difference?

Does Howard Dean at the helm of the Democratic Party matter?

Most analysis and pundits, as well as many critics on the left, are saying no. First, as N.Y. Times columnist Paul Krugman pointed out (quoting that "muckraking" left-wing publication, Counterpunch), Dean is no progressive, and second, the party chairman is just a fund-raiser, with no power to set policy or direction.

In fact, however, Dean could make a difference, particularly on the issue of Social Security, and that could make a difference in the party's fortunes in next year's Congressional elections.

It seems clear that the Bush administration has overstepped badly in its attack on Social Security. The effort to scare young people with talk of the system going bankrupt has not worked. Even the tame corporate media have not bought this story for the most part. While they submissively adopt the administration's terminology, calling the president's demolition plan a "reform" effort, many news outlets have pointed out the falsehood of that bogus bankruptcy claim.

Now many Republican in Congress, faced with the prospect of going to the voters next year, are anxiously telling the president to back off, to slow down.

Where Dean comes in is in his instinct to be combative.

The reflexive Democratic response to every issue in recent years has been to seek compromise, to back off.

Social Security is no place for this to happen. As any general knows, with the Republicans in retreat, the Democrats need to go on the attack.

Democrats have their strongest issue in decades in the fight over Social Security and they should be going for the jugular on it.

They have a president who has squandered his credibility, first with his now fully exposed lies about Iraq, and now about his transparent lies regarding Social Security.

Meanwhile, Republicans as a party have been exposed as liars. For years, the GOP has cried foul saying the Democrats unfairly tried to frighten voters by saying that Republicans were out to weaken or destroy Social Security. They always insisted that they had no such intention.

Now that claim stands fully exposed. The Bush administration and the Republican majority in Congress clearly are on an ideological crusade aimed at gutting the retirement program and causing its collapse.

Dean needs to make that case, and to bring the party, and its elected officials with him. They need to make the argument that Democrats will not compromise on Social Security, and that they will not allow the president’s plan to peel younger workers off of the program with a promise of "private" investment accounts.

But they need to go further and make the point that only the return of a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress can insure against further, or future attacks on the system.

That's something that Dean should yell about. The louder the better.
=====================================

February 14, 2005 All the president's friends: A Riefenthal moment in Montgomery County, PA

I had a close encounter with the president last week--at least as close as someone of my political leanings and lacking James Guckert’s press pass can hope to get.

It felt a little like a Leni Riefenthal moment, scripted to the last detail.

The Man was coming to my neighborhood--the Montgomery County Community College gym just a few miles down the road from my house--to take his Social Security wrecking campaign to the people.

I had just covered a press conference by local activists protesting his planned divide-and-conquer strategy of offering private investment funds for the still young and foolish, and decided to swing by the college to see what was happening there.

Along the way, which turned out to be the route the president's motorcade was to take an hour or so later from the Willow Grove Naval Air Station to the college, the security was astonishing. Every police and emergency vehicle in the county seemed to have converged on this stretch of highway. Every driveway and intersection sported a vehicle blocking access. Bridges over the roadway each had what appeared to be a Secret Service SUV parked nearby, lights flashing.

This is clearly a popular fellow, this George W. Bush.

At the campus, I found a parking space near the gym and started walking towards a long line of people stretching back from the door.

At the end of the line were a cop car, one local police officer in uniform, and several very large young men in sports jackets. The cop looked diminutive and inconsequential next to them, and he wasn't doing anything. The young men were clearly in charge.

I approached them and they looked at me--dressed in jeans and bearded--skeptically, I thought.

"Do you have a ticket?" one of the big guys asked, unsmilingly.

"No. Where do I get one?" I replied.

"You can't. It's too late." Now there a smile.

"Where did you get them, before it was too late?" I asked him.

"Senator Santorum," he said, referring to Pennsylvania's junior and extremely right wing senator, Rick Santorum, who is up for re-election next year.

"How would I have known that?" I asked. "I don't recall reading any announcements in the media about how to get tickets for the president's visit."

"I don't know," the young man said. Now the smile was a kind of smirk.

"Pretty strange way for a president of all the people to behave, don't you think?" I asked. "I mean, don't presidents want to have people come to their speaking engagements?"

This time I got no answer.

"So who are you guys?" I asked them. "You don't look like Secret Service."

"We're from the Republican Party," one of them answered.

"The president's having the Republican Party handle security for his visit?" I think I sounded a little incredulous. I was. This was, after all, not a campaign appearance; the campaign ended back in early November. This was the president of the United States making a visit to my neighborhood, wasn't it? So what is the deal here? Saving money on security by having Republican goons do the security, like Hells Angels at a Stones event?

I revealed myself as a member of the press at that point, mentioning In These Times, a publication that had once issued me an identity card. They looked suspicious.

"The White House press officers are arriving with the president," I was told. "You can talk with them then about getting to cover the event."

I didn't have time for that, and was pretty sure I wouldn't have had any luck on such short notice anyhow, especially with no assignment letter in hand, and wearing a "No War in Iraq" T-Shirt under my parka.

The following day, the local media were full of stories about how the president, speaking to a full room of local residents, had warned about Social Security going "bankrupt" and about how those of us now over the age of 55 had "nothing to worry about" regarding our retirement.

There wasn't a word about how the adulating audience in that hall had been hand-selected by the office of one of the Senate's most hard Right members. My guess is that most of the people sent to cover the event didn't even think to ask how the crowd had been assembled.

No doubt the same thing was repeated across the country at the various venues where the president went to "sell" his "reform" program for Social Security.

Little wonder then that he's being allowed to get away with presenting this plan to wreck the system as its opposite--a plan to save it.

He only presents it to people who ideologically oppose Social Security, or who are too ill informed to know what he's up to.

There is something sick going on in this country, when the president has to be so hermetically sealed off from dissent, and when the media are so ready to help to protect him, and the rest of us, from reality.
======================================

February 10, 2005
Gannon or Guckert: No Wonder Nobody Noticed This Guy! He Fit Right In

The real question the public should be asking in l'Affaire "Jeff Gannon" is why it was so easy for a Republican shill posing under a false name (he's really James Guckert) as a journalist to last so long hiding out among the members of the legit White House press corps., and why it took bloggers to expose him.

The answer is that his puffball questioning of the president was not that different from the questions that are routinely asked by the mainstream reporters in that gaggle of fine suits and well-coifed hair.

Anyone who watched the press crew at the staged session back in 2003 when Bush announced his invasion of Iraq would have to agree that there is little difference between the reporters for our so-called Fourth Estate and this poseur. Instead of questions about why the U.S. would be invading a country that posed no threat and that had not attacked or threatened to attack America, and about how this enormous diversion of military resources would affect the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, reporters asked the president about his faith and family! Not only that--the legitimate press corps allowed the White House to decide in advance which reporters would get to ask questions, after first requiring them to submit their questions in writing. Uppity members of the group, including Helen Thomas, were forced to go to the back of the room behind the potted palms.

In a group of real reporters, Gannon would have stood out like a sore thumb, but there aren't too many real reporters operating in Washington these days.

As I.F. Stone explained many years ago, the culture of Washington is so much built around the party circuit and concepts of “access” that most big-league reporters end up being chums with the people whose feet they should be holding to the fire. (It's hard to look under rocks if you're standing on them sipping cocktails.)

Of course, Stone was talking about the press as it was in the early 1970s. Things have gotten much worse now. Back then you didn't have a network like Fox that is simply a PR organ for the administration, and many newspapers still were not media conglomerates more worried about their licensed TV holdings and their good relations with the Federal Communications Commission than with digging up the news.

What I keep wondering is why the Bush administration has gone to such incredible, unprecedented and unprincipled lengths to control the media spin. We now know that they hired at least three journalists under the table to write favorable articles about Bush education policy, Bush social policy and Bush war policy, and no doubt these three are just the tip of a huge iceberg. We know that they put out fake news reports which they managed to get aired on regular TV news programs as though they had been generated by a real news organization. We know that they at least tried to set up--and probably secretly have set up--a department of disinformation in the Pentagon to create and distribute fake news globally. And we know now too, that they inserted a shill into White House press briefings to manipulate the coverage of the president and his policies.

And yet they've been getting such airbrushed coverage ever since 9/11 from the mainstream press you have to wonder what they were worried about. Heck, most of the mainstream media haven't even reported on this latest outrage!

The other thing I keep wondering is why the public isn't up in arms about all this deception and fraud (all accomplished, I might add, at taxpayer expense). Just imagine, for a moment, if any one of these things had been done by the Clinton administration.
================================

February 8, 2005

Academic Freedom is Almost a Thing of the Past

Amid all the controversy over the observations of University of Colorado professor and leftist Indian political activist Ward Churchill concerning the military justifiability of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, it's easy to overlook the fact that freedom of academic expression on American university campuses is already virtually dead.

Churchill, who holds a tenured position at his university, is actually in an unusually strong position. With his tenure, the only way that the lynch mob out to fire him can get rid of him without facing a huge damage suit in court for breach of contract would be to prove a case of moral turpitude or dereliction of teaching duties or something equally heinous.

But for many teachers on American campuses--indeed for most teachers on some campuses and all at some--tenure is a thing of the past. Increasingly, universities large and small, famous and unknown, are turning to contract hires to do the teaching. These virtual professors are only offered "folding chairs" that carry a contract--one year, two years, three years, or maybe five years. At that point, they have to be renewed. They cannot be considered for tenure. Many other teachers are simply adjuncts, hired on a year-to-year or semester-to-semester basis to teach one or two classes. They have no contract at all to protect them.

Clearly, a person who has no job security has no freedom of expression. Such professors and adjuncts are no better off than the worker in a Wal-Mart or a General Electric factory--which means they have no more freedom of speech than a 12th century serf. They speak out at their own risk. If any adjunct or contract-hire teachers spoke out politically the way Churchill did and roused the wrath of the unwashed masses and the loofahed and lathered Bill O’Reilly, they'd be gone in a flash--if not the next day, then certainly at the end of the term.

At Temple University, a unionized urban institution here in Philadelphia, for instance (where teachers have been working almost half a year without a contract because of management intransigence and demands for givebacks in the area of faculty governance), increasing numbers of professors are working on a contract basis. At Alfred University, where I taught journalism for a year, tenure is a bad joke. Although awarded after a typically exacting process of peer review, it has to be renewed every five years following a new peer review, thus providing as much academic freedom protection as a felt body-armor vest.

There is no question that the lack of tenure makes for less outspokenness, iconoclasm and strength of conviction. I remember when I was working as an adjunct journalism instructor at Cornell University back in 1989, going to an assistant professor colleague who was on the tenure track, looking for support for a proposal I wanted to make regarding the department's minority students, whom I had found were having trouble with my and other teachers' coursework and were then being asked to leave the school, instead of being offered remedial or preparatory assistance. He said, "Oh, that's a controversy I can't get involved in until I get my tenure."

With the bloodhounds of the right getting into full McCarthy lynching mode these days, including organized groups of student yahoos who monitor their teachers' lectures and backed by a phalanx of right-wing media mouths ready to amplify any complaint about non-mainstream viewpoints expressed by teachers in or outside the classroom, the fight for academic freedom has become more than academic. Yet instead of working to strengthen this important and historic tradition not just of tenure but of the very culture of free expression on campus, administrators are caving in to political pressure and undermining both.

Ward Churchill is a fighter, and will go down slugging. Most academics, I'm afraid, will just shut up and become conventional thinkers.
=======================================

February 7, 2005

Time for a Labor-Oriented Daily Newspaper!

t's time for a labor-oriented daily newspaper.

As a long-time professional journalist and labor activist, I have watched from the inside for thirty years now the constriction of the media and of the flow of information to the public--information which is critical to the function of a democracy.

We have reached a point today that half the people in this virtual Land of the Free think that it was Iraqis who attacked the World Trade Center, when in fact not one Iraqi was among the suicidal terrorists on those planes, where half the people in America believe not only that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that the U.S. has found such weapons, when in fact there are none and were none, where half of American young people think that Social Security will be bankrupt before they reach retirement, where in fact no such thing will happen.

Important news is routinely blacked out or buried, while administration lies, such as Bush's latest whopper that "research" shows that children do better being raised in families where there is a mother and a father than in a gay household, or his much bigger whopper that the Social Security system is going "bankrupt," are simply run as fact, with no effort to evaluate their veracity,

I've been witness to this collapse of mainstream American journalism. When I broke a story (in Salon Magazine and Mother Jones) definitively proving that President Bush had a device hidden under his jacket during the three presidential debate--most likely a wireless hearing device (see below---it was because both the New York Times and the Washington Post, as well as the Los Angeles Times, had first rejected that story when it was brought to them by my source, a respected senior NASA photo analyst and astronomer.

When it comes to reporting on critical issues facing working people--the flight of jobs overseas, the security of the national retirement system, the destruction of the right to organize and join a union, declining job safety, environmental destruction, a safety net for the unemployed or underemployed--the situation is even worse. When the media do report on these topics, it is almost always from a management perspective. Attacks on Social Security are called "reform," just as the destruction of welfare was called "reform." The obvious mega-crisis of global warming is covered "even-handedly," giving know-nothing critics (including our president) equal billing with the overwhelming scientific community's warning of disaster as if it was commentary at a football game. As for covering workers' views during labor disputes--forget it. There is hardly a labor reporter left in America, so most labor stories are now covered by the business desk, which takes management's perspective as a given.

In such a situation, it is no wonder that organized labor is being left out in the cold politically. No wonder that most Americans don't even really know what a labor union is. No wonder that in many people's minds, unions are seen as little more than gangs, or at best as just "special interests."

Yet the union leadership continues to squander untold millions of dollars on publicity campaigns and publicity departments, trying to get its story told in this biased and uninterested media.

It's time to take at least some of that money and put it to much better use, by subsidizing the creation of an independent but pro-labor daily newspaper--a publication that would have its own reporters in Washington, D.C., New York, and key labor areas like Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and that would cover all the news in the country and the world from a perspective that takes working people and their viewpoints into account.

I propose that such a paper be published on-line, not on paper. Why? The cost of printing a newspaper, and of getting it delivered to millions of homes across the country, would be prohibitive, and the money would be better spend on having a crack staff of reporters and editors. These days, working families for the most part have computers and online access, so there's really no need for paper. An added advantage is that if the publication obtained a mass list of union members' email addresses, members could receive a brief news summary of the day’s headlines each morning as an alert message, with a link to the publication.

Having the seed money for such a daily news journal come from the labor movement would free the publication from the constraints that have sapped the will and integrity of the corporate press. A few million dollars might seem like a lot of money to the unions, but since the many millions more spent on publicity for the most part just go into media office wastebaskets, it’s really not a big new expense--just a shifting of funds to a much more productive use.

The key to the success of such a publication would be its independence. It would have to move way beyond the traditional captive labor media, and even be ready and able to write critically about the labor movement when necessary. If there were not this independence, the venture would be doomed from the start.

As an independent, labor-funded daily, however, it could compel a renewal of the competing national corporate media, which would be forced to change or be exposed as biased or worse--captive of conservative politicians and corporate interests.

I envision a newspaper that would be so relevant to American workers' lives, covering not just politics, economics and labor, but sports and entertainment too, that it would be read every day, replacing the daily paper in most households.

Imagine the difference such an aggressive and independent media voice might have made in the 2002 run-up to the disastrous invasion of Iraq or in the recent election, or the impact it would have on the coming battle over Social Security. Imagine the impact it would have on progressive organizing in general!

Some union movement people--rank-and-file and leaders and particularly activists within the International Labor Communications Association (ILCA)--are starting to look into the possibility of such a venture, but there is really no time, or need, to wait. Too much has been lost already because of the lack of an honest media in America.

It's time for a labor-oriented daily newspaper.
========================================

February 4, 2005

Killing a Story, Helping to Elect a Corrupt, Lying President

Almost as astonishing as the fact that President Bush cheated and wore a device--most likely a wireless magnetic induction hearing device--during his three presidential debate appearances--is the fact that the nation’s two leading newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post, failed to report the story in any serious way.

While both papers did mention the issue once it had appeared in Salon.com, the online magazine, both also treated it as a joke, an "internet conspiracy," which was the line put out by the White House and Bush/Cheney campaign in an intense campaign designed to keep the potentially explosive story from going anywhere.

Now, in an article in Extra! , the media criticism journal published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the inside story of the killing by senior editors of this important story about presidential cheating is exposed.

It all began when Robert Nelson, a leading astronomer and photographic analysis expert at NASA's Jed Propulsion Laboratory who works on the Cassini Saturn project, saw the early stories speculating about a curious "bulge" on Bush's back following the first presidential debate. Nelson decided, out of scientific curiosity, to snap a digital photo of the president's back from a video of the debate, and subject it to the same enhancement process that he routinely uses to enhance photos taken by NASA space probes--primarily enhanced edge definition and enhanced contrast. The results, available on Extra!'s website and also on my own website, This Can't Be Happening! , were dramatic. What looked like a curiously angular bulge in the video is seen clearly to be an elaborate back harness with a wire snaking up over the right shoulder.

Nelson, shocked at what he'd found, immediately tried to notify the media. He first went to two local papers where he had some connection--the Post-Gazette in Pittsburgh, PA, where he had gone to college, and the Star-News in Pasadena, home of JPL and Nelson himself. Neither paper would touch the story, so Nelson went to the Los Angeles Times. There, he says the paper diddled for four days and did nothing. Nelson went next to science writer William Broad at the New York Times, where at least initially he had better luck. Broad passed the story to two Times science writers, Andy Revkin and John Schwartz, who went out and reported further on it.

My own investigation, which included tracking down Revkin's and Schwartz's sources, showed that they had gone to scientists at Cornell (to confirm Nelson's reputation), the Bush campaign, and to spyware experts and makers of devices similar to what Nelson had found under the presidential jacket. It was a major story they developed and on the week before election day, it was ready to run--first on Tuesday, Oct. 26, and then, after being bumped by another Times investigation--the story about the unguarded cache of high-density explosives in Iraq--on Thursday, Oct. 28.

Then something happened. According to Times sources, on Wednesday evening, when the story was typeset and ready to go, senior editors killed it, claiming it was "too close" to the election. The Extra! article includes email messages to Nelson apologizing for the killing of the story.

While Times sources initially told a Village Voice media writer in December that there never was a story, and that Nelson had been consigned to the "nut pile" when he called, Times ombudsman Dan Okrent later, in an article on his website (but not published in the Times), confirmed that there had been a fully reported story done, but that it had been killed (though he claims simply that the story "did not make the cut" and "died a quiet unlamented death."

The real story is not as innocent as Okrent claims, though. Nor was the story's death so unlamented or quiet. In an email after the story was first bumped on Oct. 26, Schwartz wrote:

"Hey there, Dr. Nelson--this story is shaping up very nicely, but my editors have asked me to hold off for one day while they push through a few other stories that are ahead of us in line. I might be calling you again for more information, but I hope that you'll hold tight and not tell anyone else about this until we get a chance to get our story out there."

Later, on Sunday, Oct. 31, after I had run a story with Nelson’s evidence, along with his further photo analysis of pictures of the bulge from the later two debates, Schwartz wrote Nelson saying:

"Congratulations on getting the story into Salon. It's already all over the Web in every blog I've seen this morning. I'm sorry to have been a source of disappointment and frustration to you, but I'm very happy to see your story getting out there."

Even in Okrent's report, reporter Revkin takes a gutsy stand that the story was improperly killed, saying, "I can appreciate the broader factors weighing on the paper's top editors, particularly that close to the election. But personally, I think that Nelson's assertions did rise above the level of garden-variety speculation, mainly because of who he is. Here was a veteran government scientist, whose decades-long career revolves around interpreting imagery like features of Mars, who decided to say very publicly that, without reservation, he was convinced there was something under a president's jacket when the White House said there was nothing. He essentially put his hard-won reputation utterly on the line (not to mention his job) in doing so and certainly with little prospect that he might gain something as a result--except, as he put it, his preserved integrity.

He adds, in a dig at his own employer, "I'd certainly choose [Nelson's] opinion over that of a tailor." Referring to news reports, including one in the Times, that cited the man who makes the president’s suits (who at least initially supported the White House line that the bulge was a wrinkle and the result of bad tailoring), he says, "Hard to believe that so many in the media chose the tailor, even in coverage after the election."

But the Times was not the only paper to kill the story.

After its editors had axed the piece, Nelson, on Thursday, Oct. 28, got a call from Bob Woodward, asst. managing editor at the Washington Post. Nelson says the man who helped break the Watergate scandal that brought down Nixon’s presidency said he'd heard the Times had killed the story, and asked to see his photos. Woodward had them checked out for authenticity, but then called Nelson back saying that he would have to jump "through a lot of hoops to get this story published," and that it would take too long to do so before Election Day. Instead of going forward, he advised Nelson to go to me.

In the end, while Nelson's remarkable photos ran on the web site of Mother Jones online on Oct. 30, his dramatic evidence of Presidential cheating and lying and cover-ups never made it into the mainstream press--yet another dismal example of the cowardice and collapse of American journalism.

This cowardice and complicity in the face of White House power continues as both the Times and the Post, and the rest of the media, continue to ignore the important story of what was under the president's jacket, even after the poor excuse of an impending election no longer exists.

What effect publication of Nelson's evidence in a major media outlet like the New York Times five days ahead of the election might have had on the outcome of the ballotting is a subject for speculation, though the notion that such an expose could have swayed 60,000 votes in Ohio doesn't seem that unlikely. Surely, however, major evidence that the president cheated in the debates and then lied about it should be a matter of ongoing media concern as he moves into a second term pushing an agenda of continued wars abroad and dismantling of the Social Security system at home. Even if, as some have speculated, the device clearly shown in Nelson's photos mounted on his back through all three debates is something medical--an atrial defibrillator or a device to administer strong painkillers--the public has a right to know what's going on.

Yet all we hear from our much-touted but clearly overrated "free press" is silence.

The Extra! story seems to have struck a nerve at the nation’s newspaper or record. For an entertaining exchange between Times public editor Dan Okrent and Dave Lindorff, go to Extra! on line.
=========================================

Bush's back, Debate 1: A bad shirt, he told ABC!
bushwire3.jpg
The NASA scientist's photographs the NY times, LA Times and Washington Post didn't want you to see.

February 3, 2005

Weapons of Mass Distortion: The President's New Campaign of Lies

Social Security, the New Deal program that has provided a basic level of economic support for the nation's elderly, disabled and orphaned for 70 years, is in grave danger--not from Baby Boomers, but from a campaign of lies and fear-mongering, led by the president.

The truth? There is no Social Security crisis. None whatsoever.

Yet, in his State of the Union address Wednesday night, President Bush put the campaign to destroy Social Security and its promise of old-age and disability security front and center in his second-term agenda, claiming that the system founded in 1935 is headed for "bankruptcy" in 2042.

Like the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this was a flat-out, deliberate lie. First of all, even if the date were correct, all that would happen in 2042 would be that the trust fund used to pay out benefits to workers would be exhausted, but even then current workers taxes would continue to cover 73 percent of promised benefits to retirees. More importantly, that 2042 projection by the increasingly politicized Social Security Administration was just a conservative projection made a few years ago based upon unrealistically low estimates of future economic growth. It has already been pushed back by several years' good economic performance, and in fact, the Congressional Budget Office and most independent economists say that the trust fund should enable the system to cover all benefits through at least 2052 and perhaps on out through 2080 and beyond.

Not mentioned by the president or right-wing critics of Social Security is the fact that by 2045, the last of the Baby Boom generation will have already shuffled off this mortal coil, taking their outsized claims for benefits with them.

Given that there is no real crisis, the real unasked question is why the president, right-wing politicians and pundits, and corporate leaders and business organizations--and the media--are all calling for "reforms" to "save" the system.

The real reason for this urgency is that they understand that the Baby Boom generation, which is approaching retirement, does pose a crisis--not for Social Security, but for them and their political agenda.

Consider this: Just as there will be nearly twice as many elderly retirees collecting benefits when the wave of Americans born between 1945 and 1960 hits its retirement age peak (the first Boomers start retiring in 2011), there will also be twice as many elderly voters. And it gets better (or more terrifying, if you are a conservative politician or a corporate executive): while today's seniors came of age listening to Perry Como in the politically quiescent 1950s, tomorrow's retirees will be people who listened to Bob Dylan and the Beatles and cut their political teeth in the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

In a few years then, we can expect to see an unprecedentedly large senior lobby that knows how to organize politically, that knows how to do take it to the street, and that has demonstrated its ability to fight hard when its own interests are at stake (remember those struggles for the vote and against the draft and the Indochina War?). And once they near retirement, this powerful voting bloc will be seeing Social Security and Medicare as their number one political issue. If Social Security is already the "third rail" of electoral politics, not to be touched, in a few years, it will become the Molotov cocktail, exploding the political status quo.

Corporate America knows this. The people in the boardrooms and the conservative think tanks aren't worried about 2042. They don't think that long-term. (If they did, they wouldn't be so cavalier about the destruction of the environment and about global warming.) They're worried about 2010, because this new senior revolution is just around the corner.

They know that today, seniors and people over the age of 65, as powerful an electoral block as they are, represent only 17 percent of the voting age population of the country, while by 2025, when the bulk of Baby Boomers will be in the 65-80 age bracket, retirees will represent 25 percent of the voting-age population, an increase of 45 percent in their relative voting power. If those aged 55-64 are added in--a reasonable assumption, since people who reach 55 are starting to think about their retirement and tend to vote more in line with the interests of actual retirees--the elderly and near elderly will by then represent fully 40 percent of the electorate. That's a 40 percent increase over the 28.5 percent of the electorate this broader group represented in 2000.

Moreover, while the Right talks ominously of a generational conflict between older retirees collecting pensions and younger workers paying the taxes to cover them, in fact, those retirees are the parents of many of those workers (not everyone has children, but everyone has parents!). And how many people complain about the size of their parents' Social Security checks, or would really want to have to be personally responsible for taking care of their elderly parents' finances? There really is considerable support even among young workers, for a secure and generous retirement system, because people don't just vote their own interests; they vote their parents' and grandparents' interests, too.

That's why there is an increasingly panicky aspect to the efforts to destroy Social Security before the Baby Boomer population realizes where its real political interests lie. Social Security's opponents know if the program is effectively killed off before it becomes a core Boomer issue, it will be much harder to re-establish it.

The Right doesn't really have much time on this issue. It appears, to judge by the marketing folks at the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), which offers memberships to everyone turning 50, that somewhere in their mid-50s, people start to think seriously about retirement. Today's oldest Baby Boomers are just hitting that milestone now.

When today's Boomers really start to contemplate their retirement, the picture will not be pleasant. Property values--where many have placed their faith and their savings--are stagnating, not rising, and post-Enron, those 401K pensions that the middle class was all excited about a few years ago, have been treading water. Meanwhile companies are whittling away pension programs as fast as they can, eliminating "defined benefit" plans that paid benefits based upon set formulas in favor of plans that pay depending upon what employees contributed, and on how well the investment portfolio performed--even as those investments that have been made with workers' contributions have been languishing or shrinking in value (if they weren't being pilfered, as happened at Enron).

What's left? Social Security and Medicare. Given the sorry state of the private safety net, it's a safe bet that it won't be long before a movement springs up among the new elderly and near elderly not just to "rescue" Social Security, but to radically transform it into a true retirement program.

Tomorrow's senior lobby won't feel constrained by current law, which makes workers foot half the bill (we're talking about their own kids, after all!). We can thus expect to see more of the tax burden shifted onto employers. We can also expect to see future Congresses pressured into passing reforms that will remove the income cap on the Social Securities tax. (And here's something the president has not told people: if the cap on income subject to Social Security taxation, currently set at $90,000 in wages, were eliminated so all income was subject to the tax, there would be no shortfall in the trust fund--not in 2042, not in 2075, never.) We can also expect to see private pensions made fully portable, so that employers can't pocket years of contributions every time they let go workers before they are "vested." As well, we can probably also expect to see a movement to expand Medicare from a niggardly program that only barely covers the medical care of the elderly, to a full-fledged national healthcare program that covers everyone.

That is a scary vision for business and the Right, and it's why Bush is pushing to wreck the system now. If the president were to go before Congress and announce that the banking system was in grave danger, and that the FDIC insurance program could not really insure people's accounts, it would spark a run on the banks and destroy the banking system and the president would probably be impeached. And yet that is exactly what his dire warnings of a bankruptcy of Social Security in 2042 are trying to do--cause a political run on the system.

The president's proposed "solution"--private accounts for younger workers--is really nothing but a classic divide-and-conquer tactic. It doesn't solve the long-term problem, and by most accounts would probably worsen it by removing some contributions that would have helped build up the reserve fund. What it would do though is leave older workers stuck with the current system, while weaning younger workers away with a promise of easy money and a lower tax bite. Then, with fewer people dependent upon classic benefits, it would be politically easier for a future Congress to slash those benefits later, since younger workers with a private "nest egg" would be less affected.

It's time to see the president's attack for what it is: an attempt to destroy the most enduring legacy of the New Deal.
==================================

February 1, 2005

Bush Policymakers and Sycophantic Journalists Have Forgotten History's Lessons in Iraq

One thing that journalists and politicians have in common (besides an unhealthy desire to be noticed, that is) is a lack of any sense of history. A politician will typically advocate policies that have had disastrous results in the past, without even making the tiniest effort to examine those lessons. Journalists, for their part, tend to live in the present and simply act as though the past never existed.

And so we have Iraq today.

The president invaded that country without cause, believing he could win a signal victory on the cheap and remake the politics of the Middle East overnight, though even a cursory examination of the history of that region, and of Western efforts to control it, would have shown the scheme to be doomed. Never mind. Bush thinks he's different.

Journalists, meanwhile, write of the American war and occupation in Iraq as though it is the first time the U.S. has engaged in such an imperial project. The phrase "winning hearts and minds" trips off their keyboards, though it was also the mantra of Pentagon during the Vietnam War too, and though the security situation in Iraq is so bad none of them dare leave the safety of their hotels or the heavily guarded and walled-off Green Zone without the protection of American troops.

The latest evidence of this shared ahistoric affliction is the election in Iraq, which Bush, after first trying to block, finally caved in to, and then has tried to claim as his own idea. The mainstream corporate media have slavishly followed the official line, calling the 60 percent turnout of Iraqis a "victory" for Bush, though most people apparently had no idea whom they were voting for (the names were kept off the lists for fear candidates would be targeted and offed by the insurgency), there was no public campaigning, and the winners--the Shiite Parties--are hardly friendly to America. (and though many, apparently, voted fearing that if they didn't they would not receive their food rations.)

Now a blogger at the Daily Kos has dug up a bit of history that should shake up both the political and the journalistic set in Washington and New York. It's an article from The New York Times dated September 4, 1967.

The headline: "U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote: Officials Cite 83% Turnout Despite Vietcong Terror"

Sound familiar? The story under that headline is also hauntingly contemporary. Written by Timesman Peter Grose, it says:

"United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

"According to reports from Saigon, 83 per cent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.

"Pending more detailed reports, neither the State Department nor the White House would comment on the balloting or the victory of the military candidates, Lieut. Gen. Nguyen Van Thieu, who was running for president, and Premier Nguyen Cao Ky, the candidate for vice president.

"A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson's policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam. The election was the culmination of a constitutional development that began in January 1966, to which President Johnson gave his personal commitment when he met Premier Ky and General Thieu, the chief of state, in Honolulu in February.

"The purpose of the voting was to give legitimacy to the Saigon Government, which has been founded only on coups and power plays since November, 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown by a military junta [sic]."

So now we have an election of sorts in Iraq that is being touted as "successful" and a victory over "terrorist" forces, conferring "legitimacy" on a government that to date has been founded on war and the violent overthrow of an existing government, and that, like the string of governments that succeeded the CIA-overthrow of Diem in Vietnam, is a puppet of the U.S. occupiers.

Of course, only some four months after The Times article was published, those "Viet Cong terrorists" began their famous Tet offensive, overrunning much of Saigon, capturing the old imperial capital of Hue, and setting in motion the forces that would lead finally to American defeat and withdrawal from Vietnam. President Johnson, facing a revolt in his party, abandoned plans to seek re-election.

Grose's naïve and fawning report looks pretty silly today. I suspect that the even more obsequious reports on the Iraqi election in the U.S. media will look at least as silly a few months or years from now.

But then, by that time, no one will remember. The politicians, and the journalists who follow in their wake, will have moved on.
==================================

Jan. 29, 2005

Chertoff buried early evidence of Bush's torture campaign in Afghanistan

(From an article of mine, Chertoff and Torture appearing in the Feb. 14 issue of The Nation magazine. )

Back on Friday, June 12, 2002, the Defense Department had a big problem: Its new policy on torture of captives in the "war on terror" was about to be exposed. John Walker Lindh, the young Californian captured in Afghanistan in December 2001 and touted by John Ashcroft as an "American Taliban," was scheduled to take the stand the following Monday in an evidence suppression hearing regarding a confession he had signed. There he would tell, under oath, about how he signed the document only after being tortured for days by US soldiers. Federal District Judge T.S. Ellis had already said he was likely to allow Lindh, at trial, to put on the stand military officers and even Guantánamo detainees who were witnesses to or participants in his alleged abuse.

The Defense Department, which we now know had in late 2001 begun a secret, presidentially approved program of torture of Afghan and Al Qaeda captives at Bagram Air Base and other locations, had made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted the suppression hearing blocked. American torture at that point was still just a troubling rumor, and the Bush Administration clearly wanted to keep it that way. Accordingly,

Michael Chertoff, who as head of the Justice Department's criminal division was overseeing all the department's terrorism prosecutions, had his prosecution team offer a deal. All the serious charges against Lindh--terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc.--would be dropped and he could plead guilty just to the technical charges of "providing assistance" to an "enemy of the U.S." and of "carrying a weapon." Lindh, whose attorneys dreaded his facing trial in one of the most conservative court districts in the country on the first anniversary of 9/11, had to accept a stiff twenty-year sentence, but that was half what he faced if convicted on those two minor charges alone.

But Chertoff went further, according to one of Lindh's attorneys, George Harris. Chertoff (now an appeals court judge in New Jersey) demanded--reportedly at Defense Department insistence, according to what defense attorneys were told--that Lindh sign a statement swearing he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his US captors and waiving any future right to claim mistreatment or torture. Further, Chertoff attached a "special administrative measure," essentially a gag order, barring Lindh from talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.

At the time, few paid attention to this peculiar silencing of Lindh. In retrospect, though, it seems clear that the man coasting toward confirmation as Secretary of Homeland Security effectively prevented early exposure of the Bush/Rumsfeld/Gonzales policy of torture, which we now know began in Afghanistan and later "migrated" to Guantánamo and eventually to Iraq. So anxious was Chertoff to avoid exposure in court of Lindh's torture--which included keeping the seriously wounded and untreated Lindh, who was malnourished and dehydrated, blindfolded and duct-taped to a stretcher for days in an unheated and unlit shipping container, and repeatedly threatening him with death--that defense lawyers say he made the deal a limited-time offer. "It was good only if we accepted it before the suppression hearing," says Harris. "They said if the hearing occurred, all deals were off." He adds, "Chertoff himself was clearly the person at Justice to whom the line prosecutors were reporting. He was directing the whole plea agreement process, and there was at least one phone call involving him."

"It is outrageous that Chertoff didn't allow testimony about Lindh's torture by American forces to come out," says Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. "It is off the charts in terms of morality, and it should definitely be a line of questioning at Chertoff's confirmation hearing: What did he know about Lindh's treatment in Afghanistan, and why did he go to such lengths to silence him about it?" But that might never happen at Chertoff's (as yet unscheduled) hearing, since the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Joe Lieberman, has endorsed the nomination.

Chertoff's judicial office is referring all inquires to the White House press office. Calls there and to the Justice Department, asking for comment, were not returned.

Ratner says Chertoff's role in the Lindh trial could well have contributed to the torture scandal that has so undermined the US effort to win over Iraqis following the invasion of their country. "Had testimony from witnesses under oath about Lindh's torture come out in court in 2002, we might have learned about the government's torture program earlier, and we might not have had Abu Ghraib and other torture scandals," he says.
================================

January 28, 2005
Deadly Idiocy: Killing People Who Want to Die Anyway

You really know the state killers have lost it when they call for the death penalty for someone who was just trying to kill himself in the first place.

That's what prosecutors are doing in the case of Juan Manuel Alvarez, the 25-year-old Californian who apparently parked his SUV on the tracks of a Los Angeles commuter train line earlier this week in order to commit suicide.

Alvarez, according to news reports, lost his nerve and left the vehicle as the train approached, and escaped injury, but the resulting crash, which derailed the train, ended up killing 11 riders and injuring many others.

Death penalty aficionados, including L.A. County’s vote-hungry District Attorney, see killing Alvarez as the logical punishment for his horrible misdeed. Under the Old Testament eye-for-an-eye logic of state killers in this great Christian Nation, it's kill and be killed.

But what exactly is the punishment when you kill someone who was trying to do that to himself anyway? If anything, after causing so much suffering and pain and loss of life, Alvarez probably wants to die more than he did before the tragedy. In any event, he certainly wanted to die badly enough to try to do himself in. All the state will accomplish by injecting him with their deadly cocktail of toxins at the end of a high-profile legal process and millions of dollars in legal costs will be helping him to do what he didn't have the courage to do himself.

Hurray for the death penalty!

In fact, many of the nearly 4000 people currently on death row are there because they wanted, after a fashion, to die.

For all the right-wing blather about how without a death penalty, some killers will eventually return to society to kill again, it is arguable that more people have been slain and will be slain because the death penalty tempts weak-willed people to kill as a way of ensuring that they themselves will be punished with death.

Leaving aside whether it is even right to punish—particularly to punish with death-- someone who is so whacked out that he tries to kill himself by parking in front of a moving train, what point is there in killing him for doing it? What he really needs is psychiatric help.

Naturally, someone who commits such a crime, causing even if unintentionally, the deaths of nearly a dozen innocent people, needs to face consequences of some kind. And society needs to be protected from a person capable of such an outrage. That's what prison confinement should be for.

But killing him, while certainly protecting society from any future idiocies by Mr. Alvarez, may well encourage more such kamakazi acts by other disturbed individuals like him.

Far better to lock Mr. Alvarez away for a long time, so that others of a similar mind may ponder the idea of spending years behind bars, without so much as a rope to hang themselves with.

That's unlikely to satisfy the bloodlust of the death penalty crowd, but it sure makes a lot more sense, all things considered.

PS:

The nasty truth is that prosecutors, while craven, are not stupid. Like Philadelphia's D.A. Lynn Abraham, who nearly always opts for the death penalty in murder cases, they know that by asking for death at the outset of a case, even when they know they haven't got a chance of getting a death sentence, they get a much more pro-prosecution jury because they can screen off all those who express qualms about voting for death. And if that's true, then the corollary is also true: people on death row were put there by the least reliable and most biased trials possible--exactly the opposite of what should be happening. But that's another story for another column. To read more about it go to: The Death Penalty’s Other Victims (Salon magazine, Jan. 2, 2001)

================================
January 27, 2005
Bush secret journalistic payroll keeps getting longer

It should be obvious now that the two syndicated right-wing columnists exposed as paid shills for the Bush administration are really just the tip of a grimy iceberg.

With the admission by Armstrong Williams that he had pocketed a cool $240,000 from the "Education" Department to pimp in his columns for the Bush's "No Child Left Behind" program, and by Maggie Gallagher that she'd taken $21,500 from Health and Human Services to pimp for Bush's "support for marriage" initiative (sexism is alive and well in the Bush White House when it comes to bribes), comes word that the administration spent a whopping $88 million in 2004 on PR for its various schemes, up 33% over last year.

That's our money.

The likelihood is that there's plenty more tainted cash that went to shameless hacks like Williams and Gallagher, though.

The irony in all this is that so much of the corporate media these days is pimping for Bush anyway. Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) has documented how ABC and NBC have skewed their coverage of the alleged Social Security "crisis" by implying that the bankruptcy predicted by Bush is a universally accepted reality, when in fact it is only a deliberately scary and wildly improbable scenario.

The coverage of the war in Iraq, which is going from bad to worse but which keeps getting positive coverage on all the networks and in the press, with wounded and killed Americans and U.S.-brutalized Iraqis kept carefully and deliberately out of view, could have been scripted at the White House.

Of course, maybe there are key players in all the editorial offices of these institutions, steering their coverage in a pro-Bush direction in return for some under-the-table cash, but this seems unlikely. More probably, the media are behaving like administration PR outfits because it's easy, it's safe, and it's cheap--and because shilling wins valuable points that can be cashed in during regulatory issues, as when newspapers seek permission to buy a TV station in their own circulation area.

Still, there is something almost smutty about well-fed people like Williams and Gallagher taking money in return for writing positive stories for the president. There should be some kind of intellectual STD that you contract for performing that kind of obscene act--something that causes warts to appear on the eyelids and the tips of the fingers or something.

Gallagher said she would have told her readers about her check, but she "didn’t remember."

Personally, I'd have a hard time in my income bracket "forgetting" a check for $21,500. I suspect that that is the case for most hard-working scribes, though maybe not for the coiffed airheads that grace the little screen, or for the people whose faces appear in thumbnails next to their verbiage on editorial pages across the nation. (I wonder if she "forgot" to include it on her income tax return...)

Bush has called on his cabinet officers not to buy good press, though he has not called on them to come clean and report on the good press they've no doubt already bought. This is a bit like his telling the military not to torture after first authorizing a program of torture.

You can almost see the wink as he says it.

What this saga says about the Bush administration is that it knows it's pulling a fast one on the American public--on taxes, on the war, on Social Security, on education "reform," on health care. You name it. Bush and his gang have so little confidence in the inherent merits of their programs and plans that they have to pay people in the media to give them the proper propagandistic spin.

Just one more reason for Americans to doubt what they're reading, seeing and hearing about this most staggeringly corrupt and power-hungry administration.

====================================

January 25, 2005
Surprise, surprise! America's puppet regime in Iraq is acting just like Saddam

One thing you can pretty much count on. When the U.S. charges in with guns blazing and bombs blowing up with the promise of "bringing democracy" to some benighted and oppressed people, the end result will be a corrupt and barbaric regime not much better, and maybe worse, than the old one.

This was certainly so in Vietnam, where one dictatorship after another was set up under American authority, each with its own new style of viciousness and corruption. It was true in Korea, where the U.S., after fending off North Korea, underwrote and supported a string of vicious tyrants. It is proving to be so in Haiti, where a gangster regime has been installed by U.S. troops.

So why the surprise that the regime set up in Iraq, soon to be validated with a fraudulent election (the world's first secret election where voters don't know whom they are voting for because the candidates, especially those backed by the U.S., dare not give out their names or speak in public of their "platforms") is proving to be every bit as vicious as the old (one-time U.S-backed) regime of Saddam Hussein?

The U.S. military and the corrupt and smugly colonial administration of L. Paul Bremer set the tone early on, with brutal torture of captured Iraqi insurgent fighters and the casual slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians, including huge numbers of women and children (called "collateral damage by U.S. authorities).

Now we learn from Human Rights Watch that the interim U.S. puppet regime of Iyad Allawi is practicing all those Saddamite methods of torture itself on those the regime opposes. We've got reports of people being "routinely" hung by the wrists on meat hooks, shocked on the genitals with electrodes and beaten in torture chambers by people who are actually the very same guys who were working there beforein the employ of Saddam himself.

Human Rights Watch says these tender mercies are being practiced not just on Iraqi insurgents (most of whom are probably simply shot when captured), but on "political enemies" of the regime.

Abu Ghraib prison, built originally by Saddam's regime for use as a torture center, and later used by the U.S. military and CIA for the same purpose, is now reportedly back in business under the aegis of the Allawi regime.

No comment from that great purported exporter of democracy, George Bush, or from that great prophet of democratic renewal in the Middle East, Paul Wolfowitz. No promise to investigate this ugly contradiction coming just five days after the president's lofty inaugural claim that America has been called upon by the Almighty to "end tyranny" in the world.

Surely, if our 120,000 troops and hundreds of billions of dollars in weaponry in Iraq cannot end tyranny in that country, we are unlikely to end it anywhere.

But of course, like everything else this administration does, the claim to be promoting democracy is nothing but a lot of words, masking an ugly reality.

The real truth? Those Iraqi torturers have been trained by American forces. Heck, they're almost certainly even using U.S.-supplied, U.S. taxpayer-financed torture equipment. (Taser Corp., helping to reduce America's ballooning trade deficit, one jolt at a time.)

They're just doing what the Pentagon and CIA, and Don Rumsfeld's new secret intelligence unit want them to do, namely: crush all opposition to America's hand-picked, puppet rulers in Iraq.

None of this will surprise the people of the rest of the world, who have long known that America is no tribune of freedom.

The question is, when will the American people themselves stop believing this malarkey, and recognize what their sons and daughters are being asked to die for?

===================================

John L. Hess
hess.jpg
1917-2005

January 21, 2005

John L Hess (1917-2005): Journalism Takes a Big Hit

American journalism lost one of its finest practitioners, The New York Times lost its conscience, and I lost a good friend and mentor last night with the death of John L. Hess, who died in his sleep at the age of 87.

John, who only recently finished a devastating and entertaining book on his years at the New York Times (My Times: A Memoir of Dissent), worked right up to the end, reading incisive and wryly witty columns on WBAI, and filing equally important commentaries on national and global events on his own website “John L Hess: Dissents”. His last piece on the site, "Let Them Eat Sushi," lambasted a Times restaurant critic for swooning over the $500 sushi plate at a new sushi joint in the city, which he awarded four stars, noting that the same critic had also swooned, in a budget eating column, about the $25 sushi of another restaurant, which he gave no star to. "One might say that the stars are based on price more than on the quality of the food," Hess wrote archly. Typically, he also noted that the restaurant that charges $500 for a plate of raw fish pays less for a week's work to its dishwashers.

His penultimate blog column, dated Dec. 28, "Uncle Scrooge," was about the Tsunami disaster: "I can’t get over it. We tell the wealthier countries of the world to chip in billions for the victims of this catastrophe, and then we toss three million into the kitty. No doubt we'll shell out a bit more, but don’t hold your breath. It's not high on our national agenda. Leaders of both parties are visible on our TV screens with their hands out -- but it's relief from taxes that they’re asking--or more federal spending in their own district. Call us Uncle Skinflint."

John was the kind of journalist you rarely see any more--intensely committed to his craft, both as reporter and writer, and as human being. He had no interest in promotions and power--remaining a reporter all his career and shunning the chance for a private office that comes with toadying and senior editorship. He was always willing to push for the truth--a habit that ended up getting him put onto beats that were meant, probably, to drive him away. Instead, as when John was put on the food beat by his bosses at the Times, he turned exile into opportunity, going after the corruption and inanity that are endemic in the New York restaurant and restaurant reviewing complex.

As an investigative reporter, John was nothing short of exemplary. Less of a self-promoter than his Gotham contemporaries, Jimmy Breslin and the late Jack Newfield, his expose of New York State's nursing home scandals stands today as a model of what an aggressive and uncompromising Fourth Estate can do if it wants to, and is easily the equal in importance to anything they or other great journalists have done.

Not content to simply report on misdeeds and corruption, John was an activist journalist, as demonstrated by one of his proudest journalistic accomplishments--the key role he played in getting New York to allow for farmers' markets in public spaces, so that the city's urbanites and the region's many small farmers could establish a direct economic and nutritional link free of the corporate intermediary of supermarkets and wholsale distributors.

While his writing could be caustic, John in person was a warm and gentle human being with a marvelous sense of humor.

Once, when I lived in Hong Kong, back in the early 1990's, John passed through on a trip back from Vietnam, where he had gone with his photographer daughter. He was anxious to see China, and I offered to take him for a short hop into Guangdong for an overnight stay in Guangzhou.

While there we made a quick runout into the countryside so he could see how peasants were living in the new "get rich quick" era after Deng Xiao-ping's decision to promote entrepreneurialism, and then that night, went to a night club to see what the new rich were doing. Typically, John wanted to meet the rock band that performed that evening. We went with them back to their apartment, and got to learn a bit about the rock counterculture flourishing in the wake of all the new money pouring into such clubs.

The next day, we headed back by train to Hong Kong. As it happened, I saw our train would stop right at the station near my apartment, so I suggested that we disembark there and go to my flat for a meal and to meet my wife, Joyce and daughter Ariel, before taking John to his downtown hotel in Kowloon. He agreed.

Unfortunately, we had no phone and we were already on the train, so I had no chance to notify my wife of this change in plans. Bad idea.

When we arrived at the door, the house was a mess.

My young daughter, nine at the time, was in her underwear (it was summer, hot and muggy), newspapers were all over the floor, and she was about to cook dinner. As it happened, my wife had decided to let Ariel plan, shop for, and cook dinner that night. Her menu of choice--chicken tenders, snow peas, bamboo shoots and noodles.

John was a gentleman about the intrusion. He apologized for the surprise visit, ignored Ariel to spare her embarrassment, and waited patiently for the feast.

After dressing more appropriately, Ariel proceeded to sauté the chicken with the snow peas, and to separately steam the bamboo shoots and cook the noodles.

She delivered the plates to the table and we sat down to eat.

John, a true epicure of the first order and the bane of pretentious cooks everywhere, asked his young hostess how she'd done the "splendid" chicken. "I cooked them in their own juices," my daughter replied proudly.

"Precisely right!" John exclaimed, "and marvelously done! And what are these?" He lifted a pointed bamboo stalk with his chopsticks.

"Young bamboo stalks," my daughter said.

John inquired how she had shopped for them, and when she said she had selected them individually at the local wet market, asked her what the criterion was.

"They have to be young and fresh," was the answer.

"That explains why they are so tender," he told her. "And what are these?" He pointed to the noodles piled on the plate.

"Space noodles," my daughter informed him seriously.

Without missing a beat, the former New York Times food critic said, "A perfect complement to a delightful entrée!"
=======================================

January 19, 2005

Bush's Scheme is a Classic Divide-and-Conquer Attack on Social Security

You wouldn't know it from reading or watching the mainstream media, but the campaign to destroy Social Security is been begun.

President Bush, in his second inauguration speech Thursday, will lay out what he is calling a "reform" of the system, designed to "rescue it" from "bankruptcy." This man, who himself will be collecting a cool guaranteed $200,000 a year for life (plus gold-plated health benefits) after just eight years of work in the White House, will soothingly describe his "reform" as leaving retirees and those nearing retirement with the same system they are used to, while giving young workers the chance to "own" some of their retirement tax contributions.

The corporate media--no friend of a system that currently requires them to pay 6.2 percent of their payroll into the Social Security system themselves, which for some is the only tax they have to pay anymore, thanks to Bush corporate tax giveaways--has latched uncritically onto the Bush vocabulary of "ownership society" and "reform."

Don't believe a word of it. This isn't reform. It is a classic divide-and-conquer scheme by the Right designed to destroy Social Security while it still has a chance to do it. (Once the Baby Boom generation begins retiring in 2011, they will be far too powerful a political force in defense of adequate retirement funding for any Congress to weaken the system.)

If Bush can convince a Congress dominated by Republicans and their timid "moderate" Democrat allies to approve his devious scheme, those under 50, or perhaps 55, will be given the option of taking some $1-2000 of their Social Security tax each year and placing it in an investment account. That money, Bush and his backers claim, would grow faster than the money in the Social Security Trust Fund. Of course, there's no promise of this happening. Nor does he talk about the fact that these private investment funds, like 401K funds, will be handled by Wall Street brokerage houses, which will be charging huge fees to churn those investments. In England, where the same idea was tried, retirees are now discovering that all the brokerage fees ended up eating up their profits, leaving them worse off than if they'd stuck with the old system.

Meanwhile, the older folks, who remain in the current system, will find that their benefit payments, which for decades have been funded by current workers' contributions, are under mounting pressure to be cut. Why? Because all those hundreds of billions of dollars that younger workers take out of the tax stream to invest in their private accounts, which would have been supporting current and future retirees, will have been removed, leaving the trust fund as much as two trillion dollars in the hole by 2020.

At that point, Congress will have a much easier time cutting benefits to seniors because it will only be a portion of the elderly who will be seeing their monthly checks reduced, not everyone. Those who are in the private plan--which over the years will no doubt have been expanded to allow even larger shares of the Social Security tax to be diverted--will not be impacted.

Later, when those with the private plans start to retire, and discover that their "ownership society" nest eggs are not going to hatch, it will be their turn to suffer. There will be no mass support for their crisis, since older retirees, who normally could be expected to rally to support the retirement system in a crisis, will not be affected by the private funds shortfall.

It's all part of a massive, wide-front assault on workers, who are also seeing their pensions terminated by artificial bankruptcies, such as those now being filed by the airlines. Managements are discovering that they can go into the increasingly right wing and sympathetic federal courts and win judgments abrogating their union agreements and terminating their pensions. In non-union companies, pensions are being downgraded or simply eliminated, all in the name of global competitiveness.

President Bush and his gang of neo-con wreckers already lied the country into an endless war with no point and no exit in Iraq, pretending the country was threatened by "weapons of mass destruction" that were a fiction. Now they are trying to destroy our old-age security by lying that the Social Security system is facing insolvency. It's not, any more than Iraq under Saddam Hussein was a threat to American security.

If Americans don't wake up soon, we'll be right back to 1930, when reaching retirement for most people meant sinking into a life of Dickensian poverty and despair, or going hat-in-hand to already financially strapped children for help.

========================================

January 16, 2005

New York Times Iraq Death Chart Omits Biggest Slaughter: Civilian Victims of U.S. Military

A horrifying chart and map on the opinion page of Sunday's New York Times graphically displays the carnage caused by the ongoing U.S. war in Iraq. Over a 14-day period during the first two weeks of the new year, Brookings Institution senior research assistant Adriana Lins de Albuquerque shows that 202 people died "as a result of the insurgency."

But the chart is deceptive, leaving out at least as much as it puts in.

First of all, and most importantly, as Lins de Albuquerque notes in her brief explanation, the chart doesn't give any information about the number of Iraqi insurgents killed by U.S. forces over the same period, nor does it give figures for Iraqi civilians "accidentally killed by coalition forces."

As she explains, "because of the limits placed on reporters," such information is not available (she fails to mention that also left out are the numbers of people killed by Iraqi troops and police).

In fact, we know from reports by the U.S.-backed government in Iraq that the U.S. has been "accidentally" killing Iraqi civilians at a prodigious rate--a rate both higher than the rate they are being killed by insurgents and higher than the rate that the U.S. forces have been killing insurgents. If that report, released late last fall, is correct, then a chart displaying the victims of U.S.-led forces would be larger even than the one developed by Ms. Lins de Albuquerque.

If those ratios are correct, the U.S. is probably also killing more civilians on average than the 38 percent or total deaths (76 civilians in the first two weeks of January) caused by the insurgency. For all the media focus on the viciousness of the insurgents, it would appear that they are being much more effective and selective in their attacks--killing primarily Iraqi troops, Iraqi police, and U.S. and "coalition" troops--than is the U.S.

Of course, most of the civilians killed by U.S. and "coalition" forces are killed "accidentally" only by the most strained definition of the term. The truth is that American aircraft are dropping bombs, including anti-personnel weapons and, reportedly, napalm, as well as 500 and 1000 lb. explosives once known in the trade as "block busters," on urban targets all the time. Occasionally one of these weapons will be reported as having hit the wrong target, but even when they hit the right target, it"s safe to say that the so-called "collateral damage" is widespread and horrific.

In addition, there are the helicopter and fixed-wing gunships, which are designed to completely saturate wide areas with deadly fire, killing every living thing in those "dead zones" with projectiles that penetrate even concrete walls. When civilians die at the hands of these genuine weapons of mass destruction, their demise can hardly be termed "accidental."

Little wonder that the Iraqi government report found that a third of U.S.-caused casualties are children under the age of 14.

Finally, U.S. ground troops themselves are popping off civilians at a scandalous rate, thanks to a "spray and pray" policy of firing off everything they've got in a 360-degree radius whenever they come under enemy fire. Little wonder that reporters in Iraq are at least as afraid of being killed "accidentally" by American forces as they are of being attacked by insurgents or of hitting an errant roadside bomb.

Little wonder also that U.S. military authorities have a policy of not reporting civilian or insurgent death totals. The grisly details of their campaign of slaughter would not be popular either in the Middle East or here at home.

Or at the New York Times, where printing such a chart would have taken up not just the entire opinion page, but the whole editorial page, too.

=======================================

January 12, 2005

Past Time for an Accounting of This Massive Fraud

The great thing about being George W. Bush is never having to say you're sorry.

Several hundred billion dollars down the tubes in Iraq in a war that was started on the trumped up claim that Saddam Hussein had been building and stockpiling "weapons of mass destruction," and several hundred millions of secret dollars spent belatedly trying to find a hint of such weapons, all for naught.

Not only are there no such weapons, the few efforts that did exist to try to make something nasty having been dismantled by 1991, but the Iraqi scientists arrested by invading American troops, and held incommunicado for as long as two years now have been found to have been innocent of any wrongdoing.

In fact, some of the leaders of the so-called Iraq Survey Group charged with finding WMDs in Iraq have been calling on the Pentagon to release those scientists, who include Gen. Amir Saadi, who had been a liaison between the Hussein government and U.N. arms inspectors, Rihab Taha, the biologist American reporters breathlessly referred to as "Dr. Germ" for his alleged work years ago with germ weapon research, and Huda Amash, who was similarly, if somewhat sexistly, awarded the moniker "Mrs. Anthrax." ISG officials say they have cleared all three of involvement in any illegal WMD work for Hussein over the past decade or more, and add that they have been cooperating with investigators.

They shouldn't hold their breaths waiting for release, however. The Pentagon appears bent on keeping them in captivity indefinitely, as it is doing with most of the detainees at Guantanamo and other secret holding pens.

We shouldn't hold our breaths either for an honest accounting of what the ISG did and what it learned about the imaginary WMDs that were the causus belli of this ugly, bloody conflict in Iraq. The Bush administration and the Pentagon, clearly massively embarrassed by the failure to turn up even a shred of evidence of WMDs after two years of searching, are sealing the ISG's records, and are not giving any account of the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars wasted in what was clearly a frantic political effort to find expost facto justification for an illegal war.

We're supposedly "building democracy" in Iraq, but meanwhile we're deconstructing it here at home, where the areas that the public has a right to know about are being shrunk by the day.

In the name of those non-existing WMDs, American soldiers continue to die at a rate of two or three a day, while Iraqi civilians, their cities flattened, their water rancid, and their hospitals swamped, are dying at about ten times that rate.

A policy mistake or fraud of this magnitude cries out for accountability.

=====================================

Tucker Carlson is a Thin Idiot

Apologies to Al Franken, but Tucker Carlson is a thin idiot.

If you have any doubt about it, read his whiney essay, "Can't buy me love," decrying the world for its alleged ingratitude toward the U.S for our alleged big-heartedness (Tucker Carlson Unfiltered).

The too cute pundit, recently axed along with his show "Crossfire" on CNN, admits that the U.S. is sending "huge amounts" of money (sic--it's only "huge" compared to what we were going to send, not compared to what much smaller countries like Spain are sending, or to what Amnerica usually sends, and not compared to the amount the U.S. spends on weaponr--two new F-22 fighters cost much more than the entire U.S. tsunami aid pledge) for tsunami relief only because of criticism of the miniscule amount of aid originally offered by the Bush administration. But he goes on to say, "Let's not expect that money to win us any affection."

Why such gloomy expectations about the response of Indians, Indonesians, Malaysians and Sri Lankans towards American aid? Because, he pouts, the French allegedly didn't love us for the Marshall Plan aid we provided after World War II, and the Iraqis aren't grateful for the billions of dollars he claims we are "pouring" into Iraq--"much of it for humanitarian purposes."

The French, of course, had reason to be a bit resentful towards the U.S. in those post-war years. First of all, America basically did squat to help them as Hitler's Wehrmacht overran their country, until the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, by which time all France was under German control. Second, our much-ballyhooed Marshall Plan aid after the war was mostly loans that had to be repaid with interest. And finally, the U.S. massively interfered in post-war France to undermine the French left--not something that other nations, particularly alleged democratic allies, take kindly to. (The whole Marshall Plan, for that matter, was really not humanitarianism, but rather was all about trying to head off a Socialist/Communist takeover of Western Europe after the war.)

As for those ungrateful Iraqis! Our unprovoked and illegal invasion of their country has only leveled some of their cities, and only killed 100,000 or so of their people. The least they could do is appreciate that miniscule fraction of the $100 billion a year we are spending in their country rebuilding some of the stuff that we're continuing to blow up!

Carlson's written version of the essay on the PBS website at least corrects for the factual error that he fobbed off on viewers on PBS, when he made the startling claim that the U.S. is providing more in humanitarian aid in Iraq than it is spending on the military effort. This of course is ludicrous. The Pentagon spends nearly $4 billion a week on destruction, while Congress only allocated $18 billion for reconstruction, and not even 25 percent of that amount has been spent a year later (most of it to pay politically well-connected U.S. firms that funnel the money right back to U.S. shareholders).

I confess I'm kind of surprised he didn't include a grumble or two about the ungradeful Vietnamese, who over the years have shown so little graditude for all the "humanitarian aid" we fired at--excuse me--lavished on them over the course of two decades.

Carlson is a loudmouth, but the volume of his rants seems mainly designed to keep the listener from focusing on the details, which are fraught with falsehoods designed to bolster his ludicrous political views.

=============================

January 7, 2005

Jones-Boxer Rebellion was a Big Progressive Victory

It's easy to dismiss what happened in Congress Thursday, when several members of the House, led by Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio), and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), stood up and challenged the awarding of Ohio's 20 electors to George Bush, as "poor losing" or "grandstanding" or "conspiracy theory stuff," as Republican critics and much of the media did.

Certainly the holding up of the official confirmation of Bush's electoral victory for a second presidential term of office was not going to lead to a real investigation of the massive electoral fraud and misconduct that marred the Ohio voting, much less an overturning of the results of that state's election or the outcome of the presidential race. Even if, as is probable, the election was stolen by Republicans, that party's majority control of both houses of Congress and of the machinery of the federal government's law enforcement and investigatory apparatus makes any legal challenge to the election impossible.

Still, the Democratic protest, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, was a critically important victory for progressives.

What happened in Ohio--and elsewhere across the country--during this recent election, was the deliberate, massive suppression of the votes of working class people, seniors and minorities, especially blacks, by the Republican Party, Republican election officials, and in Ohio, by the Secretary of State, J. Kenneth Blackwell, a man whose job is to protect the right to vote, but who, because he also served as co-chair of the state's Bush reelection campaign, actively worked to subvert that right.

Most of the corporate media chose to ignore what happened, or to downplay it. Even the reporting about Thursday's historic challenge to Ohio's 20 electoral votes dealt mainly with the theatrical aspect of the event, not the abuses that it sought to highlight. And those abuses were horrific: deliberate shorting of voting machines in minority and Democratic election districts that led to hours-long waits in a cold rain for voters and that discouraged tens of thousands from even casting a vote; deliberate groundless challenging of thousands of black voters by Republican operatives aimed at further slowing the voting process; deliberately slow processing of absentee vote applications followed by an illegal refusal to permit those who didn't receive their ballots in time to cast provisional ballots instead; an illegal effort by Blackwell to refuse to accept voter applications that were printed on paper instead of card stock, and then a deliberate delay by Blackwell's office in certifying the vote count, so as to deny those seeking a recount sufficient time to have one done properly.

Those and other vote scandals (which when taken together almost certainly stole the Ohio election from John Kerry) sadly will go uncorrected and unpunished. But because of the efforts of progressive forces--the Congressional Black Caucus, union activists, Green Party and Nader activists and others--to demand a recount in Ohio and to air, in hearings conducted by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), testimony about the vote fraud and misconduct, Bush now begins his second term under the same cloud of illegitimacy as the one that shadowed his first term.

This sense of illegitimacy is critical, and needs to be continuously pointed out by progressives during the coming battles as the Bush administration and a strengthened Republican Congress try to ram through a radical right-wing agenda of undermining Social Security, the federal courts, women’s rights, affirmative action, the Bill of Rights, labor rights, environmental protection, etc.

The president is weak (a new AP poll finds his disapproval rating at 49 percent, the lowest on record for a second-term president), and the Republican Congress is vulnerable, and this protest, if built upon, will further weaken them both.

Remember, prior to the 9-11 attacks, Bush was viewed as a poor president by a majority of the American public. Canny manipulation of public fears by Republican operatives after those attacks, and the engineering of a war against Iraq, bolstered the president's popularity and enabled jingoistic Republicans to make major gains in both houses of Congress in 2002 and 2004. Now, however, with the economy stumbling and the war in Iraq turning into a bloody disaster, Bush's standing is plunging back to its original low, and Republicans, in unquestioned control of Congress, will have to take the blame for everything that goes wrong, domestically and internationally, over the next four years.

The progressives who successfully organized the Congressional protest against Bush's second-term election win have fired the first shot in the fight against the Republicans' second-term agenda.

They did it with little help--indeed with considerable obstruction--from the desiccated and corrupt Democratic Party leadership, which predictably favored slimy acquiescence to the Republican victory.

The task now will be for progressives to build on this victory, to push aside the conservative Democrats, the conciliators who would give up without a fight, and to work both on the streets and in the party and the government to ensure that no election is stolen again.
===================================

January 5, 2005

Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Outrage

The outrage and dismay over devastation and human suffering seem to have much more to do with how such horrors were caused than the actual horrors themselves, it would seem.

At least, it seems that way when it comes to our outgoing Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose sense of horror seems to be remarkably selective.

Touring the wreckage of the recent tsunami in Banda Aceh, Indonesia yesterday, an obviously shaken Powell, a former top U.S. Army general, said, "I have been in war and I have been through a number of hurricanes, tornadoes and other relief operations, but I have never seen anything like this. The power of the wave to destroy bridges, to destroy factories, to destroy homes, to destroy crops, to destroy everything in its path is amazing."

You have to wonder what this leading member of the American war machine thought of the power of the U.S. military to destroy bridges, factories, homes, crops, hospitals, dykes, schools, entire towns and cities, rice paddies and indeed "everything in its path" back in Indochina in the years he was there. Especially as he was busy covering up the massacre of women, children and old people at My Lai. What did he think as he toured burned down villages, mile after mile of defoliated jungle, whole barren moonscapes pockmarked with craters from American bombs, millions of dead and maimed men, women and children?

And you have to wonder what he thinks now about the U.S. Shock and Awe destruction of Baghdad, or more recently, of the leveling of the cities of Najaf, Samarah and especially Fallujah.

One would think that the carnage caused by man--indeed the carnage for which Colin Powell himself bears considerable responsibility--would be far more troubling than that caused by nature.

But then we are a selectively outraged people. Where is the mass public campaign to raise money for the hundreds of thousands of wounded and displaced in Iraq? Americans' efforts when it comes to charity and fundraising related to the Iraq War is pretty much limited to providing cookies and body armor for our troops.

As Bruce Jackson wrote in Counterpunch yesterday, our media, quick to display the corpses, and the maimed and orphaned children of the Indian Ocean tsunami, don't bother to show the carnage our army is causing in Iraq. Oh, we get to see the carnage there when it was caused by the Iraqi insurgents, but not when it's our own bombs and bullets that are doing the killing and maiming. And we don't get to see the sheer magnitude of the destruction that our military has wreaked on Iraq and its long-suffering people.

That level of detail, like Secretary Powell's capacity for horror and concern, is reserved for the workings of nature.

Just as Powell was hardened by his Army boot camp training to accept human suffering as a normal consequence of battle, and to bury his humanity when it comes to war, we Americans as a people are being hardened by our compliant pro-government media to put that part of our natural compassion in a lockbox.

Like Pavlov's dogs, we rally to the cause when a storm strikes in Florida or a tsunami hits in Indonesia, but avert our eyes when our own military is the agent of destruction.
====================================

January 5, 2005

Rep. Conyers to Challenge Stolen Ohio Election Thursday

Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), who headed up hearings by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee into the vote in Ohio, will be presenting his report on the fraud, abuse and misconduct of that crucial state's election this Thursday (Jan. 6), and will be calling on his colleagues in the House and Senate to challenge the 20 Republican Ohio electors allegedly chosen in that presidential vote.

Conyers' meticulous report lays out clear evidence that Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, who infamously doubled as chair of Bush's Ohio re-election committee, and who in a fund-raising letter written before the votes were counted boasted of "delivering" the state to Bush, actively adopted measures that disenfranchised hundreds of thousands of mostly minority voters. Conyers goes on to say that Republican operatives, who deliberately engaged in a campaign of voter intimidation targeting black voters, probably also scared away, or kept from voting by creating massive delays, tens of thousands more voters.

The report breaks the misconduct and illegalities into three categories:

* Efforts before Election Day to reduce Democratic registration--most notably by refusing to accept registration forms on paper that was too thin and by mailing out absentee ballots too late and then refusing to provide provisional ballots to those who claimed they had asked for absentee ballots but never received them (a requirement under federal voting law).

* Efforts to discourage turnout on Election Day, and to slow the voting interminably in mostly minority districts, for example by providing one voting machine where similar districts in wealthier Republican areas would have 6-10 machines--a tactic that led in some places to waits of as much as 6-10 hours and that led tens of thousands of people to give up and go home. A second method, adopted by the Republican Party, was to assign thousands of challengers to polling stations in minority districts to challenge legal voters, thus tying up the voting lines.

Taken altogether, Conyers' report says that the mismanagement of the elections process, together with fraud and errors, resulted in the disenfranchisement and non-counting of "hundreds of thousands" of votes in primarily minority and Democratic-leaning districts--far more than the 118,000 votes that the official recount claims Bush won the state by over Democrat John Kerry.

Conyers and other Democratic House members plan to call at Thursday's session (as they tried to do unsuccessfully after the 2000 election) for the full Congress to reject certification of Ohio's electors, and for a Congressional investigation, ideally by a bi-partisan select committee, of Ohio's election.

If just one member of the Senate agrees to join in that call (in 2001, none would), Congress, under the Constitution will be required to delay certification of the president's election, since without Ohio's 20 electoral votes, Bush does not have the required 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

An overturning of the Ohio results seems unlikely, despite the convincing evidence presented by Conyers' committee, given the solid Republican majorities in both House and Senate, but even a cursory and politically hobbled investigation into his findings by a joint committee would undermine President Bush's claim of a second-term "mandate," and leave his ultimate victory tainted at a time that he is facing increasing public doubts regarding his leadership on both domestic issues and on his war in Iraq.

It would be an opportune time for those unhappy with the Ohio outcome to make their views known to their congressional representatives--particularly to their senators.

Sen. Kerry on Wednesday showed himself to be a patsy for Republicans and sealed his fate to go down in history as the latest in a string of conservative Democrats ready to sell out progressives and minorities when he vowed not to challenge Bush's victory in Congress. If the rest of the Democrats in the Senate follow his lead and fail once again to respond to their colleagues in the House--particularly those in the Congressional Black Caucus--and don’t rise to join them in challenging the Republicans' Jim Crow tactics of vote suppression in this latest presidential election, they will have signaled the death of any hope for the Democratic Party as a vehicle for progressive change, or even as a viable opposition.

They will deserve to have lost.

To see the full Conyers’ report, go to a href=" http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010605Y.shtml"> Truth Out.
====================================

January 3, 2005

Time to Put Democratic Senators in the Hot Seat

Perhaps the most powerful moment in Michael Moore's film "Fahrenheit 9-11" was the stony silence in the hall of the joint session of Congress as a line of African-American and other representatives of color stood up and pleaded in vain for just one senator to issue an official challenge to the Florida electoral college delegation and its vote in favor of candidate George Bush.

This Thursday, we are destined to have a repeat of that dramatic event.

Congressman John Conyers, (D-Michigan), the representative who has chaired hearings into the Republican-led efforts in Ohio to keep people from registering, to keep voters from voting, and to mess with the vote totals to keep the vote for Democrat John Kerry as low as possible--in short the "vote suppression" effort that was deliberately made over the course not just of election day but of the months leading up to the balloting--has vowed to challenge the state's delegation to the Electoral College.

Under the Constitution, it requires only one representative and one senator to initiate a challenge, which would then mandate an official inquiry into the state's election, and delay certification of the national presidential election results.

While it is unlikely, with a Congress firmly in the hands of the Republican Party, with the attorney general's office packed with Bush appointees, and with the FBI run by Republican party hacks, that any serious effort would be made to find out what actually happened in Ohio, such an investigation would at least serve to embarrass Republican officials, and to undermine the ludicrous Bush claim of a mandate for his second term of office.

With so many leading Democrats in Congress and the Democratic National Committee falling over each other calling for a cave-in to Republicans on issues from abortion rights and prayer in schools to social security "reform" and foreign policy, it will be fascinating to see if this time around, somebody on the senate side has the guts to join Conyers in his call for a challenge to the Ohio delegation.

One big difference in the new Senate, which has a net five more Republicans than the last one, is that it has a new black senator, Democrat Barack Obama from Illinois. Obama has not made his views known concerning Conyers' call but he is sure to be at least respectful of this senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus. A number of other more liberal members of the Senate--including Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and Jon Corzine (D-NJ), the latter eyeing a run for governor in New Jersey where Democratic candidates depend on heavy support in the state's African-American communities--clearly embarrassed by their silence in the widely viewed Moore documentary, may also want to take a stand this time around.

Democrats, particularly in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and New Jersey, but also across the country, may want to send messages to these and other critical liberal senators (how about the number one loser himself, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts?), urging them to heed the call from their African-American colleagues from the House this time, instead of lamely sitting on their hands the way they did in January 2001.

No doubt, thanks to Moore, there will be more than just a private filmmaker's camera in the hall this time around, panning over the Democratic senators in their seats. (Last time, the event didn't even make the news, despite the public passion and controversy over the outcome of the Florida vote in 2000, which is what made Moore's film sequence so striking.)

The 2004 efforts to suppress the Democratic vote, made in not just Ohio but in Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and many other states at the hands of the Republican Party and its elected officials in state and county offices across the country, are a scandal of epic proportions, reminiscent of the old days of Jim Crow in the South. Whether or not these schemes and frauds altered the outcome of this latest presidential race, they need to be exposed and ended.

A Congressional challenge and inquiry would be a great place to start.

Here’s one site offering a quick way to contact Democratic Senators: www.progressivedemocrats.org