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Editorial: Congress Critters Lament NSA Snoop Agenda
Thursday May 11th 2006, 8:16 am
Kurt Nimmo
Another Day in the Empire
Naturally, it is the job of the corporate media to paper over the real reasons for the NSA snoop database, described as "the largest database ever assembled in the world," according to a source quoted by USA Today. Leslie Cauley of the daily newspaper tells us "the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity," and attributes this excuse to shadowy sources, as usual, and yet not a single nine eleven terrorist, with the exception of the nut job Zacarias Moussaoui, has faced a jury or suffered a conviction.
Instead of alleged terrorists, the NSA is running its super-sophisticated algorithms on the telephone, email, and web traffic data of average Americans with the help of multinational telecoms such as AT&T, Verizon, Qwest, and BellSouth. "The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said."
Actually, this is not only misleading, it is completely disingenuous. Back in May of 1999, well before "everything changed" on September 11, 2001, the NSA was using Echelon to poke through the private communications of Americans.
According to the New York Times, at the time "the House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens." In fact, there are no "legal standards" and all such activity is strictly a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. "Although Echelon was originally set up as an international spy network, lawmakers are concerned that it could be used to eavesdrop on American citizens," Niall McKay wrote for the Times. So threatening was Echelon, the European Parliament in May 2001 urged its citizens to use cryptography in their communications to protect their privacy, thus revealing the network was not intended to ferret out spies and terrorists but rather underwear drawer snoop average citizens, who are, of course, the real threat to government. It can be accurately stated that "signals intelligence" (snooping private communications) has posed a threat since the creation of the UKUSA Community, a snoop and subvert alliance of English-speaking nations led by the United States and United Kingdom and formalized in 1947 or 1948 with the signing of the secret UKUSA SIGINT.
If not for the director of Australia's Defense Signals Directorate spilling the beans in 1999, we would know little about the UKUSA Agreement. No "government or intelligence agency from the member states had openly admitted to the existence of the UKUSA Agreement or Echelon. However, on a television program broadcast ... in Australia, the director of Australia's Defense Signals Directorate acknowledged the existence of the agreement" and thus massive and Constitutional-busting snooping. According to a report issued by the European Parliament (Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information, an appraisal of snoop technologies)
Echelon is just one of the many code names for the monitoring system, which consists of satellite interception stations in participating countries. The stations collectively monitor millions of voice and data messages each day. These messages are then scanned and checked against certain key criteria held in a computer system called the "Dictionary." In the case of voice communications, the criteria could include a suspected criminal's telephone number; with respect to data communications, the messages might be scanned for certain keywords, like "bomb" or "drugs." The report also alleges that Echelon is capable of monitoring terrestrial Internet traffic through interception nodes placed on deep-sea communications cables.
In the current context, it is more likely words such as "impeach Bush" or "Bill of Rights" are searched and pegged for inclusion in this dictionary than "bomb," "drugs," or even "Osama bin Laden." Again, for a government responsible for war crimes and massive financial corruption, the enemy is naturally the people, not mythical and illusory terrorists, the latter usually conceived to scare the short pants off a semi-somnolent public.
In a futile effort-as worthless as the 1999 "investigation" into Echelon-to get to the bottom of all this snooping, "Arlen [Magic Bullet] Specter, R-Pa., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would call the phone companies to appear before the panel 'to find out exactly what is going on,'" reports the Associated Press. "Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with al Qaida? These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything ... Where does it stop?" asked a clueless or disingenuous Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
It doesn't stop, Mr. Leahy. In fact, it has gone on for more than fifty years, unopposed and unchecked. As Christopher Pyle revealed in January 1970, the U.S. Army has long spied on the American public. Pyle's revelations resulted in the empanelling of the Church Committee (the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, a Senate committee chaired by Senator Frank Church) in 1975. Church summarized that government snooping and subversion, most notoriously COINTELPRO, "exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power which are imposed by our country's Constitution, laws, and traditions.... The Constitutional system of checks and balances has not adequately controlled intelligence activities. Until recently the Executive branch has neither delineated the scope of permissible activities nor established procedures for supervising intelligence agencies. Congress has failed to exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put. Most domestic intelligence issues have not reached the courts, and in those cases when they have reached the courts, the judiciary has been reluctant to grapple with them" (see the Church Committee's Final Report, Book II).
Over the last three decades, not only has the judiciary been "reluctant to grapple" with the ongoing destruction of the Constitution, they have facilitated this process. It is not the job of Congress-the lamentations of Patrick Leahy not withstanding-to "exercise sufficient oversight, seldom questioning the use to which its appropriations were being put," but rather to stay out of the way of a bellicose executive, bent on tracking down domestic enemies and destroying them or at minimum rendering them impotent to exercise their rights, as granted by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. As the nomination of Michael Hayden to head up the CIA (or oversee its dismemberment) reveals, the executive branch, essentially an autocratic office operating under a state of exception, as delineated by the orchestrated events of nine eleven and amplified by the Patriot Act. Carl Schmitt and the Nazis would approve.
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Comment on this Editorial
Editorial: Comments On David Sirota's New Book - Hostile Takeover
by Stephen Lendman
May 10, 2006
I'd like to begin my commentary on David Sirota's important new book Hostile Takeover with my strong endorsement of his fine work. Everyone should read it to learn what's really going on around us that affects us all in the most important ways I know and which most people at best only vaguely understand on many if not most of the major issues. Those who read it will learn in stunning and graphic detail how large corporations in league with government at all levels serving their interests and not ours are destroying the democratic pillars of our society. The result now evident when we know the facts David presents is a great irreversible harm to the great majority unless we can collectively act in time to reverse the destructive path and economically downward trajectory we're now on - all planned and implemented by our elected officials in service to their generous corporate benefactors. In his important book, David lucidly explains the problem in detail and gives us an action plan to fight back.
Introduction
When I first heard about David's new book, I was very eager to read it. I had to be as earlier I wrote and got published a long article by the same title. David's approach and mine covered some of the same ground but differed as well including the subtitles we chose. My approach was to concentrate on the economic consequences of corporate size and dominance to ordinary people. David did the same, but as was clear from his subtitle, he did it by documenting in powerful detail "how big money and corruption" control the political process for their own gain. He also goes further to show how we can fight back to regain the essential rights we've lost. I covered some of that myself in an earlier article I wrote called Democracy in America - It's Spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T-I-O-N. It's posted on my blog site - sjlendman.blogspot.com. In his book, David gives more than just an account of how our government was bought. He presents the evidence in "handbook" form, exposing the lies and myths politicians and corporations tell us, and gives us an action plan to fight back and win.
David and I both know that corporations exist for one purpose only - to make a profit. I explained in my writing that corporate law mandates that publicly owned corporations serve only the interests of their shareholders and do it by working to maximize the value of their equity holdings by increasing sales and profits. They have to do this and don't have a choice. Should they do otherwise, the companies would likely face legal consequences and their top executives dismissal. But David explains that in a democratic society, government is supposed to serve the people and act as a counterweight to unrestrained corporate power which left on its own could destroy society. At times in the past, our elected government actually passed laws and did that, if imperfectly. But that was then, and this is now - a brave new world order. It's one with giant corporations literally running amuck in charge of everything: writing the laws, making the rules, deciding who governs and how and who serves on our courts. They even have to sign off on it before the nation goes to war. Those wars have nothing to do with national security threats (we've had none since WW II), making the world safe for democracy or deposing tyrants. I've explained this in other writing also on my blog site including exposing the sham of the so-called "war on terror" which is nothing more than a bogus scare tactic to get the public to go along with bad policy. That policy includes waging war, although they're only fought as a last resort when less extreme methods don't work.
Why resort to war? They're fought to control markets, vital resources like oil and cheap labor to help those same corporations make more profits. In that kind of world, there's nothing to stop them from operating as legalized private tyrannies (with their own armies we pay for through taxes) exploiting us (and the planet) for their gain and doing it as another author explained in his book called The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Those who can pay can play, and those who can't have no say and don't get their way. Money not only talks, it rules the world.
It all means that the political game is rigged by and for corporate America to enrich them and do it at our expense. And they're aided and abetted by the big government they bought and paid for to do their bidding - a kind of incestuous relationship for mutual gain. It's a democracy all right, but only for the privileged few and no one else. Voters at one time may have thought they had a say when they went to the polls, and to some degree they did. But today, about half of them understand they're powerless and don't even bother showing up. Why do it when they know that on election day the real game is big business and big government playing "let's make a deal" - "you scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours." But to play, you better have lots of "scratch." It's an arena where only powerful interests have a say and well paid lobbyists (aka influence-peddling "bagmen") "grease the wheels" of big government to make it work for big business in a "snatch and grab" all you can enterprise that leaves the public largely out in the cold. It's the same story at the federal, state and local levels although the higher up in the bureaucracy it takes place, the bigger the stakes are.
The pubic to some degree knows what's going on and how it's interests have been ignored. At times it's stood by, watched, likely felt overwhelmed and helpless and done little to fight back. But maybe because the pain of bad policy has begun to bite deeply in recent years, David feels that's changing and people are beginning "to demand answers about why our government is selling us out." That's why he wrote the book - to give everyone left out of the political process a way to fight an unfair system and win back the rights and benefits they've lost. He explains the book's intent is to do more than just tell the story of how our government was bought like a commodity available to the highest bidder. It does that and then goes on in "guidebook" fashion to give us the tools we need to fix the system so it works for us.
Hostile Takeover Counts and Documents the Ways the Political Process Has Become Corrupted
David then divides the rest of his book into explaining the enterprise of government as a wholly-owned business subsidiary in 10 separate chapters. In each one, he explains how our so-called elected officials have corrupted their high office to allow their corporate benefactors to exploit us for their benefit. The evidence in each chapter shows no matter how you slice and dice the political system, it always comes out the same way - they win and we lose: more and more until it's down to the nub, and we've lost it all unless we can fight back to recoup and save ourselves before it's too late. David thinks we can do it. First he explains what we've lost, and then he lays out an action plan to win it back. And throughout the book, David gives copious and powerful anecdotal corroboration to make his case for the abuses being committed against us that need redress.
As I explained above, I've also written about these abuses and understand how our corrupted system works. I'm a bit less sanguine than David on the public's insight into the problem or its readiness to act - yet. But David and I are on the same page, and for me he's preaching to the choir. I believe most others, however, don't know or understand enough about how they're being abused, let alone what to do about it. This book is for them and is essential reading. I endorse and recommend it strongly. And I'll go a step further and call it a survival manual and a call to arms. I believe things are even more dire than David explains. I think it essential that the public en masse must begin to act in its own interest and defense and do it soon and effectively. Unless it does, what little remains of our tattered republic and democracy in name only will be lost entirely, and it will be too late to regain it.
Chapter One: Our Tax System - Call It Robin Hood in Reverse
Also call it the great tax scam. David quotes the now indicted and disgraced former Republican House Majority Leader Tom Delay saying on the eve of the Iraq war in 2003 that "Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes." I wonder what he was inhaling just before he said that or how stuffed his pockets were with corporate cash. It's hard deciding whether absurd or outrageous better characterizes such an outrageous statement. When Lyndon Johnson was president and needed revenues for his illegal war in Vietnam, he had to raise taxes and still couldn't get enough to pay for it without running up debt and adding to inflation which sent the economy into decline in the 1970s.
David then explains that in today's world as seen through the eyes of Republican ideologues and most Democrats willing to go along with them, cutting taxes has become a religion with no regard for the common sense notion that the revenues only gotten through taxes pay for all the essential services we rely on like schools, infrastructure and everything else. So it only makes sense that when government takes in less revenue, it has less available to provide us with the things we need, expect and rely on in a modern society.
But that's hardly the end of the story. Under the Bush administration, not only have there been large tax cuts, but the ones enacted have caused the "tax structure (to be) flipped on its head." Call it the great transformation of a once-progressive system inverted to take from the poor and middle class and give to the rich. It's a process that began during the Reagan years. But under George Bush it's exploded to become greed writ large and has now even been replicated at the state level. The most well-off who don't need it have benefitted hugely according to the nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice. They report that by 2010 after the Bush tax cuts have been fully implemented as they now stand, the top 15% of income earners will have gotten two-thirds of the benefits with the top 1% getting a $600 billion dollar bonanza. On the other end, the bottom 60% will have gotten an illusory less than 18% of the benefits.
That's so because to help offset this handout to the rich, the Bush administration imposed user fees on various services amounting to billions of dollars that affect low and middle income people the most. Also, federal grants to states have been cut and new obligations imposed on them without the proper funding to cover their cost creating what's called "unfunded (or underfunded) mandates." To comply, states have had to raise taxes and fees which again fall disproportionately on lower income people. For these same people, the result has been "now you see 'em, now you don't" tax cuts that amount to a net tax increase and effective loss and lower standard of living for the great majority of the public.
And to make things even worse, Corporate America has made out like thieves from big tax cuts in various forms and their ability, especially under this administration, to exploit legal loopholes and take advantage of lax tax law enforcement. So although the official corporate tax rate is supposed to be 35%, most corporations never pay close to that amount. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), 94% of major corporations pay less than 5% of their income in taxes, and corporate tax payments are the lowest they've been in 60 years. In addition, many of the wealthiest companies often pay no tax at all and some of them actually get large rebates. They're added to the already large subsidies most large companies get, otherwise known as corporate welfare or socialism for big corporations and the rich and "free market capitalism" for the rest of us. That's also apparently called "the American way."
The bottom line of Bush administration fiscal policy has been huge budget deficits caused by these unfair tax cuts plus big spending increases (off the books) to fund two ongoing illegal wars plus the new Office of Homeland Security that alone costs $40 billion a year that we know about. So far these policies have fueled overall economic growth and big corporate profits as it did in the 60s and early 70s. But at some point the bills come due and must be paid, although apparently there's no plan to do it. This is a recipe for economic trouble or worse down the road. The lesson is always the same that the price for good times (however gotten or for whose benefit) that were too good or for reckless (or fiscally irresponsible) behavior that was too reckless has always been the same: the day comes when you "gotta pay the piper." Herb Stein, Richard Nixon's chief economic advisor, said the same thing in his memorable dictum that "Things that can't go on forever won't." It's called a day of reckoning but those least able to cope when it comes (which it will) will be the same ones cheated by this administration's tax policies.
Because of the length of my review and eagerness to cover as much of the book as possible, I won't list David's solutions that he enumerates at the end of each chapter. I'll just say, he's on the mark and that a government working for the people and not the privileged few and corporate giants would carefully consider them all and implement most or all of them. Sadly, today and under this administration there's little chance of that happening unless we force them to.
Chapter Two: Wages - Rising for the Well-Off but Stagnation or Worse for the Rest of Us
The minimum wage in this country is $5.15 an hour, hasn't been raised since 1997, and is now at the lowest point it's been since 1949. The people earning it and no more might get along fine if they have no dependents, don't mind not eating much, enjoy camping out year round, love old tattered clothes, never get sick and are able to educate themselves. For the rest of us, that income level is well below the officially stated poverty line that no one can live on but which is artificially kept low for political reasons. That situation is a metaphor for the average working person in the US who, adjusted for inflation, now earns less than 30 years ago even with modest annual increases.
David points out the widening gap between low wage earners and the affluent. In my article I had slightly different data than David and will share it with readers. In 2004, I wrote the average CEO earned 431 times the income of the average working person. That was up from 85 times in 1990 and 42 times in 1980 at the beginning of the Reagan years and the Republicans rise to dominance. David and I also used a different figure on what the average CEO now earns annually. He noted $9 million a year and my number was $14.4 million (mine likely included bonuses and/or stock option benefits not in David's figure) in 2001 and rising - plus huge supplemental benefits from SERPS (Supplemental Executive Retirement Plans) that effectively increased their income by half again and all the other special perks corporate executives get but the average working stiff never does. Some companies even pay the income tax for their top executives. I described all this in one section as the US being the unthinkable and unmentionable - a rigid class society and one becoming more extreme all the time.
But along with stagnating wages, essential social services are being cut, especially since Bush took office in 2001. That too is part of the plan to transfer wealth to the rich from the rest of us. It's created a crisis in some areas like vital health insurance needed at all times but crucial to have in the face of the rising cost of health care services and less of them being provided for the needy (and to those of us like myself on Medicare) by a government intent on fighting wars, helping the rich get even richer and destroying the social safety net including the pillars of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
So-called "free trade agreements" like NAFTA and CAFTA have just made it worse. These and the alphabet soup of other trade agreements were sold to the public in the countries adopting them as a way to grow their economies and increase jobs. The result years after implementation has been hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and the realization that these plans were never intended for that purpose in the first place. They were and still are plans for the US and dominant Global North nations to be able to craft a set of binding trade rules overriding the sovereignty of all member states to benefit giant corporations at the expense of working people in those countries. It's worked like a charm, and the terrible carnage it's caused is proof positive. Instead of creating jobs in the US and other Global North countries as promised, jobs have been outsourced or exported to low wage countries including many thousands of higher-paying manufacturing and high tech ones. Even a low-wage country like Mexico has suffered as jobs once sent there have since been lost to even lower-wage paying countries like China, Bangladesh and Haiti. And Mexico's small farmers have been devastated by US heavily subsidized agribusiness that's driven many thousands of them out of business and has done the same thing in India and elsewhere.
The result in the US is services, like jobs at Walmart and McDonalds, now account for nearly 80% of all business while manufacturing has declined to about 14% and total manufacturing employment is half the percentage of total employment it was 40 years ago and falling. Our low unemployment rate the Labor Department reports monthly only disguises the damage done. In the view of some economists, if the rate today was calculated the same way it was during The Great Depression when it rose to a peak of 25% of the working population, the true current figure would be about 12% instead of the most recently reported 4.7%. The current calculation method includes part-time workers who work as little as one hour during the monthly reporting period. It also excludes discouraged workers who wish to work but who've stopped looking because they can't find jobs.
As he does in all his chapters, David goes on to note and explain the myths and lies the public is told to hide a bad and deteriorating situation concluding again with a set of sensible solutions unlikely to be adopted unless the public fights for them.
Chapter Three: Jobs - The Good Ones Are Vanishing and the Poor Ones Don't Pay Enough or Provide Needed Benefits
In this chapter David goes into more detail on what he discussed in the previous one under wages. He provides lots of ammunition to show how much trouble we're really in. One example was from University of California researchers who estimated in 2004 that "up to 14 million American jobs are at risk to outsourcing." An even more stark assessment came from Gartner Research that predicted as many as "30% of high-tech jobs could be shipped overseas by 2015." If they're right, does that mean that formerly high-paid software engineers will now be ringing up the few purchases most people will be able to afford at the Walmarts of the world. Not a pretty picture nor one most readers of David's book or this review would wish to look forward to - unless they love the idea of living in a nation heading for third-world status and run by a government aiding and abetting the downward trajectory.
David also goes on to explain that our government ignores the plight of good jobs being lost and, in fact, effectively endorses the loss through the large subsidies it makes available to the companies doing the exporting. In addition, the safety net of unemployment insurance has been gutted through budget cuts so fewer of the unemployed now receive benefits they need which are available for a shorter period of time. Besides that, the budget for job training to help the unemployed has been severely cut over the past 25 years. Currently 84% of what was available back then no longer is. David documents it all with powerful and graphic anecdotal examples of the terrible damage done and a government that allows it to happen showing it no longer cares about ordinary working people.
Chapter Four: Debt - It's High, Rising, and Becoming a Great Burden for Ordinary Working People
Many of us may know something about how the Bush administration turned a budget surplus into huge deficits with little if any relief in sight for years to come. They also should know a good bit more about mounting private debt, especially if they're one of the many millions burdened with their own debt obligations and have a hard time figuring out how to repay them while simultaneously adding more.
The problem stems from a society weaned on the notion that we should buy now and pay later regardless of whether our debts from borrowing must be serviced which means paying high interest carrying charges. That's especially true in the case of the main way consumers run up debt - on their credit cards where David explained that the predatory credit card industry makes out like mega-thieves pocketing $24 billion in 2004 from late usury-level penalty fees alone which made up the bulk of their $30 billion in profits. Like all other major industries, this one has friends in high places, and it freely "scratches their back" with lots of "scratch" to get legislation favorable to its interests - namely, letting them get away with grand theft. The result, as David reports, is the tragedy of US consumers being $2 trillion in debt with the average household carrying and servicing through monthly interest payments an unpaid credit card balance of about $7,500. That's debt hell for these afflicted consumers, but profit heaven for the credit card bandits. I personally know how these companies work and always have. As a result, I pay my monthly bills in full and have never paid the few credit card companies whose cards I carry one cent in interest since getting my first credit card about 40 years ago. I'm also sensible and restrained in my spending so my monthly balance is never onerous. My advice to others on how to beat these thieves who thrive on your excesses is do as I do, and they'll never know what hit them until it does.
Making matters far worse for the public, already plagued by stagnating wages and good jobs exported to cheap labor countries, is the new bankruptcy legislation. It gutted consumer protection making it much harder to get that protection when it's most needed. The new law gives the predatory credit card companies license to steal even more than they're now doing by making it much harder for ordinary people to seek the bankruptcy protection they used to have. The law was passed through lies and deceit about consumer abuse of the system that needed correcting. In fact, Harvard University researchers found that 90% of personal bankruptcies result from illness, unaffordable medical bills for people without insurance to cover them, job loss, death in the family or divorce - hardly conniving people trying to rip off the credit card companies or lending agencies.
David then once again goes on to explain in detail the lies and myths about who benefits and who loses under the new law, the economic conditions for most people making them more vulnerable when trouble strikes, and much more including his sensible solutions to the problems now created.
Chapter Five: Pensions - Workers Actually Could Count on Them Once - But That Was Then, and This Is Now
A major part of the American dream is that after a lifetime of work we can look forward to a comfortable retirement and secure future. Long ago, things turned out that way for most ordinary working people who had good, high-paying jobs with essential benefits, like those in manufacturing now lost. They also had strong union protection which won them the rights they were able to enjoy while still working and after they retired. No longer in today's hostile world where our government officials in league with big corporations are rewriting sacred rules allowing these companies the ability to evade their obligations to workers once thought to be inviolable.
So even though these companies once agreed in union negotiations to legally binding contract obligations regarding worker benefits to be paid to retirees, they're now seeking legal protection through the courts to back out of them. The courts today are stacked with corporate-friendly judges, but even when companies have no justification for redress, they're able to drag out legal cases for years through appeals so that even if they end up losing, many retirees will have died off waiting and the companies will save millions even after legal expenses which aren't cheap.
Besides fraudulent corporate lawsuits to welsh on their obligations, companies are ingenious in coming up with new ways to cheat their employees. The AP reported one such way in 2002 which was the quiet conversion of the retirement plans of eight million workers to so-called "cash balance" schemes by hundreds of companies. As David explained, these new plans were and are nothing more than a con to let these companies back out of their guarantee to give their workers a lifetime monthly pension and instead offer them one lump-sum payment. The companies getting away with this scam are able to save many millions of dollars because that payment amounts to far less than the original promised benefits which is why they devised this scheme in the first place.
Even the Bush administration tried getting into this act by rolling out what David rightly calls "the granddaddy of all pension rip-off schemes : privatizing Social Security." I've called it the grandest of grand thefts if they're ever able to pull it off. It hardly matters to this administration that this magnificent plan has been "the most successful government initiative" ever in our history and which has lifted many millions of working people out of poverty and made it possible for them to have a decent retirement that otherwise wouldn't have been possible. What the Bush administration proposed doing was to turn this program over to the sharks on Wall Street and let them run it and be able to skim off a bonanza in big fees from retirees who would be their victims and end up with less than they now receive. A University of Chicago economist did the math and estimated that Wall Street would earn between $400 billion and $1 trillion in broker and administrative fees under the Bush mega-ripoff scheme. Thankfully the public balked strongly enough, and for now at least, the administration has backed off. But you can bet they're likely plotting their next move to resurrect what will be their dream scheme if they ever do pull it off. And when they launch their next attempt, it's almost certain they'll again try using the canard that the system is in danger of going bankrupt and only privitizing it can fix it. So far the public hasn't bought this deceit and hopefully won't the next time they try selling it. But David makes it very clear that the future security of millions of working people is in jeopardy through pension and Social Security "reform" (meaning scamming the public to steal our future for corporate gain) unless we the people are vigilant and take steps to fight back. David shows us how.
Chapter Six: Health Care - Present Plans or Lack of Them Are Hazardous to Our Health
Although the government may ignore and deny it, it's beyond dispute this country has a major and unforgivable health care crisis that continues to get worse. Presently 46 million or more people here have no insurance coverage at all, millions more have far too little, and David dramatically points out that 82 million Americans had no health insurance for some period of time between 2003 and 2004. This is happening in a country that spends almost 2.5 times the median average for the industrialized world, and yet the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked the US 37th in the world in "overall health performance" and 54th in the fairness of health care. Moreover, every developed country in the world except the US and South Africa provide free health care for all its citizens paid for though taxes.
David dramatically points out that we may have the best doctors and most advanced medical facilities in the world, but what good is it if they're unavailable to a vast number of the people living here because they can't afford to use them. David goes on to detail much more, explaining that despite the inadequacy of our health care system, the providers of it are some of the most profitable companies in the country - such as the HMOs, the other big insurers and the big drug companies. He also explains that a key reason why we spend so much and get back so little overall is that 15 cents of every dollar we spend on health insurance is skimmed off for "administrative expense." That's just code language for private industry very high profits. Compare that to our government run programs like Medicare which only spends 4 cents of every dollar on these expenses. I'm on Medicare and am very pleased with it except that recipients are being forced to pay an increasingly greater amount for it. The idea is to enable the government to welsh on its obligation to us to divert even more funds to its corporate allies - our loss for their continuing gain.
At the end of WW II, Harry Truman unsuccessfully tried to get Congress to pass a universal health care government run program. He never had a chance to get it through the Congress as the dominant health care industry companies and the legislators shot down his proposal and every new one that came along later to extend universal coverage to everyone. It's not because of the cost, although we were told that's the reason. It's because government owes its allegiance to its big corporate benefactors that won't do anything to deny themselves the right to control the health care delivery process and be able to charge whatever prices they wish for their products and services. They certainly have taken full advantage of that, and the result is the dismal state of our health care system and the high industry profits resulting from it.
As in his other chapters, David does a fine job exposing the lies and myths the public is told to justify a bad system. And he ends the chapter again by offering the kind of common sense solutions a responsible government serving the people would have jumped on and enacted long ago. It's now up to the public to rise up and demand they do it.
Chapter Seven: Prescription Drugs - The Best Advice Is to Stay Well and Not Need Them - Their Cost May Make You Sicker
Here are some of the facts David reports on what I like to call Big Pharma. This industry is one of the most profitable in the country making about 18 cents profit on every dollar of sales; it's aided by government using our tax dollars to fund about one third of all research on new drugs the industry gets at no charge; the industry spends about twice as much on advertising, promotion and administrative costs as they do on R & D to develop new drugs; the prices charged for prescription drugs in the US are inordinately high compared to the rest of the world and are rising at about four times the rate of inflation; these rising costs plus those for most all health services are rising so fast, companies are forcing their employees to pay a greater share of them or are reducing overall health care benefits; and the industry has one of the most powerful and effective trade associations representing their interests (PhRMA - that I spelled a different way above to refer to the companies and not the association) seeing to it that elected officials are well lubricated with campaign contributions and more personal benefits to assure that any legislation hostile to their interests never sees the light of day.
The bottom line is a Congress acting like a "wholly owned subsidiary" of the drug industry and consumers paying dearly for it. And just like other industries covered in the book, the drug giants try to justify their consumer-unfriendly policies with deceit and lies like claiming charging lower prices would mean less innovation and fewer new drugs. They also never mention that easier regulations have allowed them to come to market more quickly with new drugs that later turned out to be unsafe and in some cases resulted in deaths. One drug giant's Vioxx is a stark case in point and one in which the company is now involved in large class-action litigation on behalf of 10,000 consumer plaintiffs plus a second class-action suit on behalf of insurers and HMOs.
The drug industry will also profit handsomely from the new Medicare legislation that is so bad it could only be passed in the middle of the night and then only after enough lawmakers who first voted against it were coerced or bribed to change their mind - a testimony to this industry's influence. Under the plan, Medicare's bulk purchasing power was neutered so the drug companies could charge full, undiscounted prices for their products. The hidden details of this prescription plan for seniors are bad enough to make it worthless for many on Medicare like myself. But the plan is a likely bonanza for the industry and may net them hundreds of billions of dollars including about an extra $139 billion because the government can't negotiate lower prices.
David goes on to list other abuses the drug industry is allowed to get away with by our government that should be working for us but isn't. I'll mention just one more which is an attempt by the industry to prevent consumers from buying their drugs from other countries like Canada on the false pretext they're unsafe - even though they're the same drugs. So much for honesty and fairness. Once again David shows us how we can fight back and win.
Chapter 8: Energy - Try to Think of Another Industry with Closer Ties to Those Now in the Administration
The Bush administration is run by a cadre of high level officials formerly involved with energy companies before they came to government including the president and vice-president. Now try to think of another industry that will be better treated by those in government than this one. There is none, although there are lots of others who get their full share and aren't complaining.
There are good reasons why energy prices are high today, and we either don't hear about them or enough about them. The main reason is we're a profligate nation with 5% of the world's population that consumes 26% of the world's daily oil production and about 23% of total natural gas production. The reason we're so wasteful is the industry wants it that way and the government, in full support of the energy giants, encourages consumption and discourages conservation. The reason is obvious. Our bad habits are good for business.
David's book didn't have some industry figures I now have to show how good business really is in a time of sky-high oil prices. I'll do it by citing the operating results of the oil giant I most like to pick on because they make it so easy for me to do it - Exxon-Mobil. In 2005, this company showed it's currently the largest corporation in the world. In its annual report to shareholders and Wall Street investors, it reported the highest annual profit ever earned by a publicly traded company. It was a breathtaking $36 billion on sales revenue of $371 billion. But that's not the end of the story. The good times just keep rolling for this oil giant as it recently reported its operating results for its 2006 first quarter, and they're better than ever: profits were up 7% from last year to 8.4 billion (their highest ever for a first quarter) and sales were up as well by 8.4% to $89 billion. Now to put all that in perspective, based on its 2005 sales volume, Exxon-Mobil is so large that if this company were a country it would rank in size ahead of nearly 75% of all countries in the world. They can thank the Bush administration for a lot of their success. Guess who their top executives will be voting for in November and the top officials of the other energy giants as well.
High energy prices (and specifically oil prices) are also the result of at least two other factors which David discusses. One is the effect on competition by massive consolidation in the industry, especially among refiners. He noted the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) approved 413 mergers during the Clinton years and another 520 in the first three years of the Bush administration. Fewer companies mean less competition, and that's led to higher prices. David also reported that Consumers Union in 2004 found that higher prices were mostly from higher charges at refineries. And those increases were the result of lax federal regulation which allowed refiners to create artificial bottlenecks in supply driving up the cost of gasoline at the pump. There's a nasty word for this never used. It's called price fixing, and our government watchdogs are allowing it with their winks and nods to their oil giant friends. The consuming public is forced to pay the price and is lied to by the government and industry trying to justify it.
To top it all off, it's well known, especially by those who try to deceive us, that energy supplies are finite. With that in mind, you'd think the government would be encouraging or even mandating the industry to make a determined effort to find alternative sources to replace our dwindling resources that won't last forever. And you'd also think laws would be passed requiring conversation especially by raising fuel efficiency standards for vehicles and enacting other measures to lower energy consumption. But if you thought that, you'd be wrong. Although the need is urgent, doing these sensible things are bad for business. And as we see repeated industry after industry, our government will even pursue reckless policies to support their corporate friends and funders, and in the process ignore the needs of the public. Nothing will ever change until we demand it, and that's what David is trying to convince us to do.
Chapter 9: Unions - They Once Were Strong and Won Great Benefits for Their Members - No Longer
David observes, and I strongly concur, that there's no clearer expression of corporate America's hostile takeover of government than how elected officials treat ordinary working people. Above all, that means their right to organize and be represented by strong unions that will fight for their rights. Large corporations especially hate unions and always have. But a golden age of worker rights emerged during The Great Depression in the 1930s when economic conditions became so dire the Roosevelt administration and enlightened business leaders knew they had to make big enough concessions, like it or not, to avert a possible worker's revolution similar to what happened in Russia in 1917. The key legislation enacted for workers was the passage of the Wagner Act that established the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) that guaranteed labor the right to bargain collectively on equal terms with management.
Things began to change in the post WW II era beginning with the 1947 passage of the Taft-Hartley Act that was the first major shot across the bow by corporate America to curb the power of organized labor. But things really picked up steam adversely during the Reagan years when that administration showed its contempt for working people. It began in 1981 with the firing of 11,000 striking air traffic controllers, jailing its PATCO leaders, fining the union leaders millions of dollars and finally "busting" the union. The Reagan administration also used federal tax dollars to finance strike-breaking, worked to reduce worker health and safety protections and campaigned to change federal statutes guaranteeing worker rights to organize and bargain collectively.
From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, things have gotten progressively worse as the social contract the government once had with the people has been systematically dismantled. It's been done program by program, year after year with the ultimate goal of the Bush administration and all politicians beholden to business to make all ordinary working people "self-sufficient" with little or no safety net for protection and the power of union representation effectively neutered. We see the result in how union membership has declined through the years. Whereas in 1958 about one third of the work force belonged to unions, today it's under 13%. That shameful figure is the lowest in the industrialized world to the detriment of all ordinary working people here.
Corporate America in league with government has shamelessly campaigned against unions in an effort to demonize them to discourage workers from understanding how membership benefits them. The rhetoric used is hostile, deceitful and contrary to the facts which David lists: average union workers earn about one-third more in total compensation than nonunion members; 89% of union members have employer-paid health care benefits compared to 67% of nonunion members; employers pay a greater share of union member health care premiums than they do for nonunion members; over two-thirds of union members have short-term disability insurance compared to about one-third of nonunion workers; and, union members receive about 26% more vacation time and 14% more total paid leave (vacations and holidays) than nonunion members. Also, strong unions benefit nonunion workers according to the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute. They reported union influence resulted in an 8.8% wage increase for the average nonunion high school graduate. And another key fact came out of the influential Council on Foreign Relations. They reported that the decline in union membership "is correlated with the early and sharp widening of the US wage gap" between the well-off and ordinary working people.
Again David goes on to list and debunk the many myths and lies government and business try to use to attack and destroy organized labor. Without it or in weakened form, big corporations especially can exploit their work force, hold down wages and benefits and increase their profits. So far their plan is working like a charm as noted earlier in the section under wages. Ordinary working people today earn less than 30 years ago when adjusted for inflation, and the gap between rich and poor has widened to obscene levels and it's getting worse. It's unlikely this trend will be reversed unless a way is found to revive the union movement so that working people again have a strong voice fighting for their rights. Again, David offers solid solutions.
Chapter Ten: Legal Rights - This Means the Right of Ordinary People to Have Their Day in Court and Be Treated Fairly Because the Law Assures It - It's Called the Right of "Due Process" Guaranteed Under the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution
Fair treatment under the law in a democratic society serving us all is the way things should be, but they're not, Fourteenth Amendment notwithstanding. That's because corporate America in collusion with their government benefactors have stacked the legal deck to prevent it. So instead of equity and justice we have "tort reform." That's code language meaning limiting the legal rights of ordinary individuals including their ability to file lawsuits against corrupt companies and be able to get fair redress for the harm caused them.
David shows how government has pandered to corporate wishes. In 1995, Congress passed a bill limiting shareholders' rights to sue company officials and get proper restitution when they cooked the books or violated the law in other ways. Then in 2005, Congress enacted legislation limiting our right to file class-action lawsuits. And the same thing is happening at the state level, so that power and influence is stripping ordinary people of their legal right of protection against corporate abuse that seems to become greater as corporations grow larger and get cozier with elected officials. The 2005 federal legislation requires most class-action suits to be filed only in federal courts which are more heavily stacked with business-friendly justices than the state ones. Also, many state laws are tougher and federal courts are so overburdened many cases never get heard and those that do must wait far longer to be placed on the court docket. When justice is delayed under this kind of an unfair system, it's denied.
Once again David shows how big corporations and their government lackeys have gamed the system and rigged the legal rules so they win and ordinary people suffer for it and are denied justice. One more time David shows us how to fight back and win.
The Sum of It All for Ordinary People
David sums up his thoughts in a final chapter asking when "will this downward spiral ever end?" He then goes on to tell us the good news and the bad. As if we didn't know it, he stresses the bad news is both major political parties are complicit with their corporate allies and willingly aid them in their hostile takeover. So any time we're able to throw the bums out, we're just likely to get new bums. David adds more bad news explaining "the media" largely ignore what's going on. I'd go much further than David and say the "media" are the dominant corporate media, and they're in on the scam as they too benefit from it. The reporters and pundits they have on air or in print have little latitude beyond what their employers expect them to do. If they want to keep their jobs, they'll support corporate-friendly policies because they're good for business including the companies they work for.
But David also gives us some good news. Americans are smart he says. They know corporations and the rich have too much power, and government is there to serve them. We also have new avenues to connect with each other and become better informed. The growth of alternative media, the internet, weblogs (I have my own) and more are attracting growing numbers and over time may weaken the corporate media's stranglehold on us as our main source of information - which is no information at all. It's the party line designed and intended to "keep the rabble in line" so they can continue their wicked ways at our expense.
I must briefly add an update to David's reported good news on alternative media sources. It seems when things are getting too good for consumers, corporate America mounts an offensive to regain the offensive and grow their profits handsomely in the process. That's what the telephone and cable companies are now doing in Congress with their attempt to make the Web a gated community. They want to destroy net neutrality by gaining the right to charge their Web site customers based on the amount of their traffic. Their plan is to be able to offer a new tier of broadband service to companies using their networks to make them pay more for speedier access. There's lots more they want as well, if they can get it, that will benefit them but hurt consumers. There's now momentum building on Capitol Hill to head off this intrusion to rewrite the rules and hurt our internet freedoms. We won't know the outcome for a while, but the stakes for the public are very high and the adversary we face is very powerful and committed to beat us.
Overall on all the issues he discussed in his book, David admits we face a tough struggle and that "for every victory.....there are many more defeats." But he ends the book with his final prescription on how we can fight back, and I'll list the ones he's chosen:
1. Reject the idea that we can't bring about change. History shows we can if we're fully committed.
2. Get informed on what's going on and how it's harming us. It's not that hard if we try, but you won't get it on TV or in your morning paper.
3. Fight back at the grass roots. That's how Republicans began their rise to power back when Democrats controlled the White House for 20 years and the Congress for much longer. It starts at the local level and goes up from there. In my city of Chicago, it's called the city council and various boards that run the functions of government.
4. Don't get co-opted by the system. Instead, organize ordinary people for political action where you live. Remember how former Democrat and House Speaker Tip O'Neill characterized the system when he said "all politics is local." His grammar may have been bad, but his wisdom was sound.
5. Campaign and fight for public funding of elections. As long as private money rules, they win and we lose.
David ends on a very upbeat note, and I'll add my own after his from my article on the same subject. He cites our history of an active population that in the past fought back and won major victories - ending slavery, women's rights including to vote, the right to organize, civil rights and lots more. We've always fought injustice when it got bad enough and those affected wouldn't take it anymore. David concludes he's confident our outrage will grow enough to make us fight back again and lead us to a better future. And I'll end this section with a quote by famed Chicago community organizer Sol Linowitz who understood and preached that "the way to beat organized money is with organized people." He proved it.
My Own Summation of David's Important Book
I loved the book, especially because I wrote about the same subject using the same title as I stated at the outset. I also said up front and will repeat again that everyone should read David's book as a starting point to learning what's wrong that's harming us and getting worse and then learn how we can fight back and win.
That said, I have some suggestions for David in future editions of this book. I covered a few issues David didn't in my "Hostile Takeover" article, the earlier companion one to it I called "Democracy in America - It's Spelled C-O-R-R-U-P-T-O-N" and other writing. I'll list three important ones briefly and end.
l. Obscene levels of military spending that benefit the defense contractors and all other companies serving the military - industrial complex have hurt the public enormously. I wrote that the Center for Defense Information reported that since 1945 over $21 trillion dollars has been sucked out of the economy for military spending largely to benefit US corporations even though the country had no real enemies all through those years - and we were lied to all that time to make us believe we did. The public paid for this largesse through our taxes that should have been spent on essential social services we never got.
2. The state of public education in the country has been degraded by a combination of neglect and a deliberate effort to produce new generations of young people only fit for low-paying service jobs - because many of the good ones (especially in manufacturing and high-tech) are being exported to low-wage countries. George Bush's "no child left behind" education program is just another fraud to enrich corporations at the expense of school children.
3. The prison population in the country has grown to over 2.1 million with about 900 new inmates being added each week. It's now the largest in the world, even greater than China's with four times our population and a government that has no compunction about locking people up. I wrote a major article on this I called "The US Gulag Prison System", and I was referring to the one at home. This is an outrage and should be a national scandal as is the state of what I call our criminal-injustice system. All of it is an outgrowth of a society benefitting wealth and power and doing it at the expense of ordinary people who naturally become more restive as their lives become more intolerable. So we've chosen to solve the problem by locking up as many of them as we can on any pretext instead of providing essential services and correcting corporate abuses which is how a government serving us would do it. This one (Republican or Democrat) doesn't and won't unless we make it do it.
I urge David to consider adding these topics to a future edition of his wonderful book. But I applaud him for his important contribution. It's his first book, and I certainly hope not his last.
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
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Editorial: Reshuffling the cards in Iraq
By Ghali Hassan
05/10/06 "IICH"
The recent installing of a puppet government in Iraq under U.S. Occupation shows that America's messianic mission of "spreading democracy" is flawed. The fraudulent electoral "law" imposed by the Occupation, and the U.S. addiction to violence to protect its imperialist and corporate interests at the expense of the Iraqi population provide compelling evidence against the U.S. imperialist agenda in Iraq.
Contrary to the myth played and promoted by the Western so-called "Left" and "Right" and the corprorate media that the "US failed [in Iraq] because of poor planning" and "incompetence," the U.S. planned the war and the occupation (military and economic) of Iraq months before the illegal invasion took place. The U.S. failed in Iraq for the following reasons: 1) the U.S. is serving its own imperialists and corporate interests in Iraq, not the interests of the Iraqi people. The overwhelming evidence shows that since the invasion, the Bush administration and their cronies have benefited immensely from looting Iraq's wealth; 2) the U.S. aim was to destroy Iraq; 3) the anti-imperialist, anti-Occupation consciousness of the Iraqi people; and 4) the undeterred Resistance of the Iraqi people to the U.S. imperialist agenda.
Three months after the 1991 U.S. war on Iraq, which devastated the country's infrastructure and killed hundreds of thousand of innocent Iraqi civilians, the government of Saddam Hussein was able to restore basic services and provided the population with food, water and electricity. Iraq was a very safe and united nation. This was achieved despite the illegal interference of the U.S. and Britain in Iraq's affairs and the criminal genocidal sanctions imposed by the UN and enforced by the U.S. and Britain.
Three years after the U.S. invasion, Iraq is a destroyed country under a fascist Occupation. Iraqis have no water, no electricity, no jobs (unemployment at 70 percent), and lack basic health care services. Iraqis, at all levels, are far worse off than before the invasion and Occupation. There are no security and no human rights. Hundreds of thousand of Iraqis, mostly women and children, have been killed by U.S. forces. Iraqis continue to be arrested without charge, tortured, and abused by U.S. forces and their trained militias and death squads.
Long before the invasion, the U.S. and Britain trained, armed and financed expatriate Iraqi criminal elements in the U.S., Britain and Iran. Once they entered Iraq on the back of U.S. tanks, the expatriates and their minders embarked on a criminal process of "de-Baathification," which implied the liquidation of anyone associated with the Ba'ath Party, as well as anyone with anti-Occupation nationalist views. "De-Baathification" is simply a murderous tool for inciting violence and destroying Iraqi society. Tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have been killed in cold blood by the U.S.-trained and armed militias, and others have simply disappeared. None of these daily mass murders of innocent civilians were committed under the previous regime of Saddam Hussein.
The label of "Sunnis" and "Shiites" is a U.S. creation to provide a smokescreen and divert people's attention from the crimes of the Occupation. The relationships between the armed militias and the Occupation can only be described as symbiotic relationships. It is a campaign of terror financed and implemented with the full force of the U.S. and its agents.
If one examines those expatriates who the U.S. piggybacked to Iraq and placed them in higher positions to serve its imperialist-Zionist agenda; one will have great difficulty in finding anyone with anti-Occupation, nationalist views. The U.S. administration continues to reshuffle the expatriates like cards. In other words, they are recycled for the same purpose. From the first day they arrived in Iraq, they settled with the occupying forces completely isolated -- in the fortified "Green Zone" -- from the Iraqi population. They have one thing in common with the Bush administration: looting Iraq's wealth and destroying Iraq's unity. It is consistent with the U.S. effort to colonise Iraq and create a dependent subordinate Iraq.
During the 2005 U.S.-staged Iraqi elections, there were no candidates or political parties with political ideologies, just religious and ethnic slates brought into Iraq with the invading forces. In addition to the illegitimacy of the elections -- conducted under foreign military Occupation -- the U.S.-imposed electoral "law" or the Transitional Administrative Law (TAL) denies Iraqis their rights to "one person-one vote." The TAL is designed to serve U.S. interests and to limit the power of the newly "elected" assembly. TAL gives the Kurds effective veto power, and hence creates stalemate, as seen lately. In addition, the U.S.-drafted constitution was there to cement and legitimise these various ethnic and sectarian divisions. One wonders why Britain and the U.S. do not have the same "democratic" system at home.
The Bush administration needs this propaganda of "turning point(s)" to show the world that its imperialist policy remains on course -- something positive out of Iraq -- and that is "spreading democracy." The reality is that the U.S. spreading hate and violence. What the U.S. brought to Iraq is not "democracy," but bloodshed, gross abuses of human rights and a culture of corruption unheard of in Iraq. The country is continues to be occupied militarily by more than 200,000 U.S. forces and their mercenaries and economically by U.S. corporations.
At the same time, the U.S. administration continues its unwillingness to allow Iraqis (under Occupation) to govern themselves through the democratic process, which shows that the Bush administration's aim is to rule Iraq behind a group of criminals capable only of subjecting the Iraqi population to daily terror. After three years of Occupation-generated violence and looting, Iraqis have given up on the U.S. version of democracy. It is now called America's democracy of looting Iraq. In a word, the U.S.-imposed government is just a thin veil to shield the Occupation.
In his chronicle of America's past criminal attacks against defenceless nations, Stephen Kinzer sees the parallels between the U.S. invasion of the Philippines and U.S. invasion of Iraq were identical. In Overthrow (Times Books, 2006), Kinzer writes: "Early in the twenty-first century, ten decades after the United States invaded the Philippines and a few years after it invaded Iraq, those two countries were among the most volatile and unstable in all of Asia." Both nations remain poor, exploited and undemocratic. Indeed, the Bush administration is in the process of ruling Iraq based on the Philippines model.
Anyone familiar with the U.S. legacy in the Philippines has no difficulty in identifying the criminal role played by the U.S. administration in terrorising the civilian population of the Philippines, since it was invaded by U.S. forces more than a hundred years ago. The Occupation of Iraq is reminiscent to that of the Philippines. Like the Occupation of Iraq, the occupation of the Philippines was defended as a war for "civilization" and "freedom." U.S. forces treated the civilian population with brutality. They used brute force, including the burning of entire villages, tortured and abused of prisoners and detainees.
After decades of military occupation, the U.S. continues to have massive military basing rights and military agreements with the Filipino government. Today, the U.S. rules the Philippines behind a façade of a de-facto civilian-military alliance -- re-shuffling the same oligarchs -- since "independence" from the U.S.
Under the dictator Ferdinand Marcos (1972-1986), the civilian population of the Philippines was terrorised by state-sponsored terrorists. The terror campaign of the military and death squads in the Philippines has all the hallmarks of the current terror campaign in Iraq. Furthermore, the Philippines continue to lag behind in economic development. Poverty and unemployment are ranked amongst the highest in the world. The common slogan in the Philippines to day is: "Better to die working in Iraq, than to stay home and watch your family starve." Will the Iraqi people accept the Philippines' model? Not likely.
The U.S. administration has become so obsessed with war and violence that it has increased the danger for all life on the planet. The U.S. use of democracy as a tool to serve its imperialist and corporate interests has increased the perils of both poverty and violence by creating and supporting an elitist system of corruption and greed. It fosters and rewards criminals and criminal behaviour.
Unless the U.S. is forced to withdraw from Iraq immediately, no re-shuffling of the same cards will change the situation on the ground in Iraq. The only remaining option for people around the world is to provide moral support for the Iraqi people
Ghali Hassan lives in Perth, Western Australia. He can be contacted on: G.Hassan@exchange.curtin.edu.au.
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Enough Already!
Bush says brother would make great president
10/05/2006
US President George Bush (pictured) today suggested that he would like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.
US President George Bush today suggested that he would like to see his family's White House legacy continue, perhaps with his younger brother Jeb as the chief executive.
The president said Florida Governor Jeb Bush is well-suited for another office and would make "a great president."
"I would like to see Jeb run at some point in time, but I have no idea if that's his intention or not," Bush said in an interview with Florida reporters, according to an account on the St Petersburg Times website.
The president said he had "pushed him fairly hard about what he intends to do," but Jeb has not said.
"I have no idea what he's going to do. I've asked him that question myself. I truly don't think he knows," Bush said.
Jeb Bush, 53, will end his second term as governor in January.
His brother George ends his second presidential term in January 2009. Neither can seek re-election because of term limits.
Comment: We totally agree. Jeb proved his Presidential credentials when he played a key role in stealing the election for his brother in 2000, so he is surely well-equipped to continue that legacy. Go for it Jeb! Do it for Democracy and Free Iraq!
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Bush's low ratings worry Republicans
By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
WASHINGTON - President Bush's job-approval ratings have sunk so low - to 31 percent in two major polls - that it's time to pull out the history books.
Not only has he hit all-time lows for his own administration in both the Gallup and CBS/New York Times polls, he is also working his way up (or down) the all-time list of lowest job-approval scores. In the Gallup records, which go back to President Franklin Roosevelt, only Presidents Truman, Nixon, Carter, and George H.W. Bush hit lower points.
Perhaps most disturbing to Mr. Bush is that he is losing Republicans. The Gallup poll, released Monday, showed a 13-point drop in one week among self-identified Republicans, from 81 percent to 68 percent. Frank Newport, Gallup's editor in chief, cautions against overinterpreting those numbers, given the size of the Republican sample (about one-third of those polled) in any single survey. That number has dipped before and bounced back. But polling experts agree that the overall trend is evident.
"Clearly, he's lost ground among Republicans; all the pollsters are seeing that," says Karlyn Bowman, an expert on polls at the American Enterprise Institute. "Now he is just holding onto his base ... the people who are with you when you're wrong or with you when things are going terribly."
It's difficult to pinpoint exact causes week-to-week for a change in support. Overall, voters cite the Iraq war most often as the decisive issue. In recent news, Mr. Newport points to the immigration debate, the new CIA director, and gas prices as other "logical suspects." And of course, some polls show slightly better numbers; this week CNN had Bush going up from 32 to 34 percent.
Still, Republicans are quietly worrying that Bush could even dip below the psychologically significant threshold of 30 percent in a major poll. And while Bush is bringing fresh faces into the White House - so far, a new chief of staff and press secretary - to try to reinvigorate his team, some analysts suggest it's getting to be too late to significantly alter the nation's sour mood going into the November midterm elections.
On individual issues, such as the new Medicare prescription drug benefit, the White House sees signs of improvement. This week, as Bush tours Florida to tout the program, in advance of the May 15 sign-up deadline, aides say the program is gaining popularity. Indeed, the latest CBS/New York Times poll shows 42 percent of respondents say their prescription drugs expenses have gone down versus 19 percent who say they have gone up.
But the dominant tone among Republicans focused on November remains one of concern that the low public opinion of Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress could affect local races throughout the country. In other words, analysts say, some discouraged Republican voters might not turn out - and that, matched with a highly motivated Democratic electorate, could bring some upsets of GOP-held congressional seats. With only a 15-seat margin of GOP control in the House of Representatives, enough upsets could hand Congress to the Democrats.
And so Republicans are trying to devise messages that will drive turnout, regardless of how Bush is doing. One theme is impeachment: Elect a Democratic House, and Bush could be impeached. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who would become speaker of the House if the Democrats win control, denies that there would be a quick move to impeach Bush, but she has promised a series of investigations into the Bush administration.
"We're certainly going to do all we can to motivate our base to turn out by highlighting what our members have done in their districts," says Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership (RMSP). Then "we will point out what it really means to throw out the Republicans. Do you really want a Nancy Pelosi in there [as speaker]?"
Ms. Resnick notes that a lot of RMSP members represent swing districts, which are critical to maintaining overall GOP control.
Among social conservatives, an important part of the GOP base, another turnout motivator will be a new wave of anti-gay marriage measures on state ballots. So far, measures providing for a state constitutional ban have qualified for the ballot in six states: Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Activists in five other states - Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, and Massachusetts - are also working to get measures on their ballots. In addition, Illinois may have a nonbinding referendum question on same-sex marriage in November. It would not have the effect of law, but it could still drive turnout.
Gary Bauer, a religious conservative activist who ran for president in 2000, says he and other leaders, James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, are planning a series of rallies around the country in places with close races to try to stimulate turnout.
"Certainly through my political action committee and others there will be a great deal of advertising on Christian and conservative talk radio to explain what's at stake in the election," Mr. Bauer says.
In addition to the impeachment threat and the prospect of a Speaker Pelosi, whose San Francisco-liberal image is anathema to many Republicans, Bauer says, "We'll remind them that one more vacancy on the Supreme Court could tilt the court in their direction."
Supreme Court nominations require approval by the Senate, which is generally seen as a greater long shot for Democratic takeover than the House, but not impossible.
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Getting Past the Watergate Fixation
By Russ Baker, TomPaine.com. Posted May 11, 2006.
The ongoing GOP corruption scandals are just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is how business is done every day in Washington.
We knew this was big back in March, when a court sent ex-Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif. -- convicted of taking $2.4 million in bribes from military contractors -- off to serve eight years in prison, the most severe sentence ever handed out to a member of Congress. From then on, the sleaze chain has been metastasizing. More members of the House might be implicated -- and even top CIA officials. Now it is being described as the largest federal corruption scandal in a century. With stories of prostitutes and all-night poker games at the Watergate hotel, it is one scandal that truly is deserving of the "-gate" suffix that has become such a dreary journalistic cliché.
No matter how big the affair grows, though, it is likely to follow in the path of so many of its predecessors -- distracting public attention from a larger and more important reality: Today, "the largest corruption scandal in a century" is not WatergateGate -- it is the everyday performance of the U.S. government. The worst sleaze in Washington is mainly legal, as the old saying goes; and that includes the sorry state of the entire intelligence apparatus -- beyond whether the #3 CIA official improperly participated in those late-night, high-stakes card games.
Too many in the media treat a juicy mess like the Cunningham Affair as a shocking aberration. Consider the wording in a New York Times article on Sunday, which described "a growing suspicion among some lawmakers that corrupt practices may have influenced decision-making in Congress and at executive-branch agencies."
Who would have thought? Don't the editors read their own paper? It's been clear for some time that corruption in the Bush administration has exceeded a Washington standard that already was pretty tawdry. Some of the stories are known already, especially to TomPaine.com readers: White House procurement chief taken out in handcuffs in connection with a sprawling lobbying corruption investigation; the vice president's chief of staff indicted for perjury; the unseemly setup between Bush's first FEMA director and Brownie, the incompetent neophyte who replaced him.
But many of the larger misdeeds have gone unreported, in part because -- technically illegal or not -- they represent business as usual in Republican Washington today. Virtually every federal agency is now captive to the corporate interests it is supposed to regulate. The reach of corporate influence has even compromised the science agencies on whose fact-finding and truth-telling crucial questions of national safety and even survival depend.
And then there is Congress. A quick comparison of committee activity and floor votes with campaign finance reports tells the story. Never mind the now-controversial "earmarks," in which legislators secretly slip goodies at the last minute into larger bill packages. The real scandal is going on in plain sight. The entities that give the most get the most -- and the goodies keep on coming. That outfits like Halliburton can survive a never-ending series of contracting horror shows with their federal contacts intact says a lot about Congress's willful abrogation of fiduciary duty on behalf of the taxpayer.
The main mistake Randy Cunningham made was accepting the goodies while he was still in Congress. There is no crime involved in doing the exact same favors for government contractors, and later joining the company's board or getting hired as a highly-paid lobbyist, or getting payback on a more indirect basis. That's the deal all over town, and some of the most "well-respected" names in America have such arrangements -- and not all of them are Republicans. The whole thing stinks, but what to do about it? That's the rub.
Speaking of a rub, besides the careless greed, in the Cunningham Caper we are blessed by the emergence of a sexual angle worthy of a British tabloid, with the congressman alleged to have enjoyed the favors of big-league prostitutes in return for military contracts. Sexual peccadilloes always get the public's attention in a way that other misdeeds, like accepting bribes from defense contractors, cannot. That Cunningham and his buddies may have preferred presumably-discreet professional company over out-of-wedlock friends of the Gennifer Flowers ilk, makes perfect sense in an atmosphere where holier-than-thou sanctimony cannot bear scrutiny. That might take the story to a new level, since these sins would have been committed by the staunchest defenders of the "sanctity of marriage."
Those who care about the ever more brazen sellout of the public interest over the last five years have no choice but to take these revelations in whatever garb they come -- and if they're scantily clad, so be it. Meanwhile, consorting with prostitutes -- the thing that will get perhaps get the most attention -- is the one thing that matters least to the future of our body politic.
With this new WatergateGate, we must at all costs beware the Woodward Fallacy -- that sanitation is a substitute for politics and ideas. It is the conceit of the reigning elite. But in fact we can get rid of Cunningham and his cronies and the rot will continue, unless change goes much deeper to the root.
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Why Hayden is a 'Perfect' Pick
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet. Posted May 10, 2006.
It makes perfect sense for President Bush to nominate Gen. Michael V. Hayden as CIA director, no matter what the critics, including a surprising number of normally housebroken Republicans, have to say.
True, Hayden was in charge of the National Security Agency during the run-up to Sept. 11, a massive terrorist attack that intelligence agencies are built to prevent. But remaining unflappably confident while getting it all wrong is a vital credential for the head of the CIA under this administration.
Recall that former CIA Director George Tenet was honored by Bush with the Medal of Freedom for dutifully pretending that the case for WMD in Iraq was a "slam-dunk" and politely taking the hit on Bush's infamous "16 words" State of the Union lie about that African uranium.
The Bush administration long ago abandoned the idea that intelligence should ever be permitted to curb this president's imperial hubris or political agenda. Were it otherwise, the president would not be turning over control of the CIA, long presumed to be a civilian check on the military, to an active-duty general whose loyalty to the president was proved by his eagerness to conduct illegal wiretapping of unsuspecting Americans.
Hayden passed that test superbly while head of the NSA, proudly defending Bush's illegal eavesdropping on the same citizenry whose freedom the president is sworn to preserve, while stonewalling the probes of Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, who considers the wiretaps illegal.
"Now, with Gen. Hayden up for confirmation, this will give us an opportunity to find out" more about the eavesdropping program, Specter told Fox News, probably over-optimistically -- especially since Hayden will be confirmed by a Bush-friendly committee.
Hayden headed the NSA from 1999 until last year, when John D. Negroponte appointed him as his top deputy upon assuming the newly created position of director of national intelligence. And therein lies the real reason for Hayden's appointment; his proven loyalty to Bush and his man, Negroponte, who by forcing out Porter Goss as head of the CIA and replacing him with Hayden now assumes unprecedented control of the vast U.S. intelligence apparatus.
Hayden's track record does not otherwise justify this appointment. It was on Hayden's watch that the NSA, after all, failed to properly alert the president to the Al Qaeda threat. Of course, it is possible that the agency did alert the president of an imminent threat and that the information was ignored as the president traipsed off to his lengthy summer vacation on his ranch; we already know that the system, as Tenet has said, was "blinking red." But if that is the case, Hayden has not said so.
Unfortunately, Hayden has other disasters besides Sept. 11 on his resume. While at the NSA, he tried to implement the expensive, ambitious "Trailblazer" program, aimed at upgrading NSA's technology, but analysts have deemed the outcome a multibillion-dollar bust. Meanwhile, even a number of prominent Republicans have attacked his bypassing of laws protecting our civil liberties, under Bush's direction--conducting unauthorized taps on the e-mail and phone conversations of at least 5,000 Americans.
"You need someone who will stand up to pressure from the president," James Bamford, author of two books on the NSA, told the New York Times. "Instead, he's shown he's willing to throw out his own principles on civil liberties to please the president."
This ability to accommodate totalitarian values in exchange for career advancement is viewed as a terrific asset by Negroponte, who handpicked Hayden for this new job within hours of Goss' abrupt resignation. Negroponte, after all, is most infamous for his tenure as ambassador to Honduras during the Reagan years, when he exemplified that administration's see-no-evil approach to monitoring the malleable military dictatorship's human rights violations -- which included everything from the army's torture and slaughter of nuns to the regime's arming and protecting the United States-created Contra guerrillas who were terrorizing civilians in next-door Nicaragua.
No doubt, Negroponte also won the admiration of the Bush honchos through his role during the Reagan years in supplying arms to the Contras in violation of a congressional prohibition on such sales.
The inescapable conclusion here is that Negroponte was picked by Bush to be the intelligence czar because of, rather than despite, this unsavory past. Negroponte, with a history of disastrous foreign adventures and contempt for the checks on power required for democratic governance, is an all-too-perfect Bush appointee. So, too, his deputy Hayden, nominated by Bush to head the CIA.
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Rumsfeld is a pathological liar
By Mike Whitney
11/05/2006
The American people have been ripped off big-time by Rummy. From the onset, it's been one wretched excuse after another. Nothing is ever his fault; not the occupation; not the lack of soldiers; not the looting in Baghdad, not the faulty-armor, not the resistance, nothing. Ever!
Nothing he says can be trusted. In 6 years, he's never uttered a completely reliable statement, just convoluted pronouncements that have to be parsed by experts. That's why it was so satisfying to see him skewered by Ray McGovern's questions. McGovern had Rumsfeld backpedaling like he'd just been harpooned. Honesty has that kind of effect on people like Rumsfeld; that's why they surround themselves with goons like a Mafia kingpin. They need a human-shield to protect them from the truth.
The American people have been ripped off big-time by Rummy. From the onset, it's been one wretched excuse after another. Nothing is ever his fault; not the occupation; not the lack of soldiers; not the looting in Baghdad, not the faulty-armor, not the resistance, nothing. Ever!
Every errant bomb, every wayward missile, every downed helicopter, every dead soldier, is someone else's fault.
Teflon Don; the biggest buck-passing narcissist the country has ever produced.
When the photos showed up from Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld feigned surprise. "A few bad apples", he moaned. Now we know he did everything except fit the prisoners with women's underwear.
Nice touch, eh?
Now he's deployed troops in the United States and has a regional headquarters in Colorado (NorthCom) to spy on American citizens; all part of a sick plan to militarize the country and show everyone what a smart guy he is.
That's what it's all about isn't it? An egomaniac trying to show everyone how brilliant he is? The only problem is he's failed at everything he's tried. Every part of the occupation has been so badly botched it's totally beyond repair. Now, the London-based Senlis-Council is reporting that Afghanistan is unraveling, too.
Should we be surprised?
Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti; flop, flop, flop, one failure after another.
"We know where the weapons are...they're in the area around Tikrit".
What a joke; it's like a carnival huckster pitching snake-oil to farm boys; nothing but smoke and mirrors; nothing but intellectual flatulence.
Or this:
"As we know, there are known knowns. And there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."
What type of flim-flam is that? Just more smart-ass, circuitous bullshit meant to impress and confuse; the clever blabbering of confidence man.
Is that what passes for honesty at the Pentagon?
This is what the truth sounds like:
"The decision to invade Iraq, was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions - or bury the results." Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold
That's right; "or bury the results".
Here's another Rumsfeld gem describing the war on terror:
"Things will not be necessarily continuous. The fact that they are something other than perfectly continuous ought not to be characterized as a pause. There will be some things that people will see. There will be some things that people won't see. And life goes on" (Oct. 12, 2001, Department of Defense news briefing)
More tortured language; more oblique banter; more meaningless gibberish.
Now, compare that to the candor of one of his strongest critics:
(Rumsfeld is) "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically" he has "put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his Cold-Warrior's view of the world, and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower." Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton.
Bull's-eye!
So what's Rumsfeld's reward for 6 years of bungling?
Now, he's trying to suck the CIA into the War Department so he'll have control over the entire intelligence budget. That way he can carry out his criminal renditions and deploy his global paramilitaries in complete secrecy. It's another giant step towards a military dictatorship.
Here's a short-list of Rumsfeld's more memorable lies.
A month before the invasion of Iraq Rumsfeld boasted on PBS' News Hour that Americans would "be welcomed by the majority of the civilian population of Iraq...There's no question but that they will be welcomed".
Lie. No candy, no flowers, no cakewalk.
Here's the Pollyanna-way he characterized the "success" in Afghanistan, where the countryside is still 100% controlled by warlords and drug-dealers and where Bush's Marshall Plan has never materialized:
"Go back to Afghanistan. The people were in the streets playing music, cheering, flying kites, and doing all the things that the Taliban and Al Qaida would not let them do."
"Flying kites"? What baloney.
Here's Rumsfeld on Saddam's weapons programs:
6 months before the invasion, he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee in 2002, and said, "His regime has amassed large clandestine stockpiles of biological weapons" as well as "large clandestine stockpiles of chemical weapons".
Wrong again.
He insisted that Saddam had stockpiles "of VX nerve agent, sarin, mustard gas, anthrax, botulism and possibly smallpox". Later he would claim that Saddam produced, "38,000 liters of botulism toxin, 500 tons of sarin, and upwards of 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical weapons" as well as mobile biological-weapons labs.
What utter nonsense. These numbers were picked out of mid-air with no factual basis whatsoever. The intelligence community had no part in this charade; it was all cooked up by Rumsfeld's stooges in the OSP (Office of Special Plans) so they could drag the country to war.
In 2002 Rumsfeld addressed the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce and told them he had "bulletproof" evidence linking Saddam to Al Qaida; another lie designed to connect Saddam to 9-11.
When Rumsfeld was challenged about his claim, he protested,
"Never said that...never did. You may remember it well, but you're thinking of someone else. You can't find anywhere me saying anything like either of those two things you just said. I may look like someone else."
No, Rumsfeld does not "look like someone else"; he's the same unctuous, medicine man whose been pedaling his claptrap from the Pentagon-platform for 6 years. He piggy-backed the nation to war on a pack of lies and now he's leading the charge to attack Iran.
It's all been lies; Iraq, Iran, 9-11, Katrina, the war on terror; "a vast tapestry of lies" as Harold Pinter noted. Not a speck of truth to any of it.
The American people are being set up for the next big performance; another terrorist attack on the "homeland". Rumsfeld will undoubtedly spearhead the crackdown on Muslims, leftists, intellectuals, political enemies, union leaders and anyone else who might pose a threat to his crackpot master-plan. His scheme is bound to fail just like everything else, but not before thousands are either "disappeared", brutalized or dumped in a land-fill somewhere. Destruction is the only thing for which Rumsfeld has shown any particular aptitude. I expect he will continue to perfect this one, solitary talent.
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Rumsfeld says Russia, China policies worrying
Thu May 11, 2006 04:54 AM ET
PARIS (Reuters) - The United States is concerned about Russia's use of its energy resources as a political weapon and China's lack of transparency over military spending, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was quoted as saying.
In an opinion piece printed in France's Le Figaro daily on Thursday, Rumsfeld said the U.S. focus was currently on Iraq and Afghanistan but that in the future, its policies would be determined by choices made by other powers such as China and Russia.
"Russia, a country with vast natural resources ... is a partner of the United States on security," Rumsfeld said.
"But on certain issues, Russia has not been very cooperative and has used its energy resources as a political weapon."
Vice President Dick Cheney provoked an angry reaction from Russia earlier this month when he told Baltic and Black Sea leaders that Russian President Vladimir Putin was backsliding on democracy and using energy reserves to "blackmail" Moscow's neighbors.
Russia drew international criticism earlier this year when it briefly turned off its natural gas taps to Ukraine in a pricing dispute that disrupted supplies to Europe.
Rumsfeld said China's lack of transparency over military spending complicated the relationship between the two countries.
"Some aspects of the Chinese attitude are worrying and complicate our relations," he said.
"A notorious lack of transparency (on military spending) is of course worrying for China's neighbors."
China says it has been open about its military spending and says that as a share of gross domestic product and the government budget it is fairly low by international standards.
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All of Us Participate in a New Iraq
By Dahr Jamail
10/05/2006
It is only when more people in the US begin to fathom the totality of the destruction in Iraq that one may expect to hear the public outcry and uprising necessary to end the occupation and bring to justice the war criminals responsible for these conditions. Until that happens, make no mistake: all of us participate in a new Iraq, our hands dyed in the blood of innocents.
Last Friday I was at the University of Texas, Austin, giving a presentation on Iraq. After dumping an hour's worth of horrible "real news" about Iraq, I was asked the question I have by now learnt to expect: "Is there anything good happening there at all?" I understand why people ask this. There must be some hope, somewhere, right?
I suggested that there are always the military press releases folks can go to, for an "upper" about Iraq. Here I recounted one of these bogus "news" reports. Released during my second stint in Iraq, a report of May 21, 2004, stated: "The Coalition Provisional Authority has recently given out hundreds of soccer balls to Iraqi children in Ramadi, Karbala, and Hilla. Iraqi women from Hilla sewed the soccer balls, which are emblazoned with the phrase, All of Us Participate in a New Iraq."
THEM
That same evening after my presentation, I received an email from a doctor friend in Baghdad. The email pertains to the question I was asked, so I quote it here:
"Dear Mr. Dahr, I am wondering why? Americans and coalition forces were supported by pro-Iranian Militias, like the Badr Organization! The support and help of Iraqi Shiites at first helped to somewhat stabilize and maintain the occupation. Death squads trained by the coalition forces are working day and night under cover of the Ministry of Interior, attacking innocent people: both Sunnis and Shiites!!!! In spite of knowing very well who is doing what, we still see no improvement in the security situation. On the contrary, the situation is getting worse. I have many colleagues, doctors and other professionals, who are now begging for help to get out of Iraq for their lives and for their families' lives! The only losers are the Iraqis. The only Iraqis who are benefiting from this war are those who spend all their life outside Iraq and are now living in their big castle, the green zone!!!!! Everyone now knows that the invasion of Iraq was carried out upon falsified testimonies and lies!!!! What is going on on the ground differs a lot from what the media tells!!!!! I mean that."
As bad as things are in Iraq today, it may come as a surprise to many people in the US, including many who never supported the illegal invasion and occupation to begin with, that Iraq has been a disaster from the first day of the invasion.
Each time I hear this question, several scenes from my time there flash through my mind, and I am left pondering whether anything good has happened in Iraq since the beginning of the US-led invasion.
THEN
I recollect my experience of May 22, 2004, the day after the soccer ball report. This was weeks after news of American soldiers torturing detainees at Abu Ghraib had hit the corporate media. The first mock-court martial had just convicted one of the soldiers complicit in the atrocities, when I decided to go to Abu Ghraib. I wanted to meet and interview the family members who were attempting to get into the prison to see and talk to their loved ones detained there.
Prior to this trip, my interpreter and I had interviewed a man who had been tortured horrifically in Abu Ghraib. He had laughed, "The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house!" At the dusty, dismal, heavily guarded razor wire-ensconced area outside Abu Ghraib, many more horror stories awaited us. Despair and hopelessness pervaded the atmosphere as grieving family members waited, hoping against hope to be granted their chance to visit a dear one inside that gruesome compound.
Congregated on that patch of barren earth were men and women and wailing children. Their anguish matched their outrage as they remained unable to gain access to their loved ones held in the prison, or to procure any information about them.
Sitting on the hard packed dirt in his white dishdasha, his head scarf languidly flapping in the dry, hot wind, Lilu Hammed stared at the high walls of the nearby prison. It was almost as if he were attempting to see his 32-year-old son Abbas through the tan concrete.
He sat alone, his tired eyes fixed unwaveringly upon the heavily guarded Abu Ghraib. When my interpreter asked him if he would speak with us, several seconds passed before Lilu slowly turned his head to look up at us. "I am sitting here on the ground now, waiting for God's help."
His son had been in Abu Ghraib for 6 months, following a raid on his home that produced no weapons. The young man had never been charged with anything. Lilu held a crumpled visitation permission slip in his hand that he had just obtained, which allowed for a brief reunion with his son on the 18th of August, still three months away.
A pack of Humvees drove past, leaving us engulfed in a cloud of dust. A woman standing near us exclaimed, "We hope the whole world can see the position we are in now!"
I scan my memory further and recall November 11, 2004. My interpreter showed up at my hotel in a very somber mood. The previous night, after the curfew began at 9:30 pm, US military helicopters had been circling his neighborhood until 3 am. "How can we live like this," he asked, holding up his hands. "We are trapped in our own country." He confessed, "You know, Dahr, everyone is praying for God to take revenge on the Americans. Everyone!"
Later that night, another Iraqi friend showed up at my room with a wild look in his eyes, sweat beads on his forehead. "My friend has just been killed, and he was one of my best friends. I can't imagine that he is dead, really, but I guess it is okay." He told me about his friend's family. "They are so poor, they live 21 people in a house with three bedrooms, and they are good people."
This wasn't all. A relative of his had been missing for six days. That day, his body was brought to his family by someone who found it on the road. The body, which showed visible signs of torture, had two shots in the chest and two in the head. The four bullet shells that had killed him had been placed in his trouser pockets.
"I am crazy today with this news Dahr," my friend exclaimed, his hands up in the air, "The number of people killed here is growing so fast everyday, it is shit." He hung his head back and took a deep breath, then slowly exhaled. He reminisced how his whole life had been the same in Iraq but never as bad as at that point. "When I was a child, it was common to have some family member or the other killed in the war with Iran," he said, "but now, everyone is dying every day."
On 12 November 2004, following this grim discussion with my two interpreters, I remember meeting with Dr. Wamid Omar Nadhme, a Senior Political Scientist at Baghdad University. An older, articulate man who vehemently opposed the regime of Saddam Hussein, he had by then grown critical of the US policy that was responsible for the violence and chaos devouring his country.
Commenting on the current situation, he told me: "I can assure you, it is well over 75% of Iraqis who cannot even tolerate this occupation. The right-wing Bush administration is blinded by its ideology, and we are all suffering from this, Iraqis and soldiers alike." I cannot forget his concluding remarks to me. "Iraq is burning with wrath, anger and sadness."
Another telling instance of how nothing good happens in Iraq reached me on November 19th, exactly a week after my meeting with Dr. Nadhme. I received a call from one of my interpreters, who at the time was in his mosque for the Friday prayers. I could hear the deafening roar of hundreds of people chanting, "Allahu Akbar" (God is Greatest). The sound reverberated in the confined area behind his panicking voice: "I am being held at gunpoint by American soldiers inside Abu Hanifa mosque, Dahr." His incredulous bewilderment was palpable as he yelled, "Everyone is praying to God because the Americans are raiding our mosque during Friday prayer!"
He kept making short calls, updating me on the atrocity. After a few sentences of information he would hang up. His intermittent running commentary from within the mosque where he was trapped remains one of my most eerie experiences of Iraq. In the gap between his calls I would quickly type in the last bit of information before he would call back with more.
"They have shot and killed at least 4 of the people who were at prayer and at least 20 are wounded now! I cannot believe this! I can't let them see me calling you. I am on my stomach now and they have guns aimed at everyone. There are so many people inside the mosque, and it is sealed. We are on our bellies and in a very bad situation."
I could hear the screaming in the background amidst gunfire. The soldiers eventually released the women and children along with the men who were related to them. It was sheer luck that my interpreter escaped that day. He was released because a boy approached him asking him to act as his father.
When later he came to my hotel, he was distraught and crying. "I am in a very sad position. I do not see any freedom or any democracy. If this could lead into a freedom, it is a freedom with blood. It is a freedom with emotions of sadness. It is a freedom of killing. You cannot gain democracy through blood or killing. You do not find the freedom that way. People were going to pray to God and they were killed and wounded. There were 1,500 people praying to God, and they went on a holiday where people go every Friday for prayers. And they were shot and killed. There were so many women and kids lying on the ground. This is not democracy, neither freedom."
He had recorded the entire thing on the small tape recorder that we used while interviewing people.
These memories are but a glimpse of the horrible reality that the Iraqi people are suffering on a daily basis under US occupation. The only change that occurs is a worsening of conditions; it's a pattern I have witnessed from the beginning.
NOW: For Us and Them
At least 122 Iraqis died over the last weekend. These were only the reported deaths. The total number of Iraqis killed thus far as a result of the occupation is most likely close to a quarter of a million.
Also last weekend, a British military helicopter was shot down in Basra, killing five soldiers. This sparked a confrontation between British troops and Basra residents, who pelted the occupation troops with petrol bombs and stones while shouting profanities at them. Two British tanks and a Land Rover were set ablaze. In the first week of May, 20 occupation soldiers have been killed in Iraq, bringing the total number to at least 2,420.
At one point during that presentation in Austin, I attempted in vain to describe to the audience what life in Baghdad is like. It was in vain, because how can anyone in the United States begin to imagine what it is like to be invaded, to have our infrastructure shattered, to have occupying soldiers photographing detained Americans in forced humiliating sexual acts and then to have these displayed on television, to have our churches raided and worshippers therein shot and killed by occupation troops?
It is only when more people in the US begin to fathom the totality of the destruction in Iraq that one may expect to hear the public outcry and uprising necessary to end the occupation and bring to justice the war criminals responsible for these conditions. Until that happens, make no mistake: all of us participate in a new Iraq, our hands dyed in the blood of innocents.
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Putin chastises U.S. on democratic ideals
JUDITH INGRAM
Associated Press
Wed, May. 10, 2006
MOSCOW - President Vladimir Putin took a swipe at the United States in his state of the nation address Wednesday, bristling at being lectured by Vice President Dick Cheney and comparing Washington to a wolf who "eats without listening."
During an emotional moment in the nationally televised speech, Putin used the fairy-tale motif on the need to build a fortress-like house and to illustrate Russia's need to bolster its defenses. He also suggested that Washington puts its political interests above the democratic ideals it claims to cherish.
"Where is all this pathos about protecting human rights and democracy when it comes to the need to pursue their own interests? Here, it seems, everything is allowed, there are no restrictions whatsoever," Putin said, smiling sarcastically in the address to both houses of parliament.
"We are aware what is going on in the world," he said. "Comrade wolf knows whom to eat, he eats without listening, and he's clearly not going to listen to anyone."
Political analyst Alexei Makarkin told Ekho Moskvy radio the "wolf" reference was a response to the "United States, its actions in Iraq and plans toward Iran, its games on the territory of the CIS (former Soviet territory) and its criticism of Russia."
Putin's speech came nearly a week after Cheney on May 4 took a verbal slap at the Russian leader, saying the government sought "to reverse the gains of the last decade."
In another apparent barb aimed at the United States, Putin said countries should not use Russia's World Trade Organization membership negotiations to make unrelated demands.
"The negotiations for letting Russia into the WTO should not become a bargaining chip for questions that have nothing in common with the activities of this organization," Putin said.
In April, U.S. senators visiting Moscow said Russia's democracy record and its stance in the Iranian nuclear crisis would influence Congress as it considers Moscow's bid to join the global trade body.
Nationalist legislator Alexei Mitrofanov told reporters in the Kremlin that Putin's Russia was in no way looking for a confrontation with the West, "but we want to be a politically and economically independent state."
Putin pointed out that Russia's military budget is 25 times lower than that of the United States. Like the U.S., he said, "we also must make our house strong and reliable."
"We must always be ready to counter any attempts to pressure Russia in order to strengthen positions at our expense," he said. "The stronger our military is, the less temptation there will be to exert such pressure on us."
Putin said the government would work to strengthen the nation's nuclear deterrent as well as conventional military forces without repeating the mistakes of the Cold War era, when a costly arms race with Washington drained Soviet resources.
He said Russia would soon commission two nuclear submarines equipped with the new Bulava intercontinental ballistic missiles - the nation's first since Soviet times - while the land-based strategic missile forces would get their first unit of mobile Topol-M missiles.
The new missiles and warheads, which can foil defenses by changing direction in flight, would allow Russia to preserve a strategic balance without denting the nation's economic development goals, he said, adding that Russia needs a military that is capable of answering all modern challenges.
Two-thirds of the army will be professionals instead of conscripts by 2008, he said, allowing the state to reduce the length of obligatory service from two years to one, and nearly 600 rapid-response units will be formed by 2011.
"We need a military that is able simultaneously to carry on battle in global, regional and, if need be, several local conflicts," he said.
The military should be able to guarantee Russia's territorial integrity, he said - a reference to the threat of Islamic extremists in southern regions surrounding Chechnya. He said the threat of terrorism remained significant, and that "extremists of all stripes" feed off of local and religious conflicts.
"I know that someone very much wants Russia to get bogged down in these problems and, as a result, to be unable to solve a single one of its problems of full-scale development," he said darkly without identifying the foe.
Turning to health care issues, Putin called the demographic slide that has shrunk Russia's population by millions since the 1991 Soviet collapse "the most acute problem of contemporary Russia," and he encouraged legislators to budget for more generous birth bonuses, childcare support subsidies and educational benefits for mothers to encourage women to have children.
"I am convinced that with such an approach, you will earn words of gratitude from millions of mothers, young families, all the citizens of our country," Putin said.
He also called on more Russians to take in foster children from institutions where about 200,000 orphans and abandoned children are interned.
Most Russian families are small, with couples usually having only one or two children. Putin and his wife have two daughters.
Russia's population dropped by about 4 percent to 142.7 million between 1993 and 2006, according to the Health Ministry. Experts attribute the plunge to post-Soviet economic turmoil that has badly hurt the state health care system, leading to a drop in birth rates and life expectancy. Increased poverty, alcoholism, soaring crime and emigration have also taken their toll, leading to an average life expectancy of just 66 years - 16 years lower than Japan and 14 years lower than the European Union average.
The ITAR-Tass news agency reported that the comments on reversing the population decline prompted 27 bursts of applause and that listeners in all applauded 47 times - more than in any of Putin's other state of the nation addresses.
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12 Boys Accused In Sexual Assault Of Girl, 8
KMBC-TV
May 9, 2006
ST. LOUIS -- Twelve boys in the first and second grade at a St. Louis elementary school are accused of sexually assaulting a second-grade girl during recess, authorities said Tuesday.
One teacher who was supposed to be supervising the recess has been fired, and another suspended with pay, St. Louis schools superintendent Creg Williams said. The boys, ages 6 to 8, have been suspended for the rest of the school year. Names of the teachers and students were not released.
The girl, who is 8, is physically OK but will not return to school for the rest of the school year. "We don't know what type of emotional scars it will have on the young lady," Williams said.
"In my mind it's unconscionable that it happened and in my mind people have to be held accountable," Williams said. "How is it this kind of thing is even in the minds of young men?"
The incident happened Friday at Columbia Accelerated Community Educational Center, a school with 400 students in pre-kindergarten through sixth grade on the city's north side.
Shortly after lunch, three classes of first- and second-graders were outside for recess. A student saw several boys huddled around the girl who was on the ground, and alerted a teacher.
School district spokesman Tony Sanders said details of the assault are not yet clear. Police were initially called and turned the investigation over to juvenile authorities.
The boys could face misdemeanor charges of first-degree sexual misconduct and third-degree assault, said Kathryn Herman, administrator of the city's Juvenile Court. She said one of the boys is age 6, seven are age 7, and four are age 8.
"These are really young kids," Herman said. "I can't think of many other cases at this age with this type of incident."
Williams said his office received "sketchy" information about the incident Friday, but he wasn't alerted to the seriousness of it until Monday. He immediately went to the school, then contacted the girl's mother.
The district's crisis team is trying to determine if any other girls were also assaulted, Williams said. A letter was going out to district parents on Tuesday, alerting them to the incident. Counselors were also available to students at the school.
Williams said the district will also consider counseling or other efforts for the boys accused of the crime. They will not return to Columbia but will likely be sent to different schools next school year, he said. The girl may also be transferred to a different school.
"We'll get help for the boys, too, then decide what to do with them," Williams said.
Williams said other adults at the school could also be reprimanded if an internal investigation determines they failed to supervise the recess or swiftly address the incident once it came to light.
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Around the World
British agents knew of lead bomber: report
Last Updated Thu, 11 May 2006 08:30:03 EDT
CBC News
British intelligence agents had the ringleader of last summer's London bombings on their radar before the attacks, but their limited resources were focused elsewhere, a parliamentary report said.
British agents decided not to concentrate on Mohammad Sidique Khan, from West Yorkshire, because other threats were deemed a higher priority, the Intelligence and Security Committee report said.
On July 7 last year, Khan led a group of suicide bombers who blew themselves up on London subways and a bus, killing 52 people.
Agents had become aware of Khan and Shazad Tanweer, another of the bombers, as peripheral characters in other investigations and surveillance operations.
People detained in other countries had referred to men from Britain known only by pseudonyms who had travelled to Pakistan in 2003 and sought meetings with al-Qaeda figures, said the report, which was released Thursday.
However, British agents hadn't been able to confirm their identities before the attacks.
Instead, intelligence agents focused on more pressing cases, including "known plans to attack the U.K.," the report said.
"When resources became available, attempts were made to find out more about these two and other peripheral contacts, but these resources were soon diverted back to what were considered to be higher investigative priorities."
The report said the involvement of al-Qaeda in the attacks was unclear, and it had found no links between the July 7 bombers and the men who failed in their attempt to bomb the London transit system two weeks later.
The report also concludes that security services could not have stopped the attacks.
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Tories blast 'waste' as McConnell takes on 12th adviser
Scotsman
11/05/2006
THE First Minister, Jack McConnell, came under Tory fire last night following the appointment of another special adviser.
Douglas Trainer, a former student leader, takes the number of special advisers in the Executive to a record 12, the maximum permitted.
Mr Trainer was president of NUS Scotland and the NUS nationally in the 1990s, and later worked in financial public relations in London.
His salary was not disclosed but is said to be in the pay band of £37,365 to £48,354.
The appointment pushes the total pay bill for the special advisers - nine for Mr McConnell and three for Nicol Stephen, the deputy first minister - to nearly £750,000 a year.
Comment: Around the world, already corrupt politicians appear to be cashing in at the expense of the docile taxpayers. All of it seems to suggest that the rats are looting the pantry before the ship sinks.
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Attack in Canada 'now probable': CSIS report
Last Updated Wed, 10 May 2006 12:45:28 EDT
CBC News
It is "now probable" that an Islamic extremist group will try to launch an attack on Canadian soil, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warns in a report just made public.
"During the past year, Canada and Canadian interests abroad continued to be under threat from al-Qaeda and its affiliated groups,'' Jim Judd said in his 2004-05 report to the public safety minister.
The Canadian Press obtained a copy of the report on Tuesday through an access to information request.
"While the threat r