Hi. I leave for a week with three, uneasy pieces designed to
further rumination and contemplation of a differant nation.
Best wishes to all. -Ed
Published on Tuesday, February 14, 2006 by TruthDig
Cheney Shoots A Texas Liberal
by Molly Ivins
Of course the jokes are flying all over Texas-what's the fine for
shooting a lawyer?-and so forth. Dick-Cheney-shooting-Harry-Whittington is
fraught, as they say, with irony. It's not as though the ground in Texas is
littered with liberal Republicans. I think the vice president winged the
only one we've got.
Not that I accuse Harry Whittington of being an actual liberal-only by
Texas Republican standards, and that sets the bar about the height of a
matchbook. Nevertheless, Whittington is seriously civilized, particularly on
the issues of crime, punishment and prisons. He served on both the Texas
Board of Corrections and on the bonding authority that builds prisons. As he
has often said, prisons do not curb crime, they are hothouses for crime:
"Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants."
In the day, whenever there was an especially bad case of
new-ignoramus-in-the-legislature-a "lock 'em all up and throw away the key"
type-the senior members used to send the prison-happy, tuff-on-crime
neophyte to see Harry Whittington, a Republican after all, for a little
basic education on the cost of prisons.
When Whittington was the chairman of Texas Public Finance Authority,
he had a devastating set of numbers on the demand for more, more, more
prison beds. As Whittington was wont to point out, the only thing prisons
are good for is segregating violent people from the rest of society, and
most of them belong in psychiatric hospitals to begin with. The severity of
sentences has no effect on crime.
Texas still keeps the nonviolent, the retarded, senior citizens, etc.
locked up for ridiculous periods-all at taxpayer expense. If we could ever
get to where we spend as much per pupil on education as we do per prisoner,
this state would take off like a rocket. In 2003, we spend nearly $15,000
per prisoner, while average per-pupil spending was just over $8,000.
I am not trying to make a big deal out of a simple hunting accident
for partisan purposes-just thought it was a good chance to pay tribute to
old Harry, a thoroughly decent man. However, I was offended by the
never-our-fault White House spin team. Cheney adviser Mary Matalin said of
her boss, "He was not careless or incautious [and did not] violate of any of
the [rules]. He didn't do anything he wasn't supposed to do." Of course he
did, Ms. Matalin, he shot Harry Whittington.
Which brings us to one of the many paradoxes of the Bush
administration, which claims to be creating "the responsibility society."
It's
hard to think of a crowd less likely to take responsibility for anything
they have done or not done than this bunch. They're certainly good at
preaching responsibility to others-and blaming other people for everything
that goes wrong on their watch.
Of course the Cheney shooting was an accident.
But is it an accident if your home and your life are destroyed by the
flood following a hurricane? Especially if the flood was caused by failed
levees, a government responsibility?
Is it an accident if you are born with a clubfoot and your parents are
too poor to pay for the operation to fix it? Is there any societal
responsibility in such a case?
Is it an accident when your manufacturing job gets shipped overseas
and all you can find to replace it is a low-wage job at the big-box store
with no health insurance, and your kid breaks his leg, and you can't pay the
bill, so you have to declare bankruptcy under a new law that leaves you
broke for good, with no chance of ever getting out of debt? Or was all of
that caused by deliberate government policy?
Cheney is much given to lecturing us about taking responsibility. When
and where does societal responsibility come in?
Cheney has a curious, shifting history on issues of blame and
responsibility. He was vice chair of the congressional committee that spent
11 months investigating the Iran-Contra affair and author of its minority
report. As John W. Dean highlights in a recent essay, the 500-page majority
report concluded the entire affair "was characterized by pervasive
dishonesty and inordinate secrecy." But Cheney's report said the Reagan
administration's repeated breaking of the law was "mistakes ... were just
that-mistakes in judgment and nothing more."
Those of you who saw Cheney's interview with Jim Lehrer last week may
recall the passage on Darfur that ended with this:
Lehrer: "It's still happening. There are now 2 million people
homeless."
Cheney: "Still happening, correct."
Lehrer: "Hundreds of thousands of people have died, and-so you're
satisfied the U.S. is doing everything it can do?"
Cheney: "I am satisfied we're doing everything we can do."
His head still tilts over more to the right when he lies.
Molly Ivins is the former editor of the liberal monthly The Texas
Observer. She is the bestselling author of several books including "Who Let
the Dogs In?"
***
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/opinion/10krugman.html?th&emc=th
The Vanishing Future
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: February 10, 2006
At this point we've had six years to grow accustomed to Bush budget
chicanery. (Yes, six years: George W. Bush's special mix of blatant
dishonesty and gross irresponsibility was fully visible during the
2000
presidential campaign.) What still amazes me, however, is the sheer
childishness of the administration's denials and deceptions.
Consider the case of the vanishing future.
The story begins in 2001, when President Bush was pushing his first
tax cut
through Congress. At the time, the administration insisted that its
tax-cut
plans wouldn't endanger the budget surplus bequeathed to Mr. Bush by
Bill
Clinton. But even some Republican senators were skeptical. So the
Senate
demanded a cap on the tax cut: it should not reduce revenue over the
period
from 2001 to 2011 by more than $1.35 trillion.
The administration met this requirement, but not by scaling back its
tax-cutting ambitions. Instead, it created fictitious savings by
"sunsetting" the tax cut, making the whole thing expire at the end of
2010.
This was obviously silly. For example, under the law as written there
will
be no federal tax on the estates of wealthy people who die in 2010.
But the
estate tax will return in 2011 with a maximum rate of 55 percent,
creating
some interesting incentives.
I suggested, back in 2001, that the legislation be renamed the Throw
Momma
From the Train Act.
It was also obvious that the administration had no intention of
abiding by
its concession to fiscal prudence, that it would try to eliminate the
sunset
clause and make the tax cuts permanent.
But it quickly became clear that the budget forecasts the
administration
used to justify the 2001 tax cut were wildly overoptimistic. The
federal
government faced a future of deficits, not surpluses, as far as the
eye
could see. Making the tax cut permanent would greatly worsen those
future
deficits. What were budget officials to do?
You almost have to admire their brazenness: they made the future
disappear.
Clinton-era budgets offered 10-year projections of spending and
revenues.
But the Bush administration slashed the budget horizon to five years.
This
artificial shortsightedness greatly aided the campaign to make the
2001 tax
cut permanent because it hid the costs: since budget analyses no
longer
covered the years after 2010, the revenue losses from extending the
tax cut
became invisible.
But now it's 2006, and even a five-year projection covers the period
from
2007 to 2011, which means including a year in which making the Bush
tax cuts
permanent will cost a lot of revenue - $119.7 billion, but who's
counting?
Has the administration finally run out of ways to avoid budget
reality?
Not quite. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out,
until
this year budget documents contained a standard table titled "Impact
of
Budget Policy," which summarized the effects of the administration's
tax and
spending proposals on future outlays and revenues. But this year, that
table
is missing. So you have to do some detective work to figure out what's
really going on.
Now, the administration has proposed spending cuts that are both cruel
and
implausible. For example, administration computer printouts obtained
by the
center show that the budget calls for a 13 percent cut in spending on
veterans' health care, adjusted for inflation, over the next five
years.
Yet even these cuts would fall far short of making up for the revenue
losses
from making the tax cuts permanent. The administration's own estimate,
which
can be deduced from its budget tables, is that extending the tax cuts
would
cost an average of $235 billion in each year from 2012 through 2016.
In other words, the administration has no idea how to make its tax
cuts
feasible in the long run. Yet it has never, as far as I can tell,
allowed
unfavorable facts to affect its determination to make the tax cuts
permanent. Instead, it has devoted all its efforts to hiding those
awkward
facts from public view. (Any resemblance to, say, its Iraq strategy is
no
coincidence.)
At this point the administration's budget strategy seems to be simply
to
ignore reality. The 2007 budget makes it clear, once and for all, that
the
tax cuts can't be offset with spending cuts. But Bush officials have
decided
to ignore that unpleasant fact, and let some future administration
deal with
the mess they have created.
***
Iran - The Media fall into line
Media Lens February 9, 2006
Writing in the Guardian last month, Timothy Garton Ash observed:
"Now we face the next big test of the west: after Iraq, Iran."
Garton Ash thus blithely ignored the fact that every last scrap of
evidence coming out of Iraq has pointed to only one conclusion - that Iraq's
"big test" was in fact the West's big lie. Iraq was offering a threat to
precisely no one outside its own borders.
Nevertheless, Garton Ash warned: "we in Europe and the United States
have to respond. But how?" (Timothy Garton Ash, 'Let's make sure we do
better with Iran than we did with Iraq,' The Guardian, January 12, 2006)
The Guardian's Polly Toynbee joined the propaganda chorus demonising
Iran:
"Now the mad mullahs of Iran will soon have nuclear bombs, are we
all doomed?... Do something, someone! But what and who?" (Toynbee, 'No more
fantasy diplomacy: cut a deal with the mullahs,' The Guardian, February 7,
2006)
Gerard Baker provided the answer in the Times:
"The unimaginable but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are
going to have to get ready for war with Iran". (Baker, 'Prepare yourself for
the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity,' The Times, January
27, 2006)
Why might this be?
"If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a
threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik
Revolution and the coming of Hitler."
Readers will recall near-identical propaganda ahead of the assault on
Iraq. Baker continued with some fearsome predictions:
"Iran, of course, secure now behind its nuclear wall, will surely
step up its campaign of terror around the world. It will become even more of
a magnet and haven for terrorists... Imagine how much more our freedoms will
be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or
e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima. "
This is the same Gerard Baker who wrote in the Financial Times in
February 2003 that "victory [in Iraq] will quickly vindicate US and British
claims about the scale of the threat Saddam poses".
Baker was positively gleeful:
"I cannot wait to hear what the French, Russians and Germans have to
say when the conquering troops begin to uncover the death factories Mr
Hussein has been hiding from inspectors for 12 years... And do not be
shocked if allied liberators discover all kinds of connections between
Baghdad and terrorism around the world". (Baker, 'Defeating prejudice with
persuasion,' Financial Times, February 20, 2003)
A year later, Baker had airbrushed his own justification for war from
history:
"Saddam Hussein asked for the benefit of the doubt. But that was not
something a wise leader could possibly have given him. His actions had shown
again and again the threat he represented. This threat lay not in vats of
chemicals or nuclear centrifuges but in his ambitions." (Baker, 'Freedom
from fear is a worthy goal,' Financial Times, March 18, 2004)
In his February 2003 article, Baker had predicted: "it will become
clear, even to the most rabid of anti-Americans just how much better off
Iraqi people will be without their current president. The lifting of the
yoke of Saddam Hussein will be an act of humanity far greater than the
unseating of the Taliban." (Baker, op. cit)
The New York Times' Paul Krugman describes the current state of Iraq
sans "yoke":
"In fact, reconstruction has failed. Almost three years after the
war began, oil production is well below prewar levels, Baghdad is getting
only an average of 3.2 hours of electricity a day, and more than 60 percent
of water and sanitation projects have been canceled. So now, having
squandered billions in Iraqi oil revenue as well as American taxpayer
dollars, we have told the Iraqis that from here on in it is their problem."
(Krugman, 'State of delusion,' New York Times, February 3, 2006)
According to the Los Angeles Times, America's would-be Marshall Plan
in Iraq "is drawing to a close this year" with "much of its promise unmet
and no plans to extend its funding". (Cited, ibid)
Baker is a signatory to the Statement of Principles posted at the
website of The Henry Jackson Society. Patrons include mild-mannered
neoconservatives like former US assistant secretary of defence Richard
Perle, William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, and James Woolsey,
former director of the CIA. Other signatories include former head of MI6,
Sir Richard Dearlove, Colonel Tim Collins, Oliver Kamm, Andrew Roberts and
Jamie Shea.
The Society declares that it: "Supports a 'forward strategy' to assist
those countries that are not yet liberal and democratic to become so. This
would involve the full spectrum of our 'carrot' capacities, be they
diplomatic, economic, cultural or political, but also, when necessary, those
'sticks' of the military domain." (http://www.henryjacksonsociety.org)
Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq know all about the "'sticks' of the
military domain".
Four of the Society's eight "Principles" refer to military
intervention and military power - another notes that "only modern liberal
democratic states are truly legitimate".
Everyone else, we can presume, is fair game.
Ten years from a bomb
When officialdom targets a new 'deadly threat', journalists often
embarrass themselves in their rush to be 'on side'. The January 20, 2005,
BBC 1 Lunchtime News saw diplomatic correspondent James Robbins declare that
US relations with Iran were "looking very murky because of the nuclear
threat". (BBC1, 13:00 News, January 20, 2005)
Four days later, Robbins responded to Media Lens emailers:
"I accept that it would have been better to have said 'alleged
nuclear threat'. I am sorry that my wording was not as precise as it could
have been." (Email to Media Lens, January 24, 2005)
Similarly, in a front-page article this week, the Guardian reported
that Iran's foreign minister had threatened immediate retaliation over a
move to refer its "nuclear weapons activities" to the United Nations
security council. A correction was printed in the paper two days later:
"We should have said 'nuclear activities', not 'nuclear weapons
activities'." (Corrections and clarifications, The Guardian, February 7,
2006)
Although Iran has removed the seals it put in place at its nuclear
fuel research sites, experts say it is at least a decade away from being
able to produce a nuclear bomb. Consider the current media hysteria in light
of the basic facts below.
Atomic weapons can be produced in two ways - either by using highly
enriched uranium, or plutonium. Iran is known to have produced reconstituted
uranium, "yellow cake", at its conversion facility at Isfahan. However,
according to a September 2005 report by The International Institute for
Strategic Studies (IISS), this material is contaminated and not currently
useable. If Iran were able to overcome the problem of purification, it would
then need to enrich the uranium.
Whereas uranium used in nuclear reactors requires only a small amount
of enrichment, weapons-grade uranium must be highly enriched. This can be
done using gas centrifuges, of which Iran has 164 installed at its plant at
Natanz. But this constitutes just 20 per cent of the number required to
produce a bomb. Frank Barnaby, of UK think tank The Oxford Research Group,
comments:
"They don't currently have enough centrifuges working - so far as we
know - to produce significant amounts of highly-enriched uranium or even
enriched uranium. They would need a lot more." (Sarah Buckley and Paul
Rincon, 'Iran "years from nuclear bomb",' www.bbc.co.uk, January 12, 2006)
Given these and other problems, the IISS believes it would take Iran
at least a decade to produce enough high-grade uranium to make a single
nuclear weapon. Dr Barnaby agrees:
"The CIA says 10 years to a bomb using highly enriched uranium and
that is a reasonable and realistic figure in my opinion."
Alternatively, Iran could use plutonium to produce a bomb. But the
IISS notes that Iran would need to build a reprocessing plant suited to the
fuel used in its Bushehr nuclear reactor - an extremely challenging
technical task. Iran is also constructing a heavy-water research reactor at
Arak. But, again, this will not be ready until at least 2014, and probably
later, according to the IISS.
The West's hypocrisy and double standards could hardly be clearer but
they are off the media agenda. The United States is estimated to be in
possession of no less than 10,600 nuclear warheads. Its leading ally in the
region, Israel, also has nuclear weapons, as do Russia, Pakistan, India and
China. Britain has recently sold nuclear-capable bombers to India, while the
United States has sold nuclear-capable bombers to Pakistan. Iran's is indeed
a "tough neighbourhood".
The media never mention the military coup organised by Britain and the
United States to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in
1953 to secure the country's oil. No mention is made of the massive military
support subsequently sent to the Shah dictatorship before it was overthrown
in 1979. Britain and America were thus directly responsible for a country
that had the "highest rate of death penalties in the world, no valid system
of civilian courts and a history of torture" which was "beyond belief". It
was a society in which "the entire population was subjected to a constant,
all-pervasive terror", according to Amnesty International. (Martin Ennals,
Secretary General of Amnesty International, cited in an Amnesty Publication,
Matchbox, Autumn 1976)
All of this is waved away as inconsequential by journalists.
Objections to military action are usually raised on grounds of possible
negative consequences for the West. The likely cost in lives to the Iranian
people is rarely even discussed.
Last month, the journalist Felicity Arbuthnott described the cataclysm
generated by the US-UK 'liberation' of Iraq:
"For Iraq watchers, the daily carnage of liberation, the searing,
wailing grief of the bereaved, bombed, bereft, haunt. Neighborhoods,
evocative ancient homes reduced to rubble by the 'liberators', the
surviving, bewildered, standing on shattered bricks, mortar, toys,
belongings, liberated even from home's secure warmth.
"In the distorted horrors of today's Iraq, many never make it home:
disappeared, kidnapped, shot by the occupying forces for driving, walking,
and playing, in familiar venues. Iraqi lives are the earth's cheapest.
'Government' or occupying troops kill 'insurgents' (even if baby or toddler
'insurgents') and few questions are asked." (Felicity Arbuthnott, 'Death of
Humanity,' PalestineChronicle.com, January 18, 2006)
Despite even this, despite everything that has happened, Western
journalists are once again falling obediently into line as the British and
American governments begin the long, arduous process of demonising another
oil-rich target.
http://www.medialens.org/alerts/06/060209_iran_the_media.php
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