Palast: Blacking Out Ballots Across America
[Palast wrote a version of this article for The Nation in May, but this one, published a month later, is much clearer, shorter and better written] One million black votes didn't count in the 2000 presidential election It's not too hard to get your vote lost -- if some politicians want it to be lost! San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 20, 2004 by Greg Palast In the 2000 presidential election, 1.9 million Americans cast ballots that no one counted. Spoiled votes is the technical term. The pile of ballots left to rot has a distinctly dark hue: About 1 million of them -- half of the rejected ballots -- were cast by African Americans although black voters make up only 12 percent of the electorate. This year, it could get worse. These ugly racial statistics are hidden away in the mathematical thickets of the appendices to official reports coming out of the investigation of ballot-box monkey business in Florida from the last go-'round. How do you spoil 2 million ballots? Not by leaving them out of the fridge too long. A stray mark, a jammed machine, a punch card punched twice will do it. It's easy to lose your vote, especially when some politicians want your vote lost. While investigating the 2000 ballot count in Florida for BBC Television, I saw firsthand how the spoilage game was played -- with black voters the predetermined losers. Florida's Gadsden County has the highest percentage of black voters in the state -- and the highest spoilage rate. One in 8 votes cast there in 2000 was never counted. Many voters wrote in Al Gore. Optical reading machines rejected these because Al is a stray mark. By contrast, in neighboring Tallahassee, the capital, vote spoilage was nearly zip; every vote counted. The difference? In Tallahassee's white- majority county, voters placed their ballots directly into optical scanners. If they added a stray mark, they received another ballot with instructions to correct it. In other words, in the white county, make a mistake and get another ballot; in the black county, make a mistake, your ballot is tossed. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission looked into the smelly pile of spoiled ballots and concluded that, of the 179,855 ballots invalidated by Florida officials, 53 percent were cast by black voters. In Florida, a black citizen was 10 times as likely to have a vote rejected as a white voter. But let's not get smug about Florida's Jim Crow spoilage rate. Civil Rights Commissioner Christopher Edley, recently appointed dean of Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley, took the Florida study nationwide. His team discovered the uncomfortable fact that Florida is typical of the nation. Philip Klinkner, the statistician working on the Edley investigations, concluded, It appears that about half of all ballots spoiled in the U.S.A. -- about 1 million votes -- were cast by nonwhite voters. This no count, as the Civil Rights Commission calls it, is no accident. In Florida, for example, I discovered that technicians had warned Gov. Jeb Bush's office well in advance of November 2000 of the racial bend in the vote- count procedures. Herein lies the problem. An apartheid vote-counting system is far from politically neutral. Given that more than 90 percent of the black electorate votes Democratic, had all the spoiled votes been tallied, Gore would have taken Florida in a walk, not to mention fattening his popular vote total nationwide. It's not surprising that the First Brother's team, informed of impending rejection of black ballots, looked away and whistled. The ballot-box blackout is not the monopoly of one party. Cook County, Ill., has one of the nation's worst spoilage rates. That's not surprising. Boss Daley's Democratic machine, now his son's, survives by systematic disenfranchisement of Chicago's black vote. How can we fix it? First, let's shed the convenient excuses for vote spoilage, such as a lack of voter education. One television network stated as fact that Florida's black voters, newly registered and lacking education, had difficulty with their ballots. In other words, blacks are too dumb to vote. This convenient racist excuse is dead wrong. After that disaster in Gadsden, Fla., public outcry forced the government to change that black county's procedures to match that of white counties. The result: near zero spoilage in the 2002 election. Ballot design, machines and procedure, says statistician Klinkner, control spoilage. In other words, the vote counters, not the voters, are to blame. Politicians who choose the type of ballot and the method of counting have long fine-tuned the spoilage rate to their liking. It is about to get worse. The ill-named Help America Vote Act, signed by President Bush in 2002, is pushing computerization of the ballot box. California decertified some of Diebold Corp.'s digital ballot boxes in response to fears that hackers could pick our next president. But the known danger of black-box voting is that computers, even with their software secure, are vulnerable to
Re: [Marxism] Jonathan Schell on the DP's prowar stance
On Sun, 8 Aug 2004, Dan Scanlan wrote: Moveon began in protest of the Clinton impeachment. It began as a letter that took a life of its own. I'd like to know more about this. I've been asked to perform at a benefit for MoveOn and need to decide. There's an extensive profile of the MoveOn and their history in the current LA Weekly: http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bernhard.php Michael
Re: quick question
On Fri, 23 Jul 2004, Michael Perelman wrote: What is a good source for the share of HMO dollars that goes to care rather than profits or overhead? Just about anything written by Steffie Woolhandler of Physicians for a National Health Plan (http://www.pnhp.org) Here's a short one: http://www.pnhp.org/news/high.pdf [F]or-profit HMOs take 19% for overhead, versus 13% for non-profit plans, 3% in the US Medicare program and 1% in Canadian Medicare. She's got 2 footnotes to go with it. She also had a great interview with Doug where she summarized an article she published (I think in the New England Journal of Medicine) that analyzed and compared the cost structure in lots of great ways: http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio_1.html#020711 I seem to remember that in that interview she gave astonishing figures for the range of HMO overhead rates, that they ran from a low of 12% to a high of 34%. If it wasn't in here, it was in another interview. Michael
Apropos Albany
[Michael Hoover rightly pointed out that New York State's politics were worse than most other states, so people in other states might have opportunities that we in New York don't. Apropos, here's an article on a recent study that claims to show that our state political system in New York politics isn't simply worse than most -- it's the worst one in the country period.] URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/22/nyregion/22york.html The New York Times July 22, 2004 So How Bad Is Albany? Well, Notorious By MICHAEL COOPER A LBANY, July 21 - Over a five-year period, 11,474 bills reached the floor of the two houses of the Legislature in Albany. Not a single one was voted down. And during that period, from 1997 through 2001, the Legislature held public hearings on less than 1 percent of the major laws it passed. When those laws made it to the floor of each chamber for a vote, more than 95 percent passed with no debate. Civic groups, policy advocates and even some lawmakers have long rolled their eyes at what has become known as Albany's dysfunction. But a study released here on Wednesday by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law illuminates just how bad the problem is, calling the Albany body the least deliberative, most dysfunctional state legislature in the nation. Neither the U.S. Congress nor any other state legislature so systematically limits the roles played by rank-and-file legislators and members of the public in the legislative process, the study concluded. The report, which compared New York's Legislature with those in the 49 other states, found that Albany represents the worst of all worlds, being at once stiflingly autocratic and strikingly inefficient. It noted that the two men who control the Legislature - Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, a Republican - have almost total power over which bills they will allow their members to vote on, and a wide range of sticks and carrots to help them keep their members in line. The report found that it is harder to get a bill voted on in New York than anywhere else in the nation. And it found that while New York has one of the most expensive Legislatures in the nation, if not the most expensive, its rate of bills that actually become laws is one of the lowest in the nation. The report includes a number of recommendations for change, and one of its authors, Jeremy M. Creelan, said he would be heading a statewide campaign to try to get each house of the Legislature to alter its rules. Some of the center's proposed rule changes were amusingly straightforward. Consider this one: Votes by members shall be recorded and counted only when the member is physically present in the chamber at the time of the vote. While that might sound self-evident, it would actually amount to a somewhat radical change in New York, where state lawmakers who sign in in the morning are automatically counted as voting yes on every bill that comes before them unless they signal otherwise - even if they have left for the day. The report found that 81 percent of the nation's state legislatures require their lawmakers to be physically present in the chamber to vote, and that New York's is the only Legislature that routinely allows empty-seat voting. Not surprisingly, the report was not warmly received by the two men who control the state's 212-member Legislature. Senator Bruno called the report pure nonsense, saying that other Republicans in the Senate confer with him constantly but that it falls to him to lead. Talk to the C.E.O. of any company, Mr. Bruno said. If you want to act on something, and the company has 212 employees, what are you going to do, have a discussion and let 212 employees do whatever the agenda is? Is that what you do? So you have 212 different agendas. And that is just chaotic, doesn't work. That is Third-World-country stuff. Speaker Silver said that he talked to the Democrats who make up his conference all the time. Nothing happens here in Albany, in the Assembly, without the input of the rank-and-file legislators, he said. But the input Mr. Bruno and Mr. Silver were referring to comes mainly from the members of their own parties, and it is given in private, behind closed doors. Those party conferences, in fact, are where many of the real decisions are made. Just this week the Assembly Democrats held a passionate debate about whether they should reinstate the death penalty by passing a bill to change a section of the current law that was ruled unconstitutional. And the Republican senators agonized over whether to raise the state's minimum wage - an issue that has divided the Senate for some time. But neither debate was held in public. Sometimes lawmakers do not even know
Thomas Naylor on Iran/al-Qaeda fake reports of the past
http://www.juancole.com/2004_07_01_juancole_archive.html#109044887342331691 Professor Thomas Naylor of McGill writes: quote This is certainly not the the first time these tales about Iran cooperating with al-Qa'idah have surfaced. About two years ago US spooks floated via the Washington Post and other outlets some silly stories about al-Qa'idah involved in the underground traffic in gold. Since no one could find any other trace of the alleged bin Laden billions, the covert gold market was the choice-of-the-month. The main instrument for getting the story into the public domain was the same Washington Post reporter who had already given the world the fantasy about bin Laden running the conflict diamonds trade out of Sierra Leone. The result was a story that, when US bombs started to fall on Afghanistan, bin Laden and the Taliban secured the cooperation of prominent Iranian clerics to move the gold to the Sudan, that well known international financial haven, in planes the Iranians provided. (How this was supposed to be happening after Taliban forces slaughtered so many Shia' Hazara or ousted Iran's man from Herat, was never explained.) The story was mixed up with other nonsense that had al-Qa'idah and the Taliban running gold through the historic route that smuggles gold from Pakistan to the Gulf - this must have been a big surprise to all the dhow operators who were convinced they had been moving gold in the other direction for centuries. Anyway the story made a brief media splash, then seemed to magically vanish once U.S.-Iranian relations started to thaw. Further details on this are going to be published in the paperback reissue of a book of mine called Wages of Crime, Cornell UP autumn 2004. -- Professor R. T. Naylor Department of Economics McGill University 855 Sherbrooke St. West Montreal H3A2T7 Quebec end quote posted by Juan @ 7/22/2004 08:22:21 AM
Herald: War of subversion in Iran already getting geared up
URL: http://www.sundayherald.com/43461 Sunday Herald - 18 July 2004 Regime change in Iran now in Bush's sights By Jenifer Johnston _ PRESIDENT George Bush has promised that if re-elected in November he will make regime change in Iran his new target. Bush named Iran as part of the Axis of Evil along with North Korea and Iraq almost three years ago. A US government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that military action would not be overt in changing Iran, but rather that the US would work to stir revolts in the country and hope to topple the current conservative religious leadership. The official said: If George Bush is re-elected there will be much more intervention in the internal affairs of Iran. Full at: http://www.sundayherald.com/43461
LAT: Cheney to be indicted over violating laws against trading w/ Iran?
[That would be delicious and completely deserved. The Halliburton subsidiary in Iran had its the Halliburton name on it! It's the kind of gossamer thin disguise that is used all the time to get around offshore regulations -- but which also get enforced from time to time when people decide to suddenly take the law seriously. The potential is there.] [The irony for someone like me of course is that I'm actually against the oil sanctions against Iran and think they have always been a terrible idea on both political and economic grounds. Maybe jailing Cheney will make Republicans fight to change the law -- then it'd be a twofer :o) July 19, 2004 Los Angeles Times By T. Christian Miller and Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writers WASHINGTON -- A Halliburton controversy erupted Tuesday, fueled by a grand jury investigation into whether the oil services giant violated federal sanctions by operating in Iran while Vice President Dick Cheney was running the company. The investigation centers on Halliburton Products and Services Ltd., a subsidiary registered in the Cayman Islands and headquartered in Dubai that provided oil field services in Iran. The unit's operations in Iran included Cheney's stint as chief executive from 1995 to 2000, when he frequently urged the lifting of such sanctions. Numerous U.S. companies operate in Iran, but under strict guidelines requiring that their subsidiaries have a foreign registry and no U.S. employees, and that they act independently of the parent company. At issue is whether Halliburton's subsidiary met those criteria. The Treasury Department has been investigating the matter since 2001. But Halliburton disclosed in public financial filings this week that the department had forwarded the case to the U.S. attorney in Houston for further investigation. The company said a federal grand jury had subpoenaed documents on its Iranian operations. The Treasury Department refers such complaints only after finding evidence of serious and willful violations of the sanctions law, a government official said. Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), whose office has provided information on the case to the Treasury Department, said Tuesday that Halliburton Products and Services was a sham that existed only to circumvent the sanctions. It's unconscionable that an American company would skirt the law to help Iran generate revenues, Lautenberg told reporters during a conference call arranged by the campaign of the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts. Bush campaign spokesman Steve Schmidt called the allegations against Cheney baseless, and accused Democrats of trying to use Halliburton as a distraction. Cheney's office and the White House characterized the latest criticisms of Halliburton as political. The Democrats have made clear that their all-purpose strategy, no matter the issue, whether it's healthcare or John Kerry's plans to raise taxes or John Kerry's votes against our men and women in uniform or John Kerry's proposals to cut the intelligence budget, will be met by one word: Halliburton, Schmidt said. The Kerry campaign has become increasingly flailing in their attacks as there has been increasing focus on John Kerry's record. Democrats have long criticized Cheney for his connections to Halliburton, hoping to link the vice president to the company's contracts for Iraq reconstruction and its overbilling for services in that country. Cheney has denied any connection to the contracts. The company has repeatedly found itself at the center of government investigations. The Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department are looking into allegations that top officials in a consortium that included a Halliburton subsidiary paid millions of dollars in bribes to win contracts in Nigeria. The Justice Department is also looking into reports that Halliburton officials took $6.3 million in kickbacks in Iraq. The Pentagon is examining whether the company overcharged U.S. taxpayers by more than $186 million for meals never served to U.S. troops abroad. Treasury and Justice officials declined to comment on their inquiry into the Halliburton subsidiary. Violation of the sanctions can result in criminal charges, and those found guilty can face 10 years in prison. A company can be fined as much as $500,000. Lautenberg said that in the Iran case, the actions taken by the Republican-controlled Justice and Treasury departments showed that the accusations against Cheney were more than political. He noted that the grand jury investigation comes amid a flurry of questions about Iran's role in terrorism against the United States. The independent commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks is expected to conclude in a report due Thursday that several of
C.I.A. Plays It Safe by Accentuating the Negative
[An obvious point but a good one to keep in mind: there are always at least two very strong incentives toward threat assessment inflation: CYA and the drive for institutional expansion] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/international/16DISPATCHES.html The New York Times July 16, 2004 DISPATCHES C.I.A. Plays It Safe by Accentuating the Negative By MICHAEL. R. GORDON, International Herald Tribune A former intelligence officer once told me that when faced with a confusing mass of data the safest course of action was to emphasize the potential threat. If the danger turned out to be less grave than forecast, the policy makers would be relieved. But if a serious threat indeed emerged, no one could accuse the intelligence community of having let the nation down. The analysts would not be raked over the coals for yet another intelligence failure. Given the scrutiny the CIA has received in recent years, it is not surprising that some analysts would see this as a key to bureaucratic survival. U.S. intelligence analysts have been faulted for failing to anticipate India's series of nuclear tests, underestimating the capability of North Korea to make a three-stage missile and failing to foresee the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. In the case of Iraq, it seems, the agency's analysts learned the lesson too well. Faced with a paucity of solid intelligence and confronting a regime schooled in the art of deception, the CIA filled in a sketchy picture in the darkest hues. As the recent Senate intelligence committee report makes abundantly clear, the CIA presented informed guesswork as established fact and drew far-reaching conclusions on the basis of a handful of unreliable sources. Rather than acknowledge how little firm information the American intelligence community had about Iraq's weapons programs, the CIA seems to have told 110 percent of what it knew. What made this approach so contentious is that it occurred while the White House was asserting the right to pre-emptive war. It is clear that there are situations in which the United States may have to act in the face of less-than-perfect intelligence, as the White House has noted. The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves, even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy's attack, President George W. Bush stated in his 2002 National Security Strategy. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary, act pre-emptively. But the risks of inaction have to be balanced against the risks of overreaction: spending too many lives, too much time and too much treasure to cope with a second-order threat. Rest at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/16/international/16DISPATCHES.html
Re: C.I.A. Plays It Safe by Accentuating the Negative
On Thu, 22 Jul 2004, Devine, James wrote: speaking of threat assessment inflation, there was an ad by the Committee on the Present Danger in the NY TIMES yesterday. That kind of inflation is their business. some of them were called honorable as their titles. What makes someone officially honorable? It's the official form of address for a judge, a federal legislator, or a chief executive officer at any level from president to mayor. And at the presidential level, any of his direct plenipotentiaries are honorable, including ambassadors and cabinet members. It's SOP to keep those titles afterwards (except usually for cabinet members). I believe most on that list got it from being ambassadors (including to the UN), federal legislators and judges. Michael
Housing prices
I recently read that nominal housing prices have never declined in the US since WWII. Real prices have declined three times, durind the mid and late seventies and the early 90s, but nominal prices never. Is that really true? It makes it look as if people who think they're ever-rising, rather than being delusive, have quite a track record -- you have to be a wonk to have noticed any falls ever, and even those have been short and fleeting. If it is true, is there any non-bubble-headed explanation for it? And how come it's true here but not in the UK? Michael
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
On Mon, 19 Jul 2004, Doug Henwood wrote: maybe the three million or so people who voted for nader in 2000 should take control of local democratic executive committees, use structure in place to recruit candidates, slag off on dems who suck, use available funds to issue policy statements and press releases one after another, show up at public and government meetings, control of county dem mechanisms might lead to control of state dem parties... This sounds like a very good idea, or at least one worth trying. What's the argument against it? There are two basically: one, it's impossible, and two, you won't be able to do anything with it. The reason is that the incentives are all on the other side and that all state party machines are collusive. In New York City, where you and I live, nothing short of the governorship would allow us to accomplish anything in the state worth doing. Lower level success would allow you to make symbolic gestures which by and large have already been made in our home town, from domestic partnership to living wage law to declarations against the war and patriot act. Almost everything important in New York City (as in most cities) can only be accomplished with permission from the state. And the state, as everyone knows, is run by three men in a room: the head of the state assembly, the head of the state senate, and the governor. All the other state legislators are superfluous. They do do good in the world: they do constituent service, which, if you've ever been in need of it, you know can really be a godsend. But it's not the sort of thing we want to dedicate our lives to doing. And yet you'd have to win the vast majority of these positions, each of them is inherently useless to you, in order to control the state party. But for your opponent, the machine, these seats are far from useless. For the machine members who run for them, they're jobs, they are their livelihood, for which they will fight tooth and nail. And the main thing they control is more jobs in the form of patronage, all the recipients of which will likewise fight tooth and nail: judges, clerks, armies of lawyers dependent on the distribution of trustee and estates, receipients of city jobs, etc. They have something very concrete to lose in the here and now. Our side would be fighting for something quite vague in the distant future. But then to make things worse, as we approach each tiny vicity, the odds against us double and quadruple because the Democrat and Republican state machines are defined by their collusion. The reason there is a 99% reelect rate is because no one is ever really opposed. Much of the time they aren't even nominally opposed. The two parties in New York, like in most other states, have made collusive agreements never to go after each other's seats. The minority party (which is different in different parts of the states) has just as much interest in this as the majority party; both parties control the jobs they have and want that to continue indefinately; real elections would threaten this. The end result is that it is more important to them to remain in control of their parties than to win elections; and this is their ultimate weapon. If an insurgent ever wins a contested primary, the party machine not only doesn't support their election; it actively fights against them by helping the other party to win. It sounds outrageous but it happens all the time -- that is, it happens all the times that insurgents actually run, which doesn't happen much. The two parties have an equal interest in opposing any upstart because it threatens both their machines. And if perchance you should win and get in the state legislature, the party will make sure you have zero power and will do everything possible to defeat you the next time around, first within the primary and then using the other party again. Whereas on you side, you'll really have nothing to show for your efforts for toil. It will be impossible for you to get any legislation started or to do much of anything else that would gain you a good name. And the odds of you winning reelections are even lower than your odds of getting in in the first place since the party will be mobilized against and has a vast array of dirty tricks. And then you have to repeat this, and keep holding onto it, for each seat in the state, all the while gaining nothing, while the other side has meat and potatoes at stake. And then comes the worst thing at all: if you actually do take over the state party so that you can control the nomination of federal level offices, you'll run into exactly the same thing at the federal level. I think if you really wanted to take over the state, you'd be better off with a state-wide IRV campaign. Probably equally doomed, but at least the interim incentives would make more sense: you'd build up an organization outside their grasp that could affect the media and politics independently. This is basically how people passed the
Re: The Restorer
On Tue, 20 Jul 2004, Louis Proyect wrote that the Turkish documentary The Restorer would be playing at the following times and channels: July 21, 8.30 pm. channel 34 Time Warner or 107 RCN, July 29, 3.00pm channel 56 TW, or 108 RCN Aug 4, 12 midnight channel 67 TW, 110 RCN. Louis, are you sure about this? I just checked the first two on my TiVo listings for Time Warner and they show no sign of The Restorer or any other film playing in those slots. For example, Ch 34 TW for July 21 has Assembly Update listed for the 8-9:30 pm slot. A title search for the next two weeks under Restorer also shows nothing, although that's not definitive -- it could be listed under a program title (i.e., the public access equivalent of POV or something). If the listings are wrong but you still think it's playing (which might be -- after all, this is public access) it would help to know how long it is so I could record it. Michael
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Doug Henwood wrote: I think you're overstating things. The infiltration strategy could have some influence on who gets elected, and also on the environment in which other elected officials operate - they'll have to respond to and compromise with a whole new set of actors. Maybe. Sure, but when you phrase it this way, it no longer has anything to do with taking over the party at the local level the way the conservatives did. Now you're just talking about becoming part of the democratic party oursevles and working for the most progressive of the candidates that are already possible within the existing spectrum. And elect a Cynthia McKinney or a Jerry Nadler. What the conservatives did was very different. But they also had very different issues than us -- ones that 1) they deeply believed in; 2) which could be vitally affected at the most local levels; and 3) which were so far off the map that they rated immmediate news and affected the national discourse namely the school issues of prayer and creationism, and the strategy of constraining abortion by the death of a thousand pin prick regulations. I don't know if we have any issues that fill those three conditions. Can anyone think of any? New York state wouldn't be about to raise its minimum wage if the Working Families Party hadn't been agitating for it - and the WFP is sort of playing the entryist game. No! They definately are not. They are playing the third party fusion game, which is a different game entirely which entirely avoids all the problems I laid out. New York is one of the only states you can play that game and you're right, they are having a tiny effect at the margin. But in all honesty I think they are overblowing their own horn on this issue. I don't think they were decisive. It's a Democratic party issue this year from the national level on down. (And it's classically Democratic -- they keep raising it less than it's lost by inflation, so they can argue with mainstream models that it can't possibly be hurting job growth, just stopping exploitation. They are not challenging the model.) You can also go the Labor Party route and push for an issues that would be both transformative and yet still conceivable within the existing discourse, like comprehensive health care and child care. Especially outside New York where the fusion route is not a possibility. But none of these is the take over the local and then state party from the grass roots route. Michael
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Doug Henwood wrote: What the conservatives did was very different. But they also had very different issues than us -- ones that 1) they deeply believed in; 2) which could be vitally affected at the most local levels; and 3) which were so far off the map that they rated immmediate news and affected the national discourse namely the school issues of prayer and creationism, and the strategy of constraining abortion by the death of a thousand pin prick regulations. I don't know if we have any issues that fill those three conditions. Can anyone think of any? Local minimum wage/living wage laws. Workplace safety regulations. Them we have already in New York. State-financed public health insurance. Equal pay enforcement. Those can only be affected at the state level, -- which in our state, means taking over governorship and the speakership. Nothing short of that would have any effect at all. There would be no interim victories. You can't nominate the speaker without taking over the state wide party. Theoretically you could however take over the governorship through a third party or through an outside draft -- in which case you don't have to take over the party machine. Alternative energy experiments. Land use/sprawl issues. Small school experiments. Road pricing. Etc. To the extent those are local (like protesting development or setting up charter schools) they're really not party issues. To the extent you want state aid in terms of money or grid that buys back power, it's another speakership/governorship issue. No! They definately are not. They are playing the third party fusion game They're not entirely independent of the Dem Party. They're doing an inside/outside thing. Yes, I know, that's what the fusion strategy is all about. I think maybe I've over-interpreted your question. I seem to be going a level of specficity beyond what you're looking for. If all you meant to ask was is it useful for lefties to engage in electoral politics with some of their energies? then my answer's yes, and we have no more argument. I thought you were talking about the relative merits of specific strategies -- becoming Democrats, trying to become the dominant Democrats, launching a third party, going half and half (the fusion strategy), working as outside pressure groups, fighting to change the electoral rules, etc. Michael
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Those can only be affected at the state level, -- which in our state, means taking over governorship and the speakership. Nothing short of that would have any effect at all. This is curiously maximalist for you. Organized efforts can influence incumbents if they feel like their incumbency is threatened. You don't need a total takeover to have an influence. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear -- I meant no effort *within the state party* can have any effect. State legislators are ciphers. They don't even get a chance to read the legislation. Only the speaker, the Senate leader and the governor count in making laws. That's gospel. No one who knows NY state politics will dispute it. And you can't have the speakership without a majority. You can certainly affect the three men in a room through organized efforts *on the parties from outside.* I would never dispute that. 1199 had a huge effect on health care that way in 2002. And there are tons of other examples. But those are not party efforts. Those are groups organized outside the parties exerting their influence. Michael
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
On Wed, 21 Jul 2004, Michael Hoover wrote: self-selected candidates often don't care whether they get local party support or not (and sometimes prefer not), surely progressive/left folks can do better than this with whatever shell of an organization exists... I think there is now a much more effective model available for affecting the nomination than taking over the party: the MoveOn model. MoveOn almost nominated Dean. If we on the left in New York want to nominate a more left Governor, I think the obvious way to do is get a good democrat to put their name up, and then back them them with a MoveOn style campaign aimed at the state. MoveOn has been incredibly effective in both raising money and increasing the size of the electoral cadre by lowering the price of commitment. The only problem with it is that it's run by a couple of democratic party hacks. But the best way to change that is to set up a more left one. And since they are largely tone deaf, I think you could actually beat them at their game now that they've been kind enough to write the software and show the way. Michael
Rec for people in NY tri-state: brilliant 13 minute doc on PBS
[I saw this at a festival this winter. It's a wonderful movie about the ambivalences of being a woman. Funny, heart-warming, and for me at least, very informative. It gives a deeply satisfying explanation of the oft-cited statistic of why most women are wearing the wrong size bra -- which turns out to be a much profounder question than I ever suspected.] [And it's only 13 minutes long. Although warning -- it could be buried anywhere in a one hour show of other short docs. Of course if you record it you can skip the others.] A GOOD UPLIFT Will Be Broadcast this Thursday, July 22 on PBS! Tune in to our PBS broadcast on WNET's Reel NY Series This Thursday, July 22nd at 10pm (Channel 13 in NYC -- check local listings for channel info in the tri-state area) For more info on the broadcast: http://www.thirteen.org/reelnewyork9/film_w8_f2.html Perky? Saggy? Straps sliding south? A GOOD UPLIFT is a light-hearted documentary about a Lower East Side lingerie shop, where owner and Jewish grandmother Magda, will size you up, hook you in, and set you free in the perfect bra. With the wink of an eye and quick tug of a strap, Magda supports her customers' self-esteem and bustline, embracing and enhancing women of all shapes and sizes as they embark on a journey in pursuit of the perfect bra. Produced by Faye Lederman, Cheryl Furjanic and Eve Lederman. The PBS broadcast of A GOOD UPLIFT marks the kick-off of our national outreach and education campaign, which is reaching women of diverse ages and backgrounds, to help them explore issues of women's health and wellness, body image and self-esteem. With the help of a grant from the NY State Council on the Arts, our outreach screenings this month included Girls, Inc., the Lower East Side Girls' Club, the YWCA Center for Girls, Drisha Women's Institute, and summer camps throughout the Northeast. For more information, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Or visit www.squeezethestone.org An engaging documentary... about an Orchard Street bra shop run by a Hungarian Jew who dispenses much wisdom along with undergarments - The Village Voice A film about human emotion at its most personal. It speaks to the heart with no padding. The San Francisco Jewish Bulletin
National Guard needed at home to fight fires
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/20/national/20guard.html The New York Times July 20, 2004 Governors Tell of War's Impact on Local Needs By SARAH KERSHAW S EATTLE, July 19 - With tens of thousands of their citizen soldiers now deployed in Iraq, many of the nation's governors complained on Sunday to senior Pentagon officials that they were facing severe manpower shortages in guarding prisoners, fighting wildfires, preparing for hurricanes and floods and policing the streets. Concern among the governors about the war's impact at home has been rising for months, but it came into sharp focus this weekend as they gathered for their four-day annual conference here and began comparing the problems they faced from the National Guard's largest callup since World War II. On Sunday, the governors held a closed-door meeting with two top Pentagon officials and voiced their concerns about the impact both on the troops' families and on the states' ability to deal with disasters and crime. Much of the concern has focused on wildfires, which have started to destroy vast sections of forests in several Western states. The governor of Oregon, Ted Kulongoski, a Democrat, said in an interview after meetings here Monday that the troop deployment had left his National Guard with half the usual number of firefighters because about 400 of them were overseas while a hot, dry summer was already producing significant fires in his state. We're praying a lot that a major fire does not break out, he said. It has been dry out here, the snow pack's gone because of an extremely warm May and June and the fire season came earlier. He added, You're just going to have fires and if you do not have the personnel to put them out, they can grow very quickly into ultimately catastrophic fires.'' Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, a Republican of Idaho and departing chairman of the National Governors Association, also said through a spokesman that he was worried about the deployment of 2,000 members, or 62 percent of his National Guard, who are now training in Texas for a mission in Iraq. In the past we've been able to call on the National Guard, said Mark Snider, a spokesman for the governor. We may not be able to call on these soldiers for firefighting capabilities. California fire and forestry officials said they were not using National Guard troops to battle wildfires plaguing that state, but they did say that they were using nine Blackhawk helicopters borrowed from the Guard to fight the fires. Some of the helicopters are bound for Iraq in September. More than 150,000 National Guard and Reserve troops are on active duty. Many of the Guard troops have received multiple extensions of their tours of duty since the United States went to war with Iraq last year. While Western governors focused mostly on wildfires, governors and other officials from other regions expressed a host of other worries, both at the meeting here and in telephone interviews. In Arizona, officials say, more than a hundred prison guards are serving overseas, leaving their already crowded prisons badly short-staffed. In Tennessee, officials are worried about rural sheriff's and police departments, whose ranks have been depleted by the guard call- up. In Virginia, the concern is hurricanes; in Missouri, floods. And in a small town in Arkansas, Bradford, both the police chief and the mayor are now serving in Iraq, leaving their substitutes a bit overwhelmed. Our mayor and our police chief, along with six others were activated, and they're over in Iraq, said the acting mayor, Greba Edens, 79, in a telephone interview. We had a police officer that could step in as chief, and I've been treasurer for 20 years so that just put me in the mayor's spot whether I wanted or it not. Many of the most outspoken governors who expressed concerns here about the National Guard deployments over the weekend were Democrats, including Mr. Kulongoski, Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Mark Warner of Virginia and Gary Locke of Washington. This has had a huge impact, Governor Locke said during a news conference on Saturday. In his state, 62 percent of its 87,000 Army National Guard soldiers are on active duty, including the majority of the guard's best-trained firefighters, at a time when wildfires are beginning to sweep through the state, according to state officials. But even during a meeting that featured plenty of partisan sniping, Republicans also sounded worried about whether the deployments would leave them vulnerable in emergencies. Roger Schnell, Alaska's deputy commissioner for the Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said in a telephone interview that wildfires raging through central Alaska were especially worrisome, given that 15 percent of its National Guard was stationed overseas.
LAT: Dealing with Killing
[This is much more interesting than the usual discussion. Several fairly intelligent things get said and the video game automaton explanation barely rates a mention. But it's the the comparative stats between WWII and Vietnam which occur halfway through that really grabbed my attention. They seem remarkable, if true.] Los Angeles Times 'Enemy Contact. Kill 'em, Kill 'em.' Sun Jul 18, 7:55 AM ET By Charles Duhigg Times Staff Writer NAJAF, Iraq (news - web sites) -- Tucked behind a gleaming machine gun, Sgt. Joseph Hall grins at his two companions in the Humvee. I want to know if I killed that guy yesterday, Hall says. I saw blood spurt from his leg, but I want to be sure I killed him. The vehicle goes silent as the driver, Spc. Joshua Dubois, swerves around asphalt previously uprooted by a blast. I'm confused about how I should feel about killing, says Dubois, who has a toddler back home. The first time I shot someone, it was the most exhilarating thing I'd ever felt. Dubois turns back to the road. We talk about killing all the time, he says. I never used to talk this way. I'm not proud of it, but it's like I can't stop. I'm worried what I will be like when I get home. The men aren't Special Forces soldiers. They're just ordinary troops with the Army's 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment serving their 14th month in Iraq, much of it in daily battles. In 20 minutes, they will come under attack. Many GIs and Army psychiatrists say these constant conversations about death help troops come to grips with the trauma of combat. But mental health professionals within and outside the military point to the chatter as evidence of preventable anguish. Soldiers are untrained, experts say, for the trauma of killing. Forty years after lessons learned about combat stress in Vietnam, experts charge that avoidable psychological damage goes unchecked because military officials don't include emotional preparation in basic training. Troops, returning home with untreated and little-understood mental health issues, put themselves and their families at risk for suicide and domestic violence, experts say. Twenty-three U.S. troops in Iraq took their lives last year, according to the Defense Department -- an unusually high number, one official acknowledged. On patrol, however, all that is available is talk. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, Hall says. It's like it pounds at my brain. I'll figure out how to deal with it when I get home. Home is the wrong place for soldiers to deal with combat experiences, some experts say. It's complete negligence, says Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, a retired psychology instructor at West Point who trains law enforcement officers and special operations soldiers. The military could train soldiers to talk about killing as easily as they train them to pull the trigger. But commanders are in denial. Nobody wants to accept the blame for a soldier who comes home a wreck for doing what his country asked him to do, he said. The emotional and psychological ramifications of killing are mostly unstudied by the military, defense officials acknowledge. The idea and experience of killing another person is not addressed in military training, says Col. Thomas Burke, director of mental health policy for the Defense Department. Training's intent is to re-create battle, to make it an automatic behavior among soldiers. He defends the approach, saying that if troops think too much about emotional issues in combat situations, it could undermine their effectiveness in battle. Other military representatives, including officers overseeing combat stress control programs, did not return repeated phone calls seeking comment. Much of the military's research on killing and battle stress began after World War II, when studies revealed that only a small number of troops -- as few as 15% -- fired at their adversaries on the battlefield. Military studies suggested that troops were unexpectedly reluctant to kill. Military training methods changed, Grossman and others say, to make killing a more automatic behavior. Bull's-eye targets used in basic training were replaced with human-shaped objects. Battlefield conditions were reproduced more accurately, Burke says. The goal of these and other modifications was to help soldiers react more automatically. The changes were effective. In the Vietnam War, 95% of combat troops shot at hostile fighters, according to military studies. Veterans of the Vietnam War also suffered some of the highest levels of psychological damage -- possibly as many as 50% of combat forces suffered mental injury, says Rachel MacNair, an expert on veteran psychology. Most notable among the injuries was post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition contributing to violent outbursts years after soldiers
Can Tulipmania be explained rationally as the birth of options?
[Does this argument make any sense? I can't see any upside for the planters in this arrangment. It seems they would be better off doing all their deals on the spot market. And it doesn't seem to provide any explanation for the collapse. It seems they are just in love with the ratio and are bending the facts to fit their chosen conclusion. I was wondering if people who know more about option pricing might see merits that I'm missing.] URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2103985/ moneyboxDaily commentary about business and finance. Bulb Bubble Trouble That Dutch tulip bubble wasn't so crazy after all. By Daniel Gross Posted Friday, July 16, 2004, at 2:05 PM PT During the dot.com bubble and its collapse, economists and historians increased their study of market crazes of the past, particularly the most ludicrous one of all: the 17^th-century Dutch flower bubble. The classic description of Tulipmania appeared in Clarence Mackay's 1841 classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, In 1634, the rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade. The normally sane Dutch bourgeoisie got carried away and bid up prices of tulip bulbs spectacularly in winter 1637, only to see them crash in spring. One bulb was reportedly sold in February 1637 for 6,700 guilders, as much as a house on Amsterdam's smartest canal, including coach and garden, and many times the 150-guilder average income. As Earl A. Thompson, an economist at the University of California at Los Angeles, and Jonathan Treussard, a graduate student at Boston University, note in a working paper, the contract price of tulips in early February 1637 reached a level that was about 20 times higher than in both early November 1636 and early May 1637. Sounds like a bubble. But it wasn't, asserts Thompson, who is working on a history of bubbles. Tulip-bulb investors were neither mad nor delusional in 1636 and 1637. Rather, he says, they were rationally responding, in finest efficient-market fashion, to overlooked changes in the rules of tulip investing. As European prices for the dramatic flowers rose in the 1630s, many burgomasters--local mayors--started to invest in the bulbs. But in the fall of 1636, the European tulip market suddenly wilted because of a crisis in Germany. German nobles were big fans of tulips and had taken to planting bulbs. But in October 1636, the Germans lost a battle to the Swedes at Wittstock. Then German peasants began to revolt. The German demand for tulips sagged, and princes began digging up their own bulbs and selling them, say Thompson and Treussard. The sudden glut caused prices to fall, and Dutch burgomasters began losing money. They were in a bind. Trade in tulip bulbs was conducted through futures contracts: Buyers agreed to pay a fixed price for tulip bulbs at some point in the future. With prices having fallen in the fall, leveraged burgomasters were tied into paying above-market prices for bulbs to be delivered in the spring. Rather than take their lumps, these politically connected investors tried to change the market rules--and they succeeded. First, they threatened to abandon their contracts and leave planters in the lurch entirely. But ultimately, they ironed out a deal whereby the obligation to purchase bulbs at a fixed price would be suddenly converted into an opportunity to do so. In current parlance, they aimed to transform tulip-bulb futures contracts into tulip-bulb options. Under the new deal, the investors wouldn't have to pay the high contract prices in the spring unless the future market--or spot--prices of tulip bulbs were higher. (To compensate the planters in case market prices were lower than the contract prices, the investors agreed to pay a small fraction of the contract price to get out of the contract, Thompson and Treussard note. Ultimately, that amounted to about 3 cents on the dollar.) On Feb. 24, 1637, the Dutch florists announced that all futures contracts written since November 30, 1636 and up until the opening of the spring season, were to be interpreted as option contracts, Thompson and Treussard write. The action was later ratified by the Dutch legislature. The news of these discussions began to filter out into the market in November 1636. Now, when it becomes clear that a contract is to be transformed into an option--the ability to buy something rather than the responsibility to do so--you would expect prices to rise. Why? If the investors in existing future contracts were only going to have to pay a small percentage of the contract price in the end--as was becoming apparent--then tulip planters would have to jack up contract
Newsweek: Medicine Without Doctors
[from Robert Weissman's Stop IMF list] [Long but interesting all the way through] call out quote The trouble is, few of the countries winning those grants are ready to absorb them. Their health systems have withered under austerity plans imposed by foreign creditors. Doctors and nurses have left in droves to take private-sector jobs or work in wealthier countries. And those left behind are overwhelmed and exhausted. End call out quote http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5412522/site/newsweek/ Medicine Without Doctors In Africa, just 2 percent of people with AIDS get the treatment they need. But drugs are cheap, access to them is improving and a new grass-roots effort gives reason to hope. By Geoffrey Cowley Newsweek July 19 issue - The first part of Nozuko Mavuka's story is nothing unusual in sub-Saharan Africa. A young woman comes down with aches and diarrhea, and her strong limbs wither into twigs. As she grows too weak to gather firewood for her family, she makes her way to a provincial hospital, where she is promptly diagnosed with tuberculosis and AIDS. Six weeks of treatment will cure the TB, a medical officer explains, but there is little to be done for her HIV infection. It is destroying her immune system and will soon take her life. Mavuka becomes a pariah as word of her condition gets around the community. Reviled by her parents and ridiculed by her neighbors, she flees with her children to a shack in the weeds beyond the village, where she settles down to die. In the usual version of this tragedy, the young mother perishes at 35, leaving her kids to beg or steal. But Mavuka's story doesn't end that way. While waiting to die last year, she started visiting a two-room clinic in Mpoza, a scruffy village near her home in South Africa's rural Eastern Cape. Health activists were setting up support groups for HIV-positive villagers, and Medecins sans Frontieres (also known as MSF or Doctors Without Borders) was spearheading a plan to bring lifesaving AIDS drugs to a dozen villages around the impoverished Lusikisiki district. Mavuka could hardly swallow water by the time she got her first dose of anti-HIV medicine in late January. But when I met her at the same clinic in May, I couldn't tell she had ever been sick. The clinic itself felt more like a social club than a medical facility. Patients from the surrounding hills had packed the place for an afternoon meeting, and their spirits and voices were soaring. As they stomped and clapped and sang about hope and survival, Mavuka thumbed through her treatment diary to show me how faithfully she'd taken the medicine and how much it had done for her. Her weight had shot from 104 pounds to 124, and her energy was high. I feel strong, she said, eyes beaming. I can fetch water, wash clothes-everything. My sons are glad to see me well again. My parents no longer shun me. I would like to find a job. It would be rash to call Nozuko Mavuka the new face of AIDS in Africa. The disease killed more than 2 million people on the continent last year, and it could kill 20 million more by the end of the decade. The treatments that have made HIV survivable in wealthier parts of the world still reach fewer than 2 percent of the Africans who need them. Yet mass salvation is no longer a fool's dream. The cost of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs has fallen by 98 percent in the past few years, with the result that a life can be saved for less than a dollar a day. The Bush administration and the Geneva-based Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria are financing large international treatment initiatives, and the World Health Organization is orchestrating a global effort to get 3 million people onto ARVs by the end of 2005-an ambition on the scale of smallpox eradication. What will it take to make this hope a reality? Raising more money and buying more drugs are only first steps. The greater challenge is to mobilize millions of people to seek out testing and treatment, and to build health systems capable of delivering it. Those systems don't exist at the moment, and they won't be built in a year. But as I discovered on a recent journey through southern Africa, there's more than one way to get medicine to people who need it. This crisis may require a whole new approach-a grass-roots effort led not by doctors in high-tech hospitals but by nurses and peasants on bicycles. Until recently, mainstream health experts despaired at the thought of treating AIDS in Africa. The drugs seemed too costly, the regimens too hard to manage. Unlike meningitis or malaria, which can be cured with a short course of strong medicine, HIV stays with you. A three-drug cocktail can suppress the virus and protect the immune system-but only if you take the medicine on schedule, every day, for life. Used haphazardly, the drugs foster less treatable strains of HIV, which can then spread. Strict adherence is a challenge even in rich countries, the experts reasoned, and it might prove impossible in poor ones. In light of the
More Bush Hoover parallels
What has gotten Ms. Poller worked up is Mr. Bush's decision not to address the 95th annual convention of the N.A.A.C.P. this year, making him the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to meet with the group during an entire term in office, N.A.A.C.P. officials said. Full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/14/politics/campaign/14naacp.html Michael
Slate/Noah: Park Service terminates its truth-telling police chief
[An interesting addendum to the segment in F-9/11 about the paucity of patrols in the National Parks in Washington State] [It was only yesterday I heard a radio commentator wrongly holding this up as an example of a Moore-ish distortion because he thought it was a matter of state budgets that Bush didn't directly control.] http://slate.msn.com/id/2103739/ chatterboxGossip, speculation, and scuttlebutt about politics. Gagging the Fuzz, Part 6 The Park Service formally terminates its truth-telling police chief. By Timothy Noah Posted Monday, July 12, 2004, at 5:47 AM PT The National Park Service formally terminated Teresa Chambers on July 9. Chambers is the Park Police chief who was canned this past December for answering truthfully some questions posed to her by a Washington Post reporter about how budget constraints had forced a reduction in police patrols in parks and on parkways around Washington, D.C. For months prior to that interview, we now know from an affidavit Chambers filed June 28, Chambers had been harassed by her two superiors, National Park Service Director Fran Mainella and Deputy Director Don Murphy, over her refusal to disguise within the Park Service and its parent agency, the Interior Department, these patrol reductions. (The reductions were potentially embarrassing because the Bush White House doesn't want to admit, even to itself, that it's not putting its money where its mouth is on homeland defense.) The National Park Service put Chambers on administrative leave for her sins. The expectation was that it would fire her. Now it has. The timing is significant. Earlier that day, Chambers had filed a motion with the Merit Systems Protection Board, which adjudicates whistleblower complaints by federal workers, urging the MSPB to reinstate her in her job pending its final ruling and to prevent the Park Service from formally dismissing her. The Park Service responded within hours by firing Chambers before the MSPB could rule on her motion, thereby mooting it. The MSPB will still rule, however, on whether the Park Service's firing constitutes illegal retaliation against a whistleblower, which clearly it does. Chambers, alas, will have to proceed without the help of the Office of Special Counsel, a federal agency that argues whistleblower complaints before the MSPB. The OSC agreed to take Chambers' case in February, but for inexplicable reasons it failed to act within the customary 120 days. We just continued to give them extensions, Chambers told Chatterbox. After about three weeks, however, Chambers decided to file her own complaint, as the law allows. The June 28 affidavit and the July 9 motion were both part of that effort. As is usual under such circumstances, the OSC will now withdraw from the case. Chambers says she has no idea why the OSC moved so slowly on so simple a case: I know the investigator was very thorough. But Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a private advocacy group that has been publicizing Chambers' case, notes pointedly that the special counsel, Scott Block, is a recent Bush appointee. Insinuation: Politics inspired foot-dragging. But Chatterbox has to believe that the net political effect of Chambers' case--particularly her abrupt firing last week, which leaves her without a salary--will be political embarrassment for the Bushies. Maybe it's time for candidate John Kerry to start talking up the Park Police chief's firing as an example of the Bush administration's willful blindness toward the consequences of its policies and its viciousness toward those who won't play along. Teresa Chambers Archive: April 14, 2004: Gagging the Fuzz, Part 5 March 25, 2004: Gagging the Fuzz, Part 4 Feb. 19, 2004: Gagging the Fuzz, Part 3 Jan. 12, 2004: Gagging the Fuzz, Part 2 Dec. 30, 2003: Gagging the Fuzz Timothy Noah writes Chatterbox for Slate.
Could Moore run afoul of campaign financing restrictions?
[I've got a reflex that makes me look for the fishy spot every time a CATO guy says anything, even if he says he's on our side, especially if he says that. Still, some of it's got a half-plausible ring. Not sure it how it would turn out if they tried to enforce it, though.] http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/samples200407070848.asp July 07, 2004, 8:48 a.m. Free Michael Moore! Campaign-finance reform boomerangs and hits the Democrats' favorite moviemaker. By John Samples Will Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 9/11 land him in jail? Maybe. Only time will tell. Of course, Moore won't end up behind bars because his movie criticizes George W. Bush. The First Amendment still exists, more or less. Moore may end up as a campaign-finance convict, guilty of illegally referring to a clearly identified candidate for federal office within 30 days of a primary (or 60 days of a general election). To see how Moore might become a felon, we need to understand the case of David T. Hardy, the president of the Bill of Rights Educational Foundation, a nonprofit corporation in Arizona. Hardy is producing a documentary film entitled The Rights of the People, which concerns issues related to the Bill of Rights. The film apparently refers to several members of Congress up for reelection in 2004 and to President Bush. Hardy had hoped the Bill of Rights Educational Foundation would help pay for the marketing and distribution of the The Rights of the People, including advertising on TV and radio. Hardy is a well-informed citizen. He knew enough to ask the Federal Election Commission whether his plans to market his film would fall under the strictures of campaign-finance law. As it turned out, his marketing plans were a potential felony. The FEC ruled that the ads were an electioneering communication because they mentioned candidates for national office. Federal law prohibits the Bill of Rights Education Foundation from paying for the ads. So, unless Hardy wants to pay for the marketing of the movie himself and thereafter to comply with the rules governing electioneering communication (disclosure and so on), the roll out of The Rights of the People will have to wait until after Election Day. Moore's situation is similar to Hardy's. No one doubts Fahrenheit 9/11 refers to President George W. Bush, who is running for reelection. Presumably, the advertising for the movie will include references to President Bush. After all, that's who the movie is about, and Moore's attacks on President Bush and his family are the major appeal of the film for its target audience. Broadcast, cable, or satellite ads are banned if they're funded by a corporation or union, refer to a clearly identified federal candidate, and appear within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. That means Moore's distributor, Lions Gate Films (a corporation) can't run ads between July 30 and August 30 (the date of the Republican convention, which is treated as a primary in which Bush is a candidate), or between September 2 and the November 2 general election. If Fahrenheit 9/11 shows up on broadcast, cable, or satellite TV after July 30, Moore may well be in big trouble unless he financed the movie himself. If a corporation financed the movie, Moore will have broken the law. If individuals financed the movie, the ban on electioneering communications would not apply. But Moore's movie still could not be made in concert or cooperation with or at the request or suggestion of Kerry, Kerry's campaign, an agent of his campaign, a Democratic-party committee or their agents. To help with the movie, Moore has employed Chris Lehane, a high-ranking operative in Al Gore's presidential bid. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee (along with six Democratic senators and a couple Democratic members of the House) showed up at the premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11 in Washington. After seeing the movie, the chairman of the DNC said, I think anyone who goes to see this movie will come out en masse and vote for John Kerry. Clearly the movie makes it clear that George Bush is not fit to be president of this country. The movie might well appear to be cooperating with the Democratic presidential effort. In campaign finance, appearances are often tantamount to guilt. My advice to Michael Moore: Get yourself a good campaign-finance lawyer. The election lawyer Robert Bauer recently wrote there should not be a question that a documentary filmmaker can produce for public distribution a work highly critical (and more) of the President of the United States, or of any other political figure, without confronting a challenge from the Federal government. Yet that question has been posed by Sen. John McCain and his allies, and none of us know the answer for certain.
Afghanistan's Potemkin Development
[Succinct last paragraph] URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/09/opinion/O9LAMB.html The New York Times July 9, 2004 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR The Two Sides of Kabul By CHRISTINA LAMB K ABUL, Afghanistan Look, the swimming pool is in the shape of a martini glass, boasts Alex, as he shows several visitors around his soon-to-be-opened hotel-cum-blackjack lounge. Alex, an Afghan-American who used to be a mortgage broker in Las Vegas, is really named Omar Zamadi, but he thinks that is too complicated for foreigners and foreigners are his market. Mr. Zamadi, who returned to his homeland a year ago, says he has invested $200,000 in his hotel, the Peacock Lounge. A pink-and-gold colonnaded extravaganza, which he describes as Roman style but probably owes more to Caesars Palace, the Peacock Lounge sticks out on a street in which families sleep in bombed-out houses with no roofs or windows and dusty-faced children walk to a well to collect water. Expats need a place where they can wear thongs, eat hot dogs and drink beers, Mr. Zamadi says. You can make a lot of money here. On the other side of the city, two Britons have set up Afghanistan's first cocktail bar, serving margaritas and Tora Bora specials to Westerners at $10 a drink. Their bar, the Elbow Room, is packed every night. So is a restaurant called Lal Thai where Lalita Thongngamkam's green chicken curry is served up by slinky waitresses from Bangkok in slit-to-the-thigh silk skirts with pistols in their garters. These are just a few of the many establishments for Westerners that have sprung up in postliberation Kabul, capital of the land cited by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld as a model and described by President Bush last month as the first victory in the war on terror. Not only would the Taliban's leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, have a fit, but many who supported the war to oust the Taliban regime need wonder if an invasion of bars and restaurants for Westerners is really what it was for. Although aid workers, contractors and security consultants have every right to enjoy themselves, there is mounting resentment among ordinary Afghans, who feel the West has been busier opening drinking holes than rebuilding their nation. For some time, Afghanistan has been two countries: Kabul, which is relatively peaceful, and the rest, so riven by warlords and resurgent Taliban that the United Nations has declared a third of the country off limits to its employees. But more recently, Kabul has become a city with two sides. With as many as a 1,000 nongovernmental organizations in residence, rents are higher here than in much of Manhattan. In Kabul's most affluent area, Wazir Akbar Khan, once favored by Osama bin Laden's Arabs and now a Western enclave, $5,000 a month gets only a small, uncared-for house. Most of the owners are rich Afghans living abroad, and, according to real estate agents, many are Taliban commanders living in Pakistan and using the rent to finance madrassas and militia training. An agent from the Marco Polo agency who drove me around last month told me his company leases 10 houses to the World Food Program at rents of $9,000 to $15,000 a month per house. The total comes to more than $1.5 million a year. Most Afghans feel angry that this is our money, money meant for the Afghan people, which aid agencies are spending on beautiful houses, carpets and drinking, while schools and hospitals still need to be built, the agent said. There may not yet be a Starbucks or McDonalds in Kabul but other fruits of liberation include Afghanistan's first boutique hotel, opened by a British woman, and a commercial radio station sponsored by Number One (a brand, which has become the local term for condoms). You can even take a putt at the Kabul golf club, where the landmines have apparently been cleared. At the same time, the vast majority of Afghan women still wear burqas, seen by many in the West as a symbol of Taliban oppression. The girls' soccer team at Zarghoona High School has to practice secretly and the days of Millies, the mini-skirted female drivers of Kabul's electric buses, remain a distant memory. Instead of creating industry or regenerating agriculture under Western supervision, Afghanistan is producing record opium crops and is now responsible for a whopping 75 percent of the world supply. Last week, the West finally had a chance to match words and deeds at the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul, where Afghanistan was high on the agenda. This was supposed to be an opportunity for the alliance to trumpet the success of its first peacekeeping operation outside its historic area of operations. Unlike the Iraqis, the Afghans generally welcome foreign forces. Yet the shameful failure of member nations to provide troops and equipment means that
Peter Berger on Laurie Mylroie's conspiricist influence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1254072,00.html Monday July 5, 2004 The Guardian Did one woman's obsession take America to war? She is a conspiracy theorist whose political conceits have consistently been proved wrong. So why were Bush and his aides so keen to swallow Laurie Mylroie's theories on Saddam and terrorism? By Peter Bergen Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator - they knew that - but because President Bush made the case that Saddam might hand weapons of mass destruction to his terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. In the absence of any evidence for that theory, it's fair to ask: where did the administration's conviction come from? It was at the American Enterprise Institute - a conservative Washington DC thinktank - that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a goal. Among those associated with AEI is Richard Perle, a key architect of the president's get-tough-on-Iraq policy, and Paul Wolfowitz, now the number-two official at the Pentagon. But none of the thinkers at AEI was in any real way an expert on Iraq. For that they relied on someone you probably have never heard of: a woman named Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie has credentials as an expert on the Middle East, national security and, above all, Iraq, having held faculty positions at Harvard and the US Naval War College. During the 1980s she was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but became anti-Saddam around the time of his invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In the run-up to that Gulf war, with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Mylroie wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller. It was the first bombing of the World Trade Centre in 1993 that launched Mylroie's quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the chief source of anti-US terrorism. She laid out her case in a 2000 book called Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America. Perle glowingly blurbed the book as splendid and wholly convincing. Wolfowitz and his then wife, according to Mylroie, provided crucial support. Mylroie believes that Saddam was behind every anti-American terrorist incident of note in the past decade, from the levelling of the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a cranky conspiracist - but her neoconservative friends believed her theories, bringing her on as a terrorism consultant at the Pentagon. The extent of Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist. Clarke writes: I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was spouting the Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Centre, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue. Mylroie's influence can also be seen in the Bush cabinet's reaction to the September 11 attacks. According to Bob Woodward's recent book, Plan of Attack, Wolfowitz told the cabinet immediately after the attacks that there was a 10 to 50% chance that Saddam was implicated. Around the same time, Bush told his aides: I believe that Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now. The most comprehensive criminal investigation in history - pursuing 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people - has turned up no evidence of Iraqi involvement. How is it that key members of the Bush administration believed otherwise? Mylroie, in Study of Revenge, claims to have discovered what everyone missed: that the plot's mastermind, a man generally known by one of his many aliases, Ramzi Yousef, was actually an Iraqi intelligence agent. Some time after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Mylroie argues, Yousef was given access to the passport of a Pakistani named Abdul Basit whose family lived in Kuwait, and assumed his identity. She reached this deduction following an examination of Basit's passport records that indicated Yousef and Basit were four inches different in height. But US investigators say that Yousef and Basit are the same person, and that he is a Pakistani with ties to al-Qaida, not to Iraq. Yousef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was al-Qaida's military commander until his capture in Pakistan in 2003. The reality is that by the mid-90s, the FBI, the CIA and the State Department had found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in
Nir Rosen critiques Robert Kaplan on Falluja
[Rosen's letter to editor to the Atlantic, posted by Juan Cole] http://www.juancole.com/2004_07_01_juancole_archive.html#108913458457643751 Guest Comment on Fallujah and Kaplan: Nir Rosen Journalist Nir Rosen, who has spent most of the past year in Iraq and has fluent Arabic, recently reported on Fallujah for the New Yorker. He objects to many details and arguments in the reporting of of Robert Kaplan on Fallujah for The Atlantic Monthly. (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/interviews/int2004-06-15.htm) We print here by permission his recent letter to the editor at The Atlantic Monthly 'Letter to the Editor Having spent a great deal of time in Falluja since the occupation of Iraq began, and most recently the entire month of May for my article on Falluja for the New Yorker Magazine, I was disappointed by some errors I noted in Robert Kaplan's piece entitled Five Days in Falluja, as well as by Kaplan's unambiguous identification with the Marines he wrote about. Kaplan describes Falluja as the classic terrain of radicalism, distinguishing radicalism from conservatism. Kaplan views the authoritarian royal courts of Morroco, Jordan and the Gulf States as venerable for their traditions, traditions that in the case of Jordan and the Gulf are artificial and not more than a century old. Unlike these royal courts that represent in fact the break in tradition in the House of Islam of which Kaplan writes, Falluja is in fact the most traditional city in Iraq. Unlike Tikrit, for example, where the tribes are urbanized, based inside the city, the tribes of Falluja are concentrated in the rural areas surrounding the city, and thus have not modernized and abandoned tribal customs as much as other parts of the country. The tight tribal bonds of Falluja helped preserve the city's stability following the fall of Saddam's regime. The religious and tribal leaders appointed their own civil management council even before American troops entered the city. Tribes assumed control of the city's institutions and protected government buildings. Religious leaders, whose authority was respected, exhorted the people to respect the law and maintain order. Thus there was a continuity of authority and tradition in Falluja lacking in other parts of Iraq. Known in Iraq as Medinat al Masajid, or the City of Mosques, for the over 80 mosques that dominate the city's cultural life, Falluja is in fact famous for its Islamic traditions, including various orders of Sufi Islam and the very conservative Salafi brand of Sunni Islam. One does not find the break in tradition of which Kaplan speaks, nor the reinvented abstract and ideological form of Islam he blames for radicalism. Instead one finds numerous centers for religious study that produce many of Iraq's most important theologians. The vast majority of the armed fighters in Falluja were not motivated by radical Islamic beliefs, but were fighting to defend their families, homes, city and way of life from the brutal American onslaught and were motivated by nationalism and pride. The fighters were not, as Kaplan has us believe by quoting Lieutenant Colonel Byrne, men who fought in Chechnya or Afghanistan. The vast majority of the fighters were local men who had prior military experience in the Iraqi military. A few dozen foreign fighters were also present, though most were too young to have fought anywhere else. Kaplan also fails to explain how Byrne's orders to grow mustaches and subsequently to shave them had anything to do with cultural sensitivity. The Marines would have been more culturally sensitive had they not offended Falluja's residents by humiliating their fierce pride through violent searches that terrified women and children and involved placing boots in the heads of men. Nor were the fighters of Falluja known as Ali Babas, a common Iraqi term for thieves, and what he claims the one Iraq he met called them. They were known as Mujahedin or Muqatilin, which both mean fighters, though Mujahedin has a more religious connotation. Kaplan repeatedly refers to the several thousand men of Falluja who fought fiercely in self defense as Ali Babas. They were in fact, organized efficiently thanks to military officers in their ranks, and obeyed the commands of officers in alliance with religious and tribal leaders who often had their own virtual armies. Loud speakers on the mosque towers were used for communication, alerting the fighters to where the Marines were approaching and instructing them to move to various fronts. Kaplan comments on the dominance of southern Christian fundamentalism among the Marines without judgment and reports that their
USAT: Memo on torture of foreign fighters in Iraq
[Interesting memo because it seems to prove more clearly than any other that torture was systematically applied to insurgents in Iraq. Everyone guesses that by now, but this seems like proof.] [It also contains in passing the statistic that acccording to the US military's own figures, less than 2% of all prisoners -- 100 out of 5700 -- are foreigners. But it seems like those are the one we concentrated the torture on. And this is how we produced the evidence that everything was being run by foreign fighters. We seem still to believe.] [As it to make it more absurd, the only examples of the 100 given here are of Syrians, who in many cases aren't foreigners at all to Iraqi clan vendettas -- i.e., the US military kills a guy and his cousins come kill us. Many clans extend across borders.] http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040706/6342635s.htm July 6, 2004 USA TODAY Page 6A Non-Iraqi captives singled out for harsh treatment, records say Foreign fighters seen as threat By Peter Eisler Late last year, U.S. officers at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison sought approval to use extreme interrogation tactics on a captive said to have information that ''could potentially save countless lives of American soldiers.'' The captive wasn't an Iraqi general or an al-Qaeda leader. He was a Syrian implicated in a bombing attempt against U.S. troops. ''Detainee can provide information related to safe houses, facilitators, financing, recruitment and operations of foreign fighter smuggling into Iraq,'' the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, Col. Thomas Pappas, wrote in a secret memo that sought to exempt the captive from normal interrogation rules. The memo, obtained by USA TODAY, went to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq. It laid out a plan to ''fear up'' the Syrian by throwing tables and chairs, yelling at him and interrogating him ''continuously'' for 72 hours. During that time, he would be stripped, hooded, bound in ''stress positions'' and permitted only brief intervals of sleep. Sanchez testified to Congress in May that he never saw the request. But that may not have mattered: The Syrian, identified as Juwad Ali Khalif, 31, is among several non-Iraqi nationals who were allegedly beaten and sexually abused by U.S. soldiers at the prison, according to statements to investigators in a report on Abu Ghraib by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba. The Pentagon's investigation of the abuses at the prison documented repeated instances in which suspected foreign fighters were singled out for harsh treatment, according to classified documents from the inquiry. The records show that interrogators and guards at the prison felt extra pressure to get information from the foreigners. Top U.S. officials believed at the time that foreign fighters posed a substantial threat in Iraq and were heavily involved in the deadly insurgency that continues to grip that country. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda lieutenants were calling publicly for Muslims across the Arab world to come and wage jihad, or holy war, against Americans in Iraq. And captured associates of Saddam Hussein were telling U.S. interrogators that the former Iraqi president's loyalists were recruiting foreign fighters to resist the U.S. occupation. ''There's clearly an indication that foreign terrorists are involved in the kind of violence that we see'' in the insurgency, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence DiRita said in a briefing last August, echoing a view expressed by many Defense officials. ''And we're going to use all the means at our disposal, all of the national means of power, to counter foreign terrorists.'' In recent months, however, it has become clear that the insurgents are overwhelmingly Iraqis. Foreign nationals account for fewer than 100 of the 5,700 prisoners being held by coalition forces in Iraq as security concerns, according to figures supplied by the military. The military's suspicions about non-Iraqi fighters through the latter half of 2003 and early this year had an effect on the way foreign captives were tracked and treated. This was especially true of Syrians, who have accounted for more than half the foreigners detained in Iraq. At Abu Ghraib, suspected foreign fighters typically were deemed to be of ''high intelligence value'' and placed in isolation in the ''hard site'' section of the prison, according to sworn statements given to military investigators by Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, a top military intelligence officer at the prison. That area was where virtually all the prisoner abuses are said to have occurred. A special ''foreign fighter cell'' of interrogators and intelligence analysts was devoted to questioning the non-Iraqis. Khalif was beaten repeatedly and handcuffed in stressful positions for hours by military police guards working nights at the hard site, according to sworn witness statements collected by military investigators. He also was stripped, hosed with cold water on consecutive nights and forced to sleep nude on the wet
Correction
[See comment at end] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/01/pageoneplus/corrections.html The New York Times July 1, 2004 Corrections A n article yesterday about Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, the American marine held by kidnappers in Iraq, quoted incompletely from a comment by a cousin of his in Salt Lake City about speculation that the corporal might have deserted. The cousin, Tarek Hassoun, said of a conversation two months ago with Corporal Hassoun: He said a lot of soldiers, they don't want to die, especially when they see someone dying in front of them. When the report from Salt Lake City was added to the Baghdad article, this further comment from Tarek Hassoun was omitted: But I'm sure he didn't run away. snip As Eric Umansky of Todays Papers points out, this correction fails to mention the tiny bit of context that his purported desertion was what that article was about -- the only thing it was about. They should create a new section entitled Retractions. Michael
Using the government to push Big Pharma's most profitable drugs
[From Sam Smith's Undernews]
URL: http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/328/7454/1458
British Journal of Medicine
Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness
Jeanne Lenzer
New York
A sweeping mental health initiative will be unveiled by President George W
Bush in July. The plan promises to integrate mentally ill patients fully
into the community by providing services in the community, rather than
institutions, according to a March 2004 progress report entitled New
Freedom Initiative (www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/newfreedom/toc- 2004.html).
While some praise the plan's goals, others say it protects the profits of
drug companies at the expense of the public.
Bush established the New Freedom Commission on Mental Health in April 2002
to conduct a comprehensive study of the United States mental health
service delivery system. The commission issued its recommendations in
July 2003. Bush instructed more than 25 federal agencies to develop an
implementation plan based on those recommendations.
The president's commission found that despite their prevalence, mental
disorders often go undiagnosed and recommended comprehensive mental
health screening for consumers of all ages, including preschool
children. According to the commission, Each year, young children are
expelled from preschools and childcare facilities for severely disruptive
behaviours and emotional disorders. Schools, wrote the commission, are in
a key position to screen the 52 million students and 6 million adults
who work at the schools.
The commission also recommended Linkage [of screening] with treatment and
supports including state-of-the-art treatments using specific
medications for specific conditions. The commission commended the Texas
Medication Algorithm Project (TMAP) as a model medication treatment plan
that illustrates an evidence-based practice that results in better
consumer outcomes.
Dr Darrel Regier, director of research at the American Psychiatric
Association (APA), lauded the president's initiative and the Texas project
model saying, What's nice about TMAP is that this is a logical plan based
on efficacy data from clinical trials.
He said the association has called for increased funding for
implementation of the overall plan.
But the Texas project, which promotes the use of newer, more expensive
antidepressants and antipsychotic drugs, sparked off controversy when
Allen Jones, an employee of the Pennsylvania Office of the Inspector
General, revealed that key officials with influence over the medication
plan in his state received money and perks from drug companies with a
stake in the medication algorithm (15 May, p1153). He was sacked this week
for speaking to the BMJ and the New York Times.
The Texas project started in 1995 as an alliance of individuals from the
pharmaceutical industry, the University of Texas, and the mental health
and corrections systems of Texas. The project was funded by a Robert Wood
Johnson grant--and by several drug companies.
Mr Jones told the BMJ that the same political/pharmaceutical alliance
that generated the Texas project was behind the recommendations of the New
Freedom Commission, which, according to his whistleblower report, were
poised to consolidate the TMAP effort into a comprehensive national
policy to treat mental illness with expensive, patented medications of
questionable benefit and deadly side effects, and to force private
insurers to pick up more of the tab
(http://psychrights.org/Drugs/AllenJonesTMAPJanuary20.pdf).
Larry D Sasich, research associate with Public Citizen in Washington, DC,
told the BMJ that studies in both the United States and Great Britain
suggest that using the older drugs first makes sense. There's nothing in
the labeling of the newer atypical antipsychotic drugs that suggests they
are superior in efficacy to haloperidol [an older typical
antipsychotic]. There has to be an enormous amount of unnecessary
expenditures for the newer drugs.
[17518.gif] Drug companies have contributed three times more to the
campaign of George Bush, seen here campaigning in Florida, than to that of
his rival John Kerry
Olanzapine (trade name Zyprexa), one of the atypical antipsychotic drugs
recommended as a first line drug in the Texas algorithm, grossed $4.28bn
(£2.35bn; {euro} 3.56bn) worldwide in 2003 and is Eli Lilly's top selling
drug. A 2003 New York Times article by Gardiner Harris reported that 70%
of olanzapine sales are paid for by government agencies, such as Medicare
and Medicaid.
Eli Lilly, manufacturer of olanzapine, has multiple ties to the Bush
administration. George Bush Sr was a member of Lilly's board of directors
and Bush Jr appointed Lilly's chief executive officer, Sidney Taurel, to a
seat on the Homeland Security Council. Lilly made $1.6m in political
contributions in 2000--82% of which went to Bush and the Republican Party.
Jones points out that the companies that helped to start up the Texas
project have been, and still
Re: WSJ Reporters to Conduct Byline Strike
On Tue, 15 Jun 2004, Ben Bradlee was quoted as saying: Nobody gives a rat's ass about bylines. - Ben Bradlee, during a Washington Post byline strike in the 70s. Spoken as a true boss -- and justified in context. But I don't think it necessarily applies to this one. In the ferocious 1975-76 Washington Post strike, it was the pressmen who were striking. Unfortunately they had been suckered into a well-prepared trap to break their union. The reporters' Guild was the only union to cross the line throughout the strike, and doing so provided the crucial margin that allowed management's ambitious plan to work, because it gave the paper as much quality content as their unexpectedly good replacement team could produce. In that context, the byline strike was simply a weak solidarity gesture that was too little and too late. Yesterday and today's byline strike at the WSJ, on the other hand, is by reporters on their own behalf. It seems more in the nature of what Germans call a warning strike than a mere gesture of solidarity. They are signalling that they can and will do more if they feel they have to. Personally I was completely surprised to learn that WSJ reporters has a serious union that's entering into real collective negotiations. (Fighting over healthcare givebacks seems to be a central issue.) I don't think anything like has ever happened at a Dow Jones publication before, has it? Michael
Singer: The institional illogic of military outsourcing
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/opinion/15SING.html The New York Times June 15, 2004 OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Nation Builders and Low Bidders in Iraq By P. W. SINGER W ASHINGTON From the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison to the mutilation of American civilians at Falluja, many of the worst moments of the Iraqi occupation have involved private military contractors outsourced by the Pentagon. With no public or Congressional oversight, the Pentagon has paid billions of dollars to companies that now have as many as 20,000 employees carrying out military functions ranging from logistics and troop training to convoy escort and interrogations. Yet despite the problems and the widespread accusations of overbilling, it appears the civilian leadership at the Pentagon has learned absolutely nothing from the whole experience. Last month the Pentagon awarded a $293 million contract for coordination of security support to a British firm called Aegis Defense Services. The huge contract has two aspects: Aegis will be the coordination and management hub for the more than 50 other private security companies in Iraq, and it will provide its own force of up to 75 close protection teams, each made up of eight armed civilians who are to protect staff members of the United States Project Management Office. The contract is a case study in what not to do. To begin with, a core problem of the military outsourcing experience has been the lack of coordination, oversight and management from the government side. So outsourcing that very problem to another private company has a logic that would do only Kafka proud. In addition, it moves these companies further outside the bounds of public oversight. Moreover, with the handover of Iraqi sovereignty in just weeks, why is the Pentagon, rather than the Iraqis themselves, making this decision? Indeed, it seems contrary to the overall American strategic goal of handing over the responsibilities for security to the Iraqis as a prelude to getting out of the business ourselves. The contract also repeats the cost plus arrangement that has proved problematic in the past. In effect, this deal rewards companies with higher profits the more they spend, and thus is ripe for abuse and inefficiency (as we have seen with the accusations of overbilling that have swirled around Halliburton). It has no parallel in the best practices of the business world, for the very reason that it runs counter to everything Adam Smith wrote about free markets. Finally, the usual mechanisms that increase efficiency in contracting like choosing, rewarding and punishing firms based on their experience and reputation have again been short-circuited. One would think such a major contract would go to a company that has a long operating history, or experience in such roles, or other major activities on the ground in Iraq. Instead, Aegis has been in existence for little more than a year, has worked primarily on antipiracy efforts rather than security coordination, and has never before had a major contract in Iraq. (Aegis is not even on the State Department's list of recommended security companies in Iraq.) The chief executive of Aegis, Tim Spicer, is a former British Army officer turned private warrior who titled his memoir An Unorthodox Soldier. He is infamous in Britain for his role in the Sandline affair of 1998, in which a company he founded shipped 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone in contravention of a United Nations arms embargo. His client in the case was described by Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, as an Indian businessman, traveling on the passport of a dead Serb, awaiting extradition from Canada for alleged embezzlement from a bank in Thailand. When Mr. Spicer told the press that the British government had encouraged his operation, it nearly brought down Prime Minister Tony Blair. Mr. Spicer also was a key character in a 1997 army mutiny in Papua New Guinea. The local army, upset that Mr. Spicer had received a $36 million contract to eradicate a rebellion there, instead toppled the government and put him in jail. It seems hard to believe that the people awarding the Iraq contract had any knowledge of this history. But it may actually be the case, considering the skewed way in which responsibility for private military contracts is spread out over the government to some of the strangest of places. (Recall that the private military interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison were originally hired through a computer services contract overseen by an Interior Department office in Arizona.) The Aegis deal was awarded by the Army transportation command in Fort Eustis, Va., an office with no apparent experience in dealing with the private military industry. The strength of systems of democracy and
Eating the seed corn of infrastructure
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/15/international/africa/15moza.html The New York Times June 15, 2004 Cable Thievery Is Darkening Daily Life in Mozambique By MICHAEL WINES ! 7 SEPTEMBER, Mozambique - At first blush, it may not seem odd that Mozambican businesses are doing a brisk trade in three-legged aluminum pots, ferried by the truckload to buyers in nearby Swaziland and South Africa. In fact, it would not be odd at all, but for two things. One, Mozambique's only aluminum smelter sells its entire production abroad. And two, Mozambique is not importing any aluminum, either. Factories are exporting these things made out of aluminum, said Isaías Rabeca, a power company executive. We just don't know where they're getting the aluminum from. The likely answer lies just outside the tiny settlement of 7 September, along the rutted dirt road that links this destitute collection of stone-walled shacks with the outside world. Here, deep in a towering thicket of bush, thieves cut a brace of four power lines from their creosoted wooden poles in February and carted away more than 35 miles of aluminum cable before anyone noticed. It was not the first time, not even on this particular line. That is the biggest and most recent incident, but the theft of cable has reached alarming proportions, Mr. Rabeca, a regional operations director for E.D.M., Mozambique's power utility, said in an interview. What worries us is that we don't see an end in sight. Every day seems to be getting worse. Throughout southern Africa, cable theft is ubiquitous, a sort of third-world analog to first-world thefts of car radios. In Mr. Rabeca's district, where power lines stretch over 46,000 miles of poles, the direct losses to the utility this year amount to $250,000, a huge sum here. In South Africa, the power utility Eskom said that its losses through April exceeded $2.8 million, and that they more than tripled between 2001 and 2003. Power companies are hardly the sole victims: telephone companies and railroads, among others, are struck nearly as hard by thievery. The price of replacement cable, however, is perhaps the least of the costs. Theft-related blackouts idle businesses, snarl traffic, delay trains and rob the power companies of revenue. Mr. Rabeca says maintenance workers are so consumed with restringing stolen lines that expansion of electrical service to rural Mozambique risks falling behind schedule. Finally, there is the human toll. Would-be cable thieves are regularly electrocuted in the act. Those who succeed, moreover, can wreak havoc beyond any intentions. In 2002, for example, 25 people died and 112 more were injured when a commuter train slammed into an idled supply train in the South African province of KwaZulu Natal. Investigators blamed human error, saying that rail traffic controllers were working under abnormal conditions'' because someone had stolen six feet of copper cable worth about $2.25, disabling the signal system. Metrorail, the national passenger system, now employs 2,500 workers to fight cable theft, but even so, missing cables snarl schedules daily. In Pretoria, passengers enraged by train delays caused by cable theft set the city's train station on fire in 2001. Repairs cost roughly $2.3 million. In Mozambique, long among the world's poorest nations, so much copper electrical cable has been stripped from poles that the state utility company has refitted 90 percent of its power grid with less efficient, but cheaper, aluminum cable. People weren't interested in aluminum, Mr. Rabeca said. But now that the copper's gone, they're stealing it, too. Poverty, of course, drives most of the thievery. Most cable is stolen in snippets of a few tens or scores of yards, often by people desperate to feed themselves or their families. In effect, however, they are acting as legmen for organized crime, which has turned southern Africa's stolen scrap into a lucrative industry. Experts say much of the stolen cable is fenced to scrap dealers with criminal ties, and that much of it ends up in South Africa, where it is either recycled or, often, loaded into shipping containers for export. The trade is profitable enough that criminal gangs in both Mozambique and South Africa are staging increasingly bold thefts. So far this year, Eskom has registered five thefts of heavy high-tension cables, potential killers carrying 275,000 volts of electricity. Last month, said Beulah Misrole, Eskom's top risk manager, thieves made off with a 400,000-volt line, even taking down huge metal pylons to reach the cable. Eskom deploys security guards along some high-tension routes. But they target rural and deep rural areas, she said. By the time you get there, they're gone. In fact, professional
Giving Ashcroft the brush off
[The credibility gap starts to become visible] [From Slate's Today's Papers] snip Apparently tiring of Attorney General Ashcroft's habit of slightly spinning terror cases, *nobody* fronts his announcement that a Somali man has been indicted for his role in an alleged plot to blow up an Ohio mall. As the Post emphasizes, the man reportedly has connections to Iyman Faris, the guy who apparently has admitted to connections to al-Qaida and once considered trying to topple the Brooklyn Bridge. Responding to Ashcroft, the NYT does the journalistic equivalent of coughing while muttering bull---t: FBI types suggested the plot appeared not to have advanced beyond the discussion stage. The officials expressed doubt that [the defendant] had the financial, organizational or technical skills to carry out an attack. The Times adds that the indictment itself doesn't mention the alleged bombing plot; rather it's cited in the government's motion to keep the guy without bail. end excerpt Michael
WSJ Reporters to Conduct Byline Strike
[Well here's a creative tactic in a labor dispute making it onto the front page of the WSJ. I just asked a friend who is a reporter there and he says yep, it's on -- he has a front page piece tomorrow running with no byline and considers it a matter of pride. Things are getting rancorous.] http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=storyu=/ap/20040615/ap_on_bi_ge/wall_street_journal_byline_strike_1 AP WSJ Reporters to Conduct Byline Strike Mon Jun 14,10:25 PM ET By SETH SUTEL, AP Business Writer NEW YORK - Wall Street Journal reporters plan to withhold their bylines from stories for two days this week as contract negotiations with their employer, Dow Jones Co., turn increasingly rancorous. The Independent Association of Publishers Employees, a union representing U.S. reporters at the Journal, called on its members Monday to withhold their bylines from stories in Wednesday and Thursday editions of the paper. We do not take this step lightly -- bylines are a tremendous source of pride for all, union representative Tom Lauricella wrote in a note to union members. But the intransigence of Dow Jones management forces our hand. In an interview, Lauricella said that an overwhelming majority of union members were supportive of the idea of a byline strike, and he expected wide participation. He noted, however, that overseas reporters for the Journal are not covered by the union, and several managers also write regularly for the paper. Lauricella said the byline strike, the first in the history of Dow Jones, was being called because the company had threatened to stop negotiating with the union and to impose a punitive contract, he said. It came to this because Dow Jones continues to refuse to negotiate in good faith, Lauricella said. The company is demanding we take benefits cuts and paltry wage raises that will leave us behind the cost of living. Dow Jones and the union have requested that a mediator facilitate the talks, which have stalled primarily over wages and a request from the company that employees make contributions to health care costs. In January, the union's rank and file overwhelmingly rejected a preliminary contract agreement that was made by the union's former bargaining committee, which has since been replaced. So far the byline strike is only expected to affect Journal reporters and not other Dow Jones reporters covered by the IAPE union, such as those working for Dow Jones Newswires or the newspaper's Web site. Tensions between Dow Jones and its union have been escalating in recent weeks. A number of reporters picketed in front of the company's annual meeting in April and spoke up at the meeting itself to make their case directly to the company's top management and board of directors. A spokesman for Dow Jones did not return a call seeking comment.
Sinclair Lewis quote
[Got it from A.W.A.D, so don't know the exact source] It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -Upton Sinclair, novelist and reformer (1878-1968) Michael
Sacred outsourcing
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/international/asia/13INDI.html The New York Times June 13, 2004 Short on Priests, U.S. Catholics Outsource Prayers to Indian Clergy By SARITHA RAI B ANGALORE, India - With Roman Catholic clergy in short supply in the United States, Indian priests are picking up some of their work, saying Mass for special intentions, in a sacred if unusual version of outsourcing. American, as well as Canadian and European churches, are sending Mass intentions, or requests for services like those to remember deceased relatives and thanksgiving prayers, to clergy in India. About 2 percent of India's more than one billion people are Christians, most of them Catholics. In Kerala, a state on the southwestern coast with one of the largest concentrations of Christians in India, churches often receive intentions from overseas. The Masses are conducted in Malayalam, the native language. The intention - often a prayer for the repose of the soul of a deceased relative, or for a sick family member, thanksgiving for a favor received, or a prayer offering for a newborn - is announced at Mass. The requests are mostly routed to Kerala's churches through the Vatican, the bishops or through religious bodies. Rarely, prayer requests come directly to individual priests. While most requests are made via mail or personally through traveling clergymen, a significant number arrive via e-mail, a sign that technology is expediting this practice. In Kerala's churches, memorial and thanksgiving prayers conducted for local residents are said for a donation of 40 rupees (90 cents), whereas a prayer request from the United States typically comes with $5, the Indian priests say. Bishop Sebastian Adayanthrath, the auxiliary bishop of the Ernakulam-Angamaly diocese in Cochin, a port town in Kerala, said his diocese received an average of 350 Mass intentions a month from overseas. Most were passed to needy priests. In Kerala, where priests earn $45 a month, the money is a welcome supplement, Bishop Adayanthrath said. But critics of the phenomenon said they were shocked that religious services were being sent offshore, or outsourced, a word normally used for clerical and other office jobs that migrate to countries with lower wages. In London, Amicus, the labor union that represents 1.2 million British workers, called on the government and workers to treat outsourcing as a serious issue. In a news release, David Fleming, national secretary for finance of Amicus said the assignment of prayers shows that no aspect of life in the West is sacred.'' The very fabric of the nation is changing,'' he said. We need to have a long, hard think about what the future is going to look like. However, congregations in Kerala say the practice of ordering prayers is several decades old. The church is not a business enterprise, and it is sad and pathetic to connect this practice to outsourcing software work to cheaper labor destinations,'' said the Rev. Vincent Kundukulam of St. Joseph Pontifical Seminary in Aluva, near Cochin. In Bangalore's Dharmaram College, Rector James Narithookil said he often received requests for Mass intentions from abroad, which he distributed among the 50 priests in his seminary. Most of the requests from the United States were for requiems, with donations of $5 to $ 10, he said. Bishop Adayanthrath said sending Mass intentions overseas was a way for rich churches short on priests to share and support smaller churches in poorer parts of the world. The Rev. Paul Thelakkat, a Cochin-based spokesman for the Synod of Bishops of the Syro-Malabar Church, said, The prayer is heartfelt, and every prayer is treated as the same whether it is paid for in dollars, euros or in rupees. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | Help | Back to Top
Newsflash: Reagan still dead!
[speaking of wikipedia articles, here's one that seems germane] http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Generalissimo-Francisco-Franco-is-still-dead Updated: Jun 08, 2004 Encyclopedia: Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead The death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco during the first season of Saturday Night Live in 1975 served as the source of one of the first catch phrases from SNL to enter the general lexicon. Franco lingered near death for weeks before dying. On slow news days, United States network television news casters sometimes noted that Franco was still alive, or not yet dead. The imminent death of Franco was a headline story on the NBC news for a number of weeks prior to his death on November 20. After Franco's death, Chevy Chase, reader of the news on Saturday Night Live's comedic news segment Weekend Update, announced the fascist dictator's death and read a quote from Richard Nixon praising Franco as a good friend of the United States; as an ironic counterpoint to this, a picture was displayed behind Chase, showing Franco standing alongside Adolf Hitler. From that point on, Chase made it clear that SNL would get the last laugh at Franco's expense. This breaking news just in, Chase would announce -- Generalsimo Francisco Franco is still dead! The top story of the news segment for several weeks running was that General simo Francisco Franco was still dead. Chase would repeat the story at the end of the news segment, aided by Garrett Morris, head of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, whose aid in repeating the story involved cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting the headline. The phrase may owe something to General Grant Still Dead, one of the examples of undesirable newspaper headlines in Headlines and Deadlines, a handbook for newspaper copy editors by Robert Garst and Theodore M. Bernstein.
KR: Dozens of missing Iraqis believed to be lost in Abu Ghraib
[Like a right wing nightmare of a big government police state] [NB: even the coalition official admits this off the record] [BTW, it's worth reading all the way through for its documentary cum short story value] URL: http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8891610.htm Posted on Thu, Jun. 10, 2004 Dozens of missing Iraqis believed to be lost in Abu Ghraib prison By Hannah Allam Knight Ridder Newspapers BAGHDAD, Iraq - The boy said goodbye to his boss at a local upholstery shop, passed a violent anti-American demonstration on the way home and hasn't been seen since. Mohamed Khaled Saleem's parents thought their 15-year-old son's disappearance six months ago was unique until their search led them this month to Abu Ghraib, the vast American-run prison where disturbing conditions existed well before graphic photos of soldiers abusing Iraqi inmates emerged. American administrators have lost track of dozens of detainees inside Abu Ghraib in the past year, according to human-rights workers, former inmates, a former prison investigator, attorneys, detainees' families and prisoner-rights groups. With no clearinghouse for missing-person reports and technical errors in the intake process, families like Saleem's can do little but wait outside the tall prison gates in hopes that someone recognizes the missing men pictured on their flimsy, photocopied fliers. What else can they do? asked Saad Abdulhadi al Ubaidy of the Iraqi Political Prisoners League, which has compiled hundreds of names of the missing. They can hang around a human-rights office until they get kicked out. They can wait outside the prison or the coalition offices. But they'll still go home with no answers. More than a million people are believed to be missing in Iraq, with the bulk having vanished under Saddam Hussein's brutal regime, according to several humanitarian organizations. There's no way to tell how many have slipped into obscurity after being arrested by U.S. forces, said a coalition human-rights official, speaking on condition of anonymity. The whole system is desperately overloaded, so the names get gobbled up and disappear, the official said. Recordkeeping at Abu Ghraib was sloppy and the prison was overcrowded before the abuse scandal brought long-overdue changes, former prison workers said. Many of the 3,200 detainees there can't be traced by relatives because of misspelled names or other simple data-entry errors. Others were given detainee numbers that weren't on file or were in use under another name. Some have escaped; a few have died in anonymity. I helped fix more than 50 cases myself, said Sabah Abid Saloome, a former Abu Ghraib corrections officer who's now a police investigator in Baghdad. Even one digit or one letter off, and those prisoners are off the books. Without the fixes, their families would never find them. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for coalition detention operations, said there have been occasional errors in names due to poor translation of Arabic into English or other human errors. The larger problem, he said, is detainees who give false names or aliases to hide their identities. We can only track them by the name we are given, unless we subsequently determine their true identity, Johnson said Wednesday in an e-mail response to questions. There is certainly no effort being made to hide the identity of any detainees at Abu Ghraib or any other detention facility. Human-rights workers and prisoner advocates recounted story after painful story of families who were incorrectly told their missing relatives weren't in the prison. A Kurdish couple in northern Iraq gave up their search and held a funeral for a missing son. A few weeks later, he turned up on a busload of prisoners released from Abu Ghraib. The wife of a high-ranking Baath Party member sold her bridal gold to finance the search for her husband and said she found out through back channels that he's behind bars under the wrong name. Some relatives of the 22 prisoners who died in a massive mortar attack on their camp in April still don't know that the men are dead. Records of the men didn't include home addresses, said a human-rights manager with the coalition who was asked by prison officials to help track down the next-of-kin. While it was desirable to notify families personally, particularly given the tragic circumstances of the mortar attack where detainees were killed by fellow Iraqis, it was not possible to do so, Barry wrote, adding that the remains were turned over to Iraqi health officials. By far, the most common story comes from families such as Saleem's. His name isn't on prison rolls. Yet no one can say for sure that he isn't in Abu Ghraib. This boy was by my side since the day
BAS: The nuclear powered hydrogen car
URL: http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2004/mj04/mj04lortie.html May/June 2004, Volume 60, No. 3, p. 12 BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS Bush's nuclear FreedomCAR By Bret Lortie In his 2003 State of the Union address, President George Bush proposed $1.2 billion in research funding so that Americans can lead the world in developing clean, hydrogen-powered automobiles. At the center of his vision: the FreedomCAR. Touted as a way to reverse U.S. dependence on foreign oil and global warming, the car's dirty little secret is that putting millions of them on America's interstate highways may necessitate the construction of new nuclear power plants, something that has not occurred in the United States for decades. There's one factor the president isn't talking about: the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new nuclear power plants his administration imagines making all that hydrogen, Mark Baard reported in the May 28, 2003 Village Voice. Could it be true? Could the Bush administration and Senate Republicans want to give billions of taxpayer dollars to the nuclear industry for new high-temperature, gas-cooled reactors that in theory will generate both electricity and hydrogen? You bet. Entergy, the second-largest nuclear energy producer in the United States, hopes to break ground on its co-generation Freedom Reactor in the next five years. Dan Keuter, vice president of nuclear development for Entergy, claims that the only practical way to produce large volumes of emission-free hydrogen is from advanced nuclear reactors (Advanced Nuclear Power, April 2003). The fact is a hydrogen economy only makes sense if you have a non-[greenhouse gas]-emitting source of hydrogen. That means using renewable energy and nuclear. And according to Keuter, renewables just aren't up to the task of generating the quantity of hydrogen the world is going to need. Market demand for hydrogen is forecast to quadruple by 2017, primarily for producing fertilizer, refining oil, and making methanol, methane, and other products. That estimate does not account for FreedomCARs or home electricity. Another problem is that most hydrogen is today produced by breaking down natural gas, which leads to climate change and increasing dependence on limited natural gas resources. Ethanol, produced from corn, is another potential source of hydrogen, but current methods of extracting hydrogen from ethanol require large refineries and large quantities of fossil fuels. University of Minnesota researchers say they have a solution: a prototype reactor small and efficient enough to heat small homes and power cars (Associated Press, February 13). The reactor--of the non-nuclear variety--is a relatively small, 2-foot-tall apparatus of tubes and wires that creates hydrogen for a fuel cell, which generates power. The researchers envision people buying ethanol to power these cells, capable of producing 1 kilowatt of power, in their basements and garages. For non-nuclear generated hydrogen to become a viable fuel source, something like the Minnesota basement reactor has to be developed into an affordable and readily available technology; at least that's what the American Physical Society's Panel on Public Affairs is saying. On March 1 it released a report stressing that major scientific breakthroughs are required for the president's initiative to succeed. The most promising hydrogen-engine technologies require factors of 10 to 100 improvements in cost or performance in order to be competitive, the report said. And according to Peter Eisenberger, chairman of the committee that drafted the report, once all that hydrogen is generated, you still have to store the volatile gas. That's a potential showstopper. Bret Lortie is the Bulletin's managing editor. © 2004 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Re: Thinking for ourselves: Remembering World War II
Apropos the use and abuse of the memory of WWII, here's an article c/o of Sam Smith's Undernews: URL: http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/6749 May 23, 2004 Lancaster (PA) Sunday News Gil Smart Smart News snip Believe it or not, the writer states, the administration of FDR made many blunders during that war but everybody was too busy supporting the total effort to bash the president or his cabinet! Dont believe it. Because the fact is that President Roosevelt was pretty much roundly bashed by Republicans during the entirety of the war. And during the presidential campaign of 1944, things got as nasty as ever. Indeed, our local Lancaster New Era noted in an editorial on the eve of the election, Nov. 6, 1944, that The surprising thing about this war-time presidential campaign is that it was no different from all the others. Thomas Dewey, Roosevelts opponent that year, spent much of the campaign deriding FDR as a tired old man. The Roosevelt administration, Dewey said the week before the election, was the most wasteful, extravagant and incompetent administration in the history of the nation. Dewey, in fact, spent that fall all but calling Roosevelt a communist, insisting that FDR was intent on selling the nation down the river to the reds. But at least Dewey didnt criticize FDR on the war effort, right? To have done that in the wake of the failed Market Garden operation, just before the Battle of the Bulge, would have been grossly unpatriotic, right? Judge for yourself: American fighting men were paying in blood through a prolongation of the battle of Germany for the improvised meddling of the Democratic administration and the confused incompetence of President Roosevelt. Thats from an Associated Press article that ran in this very newspaper on Sunday, Nov. 5, 1944, the morning after a major Dewey address at Madison Square Garden in New York City. end excerpt Full at: URL: http://www.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/local/6749
June 30th Explained
In the Wednesday USA Today, the article that covers Bush's speech is subheaded: quote Occupation Will End Soon; Troops Remain Indefinitely unquote Michael
Re: Famous last words
On Tue May 25, Michael Perelman wrote: As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants. snip Turns out he was only kidding about that part. I thought that he said that it was not an interview, only around drinks, not that he was joking. I didn't mean kidding haha, I mean saying one thing and doing the opposite. When, three months after he said this, we raided his office and made him the fall guy, he called a press conference to bash the US. That's not exactly falling on one's sword. Michael
Perfect Neocon Iraq Cartoon
http://www.cartoonbank.com/product_details.asp?mscssid=AT1VQC89CE608MUND8P0LBU63RKK1R88sitetype=1sid=70643did=4
Famous last words
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=%2Fnews%2F2004%2F02%2F19%2Fwirq19.xml Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime By Jack Fairweather in Baghdad and Anton La Guardia (Filed: 19/02/2004) snip Ahmad Chalabi: 'we've been entirely successful' Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. We are heroes in error, he told the Telegraph in Baghdad. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants. snip Turns out he was only kidding about that part. Michael
Kerryisms
http://slate.msn.com/id/2100720/ This is not perfectly executed (it's a bit tendentious), but it's easy to imagine it done perfectly, and it seems like a great idea. It does a great job of capturing what's wrong with the man's speech. It's not that he makes gaffes, but rather lards that he lards so many of his sentences with caveats and pointless embellishments. And the result is a language of pomposity and evasion -- even when he's saying the right thing. Michael
Newsday: Iran wanted US to invade?
[If this is true, I think I'm just going to through in the towel and decide that covert intelligence is an oxymoron. Is there no country with a spy agency who can divine their own long-term interests? Are they all willing to shipwreck their country just for the chance to say they made something happen? Maybe when another spook says you do good work it's a sign you've lost your mind.] http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-uschal0522,0,340595.story?coll=ny-top-span-headlines May 21, 2004 NEW YORK NEWSDAY Chalabi aide is suspected Iranian spy BY KNUT ROYCE WASHINGTON BUREAU May 21, 2004, 7:29 PM EDT WASHINGTON -- The Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that a U.S.-funded arm of Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress has been used for years by Iranian intelligence to pass disinformation to the United States and to collect highly sensitive American secrets, according to intelligence sources. Iranian intelligence has been manipulating the United States through Chalabi by furnishing through his Information Collection Program information to provoke the United States into getting rid of Saddam Hussein, said an intelligence source Friday who was briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions, which were based on a review of thousands of internal documents. The Information Collection Program also kept the Iranians informed about what we were doing by passing classified U.S. documents and other sensitive information, he said. The program has received millions of dollars from the U.S. government over several years. An administration official confirmed that highly classified information had been provided [to the Iranians] through that channel. The Defense Department this week halted payment of $340,000 a month to Chalabi's program. Chalabi had long been the favorite of the Pentagon's civilian leadership. Intelligence sources say Chalabi himself has passed on sensitive U.S. intelligence to the Iranians. Patrick Lang, former director of the intelligence agency's Middle East branch, said he had been told by colleagues in the intelligence community that Chalabi's U.S.-funded program to provide information about weapons of mass destruction and insurgents was effectively an Iranian intelligence operation. They [the Iranians] knew exactly what we were up to, he said. He described it as one of the most sophisticated and successful intelligence operations in history. I'm a spook. I appreciate good work. This was good work, he said. An intelligence agency spokesman would not discuss questions about his agency's internal conclusions about the alleged Iranian operation. But he said some of its information had been helpful to the U.S. Some of the information was great, especially as it pertained to arresting high value targets and on force protection issues, he said. And some of the information wasn't so great. At the center of the alleged Iranian intelligence operation, according to administration officials and intelligence sources, is Aras Karim Habib, a 47-year-old Shia Kurd who was named in an arrest warrant issued during a raid on Chalabi's home and offices in Baghdad Thursday. He eluded arrest. Karim, who sometimes goes by the last name of Habib, is in charge of the information collection program. The intelligence source briefed on the Defense Intelligence Agency's conclusions said that Karim's fingerprints are all over it. There was an ongoing intelligence relationship between Karim and the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, all funded by the U.S. government, inadvertently, he said. The Iraqi National Congress has received about $40 million in U.S. funds over the past four years, including $33 million from the State Department and $6 million from the Defense Intelligence Agency. In Baghdad after the war, Karim's operation was run out of the fourth floor of a secure intelligence headquarters building, while the intelligence agency was on the floor above, according to an Iraqi source who knows Karim well. The links between the INC and U.S. intelligence go back to at least 1992, when Karim was picked by Chalabi to run his security and military operations. Indications that Iran, which fought a bloody war against Iraq during the 1980s, was trying to lure the U.S. into action against Saddam Hussein appeared many years before the Bush administration decided in 2001 that ousting Hussein was a national priority. In 1995, for instance, Khidhir Hamza, who had once worked in Iraq's nuclear program and whose claims that Iraq had continued a massive bomb program in the 1990s are now largely discredited, gave UN nuclear inspectors what appeared to be explosive documents about Iraq's program. Hamza, who fled Iraq in 1994, teamed up with Chalabi after his escape. The documents, which referred to results of experiments on enriched uranium in the bomb's core, were almost flawless, according to Andrew Cockburn's recent account of the event in the political newsletter CounterPunch. But the
Gettleman on riding with the marines
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/02/magazine/02LIVES.html The New York Times May 2, 2004 Into the Heart of Falluja By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN M ovement to Contact. That was the name of the mission. And the moment we set off I knew it was dicey. It was 4 a.m. The sky was inky. I was outside Falluja, and 17 pumped-up marines were waiting for me in the back of a cargo truck. They were sitting on a pile of sandbags, bunched together, completely exposed. I squeezed into the middle. The truck lurched forward. The guys and their gear began to bounce around. I felt as if we were going on a hayride through a combat zone. ''We will get hit,'' a sergeant shouted. ''You can count on it.'' I couldn't get over how much the scene was like a replay of Vietnam. Or the Vietnam I'd seen in movies and photo books. The tall grass. The green fields. The flush-cheeked boys from Alabama, Texas, Missouri and the Bronx prowling the countryside, stepping under the palm trees, aching for contact. For three months, I had chronicled the Iraqi side of the war: missing fathers, burned boys, the daily humiliations of getting shoved around by young men from an alien and aggressive culture. But I decided to go out with a Marine company and see some action. And the action was Falluja. The city 35 miles west of Baghdad has become the hotbed of the resistance, the bleeding symbol of all gone wrong. The police have fled. The civic institutions have crumbled. A year into the occupation, the graffiti scrawled on the walls still reads ''Long live Saddam Hussein.'' The orders that morning were to check out a village where mortars were being fired at an American base. ''I don't begrudge them,'' a Marine officer told me. ''We'd do the same thing if some foreign dudes rolled into San Diego and set up shop.'' The marines I was accompanying last month were based at Twentynine Palms, Calif. They were spread out in several vehicles. It was your basic search-and-destroy mission. But many marines didn't like that term. They said it sounded too much like 'Nam. Open cargo trucks in hostile territory seemed like a bad idea. So I asked another officer, a square-jawed character who told me he would be happy killing insurgents for the next 10 years, why we weren't in armored personnel carriers, like the Army uses. ''These trucks are dangerous,'' he said. ''But they're all we got.'' It was even more dangerous in the last truck, because there is nothing behind you but fields and trees and countless shadowy places to hide. I found that out when, for some odd reason, we stopped in the middle of a village where everyone flashed us iron-hard looks. Cars drove back and forth, scouting us. ''If I was one of those guys, there is where I'd shoot from,'' said a marine, jabbing his finger toward a thick palm grove. Suddenly, from that spot, a fireball exploded. ''R.P.G.!'' a squad leader yelled out. We ducked. Or tried to. The rocket-propelled grenade sailed right over our truck, over our heads, less than three feet between us and a somber knock on 17 unsuspecting doors back home. ''Clear the truck!'' the squad leader yelled. I nearly wiped out just swinging my leg over the side. Bullets pinged. A piece of the truck's hood went flying. Mortars started dropping like snowballs. Whoosh, thud, whoosh, thud. I buried myself in an irrigation ditch and kissed the mud. But the marines were pros. Nobody panicked. They crawled behind a berm, got on their knees and judiciously fired back, bullet after bullet. We escaped that firefight with no casualties. But soon we were in another. And then another. The countryside was so lush and pretty. But it was swarming with insurgents. One battle ended with people fleeing into a palm grove and the marines firing after them, felling them one by one. ''Man, I think some of those guys were kids,'' a lance corporal told me afterward. ''Or they were midgets.'' After writing so much about the pain inflicted by the occupation, I was now absorbing the other side. I heard it whistle over my head. I felt it slam into the ground next to me and make the earth ripple. True, the marines' mission that day was not passing out Jolly Ranchers. It was stamping out the insurgency. But now I knew what it felt like to be in someone else's sights. The marines never fired the first shot, though they always fired the last. I also started thinking that the insurgents sure didn't look like terrorists from my vantage point on the truck. They didn't seem like radicals or hard-core fighters. They were people shooting from their bedrooms, their prayer rooms, their rice paddies and their mosques. They were people defending their land. A few days later, I left for Amman, Jordan, an hour's flight and a million miles away. Compared with
LAT: Pentagon Corruption almost Tammany in its ripeness
[Hey, we won the war! Isn't it in our interests that [Americans like my friends get the contract instead of stinking Europeans! So what if US forces die in the short term for lack of good communications. I'm talking long term.] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-iraqphones29apr29,1,3312797.story?coll=la-home-headlines Contract Causes Inquiry at Pentagon By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON -- A senior Defense Department official is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general for allegations that he attempted to alter a contract proposal in Iraq to benefit a mobile phone consortium that includes friends and colleagues, according to documents obtained by The Times and sources with direct knowledge of the process. John A. Shaw, 64, the deputy undersecretary for international technology security, sought to transform a relatively minor police and fire communications proposal into a contract allowing the creation of an Iraq-wide commercial cellular network that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, the sources said. Shaw brought pressure on officials at the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad to change the contract language and grant the consortium a noncompetitive bid, according to the sources. The consortium, under the guidance of a firm owned by Alaskan natives, consisted of an Irish telecommunications entrepreneur, former officials in the first Bush administration and such leading telecommunications companies as Lucent and Qualcomm, according to sources and consortium members. Shaw's efforts resulted in a dispute at the Coalition Provisional Authority that has delayed the contract, depriving U.S. military officials and Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system. That has angered top U.S. officials and members of the U.S.-led authority governing Iraq, who say the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis might have been prevented with better communications. In interviews, Shaw said he had a long-standing personal relationship with at least one member of the consortium, but had no financial ties or agreement with the consortium for future employment. One other member of the consortium's board of directors is under contract with his office as a researcher. Shaw said he was trying to help the group because it could quickly install the police and fire communications system, and because the group was using a U.S.-based cellphone technology called CDMA that had lost out in what he called a rigged competition last year for commercial licenses in Iraq. Three companies using European-based technology won contracts. Additionally, Shaw said that he had been contacted by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County district was packed with Qualcomm employees, and the office of Republican Sen. Conrad R. Burns of Montana, the head of the Commerce Committee's communications subcommittee, urging him to ensure that U.S. technology was allowed to compete for cellular phone contracts in Iraq. Issa confirmed they he had contacted Shaw on the issue. Burns' office did not respond to inquiries. CDMA, which was developed by Qualcomm, is used in the United States and some countries in Asia. Its rival, a standard developed by Europeans called GSM, is used in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Hey, we won the war, Shaw said in an interview. Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can that can then become the dominant standard in the region? The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Services, a unit of the inspector general, began its investigation after two senior officials with the U.S.-led coalition authority reported that Shaw had demanded that they make the changes to the contract. They refused. Daniel Sudnick, who was the senior advisor to Iraq's minister of communications, the highest-ranking American in the ministry, and Bonnie Carroll, a chief deputy, resigned this month. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the inspector general was unable to discuss this matter at this time. Carroll declined comment Wednesday. Sudnick issued a statement denying Shaw's charges of corruption in the original cellular license award that he helped to oversee. Together with my team, we were singularly instrumental in putting modern communications in place that never existed in Iraq before, Sudnick said. No one, doing it properly and carefully, and avoiding the misuse of taxpayers' dollars, could have done it any faster. The inquiry into Shaw's actions is believed to be the first for a senior Pentagon official in connection with the massive $18.4-billion package funded by U.S. taxpayers to help rebuild Iraq. According to
Africans study American democracy and are politely appalled
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/30/nyregion/30ghana.html The New York Times April 30, 2004 Studying Albany, and Giggling Politely By MARC SANTORA A LBANY, April 29 - The people of the visiting party from Ghana, a fledgling West African democracy, spoke perfect English, but walking the marble corridors of power in Albany, they came across a word they had never heard before. We were amused by the word 'lobbyist,' said Moses Asaga, a ranking member of Ghana's Parliament. This lobbyist can just walk around and they get money, he said, laughing. It was not the only surprise for the delegation visiting the capital city for what was billed as a firsthand look at American democracy in action. Specifically, they were on a mission to understand how the budget process works in the United States. But in visiting Albany, they were studying a world where individual lawmakers have a minimal effect on budget issues, deferring instead to three men who argue behind closed doors and then explain to the representatives how to vote. Indeed, several things about the workings of Albany mystified the group. We have a definite time when the budget must be passed, said Eugene Agyepong, chairman of the Finance Committee in Ghana's Parliament. With Albany's budget late for the 20th consecutive year, and New York the only state in the nation with such an unblemished record, Mr. Agyepong could be forgiven for finding the situation a bit hard to understand. If we do not have a budget, the government shuts down, he said. New York, with a population of 18 million people, has a budget of more than $100 billion. Ghana, with a population of 20 million people, has a budget of just $1.6 billion. Mr. Agyepong said that the hardest thing to understand, in some ways, was just where all the money was going, particularly the funds dealing with domestic security. While West Africa in general is not a place where there are functioning governments, much less governments operating in a way the public can scrutinize, the delegation found New York's budget opaque. Here we have to ask a lot of questions, Mr. Agyepong said. You just really don't know how each allocation is spent. That is quite bleak. Nestled between Togo and Ivory Coast, Ghana is one of the few bright spots in a region torn by civil war and corrupt despots. A former British colony, the nation operates on a parliamentary system; in 2000, John Kufuor was elected president in elections that observers considered fair. In Albany, the same triumvirate has been in power for more than a decade: the governor, George E. Pataki; the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver; and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno. During that time they have consolidated their power to such a degree that little is done without their express permission. We don't have powers concentrated to such a degree at the highest level, Mr. Asaga said. We find this a little bit strange. We expected more debate, more opinions. The visit was arranged by the State University of New York and the United States Agency for International Development. The Ghanaians visited both chambers of the Legislature. Outside the Senate, an 1892 oil painting by William Bengough depicted a young Theodore Roosevelt before a group of elegantly dressed men in a swirl of activity conveying the vibrancy of big ideas being discussed. They were eating hamburgers and drinking canned soda, Mr. Asaga said of the modern-day lawmakers he saw. Members of the delegation, unfailingly polite, were no less surprised at the business being conducted. They would introduce some baseball team to the speaker, Mr. Asaga said. Someone introduced his son. Not sure whether this was time well spent in conducting the business of the state, Mr. Asaga said that back in Ghana such antics would have drawn condemnation. They would have said, What does this have to do with anything?' Mr. Agyepong, nodding but sensing a bit of diplomacy might be needed, said, Everybody has different ways. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
State sponsored terrorism vs. amorphous reality
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/opinion/09WRIG.html New York Times April 9, 2004 One Hearing, Two Worlds By ROBERT WRIGHT snip Even a quite vigilant administration would have needed some luck to catch wind of Al Qaeda's plans. Moreover, President Bush was hardly alone in the central confusion that kept him from being quite vigilant: the idea that rogue states are a bigger threat than terrorism per se, and indeed that terrorists can't do much damage without a state's help. More scandalous, as some have noted, is that the administration didn't change this view after 9/11, when terrorists based in places like Germany killed 3,000 people using weapons (in this case airliners) acquired in America. Hence the war in Iraq. The polar opposite of a preoccupation with state support of terrorism is the view that, in the modern world, intense hatred is self-organizing and self-empowering. Information technologies make it easy for hateful people to coalesce and execute attacks and those same technologies can also help spread the hatred. That's why opponents of the Iraq war so feared its effect on Muslim sentiment. If Ms. Rice didn't appreciate that fear before the war, she should now. The current insurgency seems to have spread from city to city in part by TV-abetted contagion. And insurgents are handing out DVD's with deftly edited videos featuring carnage caused by the war. But Ms. Rice is unfazed. Yesterday she said the decision to invade Iraq was one of several key choices President Bush made the only choices that can ensure the safety of our nation for decades to come. Meanwhile, down at the bottom of the screen: IRAQIS SAY AIRSTRIKE KILLED DOZENS GATHERED FOR PRAYERS. Do headlines like that make us safer? And as Ms. Rice lauded the president for putting states that help or tolerate terrorists on notice and recognizing that the war on terrorism cannot be fought on the defensive, the crawl read: DEFENSE SECY DONALD RUMSFELD WARNS OF POSSIBLE VIOLENCE AGAINST PILGRIMS IN IRAQI HOLY CITIES, PARTICULARLY NAJAF, IN DAYS AHEAD. Yesterday even Bob Kerrey, a committee member who stoutly favored the war in Iraq, said that it is now helping terrorist recruitment through televised images of largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation. He didn't pose the observation as a question, and Ms. Rice offered no comment. There is one rationale for the Iraq war that might appeal even to those who see raw hatred as the root problem: a prosperous democracy would serve as a model, creating a Muslim world marked by less frustration and resentment. Yesterday Ms. Rice cited this rationale, criticizing a pre-Bush American policy that looks the other way on the freedom deficit in the Middle East. Good point. But what of our current cozying up to an Uzbek regime that represses Muslim dissidents? This is a natural consequence of a state-based approach to fighting terrorism of viewing the world as a realpolitik chessboard across which we project military force so that all governments will either like us or fear us (regardless of how the masses feel). end excerpt Full at: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/09/opinion/09WRIG.html
AP: US hits mosque in Fallujah
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-040704iraq_wr,1,895904.story?coll=la-home-headlines Fallouja Mosque Hit by Rocket, 40 Said Killed From Associated Press 7:41 AM PDT, April 7, 2004 FALLOUJA, Iraq -- U.S. Marines in a fierce battle for this Sunni Muslim stronghold fired rockets that hit a mosque compound filled with people today, and witnesses said as many as 40 were killed. Shiite-inspired violence spread to nearly all of Iraq. The fighting in Fallouja and neighboring Ramadi, where commanders confirmed 12 Marines were killed late Tuesday, was part of an intensified uprising involving both Sunni and Shiites that now stretched from Kirkuk in the north to the far south. It was the heaviest fighting since Baghdad fell a year ago this week. An Associated Press reporter in Fallouja saw cars ferrying the dead and wounded from the Abdul-Aziz al-Samarrai mosque. Witnesses said a helicopter fired three missiles into the compound, destroying part of a wall surrounding the mosque but not damaging the main building. The strike came as worshippers had gathered for afternoon prayers, witnesses said. Temporary hospitals were set up in private homes to treat the wounded and prepare the dead for burial. Until the mosque attack, reports had at least 30 Americans and more than 150 Iraqis dead in fighting for the Sunni Triangle cities of Ramadi and Fallouja. American soldiers clashed with militiamen of fiery anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose forces have been responsible for much of the violence other than in Ramadi and Fallouja. A U.S. helicopter was forced down after being hit by small arms fire in Baqouba, 30 miles north of Baghdad. Scores of Iraqis also have been wounded, as mosques called for a holy war against Americans and women carried guns in the streets of Fallouja. U.S. Marines have vowed to pacify the violent towns of Ramadi and Fallouja that had been a center of the guerrilla insurgency seeking to oust the U.S.-led occupation force. The 12 Marines were killed Tuesday in Ramadi, where Maj. Gen. James Mattis, 1st Marine Division commander, said his forces still were fighting insurgents that included Syrian mercenaries along a one-mile front. Sixteen children and eight women were reported killed when warplanes struck four houses late Tuesday, said Hatem Samir, a Fallouja Hospital official. A U.S. OH-58 Kiowa helicopter was hit by small arms fire and forced down in Baqouba, 30 miles north of Baghdad, the military said, as American soldiers fought militiamen of fiery anti-U.S. Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose forces have been responsible for much of the violence other than in Ramadi and Fallouja. No one was hurt aboard the chopper, and the military planned to transport it to a nearby base by truck, a U.S. official in Baghdad said on condition of anonymity. Ukrainian-led forces and al-Sadr's al-Mahdi Army clashed in the city of Kut, southeast of Baghdad, overnight, and at least 12 Iraqis were reported killed and 20 wounded, hospital officials said. Witnesses reported the gunmen killed a British civilian working for a foreign security company. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said its troops were forced to evacuate Kut early today after al-Sadr forces hit the position with mortar fire during the night. There were no Ukrainian casualties, but several dozen militants were killed, said Defense Ministry spokesman Lt. Col. Andriy Lysenko. In a significant expansion of the fighting, Iraqis protesting in solidarity with Fallouja residents clashed with U.S. troops in the northern town of Hawijah, near Kirkuk. Eight Iraqis were killed, and 10 Iraqis and four Americans were wounded, police said. In Baghdad, a top American general said the United States would press the offensive. The coalition and Iraqi security forces will continue deliberate, precise and powerful offensive operations to destroy the al- Mahdi Army throughout Iraq, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's deputy head of operations, told reporters in Baghdad. He called for the surrender of al-Sadr, who is named in an arrest warrant for involvement in the murder of a rival Shiite cleric almost a year ago. If he wants to calm the situation ... he can turn himself in to a local Iraqi police station and he can face justice, Kimmitt said. Despite the call, there was no sign al-Sadr's forces had eased their attacks: Rest at: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-040704iraq_wr,1,895904.story?coll=la-home-headlines
LAT: Handover lite
['The June 30 thing is mostly symbolic,' said Joseph S. Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant defense secretary in the Clinton administration. 'What you have on June 30 essentially is a transformation of the CPA into an embassy. But it's mostly in name.'] [A huge new U.S. Embassy will take the place of the current Coalition Provisional Authority, and the largest CIA station in the world will be in Baghdad.] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-fg-deadline7apr07,1,4645308.story?coll=la-home-headlines April 7, 2004 Los Angeles Times U.S. Firm on Iraq Handoff Sovereignty will be returned June 30, officials insist. But the coalition's control over key matters may leave both sides dissatisfied. By Paul Richter and Sonni Efron WASHINGTON -- One of the few things untouched by the new violence spreading across Iraq is the ringing U.S. insistence that no amount of instability will derail American plans to hand sovereignty back to Iraqis on June 30. But when the U.S. does make the transfer, formally ending the occupation, the new and still undefined Iraqi government will receive only very limited authority -- a sort of Sovereignty Lite that may not satisfy either Iraqis or Americans. Current administration plans call for the U.S. military to remain in Iraq at occupation strength. Under Iraq's transitional administrative law, the United States and its allies also will in effect keep control over the partially organized Iraqi army, as well as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, which has been fighting insurgents. The coalition is also expected to retain influence over the police force it is helping train. Control of billions of dollars in reconstruction aid will give the Americans additional leverage with the interim government. If the United Nations agrees to return to Iraq to help organize the country, the U.S. is likely to wield important influence through the world body as well. A huge new U.S. Embassy will take the place of the current Coalition Provisional Authority, and the largest CIA station in the world will be in Baghdad. The June 30 thing is mostly symbolic, said Joseph S. Nye, dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant defense secretary in the Clinton administration. What you have on June 30 essentially is a transformation of the CPA into an embassy. But it's mostly in name. Despite mounting questions about whether the deadline can or should be met, Bush administration officials have repeated their commitment to June 30. Denying that the date is merely symbolic, they are eager to convince Americans and Iraqis that they intend to make good on their promise to step back. We will pass sovereignty on June 30, President Bush said again Tuesday, in an appearance in Arkansas. We will stay the course in Iraq. Yet U.S. officials also stress that America will retain a guiding hand in Iraq, and they have sought to assuage concerns that the hand-over will jeopardize the costly, often painful U.S. effort to build a democracy there. That was the message administration officials tried to convey last month in describing how the new U.S. Embassy will supplant the CPA. The embassy is likely to have several thousand employees, by some estimates, including technical advisors and specialists from a range of U.S. agencies. The good old USA will still be there, a senior administration official told reporters. We'll be encouraging, supporting, persuading, and the Iraqis will get things done because they have to?. We will be there to help them stand up, to get over the rough spots. Still unanswered is the question of what form of Iraqi government will be in place July 1. U.N. envoy Lakhdar Brahimi is in Iraq holding discussions on forming an interim government that can run the country until elections next year. Although the recent burst of violence has complicated his task, U.S. officials insist that it won't delay the return of sovereignty. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that arguments about moving the transfer date were based on a misunderstanding, because U.S. authorities will have as much control over Iraqi security issues after the hand-over as they do now. The [June 30] deadline applies to political governance of the country. It doesn't apply to the security responsibility?. And I think some people have misunderstood that, he said. Until March, U.S. officials were preparing to sign a status of forces agreement with Iraq that would have set limits on how American military force could be used in the country after June 30. Last month, however, officials decided to forgo such an agreement and continue to rely on U.N. Security Council resolutions for authorization, which will give the forces broader latitude to conduct operations, analysts say. On some issues, the Iraqi government will make its own decisions -- as it increasingly has been doing. Iraqi officials recently supported OPEC's move to cut oil production,
FT: Halliburton is the tip of the iceberg
[There's nothing new about boondoggles in military procurement. But there's a systematic reason why it's 20 times worse now than it's ever been before: measured by personnel, the amount of work that is outsourced is 10 times higher than it was at the time of the first Gulf war (according to Frida Berrigan's Feb 26th interview on Doug's show, http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html). And during the same time, the military audit departments have been cut in half (and budgeting and accounting -- which writes the specs -- by two-thirds). Since everything in Iraq is a cost-plus contract, the initial bids have no binding force, and auditors are the only thing keeping people even minimally honest. And as Henry Bunting, late of Halliburton, famously put it, in 4 months on the job, he never saw an auditor in Iraq.] Financial Times; Mar 30, 2004 Focus on Halliburton obscures deeper problems By Joshua Chaffin Halliburton, the Houston-based oilfield services company, has served as an inviting target for critics of the frustrating effort to rebuild postwar Iraq. That seems logical given that Halliburton boasts $18bn in Iraq contracts -- the biggest haul of any company -- and a former chief executive, Dick Cheney, who now sits in the White House as vice-president. But the obsession with Halliburton might be obscuring a larger problem with the US-led rebuilding effort: lack of government oversight. As Congress and Pentagon investigators delve into the often opaque contracting process, they are revealing a scarcity of auditors supervising the private companies retained to carry out vast projects such as restoring Iraq's oil sector or rehabilitating its schools. The latest indication comes in a report last week from the Pentagon's inspector-general, which found there was little or no government surveillance on 13 of 24 rebuilding contracts awarded at the outset of the war and that contacting officers failed to support price estimates on nearly all those assignments. The inspector-general's report followed a draft of a General Accounting Office review, which reached similar conclusions. It noted, for example, that a single Halliburton contract extension worth $587m was renewed in 10 minutes -- with just six pages of documentation. Both of these buttress the testimony of Henry Bunting, a former Halliburton procurement officer, who told a Democratic party committee in February that he did not encounter a single auditor in four months working for the company in Kuwait. During that time, according to Mr Bunting, Halliburton employees spent recklessly on items from car rentals to gym towels -- all of which was ultimately paid for by the US government. Halliburton is not the only company in Iraq that has fallen foul of the Pentagon. Dov Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, told Congress on March 11 that Fluor Federal Systems, Perini Corporation and the Washington International Group also had cost issues. This is clearly pervasive in Iraq, said Steve Schooner, a federal contracting expert at the George Washington University school of law. Everybody over there has got the same problems. The Iraq contracts require rigorous auditing, according to procurement experts, because they were often hastily drawn, alloting hundreds of millions of dollars to prime contractors to tackle dozens of fluid projects. The cost-plus nature of the contracts also calls for high vigilance. Under the agreements, companies are guaranteed a set profit on top of their costs. Few contractors would be willing to promise a set price for speculative work they will be performing in a war zone, say cost-plus advocates. But the trade-off is that such arrangements mean companies have little incentive to rein in spending. The Pentagon has acknowledged that its normal contracting procedures were strained by the rush to war. The criminal investigation into fuel imports and other Iraq contracts is evidence, they claim, that their auditors are now on the case. Mr Zakheim told Congress that the Defence Contract Audit Agency's Iraq branch office would grow from 25 to 31 by the end of May. There may also be plans to expand the work in Iraq of a related agency, the Defence Contract Management Agency. But critics such as Mr Schooner believe that the problem has deeper roots. Since the 1990s -- when both parties promised to shrink the federal government -- the Pentagon has pushed to outsource tasks that do not involve direct combat. However, at the same time that it has entrusted ever greater amounts of work to private companies such as Halliburton, it has also reduced the trained personnel to oversee them. From 1990 to 1999, for example, the defence department's accounting and budget personnel fell from 17,504 to 6,432. During the same time, the ranks of the defence contract audit agency, the Pentagon's auditing branch, fell from 7,030 to 3,958. When they were down-sizing the government, they whacked the acquisition workforce even harder, Mr
That was then: different priorities
Copyright 2001 Associated Press All Rights Reserved Associated Press Online January 17, 2001; Wednesday LENGTH: 531 words HEADLINE: Clinton Adviser Warns of Bin Laden BYLINE: EUN-KYUNG KIM DATELINE: WASHINGTON BODY: Incoming National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Wednesday that President-elect Bush will press allied leaders to enforce economic sanctions against Saddam Hussein because the Iraqi leader remains a ''tremendous threat.'' ''There has to be continuous pressure brought on him to live up to the obligations that he undertook at the end of the Gulf War,'' Rice said. Economic sanctions against Saddam have ''eroded considerably'' and must be strengthened because he remains a threat to neighboring countries with his arsenal of nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, she said. ''He signed on to certain obligations under U.N. resolutions in 1991 and he needs to be held to them,'' Rice said. ''This is a major diplomatic effort, I'd be the first to admit, but I think we're going to have to take it on because no one wants to see Saddam Hussein escape his box.'' Rice spoke at a conference held by the U.S. Institute of Peace titled, ''Passing the Baton: Challenges of Statecraft for the New Administration.'' Sandy Berger, who holds the job Rice will assume on Saturday, addressed the meeting earlier in the day and urged Rice to advance the Clinton administration's efforts to disable the terrorism network led by Osama bin Laden. ''America is in a deadly struggle with a new breed of anti-Western jihadists,'' he said, referring to the Islamic word for ''holy war.'' Bin Laden, a Saudi-born millionaire suspected of using Afghanistan as a base for international terrorist operations, is believed to be directing a terrorism network that spans dozens of countries and is ''deeply committed to injuring and destroying the United States and our allies,'' Berger said. ''This is one of the most serious threats the next administration will face.'' Bin Laden has been linked to the suicide bombing that killed 17 American sailors on board the destroyer USS Cole during a refueling stop in Yemen last year. He also is wanted for the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. The United States fired dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles on eastern Afghanistan days after the bombings in retaliation. Berger said the Clinton administration has spent the last few years ''systematically going after'' bin Laden's terrorist web, breaking up cells and making arrests. ''I believe the next administration will need to build on what we've done to take a systematic, sustained, long-term effort to render this international network a far lesser threat to the United States,'' he said. ''More people have been killed by bin Laden and his network more Americans than all of the wars since Vietnam.'' Berger noted China's entry into the World Trade Organization, the downfall of ousted Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and Clinton's visit to India and Vietnam as some of last year's highlights. Besides the USS Cole attack, he included fighting in the Middle East and the inability to negotiate a peace agreement among the year's ''disappointments and tragedies.'' Berger has not disclosed many details about what he plans to do after leaving office Saturday, other than to take some time off and write.
Chalabi's road to the Prime Ministership in June?
[So even Arnaud de Borchgrave knows the cold war is over?] URL: http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=20040329-094918-2616r Commentary: Chalabi's road to victory By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE UPI Editor at Large Published 3/29/2004 12:24 PM WASHINGTON, March 29 (UPI) -- With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi pro-consul baton for beachwear and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well positioned to become prime minister. Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will be taking orders from the prime minister. Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons -- several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus. Coupled with his position as head of the de-Baathification commission, Chalabi, barely a year since he returned to his homeland after 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne. He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction. One company executive who asked that both his and the company's name be withheld said, The commission was steep even by Middle Eastern standards. Chalabi is still on the Defense Intelligence Agency's budget for a secret stipend of $340,000 a month. The $40 million the INC has received since 1994 from the U.S. government also covered the expenses of Iraqi military defectors' stories about weapons of mass destruction and the Iraqi regime's links with al-Qaida, which provided President Bush with a casus belli for the war on Iraq. When Chalabi established the Petra Bank in Amman, Jordan, in the 1980s, he favored small loans to military officers, non-commissioned officers, royal guards and intelligence officers. He developed a close rapport with then Crown Price Hassan who borrowed a total of $20 million. After Petra went belly up with a loss of $300 million at the end of the decade, Chalabi escaped to Syria in a car supplied by Hassan -- minutes ahead of the officers who had come to arrest him for embezzling his own bank. The Petra fiasco debacle left him sufficient funds to launch INC a few days later. Today, the MIT-trained mathematician says he has the documents that will prove he was framed by two Husseins -- Saddam and the late king of Jordan -- who wanted to put an end to his anti-Iraqi activities. Jordan used to get most of its oil needs from Iraq free or heavily discounted, which explains why King Hussein declined to join the anti-Iraq coalition in the first Gulf War. Sentenced in Jordan, in absentia, to 22 years hard labor for massive bank fraud, Chalabi hints he also has incriminating evidence of a close subsidiary relationship between Jordan's King Abdullah and Saddam's depraved, sadistic elder son, Uday, killed last year in a shootout with U.S. troops. Potentially embarrassing for prominent U.S. citizens, Chalabi's aides hint his treasure trove of Mukhabarat documents includes names of American agents of influence on Saddam's payroll, as well as a number of Qatar-based al-Jazeera TV news reporters who were working for Iraqi intelligence. The final selection for prime minister will need the assent of the president and his two deputies -- representing the country's three principal ethnic and religious groupings. Standard-bearer for Iraq's 60 percent Shiite majority and free Iraq's first president will be Abdulaziz Hakim. He is the brother of Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir al-Hakim, killed last year with 90 worshippers when a car bomb rocked the country's holiest Shiite shrine in Najaf. With an Islamic green light from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Hakim will almost certainly opt for fellow Shiite Chalabi as prime minister. Slated for one of the two vice presidential slots is Adnan Pachachi, a Sunni octogenarian with a secular liberal outlook. He served as foreign minister and ambassador to the United Nations before the Baathists seized power in a military coup in 1968. Pachachi's nod may also go to Chalabi. For the third leg of the troika, rival Kurdish parties have agreed to unite behind Jalal Talabani, chief of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. His vote, now believed to be favorable, would make it three out of three for Chalabi. Referring to Chalabi, a former
NYT: On the Hunt for Hearts and Minds
[The headline and introduction to this are completely misleading -- they make it sound like this is an approach that has promise: It is not clear whether they had won, or lost, more hearts and minds. But the day by day account that follows seems to me to leave no doubt. This seems like a trenchantly observed account of classic haplessness: alienating the people, stressing the troops, accomplishing nothing and fooling no one.] http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/international/asia/30ARMY.html The New York Times March 30, 2004 G.I.'s in Afghanistan on Hunt, but Now for Hearts and Minds By DAVID ROHDE D WAMANDA, Afghanistan Standing in a bleak, dust-covered village 15 miles from Pakistan, Lt. Reid Finn, a 24-year-old Louisiana native known as Huck, supervised as his men unloaded a half dozen wooden boxes with American flags on them. Wearing helmet and flak jacket and toting an M-4 assault rifle, the 6-foot-3, 200-pound lieutenant and former West Point football star represented his family's third generation at war. But on this afternoon, his mission was not combat. It was the distribution of blankets, shirts and sewing kits to destitute Afghan villagers. For the previous hour, American Army medics had doled out free antibiotics, asthma medication and antacids. Lieutenant Finn sipped tea with Muhammad Sani, a wizened village elder, and offered to pay for a new school or well. The more they help us find the bad guys, Lieutenant Finn explained, the more good stuff they get. As the effort to find Osama bin Laden and uproot the Taliban intensifies, the United States military is shifting tactics. A mission once limited to sweeps, raids and searches has in recent months yielded to an exercise in nation building. The hope is that a better relationship with local residents and a stronger Afghan state will produce better intelligence and a speedier American departure. But the tension between building schools one day and rounding up suspects at gunpoint the next makes the prospects for success far from clear. In a new American tactic, Lieutenant Finn's platoon and two other 50-soldier platoons are expected to patrol and get to know every detail of a 15-to-25-mile chunk of Afghan territory that runs along the border. The area holds more than 300 villages, three major ethnic Pashtun tribes, countless subtribes and a smuggling route used by the Taliban and Al Qaeda to slip from Pakistan into Afghanistan. The troops' mission is to win the trust of Afghans who have seen the Soviets, then the mujahedeen and the Taliban sweep through this area promising a better life. Now it is the turn of the Pentagon and a budget of $40 million earmarked for projects like village schools and wells. American soldiers are offering major reconstruction and relief aid in an area parched for it. Both desperation and promise appeared abundant in the isolated border areas during a three-day patrol by the company that Lieutenant Finn's platoon is part of. In one village, a brawl broke out over the free American blankets and sewing kits, with one man hitting another with a shovel. In another, a teacher announced that after offering only religious lessons under the Taliban, his school now taught 400 students subjects like chemistry, physics and English. Another man said he had re-enrolled in school to become the village's first doctor. At the age of 33, he is an eighth grader. The Americans hope their new approach will pry information about militants from reluctant Afghans. The battle, said Capt. Jason Condrey, Lieutenant Finn's company commander, centers on winning the allegiance of the population, which he called Al Qaeda's center of gravity. But the same American troops still use the standard tactics of military power to achieve their aims: intimidation, overwhelming force, hands tied behind backs and faces in the dirt. Over the course of the three-day patrol, it was not clear whether they had won, or lost, more hearts and minds. Day 1: Arrests Lieutenant Finn's platoon and three others the Comanche Company of the First Battalion of the Anchorage-based 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment had gathered at 2:40 a.m. to set out on their three-day field mission. Under a blanket of silence and bright stars, the Americans prepared to venture from a familiar enclave into a confusing Afghan mosaic. On base, the Americans watch N.B.A. games live via satellite in a morale hall, and the latest episodes of The Shield, C.S.I. and The Sopranos on pirated DVD's in their tents. On Fridays, they have surf and turf steaks, crab legs and corn on the cob in the new chow hall operated by the Halliburton Corporation. Out in the field, they wear 40 pounds of armor and equipment in sweltering heat. Their skin, clothes and equipment are
Good thing they're not splitting hairs
In today's Times one of Rice's minions, Franklin Miller, disputes Clarke's account of 9/11: quote In Mr. Clarke's account, in a chapter called Evacuate the White House, he heads into the Situation Room at the first word of attack and begins issuing orders to close embassies and put military bases on a higher level of alert -- not the kind of operational details usually handled by the National Security Council staff. He describes how Mr. Miller came into the room, squeezed Mr. Clarke's bicep, and said, Guess I'm working for you today. What can I do? I wouldn't say that, Mr. Miller said Monday. I might say, 'How can I help.' quote Ah, well -- that changes everything. The whole article is like that: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/politics/30CLAR.html They really got nothin'. Michael
The power of the purse?
[From the Slate newsletter, Today's Papers] excerpt USA Today leads with a poll that has President Bush ahead of Senator Kerry 49 percent to 45 percent with Ralph Nader at 4 percent. The poll claims that in 17 battleground states where Bush has launched an ad barrage, Kerry went from a 28 point lead to 6 points behind. end excerpt
Diversion of resources, Part II
First the military diverted specialized forces from Afghanistan to Iraq: URL: http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20040329/6056156s.htm And now the same process is being carried out by the free market: URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/30/politics/30MILI.html Michael
A.Word.A.Day--bushwa
[Here's a word ripe for resurrection. And what a doubly apt etymology.] bushwa (BUSH-wa) noun, also bushwah Nonsense; bull. [Of uncertain origin. Perhaps a mispronunciation of bourgeois.] The tone of his (Antonin Scalia's) remarks suggested that the court had never before moved social policy along by taking into account changing social mores. Which is, alas, bushwa. Jon Carroll; His Kingdom For Two More Votes; San Francisco Chronicle; Jun 25, 2002. Permalink: http://wordsmith.org/words/bushwa.html Pronunciation: http://wordsmith.org/words/bushwa.wav http://wordsmith.org/words/bushwa.ram Send your comments to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subject: line as subscribe Name or unsubscribe. Archives, FAQ, gift subscription form, bulletin board, and more at http://wordsmith.org/awad/
FT: Spanish government lied from the very beginning
[The FT also ran a longer and more detailed article on the same day, from which I just want to cull the following paragraph, which emphasizes that they suspected it was ETA from literally the very first moment they arrived on the scene:] [After 30 years in the front line of the battel against Eta, Spanish police are able to distinguish different kinds of bombs by the stench they leave behind. The acrid pall that hung over Atocha pointed to plastic explosives rather than the stale dynamite Eta usually steals from silos in France.] [And yet, as the article makes clear, the Aznar govt. had the gall to claim repeatedly that it was precisely the type of explosive that made them so sure it was ETA] EUROPE ASIA-PACIFIC: Aznar government 'ignored evidence' By Leslie Crawford in Madrid and George Parker in Brussels Financial Times; Mar 26, 2004 The Spanish government tried hard to persuade voters that the Madrid bombs were the work of Basque separatists long after evidence emerged that the attacks were far more likely to have been carried out by Islamist terrorists. Spanish police and firemen involved in the rescue told the Financial Times they knew immediately that the explosives used on the commuter trains were not the kind usually deployed by Eta, the violent separatists, because of the force of the explosion, the damage done and the smell of the explosives. If this was Eta, it was working in a very different way, one fire brigade officer said. José María Aznar's government, with an election three days later, cited the type of explosives used as its reason for blaming Eta when it briefed its European allies and the United Nations on March 11, the day of the bombings. Ana Palacio, foreign minister, instructed Spain's ambassadors at 5.28pm that day to use every occasion to confirm the authorship of Eta. That afternoon, Eta denied it was behind the attacks, which killed 190 people and injured 1,400, and an Islamic brigade claiming to be part of al-Qaeda said in the evening that it was responsible. That afternoon, Spanish police found a stolen van containing detonators, traces of explosives and a tape of Koranic verses. Even after this, the government insisted Eta was the prime suspect. Mr Aznar personally called newspaper editors that night to insist on Eta's responsibility. By early Friday [March 12], the analysis provided by Angel Acebes [interior minister] did not correspond to the facts, says José Manuel Sánchez, leader of the Sindicato Unificado de Policía, the main police trade union. German police said Spain might have put European security at risk by insisting the attack was the work of home grown terrorists rather than an external threat. The German government has been particularly critical of the delay and lack of clarity provided by Spain after the attacks. Mr Aznar, whose chosen successor lost the election, strongly denies his government misled voters or withheld information. He says it opened a new line of investigation into Islamic terrorism as soon the stolen van was found. Police arrested three Moroccans and two Indians two days after the bombings on suspicion of having aided the attacks. Several Moroccans arrested in Spain on Wednesday were based near Frankfurt, Germany, according to a report yesterday on German broadcaster Ntv. Five more suspects were arrested yesterday, bringing the number in custody to 18. Last night Mr Aznar, who will hand over to socialist leader José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero next month, joined European leaders for a summit in Brussels to map out the EU's response to the terrorist threat. They announced the appointment of Gijs de Vries, a prominent Dutch politician, as Europe's first counter-terrorism chief, tasked with co-ordinating the different security measures taken by member states. The fear that terrorists might seek to influence elections elsewhere was raised last night by Robert Mueller, director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the wake of what happened in Madrid we have to be concerned about the possibility of terrorists attempting to influence elections in the United States by committing a terrorist act, he told the Associated Press.
Diversion of resources
Headline on one of the front page articles in today's FT: Afghanistan in danger of reverting to terror breeding ground, warns UN and the pullout quote is: The report notes Iraq receives '10 times as much development assistance with [a similar] population.' Michael
Under every lie - Chalabi!
[The fun part is 1/3 of the way down: even David Kay is unloading on the Bushits now] The Independent (UK) 29 March 2004 Iraqi defector behind America's WMD claims exposed as 'out-and-out fabricator' By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles The case for war against Iraq was dealt another embarrassing blow yesterday due to claims by an American newspaper that the first-hand intelligence source on Saddam Hussein's alleged mobile bioweapons labs was a politically motivated Iraqi defector now dismissed as an out-and-out fabricator. The mobile labs, since exposed by weapons inspectors as hydrogen production facilities at best and phantoms at worst, were one of the centrepieces of the US Secretary of State Colin Powell's prewar address to the United Nations. As recently as January, Vice President Dick Cheney maintained that discovery of the labs would provide conclusive proof that Iraq possessed WMD. A detailed investigation in the Los Angeles Timesrevealed that the source claiming to have seen mobile bioweapons labs was the brother of one of the senior aides to Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, who recently boasted how the erroneous information provided by his group achieved his long-cherished goal of toppling Saddam. The source, given the unintentionally appropriate code name Curveball, was an asset of German intelligence and was never directly interviewed by US officials. The Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency do not even know exactly who he is, the LA Times reported. David Kay, the postwar weapons inspector whose declaration in January that Iraq had no WMD initiated a series of hammer-blows to the credibility of the Bush administration and the British government, described Mr Powell's use of Curveball's information before the UN as disingenuous. He told the LA Times: If Powell had said to the Security Council: 'It's one source, we never actually talked to him, and we don't know his name', I think people would have laughed us out of court. Mr Powell told the world on 5 February last year the administration had firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails capable of producing enough anthrax or botulinum toxin to kill thousands upon thousands of people. He showed highly detailed and extremely accurate diagrams of how the trucks were configured. Revealingly, he could only produce artist renditions, not actual blueprints or photographs. Since the Powell speech, Curveball's reliability has been destroyed. The German foreign intelligence service, the BND, later warned the CIA that it had various problems with the source. Curveball also lied about his academic credentials and omitted to tell his interlocutors he had been fired as a chemical engineer for the Iraqi army and jailed for embezzlement before fleeing Iraq in the late 1990s. The possible existence of mobile labs was touted as a theory by UN weapons inspectors frustrated in 1992 at their failure to find evidence of chemical and biological weapons programmes. (Saddam's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, later defected and said they had been destroyed in 1991.) The UN inspectors approached Mr Chalabi for help in establishing the existence of the mobile labs in late 1997. Scott Ritter, one of the inspectors, told the LA Times: We got hand-drawn maps, handwritten statements and other stuff. It looked good. But nothing panned out. Most of it just regurgitated what we'd given them. And the data that was new never checked out. Evidence, much of it tentative, trickled in throughout the 1990s that Saddam may have built mobile labs to conceal his weapons programmes. In 1994 Israeli military intelligence indicated that poisons were being made in red and white ice cream trucks and in green moving vans labelled Sajida Transport after Saddam's wife. UN inspectors later concluded this information was bogus. The role of Israeli intelligence in the case for war was the subject of a parliamentary report released in Jerusalem yesterday. An eight-month inquiry resisted the notion that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction did not exist, but lambasted the intelligence agencies for exaggerating Iraqi capabilities, particularly before the war. Yuval Steinitz, the parliamentarian who led the inquiry, said: Why didn't we succeed in laying down a broad and deep framework so we could rely on reports and not speculation? That is the central question. Much the same has been said in the US by veteran intelligence professionals appalled by their government's manipulation of information and Mr Powell's UN speech. Mr Powell is likely to come under the closest scrutiny because he was the member of the Bush administration most trusted internationally and because his presentation seemed so convincing. In
Newsweek: Did Chalabi Break US laws?
[By using State Department and Pentagon money to propagandize the US domestic audience?] April 5th Issue Newsweek Chalabi: A Questionable Use of U.S. Funding Under investigation: Congress is examining whether Ahmad Chalabi inappropriately used U.S. taxpayer dollars to prod America towards war in Iraq By Mark Hosenball and Michael Hirsh April 5 issue - Ahmad Chalabi has never paid much attention to rules. As an international financier, he was convicted in absentia in 1992 of embezzling millions from his own bank in Jordan. In the mid-'90s, the CIA tried to make him its point man in a plan to oust Saddam Hussein, but found he was not controllable, leading to a bitter divorce. His primary focus was to drag us into a war that [Bill] Clinton didn't want to fight, says Whitley Bruner, the CIA agent who first contacted Chalabi in London in 1991. He couldn't be trusted. Most recently, Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress have been accused of passing on hyped or fabricated reports from defectors on WMD that Saddam didn't have--but which provided the casus belli. Like the CIA, the State Department eventually cut off dealings with Chalabi. Today Chalabi is in Baghdad and wielding considerable influence as a prominent member of the Iraqi Governing Council. He's overseeing de-Baathification, a purge of alleged Saddam loyalists throughout the country. He apparently has no regrets that his WMD warnings have turned out to be inaccurate. What matters, Chalabi suggested recently, is that he finally got the regime change he had long sought. As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful, he told a British newspaper. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. Some in Congress disagree. NEWSWEEK has learned that the General Accounting Office, Congress's investigative arm, is opening a probe into the INC's use of U.S. government money the group received in 2001 and 2002. The issue under scrutiny is not whether Chalabi prodded America into a war on false pretenses; it is whether he used U.S. taxpayer dollars and broke U.S. laws or regulations to do so. Did Chalabi and the INC violate the terms of their funding by using U.S. money to sell the public on its anti-Saddam campaign and to lobby Congress? The investigation could easily become a political football. The GAO inquiry was requested by Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry (who when not on the stump is still a working senator) and another prominent critic of the Iraq war, Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee. A March 3 letter from the senators says the INC's use of U.S. money is troubling. Under a written agreement examined by NEWSWEEK, the INC had to abide by certain conditions for use of State Department funds. The group was permitted to use the money to implement a public information campaign to communicate with Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq and also to promulgate its message to the international community at large. But the grant terms would strictly exclude activities associated with, or that could appear to be associated with, attempting to influence the policies of the United States Government or Congress or propagandizing the American people. Even so, in 2002 the INC--in an apparent effort to get Congress to continue its funding--submitted to the Senate Appropriations Committee a list of 108 news stories published between October 2001 and May 2002. The INC's document said these stories contained ICP product from an INC Information Collection Program financed by State. The stories included allegations about Saddam's WMD programs and links to terrorism, as well as INC material supporting innuendo that linked Saddam to the 9/11 attacks. Late last year Chalabi's Washington representative, Francis Brooke, told NEWSWEEK that State Department money had been used to finance the expenses of INC defectors who were sources for some of the listed news stories. Brooke said there were no restrictions on the use of U.S. government funds to make such defectors available to the news media. One journalist who dealt with the INC on a defector story told NEWSWEEK that INC contacts indicated some of the defector's expenses were paid with U.S. government funds. Last week another Chalabi spokesman said, The INC paid some living and travel expenses of defectors with USG funds. None of these expenses was related to meeting journalists. He also said the group did not violate any U.S. laws. In 2001, State Department auditors found that the defector program had rung up more than $465,000 in costs that were inadequately or entirely undocumented. A subsequent audit found that the INC had improved its accounting methods. Even so, the State
The ink that says I care
[Summary of an article in today's WP from Slate's Today's Papers newsletter:] quote Each day, activists fan out to collect signatures for a petition rejecting the interim constitution, which Sistani opposes. Thousands of those signatures are scanned in nightly and sent by CD to headquarters in Najaf. Of course, Iraqi politics are still a little more lurid than the U.S.'s. According to one Shiite activist, a third of the people wanted to sign with pens dipped in their own blood; Sistani, he said, has refused people doing this. He said it's disgusting, and he doesn't accept it. unquote Full WP article: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31905-2004Mar28.html
The lighter side of Hans Blix
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/magazine/28QUESTIONS.html
Re: PK on HMOs
[A pretty good column...] And one more sizeable step in his suprisingly swift evolution away from mainstream economic thinking and towards common sense: There's a lesson in this experience. Sometimes there's no magic in the free market - in fact, it can be a hindrance. Health insurance is one place where government agencies consistently do a better job than private companies. I'll have more to say about this when I write about the general issue of health care reform (soon, I promise!). Michael
NYT: Delivery Delays Hurt U.S. Effort to Equip Iraqis
[This is great. Read this mundane article in the normal fashion. And then laugh out loud when you come to the buried -- and disavowed -- lede. These people at the Times have no shame.] The New York Times In America March 22, 2004 Delivery Delays Hurt U.S. Effort to Equip Iraqis By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT B AGHDAD, Iraq, March 21 Senior American commanders in Iraq are publicly complaining that delays in delivering radios, body armor and other equipment have hobbled their ability to build an effective Iraqi security force that can ultimately replace United States troops here. The lag in supplying the equipment, because of a contract dispute, may even have contributed to a loss of lives among Iraqi recruits, commanders say. A spokesman for the company that was awarded the original contract said much of the equipment had already been produced and was waiting to be shipped to Iraq. The frustration had been voiced privately up the chain of command by a number of officers, and broke into public debate in recent days. Training and equipping more than 200,000 Iraqi security forces has been one of the top stated priorities of the Bush administration. Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, praised the work of Iraqi security forces helping to secure his area of control in western Iraq, which includes the dangerous region around Falluja and the Syrian border. But he said the effort had faltered because of a lack of combat gear for the police, border units and the new Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. Not only are the security forces bravely leading the fight against terrorists, they are in some cases insisting on doing it alone, General Swannack said 11 days ago. They want to defeat these enemies of a new and free Iraq. If we had the equipment for these brave young men, we would be much farther along. He said that in his region of western Iraq, which includes a long stretch of the Syrian border, foreign fighters, their money and weapons were suspected of entering Iraq along smugglers' routes. In this area, he said, we are still short a significant amount of vehicles, radios and body armor to properly equip the new Iraqi force. Commanders in other parts of Iraq have also warned of serious problems. There are training, organizational and equipment shortfalls in the Iraqi security forces, said Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the new American commander in northern Iraq. There's no question about that. The American military also suffered from shortages of crucial equipment during the war and even into the current phase of stability operations. In particular, soldiers complained of an insufficient supply of the newest bulletproof vests and, when improvised explosives began taking lives, of armored Humvees. Their complaints have been echoed loudly by members of Congress. But the equipment for America's combat troops and that for Iraqi security services is obtained through separate contracting and procurement processes. The first batch of equipment for the Iraqis has been paid for and was to have been delivered under a $327 million contract to a small company, Nour USA Ltd., of Vienna, Va. But the Pentagon canceled that deal this month after protests by several competing companies led to a determination that Army procurement officers in Iraq botched the contract. Army officials found no fault with Nour. Sloppy contract language, staff turnover, incomplete paperwork and stressful combat conditions on the ground led to a badly flawed process, senior Army officials in Washington said. I've seen things go wrong before, but I've never seen anything like this, said a senior Army official with 28 years' experience in government contracting. We messed up. The Army is rushing to seek new bids for the contract, but officials said that could take two to three months. In the meantime, officials are looking to see if they can use other funds and piggyback on existing contracts for weapons and other equipment that federal agencies like the F.B.I. already have to speed the delivery of vital matériel to Iraq. Part of it is just the magnitude of how much was needed thousands of police cars, hundreds of thousands of uniforms, Maj. Gen. Buford C. Blount III, the deputy director of operations for the Army staff in Washington, said in an interview. It was just a lot harder to get stuff in than we anticipated. The $327 million contract was to supply several battalions of the new Iraqi security forces with rifles, uniforms, body armor and other equipment. The original contract, awarded in January, did not specify the number of troops to be supplied. Instead it identified specific amounts of equipment for instance, 200 trucks and 20,000 compasses. That contract was to be the first of
Nathan Newman on Withheld Medicare Details
[The $150 billion underestimate is only the beginning. The details are actually worse.] URL: http://www.nathannewman.org/log/archives/001593.shtml March 20, 2004 Withheld Medicare Details In a classic Friday information dump, the Bush administration allowed Richard Foster, the chief Medicare actuary, to release the data to Congress that he had previously been illegally told to withhold. And the details show why they didn't want it released: Instead of $14 billion in corporate welfare being paid to private health plans, the total will be $46 billion over ten years. 32 percent of Medicare beneficiaries will be pushed into private managed care plans by 2009. Traditional medicare will be systematically undermined through cutting payments to doctors-- payments to doctors under Medicare's fee schedule will decline each year from 2006 to 2012, while spending for inpatient hospital services and skilled nursing homes under the traditional government-run program will decline in 2006 and 2007. The story has the bottom line of the effects of the lies told by the Bush adminstration about the effects of the bill: if the estimates of higher costs had been known last year, they would have given ammunition to Democrats and other critics who said the bill was lavishing money on insurance companies at the expense of the traditional Medicare programs. Mr. Foster said he withheld the cost estimates and other information from Congress last year on instructions from Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program. Mr. Foster, who has been a government actuary for more than 30 years, said Mr. Scully had threatened to fire him if he gave the data to Congress. Forgot the usual petty scandals. I've said I thought the Plame Affair was pretty minor. The Memogate scandal on judges is slightly worse, but nasty partisan spying is still not on the scale of lies that fundamentally distort decisions over how we spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on our Medicare system. Someone should go to jail. Soon. A federal law stipulates that officials must not try to prevent federal employees from having oral or written communication or contact with any member of Congress on matters relating to the employees' duties. On Thursday, a group of 18 Democratic senators led by Frank R. Lautenberg of New Jersey asked the comptroller general to investigate whether Mr. Foster had been muzzled in violation of this law... An earlier Medicare law, adopted in 1997 at the behest of Republicans, explicitly protects the actuary's independence. And one problem for the Bush administration is that many conservatives who voted against the bill are as pissed as the Democrats that they were lied to about the costs of the bill. So hopefully someone will be going to jail for this lie, even if the lies about WMDs may never reach a prosecutor.
4th century religious wars in miniature
[Life imitates Onion dept.] http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3876471,00.html Thursday March 18, 2004 7:31 PM STATESBORO, Ga. (AP) - A couple was arrested after their argument over a theological point turned physical following a night at the movies to see ``The Passion of the Christ.'' The two left the theater debating whether God the Father in the Holy Trinity was human or symbolic, and the argument turned violent when they got home, Melissa Davidson said. ``It was the dumbest thing we've ever done,'' she said. Davidson, 34, and her husband, Sean Davidson, 33, were charged with simple battery on March 11 after the two called police on each other. Messages left with police Thursday were not immediately returned. According to a police report, Melissa Davidson suffered injuries on her left arm and face and Sean Davidson had a scissor stab on his hand and his shirt was ripped off. Sean Davidson also had punched a hole in the wall, according to the report. [And BTW, when she said the dumbest thing: the idea that God the Father is human is probably the only one Trinitarians have never taken.]
WP: The Fed's Brilliant Oversight of Banking
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64913-2004Mar16 Don't Expect Fed To Limit Banks' Bad Behavior By Steven Pearlstein Wednesday, March 17, 2004; Page E01 How many financial scandals does a banking company have to be involved in before the Federal Reserve will finally conclude it isn't up to the task of taking control of yet another big bank? We still don't know the answer to that question, given the Fed's boneheaded decision last week to approve Bank of America's purchase of FleetBoston, creating a behemoth with nearly $1 trillion in assets. In a single stroke, the Fed managed to reinforce its reputation as a patsy for the banking industry while undermining efforts of other regulators to get tough with corporate wrongdoers. Yes, this is the same Bank of America that agreed this week to pay $375 million, and reduce fees by $80 million, to settle civil charges that it defrauded mutual fund investors by helping a big hedge fund engage in illegal trading. It is the same Bank of America that last week agreed to pay a $10 million fine for withholding and destroying documents requested by the Securities and Exchange Commission. That's in connection with an ongoing investigation into whether B of A's securities unit engaged in illegal trading based on inside information about its upcoming analysts reports. It's the same Bank of America that helped Enron structure one of its infamous off-balance-sheet entities, then helped beat back an accounting reform that would have forced disclosure of such scams. The same Bank of America that was so proud of the one-stop service it provided to Adelphia Communications -- loans, securities underwriting, strategic advice and positive analyst reports -- that it actually detailed it in a case study it used with its new employees. The same Bank of America that helped dairy giant Parmalat place more than $1 billion in public and private debt, and now has three former employees under investigation by Italian authorities. Confronted with this embarrassing rap sheet, and a requirement that it consider the bank's compliance history and management competence, the Fed's opinion approving the FleetBoston purchase is a model of sophistry. Rather than focus on the past, the Fed's six governors lavish praise on Bank of America for cooperating with investigators and taking steps to make sure it doesn't happen again. They also reiterate their faith in the Fed's nifty new system for monitoring financial giants, which, as far as I can tell, consists of reading Eliot Spitzer's press releases. As is their wont, Fed officials declined to discuss their FleetBoston decision. But I certainly got a different take yesterday from another regulator who has spent months digging into Bank of America: They've been very cooperative and done a good job in dealing with this mess. But even now there's a striking absence of a coherent compliance culture. Given the fact that the Fed has disapproved only three of more than 350 bank mergers since 1996, the FleetBoston decision hardly comes as a surprise. The Fed reserves its regulatory zeal for cases like the 2002 proposal from Northern Star Financial, the 417th largest depository institution in Minnesota, when it apparently threatened the integrity of the entire U.S. financial system with its proposal to buy the much larger First Federal Savings, the state's 174th largest. But for big guys who have always looked to the Fed for political protection and regulatory coddling, the message from the FleetBoston decision is clear: Mergers are too important to let a few instances of corporate fraud stand in the way. All you have to do is launch an internal investigation, blame a few rogue employees, pay a fine that shaves a few pennies off quarterly earnings and promise not to let it happen again. Next up: J.P. Morgan Chase. Thanks to its leading role in Enron and other scandals, Morgan is already required to check in with its Fed probation officer every quarter. But look for the Fed to lift that inconvenient supervisory order just in time to give the green light for its purchase of Bank One later this year. Steven Pearlstein will host a Web discussion at 11 a.m. today at www.washingtonpost.com. He can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] © 2004 The Washington Post Company
Re: Will the oil run out ? Reflections from a layman
I didn't catch the earlier part of this thread, but what scale are we talking here? The world's largest oil producer is Russia. The largest average daily producer, but not the largest proven reserves and not the largest exporter. Michael
FT: US Jobs as Poor in Quality as in Quantity
Financial Times; Mar 10, 2004 Jobs data look as poor in quality as quantity By Christopher Swann in Washington Job-creation figures in the US may have struck many economists as dismal over the past few months. But even as job quantity dominates the political agenda, the quality of the few jobs being created has also caused concern. Of 290,000 private-sector jobs created since April 2003, most - 215,000 - have been temporary positions, according to last week's employment figures. Private-sector employment would have fallen last month without the creation of 32,000 temporary jobs in the professional and business services sector. About 4.3m Americans have also been forced to accept part-time positions because they have failed to find full-time work - 1m higher than the January 2000 number. The recent data show that US companies remain reluctant to commit themselves to hiring new permanent staff. Economists note wryly that US companies are happy to flirt but remain unwilling to walk to the altar. It is slightly depressing to think that even the poor job-creation figures we have had have been flattered by temporary positions, says Drew Matus, US economist at Lehman Brothers. A lot of what we have been getting is lower-quality jobs. The prevalence of such stop-gap job hiring casts doubt on President George W. Bush's ability to benefit from an economic feel-good factor ahead of November's presidential election. It also helps explain why wage growth is only just managing to keep pace with inflation, at about 2 per cent. Companies are becoming more aware of the attractions of temporary staff, says John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, an agency that helps find new jobs for dismissed workers. Not long ago companies were quite willing to have workers 'on the bench', so that they were available in case demand picked up, he says. Having overdone the hiring at the end of the 1990s, there is a greater appreciation of the need to keep workforce levels 'just in time'. Technology has made it easier for companies to recruit quickly when they urgently need to expand output, he says. Companies are trying to think of staff more like inventory, keeping things to a minimum. The appeal of temporary staff also stems from the soaring cost of the benefits enjoyed by permanent workers. In 2003 the cost of these benefits rose 6.3 per cent - most than twice the 2.9 per cent rise in cost of wage growth. Benefits now cost about a third of total cost of remuneration. This can often be enough to offset the disadvantages to temporary workers, who initially lack company-specific knowledge and are usually paid higher wages to offset their lack of work security. Some economists even suspect that Mr Bush's tax incentives for business investment, which allow for 50 per cent depreciation in the first year on most business equipment, may have temporarily helped tilt the balance in favour of spending on equipment instead of new permanent workers. This incentive is due to expire at the end of this year but may have contributed to the 15.1 per cent growth rate of business investment in the final quarter of 2003. On the margin this may help explain why companies have been keener on investment than permanent hires, said Nigel Gault, director of US research at Global Insight, the economic consultancy. But the most important benefit of temporary workers is that they can easily be dismissed if business conditions turn sour. There remains a sense of caution among executives, says Jan Hatzius, US economist at Goldman Sachs. They feel things are better but have seen enough false dawns that they are not yet totally convinced that things will stay better. Most economists continue to believe that as confidence in the recovery builds, and the opportunities to enhance efficiency become more scarce, companies will once again start to increase their permanent staffing levels. The lingering fear, however, is that the weak labour market itself could start to undermine the economic recovery, unless hiring picks up soon. Last month Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, told a congressional panel that US businesses continue to work off the stock of inefficiencies that had accumulated in the boom years.
Krugman on Greenspan
URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/02/opinion/02KRUG.html New York Times March 2, 2004 Maestro of Chutzpah By PAUL KRUGMAN T he traditional definition of chutzpah says it's when you murder your parents, then plead for clemency because you're an orphan. Alan Greenspan has chutzpah. Last week Mr. Greenspan warned of the dangers posed by budget deficits. But even though the main cause of deficits is plunging revenue the federal government's tax take is now at its lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950 he opposes any effort to restore recent revenue losses. Instead, he supports the Bush administration's plan to make its tax cuts permanent, and calls for cuts in Social Security benefits. Yet three years ago Mr. Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, warning that otherwise the federal government would run excessive surpluses. He assured Congress that those tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits. And last year he declined to stand in the way of another round of deficit-creating tax cuts. But wait it gets worse. You see, although the rest of the government is running huge deficits and never did run much of a surplus the Social Security system is currently taking in much more money than it spends. Thanks to those surpluses, the program is fully financed at least through 2042. The cost of securing the program's future for many decades after that would be modest a small fraction of the revenue that will be lost if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent. And the reason Social Security is in fairly good shape is that during the 1980's the Greenspan commission persuaded Congress to increase the payroll tax, which supports the program. The payroll tax is regressive: it falls much more heavily on middle- and lower-income families than it does on the rich. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, families near the middle of the income distribution pay almost twice as much in payroll taxes as in income taxes. Yet people were willing to accept a regressive tax increase to sustain Social Security. Now the joke's on them. Mr. Greenspan pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used that surplus to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people, but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to cut Social Security benefits. The point, of course, is that if anyone had tried to sell this package honestly Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so we can give big tax cuts to the rich! voters would have been outraged. So the class warriors of the right engaged in bait-and-switch. There are three lessons in this tale. First, starving the beast is no longer a hypothetical scenario it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending. Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to save Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point. Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve. The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position as an unelected official who wields immense power carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation. Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
FT: Protecting Sugar
[What's interesting here is the listing of precise numbers each special interest contributed to produce this result. I wonder if we'll see more of this in articles like this now that everyone can just look it up in Charles Lewis's book _The Selling of the President_. It makes very clear the economic rationality of campaign contributions, and the complete absurdity of talking about the rationality of the market in reference to a system in they determine policy.] [And of course the US is not unique in this. Every national economy is only half of a political economy, and every political system is manipulated like this or worse. The idea of a self-regulating market is as unreal as the idea of a bodiless mind. If only we had articles like this every day that made it this obvious.] http://search.ft.com/s03/search/article.html?id=040211001485 Financial Times; Feb 11, 2004; Front Page - First Section Bush acted to protect powerful sugar industry By Edward Alden in Washington President George W.Bush made the final decision to exclude sugar from the free trade agreement completed with Australia last weekend, according to administration and agricultural industry officials. The White House decision, which shores up the president's electoral prospects in key states and avoids a bruising election-year trade fight in Congress, has raised new questions about the administration's willingness to stand up to domestic lobbies that oppose freer trade. Mr Bush has already faced international criticism over his 2002 decision to protect another politically powerful industry, steel, that is influential in several electorally important states. The deal with Australia was the first bilateral trade pact in which the US insisted that a product be excluded entirely. The agreement, finalised by Mr Bush and John Howard, Australian prime minister, in a Saturday night phone call, has drawn sharp criticism from members of Congress with a long history of supporting freer trade. Charles Grassley, Republican chairman of the Senate finance committee, called the sugar exclusion a dangerous precedent. Cal Dooley, one of a handful of House Democrats who has staunchly supported the administration on trade, said: It is a disgrace that this industry, representing less than one-half per cent of all US farms, is exempted from this agreement. The sugar industry has political influence in the US far beyond its small size. It is heavily concentrated in Florida, the most closely fought state in the 2000 election, and can rally farmers in southern and midwestern states. The industry is also a large donor to Mr Bush's re-election effort. José 'Pepe' Fanjul, president of Florida Crystals, is one of 165 donors to have raised at least $200,000 for the 2004 campaign. Robert Coker of US Sugar is among the 251 donors who have raised at least $100,000. Sugar companies have made $34,500 in direct contributions to Mr Bush this election cycle, part of more than $900,000 in campaign contributions by the industry to both Republicans and Democrats up to November 2003. Ricardo Reyes, a spokesman for the office of the US Trade Representative, denied direct White House intervention, saying the USTR had long warned the Australians that sugar might be excluded. At most, this was an understanding that in order to get this thing passed [in Congress] we had to keep sugar off the table, he said. But Robert Zoellick, the US trade representative, made no public mention of the exclusion demand until a radio interview in the sugar-growing state of North Dakota late last month. Australia, the world's third largest sugar exporter, had been hoping for inroads into the US as part of the deal. But the sugar industry launched a large lobbying effort after the US agreed in December to a small increase in sugar imports as part of the Central American free trade agreement with five nations. US sugar quotas have resulted in a domestic sugar price averaging twice the world price in the past 20 years. It is now nearly four times the world price.
NYT Op-Ed: Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge
[Nice history lesson] URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13SMIT.html February 13, 2004 Beware Generals Bearing a Grudge By JEAN EDWARD SMITH H UNTINGTON, W.Va. In pulling out of the Democratic presidential race, Gen. Wesley Clark ended what was once a promising quest to join the long line of men who converted battlefield prominence into political victory. The military is one of the traditional springboards to the White House: 12 former generals have been president, six of them career military men (only lawyers have done better). Yet no general has ascended to the Oval Office for half a century. So is the demise of the Clark campaign another sign that in the urban, affluent, white-collar America of today the armed forces no longer hold enough respect to sell their best and brightest to the electorate? Probably not. Wesley Clark was never an heir to the tradition of Andrew Jackson and Ulysses S. Grant. Rather, his military career and personality fit neatly into a different military category: generals who became political also-rans. First, consider the qualities of the six career generals who won the White House. They were national icons swept into office on a tide of popular enthusiasm. George Washington was a unanimous choice of the Electoral College. Andrew Jackson, victor at New Orleans, led the crusade for democratic reform. William Henry Harrison won enduring fame at the Battle of Tippecanoe, as did Zachary Taylor at Buena Vista. Grant and Dwight Eisenhower led citizen armies to victory in the two greatest wars the nation has faced. In each case, the office sought the man, not vice versa. Yet, surprisingly, these men shared a gift for managing men quietly. Their warm personalities cast a glow over their subordinates. They took their jobs seriously, but not themselves. Eisenhower, Taylor and Grant were ordinary men who did extraordinary jobs. They commanded unobtrusively, did not posture for the press or pronounce on matters of public policy. All were highly intelligent but resisted putting their intelligence on display. Their military dispatches were crisply written in unadorned English. And if given orders they disagreed with, they complied without complaint. Taylor, Old Rough and Ready, rarely wore a uniform. Grant was most at ease in the blouse of a private soldier. The Ike jacket of World War II was designed for comfort, not ceremony. All three identified with the citizen-soldiers they led, and each was adored by the armies they commanded. They worked easily with their superiors and their skill at human relations transferred readily from war to politics. By contrast, famous generals who lost the presidency including Winfield Scott, John C. Frémont, George McClellan, Winfield Scott Hancock, Leonard Wood and Douglas MacArthur ran to prove themselves right. All had clashed with their civilian superiors, and their campaigns imploded for the same reasons that led to those clashes: assertions of intellectual superiority, moral certitude and the lack of a common touch. They were men who made a point of standing apart. They possessed messianic confidence in the correctness of every position they adopted, and had difficulty adjusting to views contrary to their own. To put it simply: they took themselves very seriously. Temperament tells the difference. The also-rans were singular achievers. MacArthur finished first in his class at West Point, McClellan second. MacArthur and Leonard Wood won the Medal of Honor. Frémont mapped the Oregon Trail. Scott, a major general at 27, was the Army's general in chief for two decades. (Only Hancock seems in temperament more like those who won the presidency thus it is not surprising that he came closest to getting the job, losing to James A. Garfield by 7,000 votes in 1880.) Each of the also-rans shared the distinction of having been relieved of his command or placed on the shelf by higher authority. Winfield Scott, after capturing Mexico City and subduing the Mexican army, was summarily relieved by President James Polk in 1848; he suffered a crushing electoral defeat at the hands of Franklin Pierce four years later. Frémont was not only relieved of his command, but court-martialed and convicted for insubordination and mutiny in 1848 (Polk granted him clemency). He became the Republican nominee for president in 1856, losing to James Buchanan. After Lincoln removed McClellan as commander of the Army of the Potomac, the Young Napoleon became an outspoken critic of Lincoln's conduct of the war and ran against the president in 1864. Winfield Scott Hancock was relieved by Grant as military governor of Louisiana for being too lax in enforcing Reconstruction. Leonard Wood charged up San Juan Hill with Theodore Roosevelt in the
Through the Bush Looking Glass
The New York Times In America February 12, 2004 The Khan Artist By MAUREEN DOWD W ASHINGTON I think President Bush has cleared up everything now. The U.S. invaded Iraq, which turned out not to have what our pals in Pakistan did have and were giving out willy-nilly to all the bad guys except Iraq, which wouldn't take it. Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our enemy's country: that Iraq had W.M.D. and might sell them on the black market. But they were wrong. Bush officials thought they knew what was going on inside our friend's country: that Pakistanis were trying to sell W.M.D. on the black market. But they couldn't prove it until about the time we were invading Iraq. The grave and gathering threat turned out to be not Saddam's mushroom cloud but the president's mushrooming deficits. The president is having just as hard a time finding his National Guard records as Iraqi W.M.D. and those pay stubs look as murky as those satellite photos of trucks in Iraq. Mr. Bush said yesterday that smaller developing countries must stop developing nuclear fuel, even as the U.S. develops a whole new arsenal of smaller nuclear weapons to use against smaller developing countries that might be thinking about developing nuclear fuel. After he weakened the U.N. for telling the truth about Iraq's nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush now calls on the U.N. to be strong going after W.M.D. Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned the Pakistani hero and nuclear huckster Abdul Qadeer Khan after an embarrassing debacle, praising the scientist's service to his country. Mr. Bush pardoned George Tenet after an embarrassing debacle, praising the spook's service to his country. (So much for Mr. Bush's preachy odes to responsibility and accountability.) The president warned yesterday that the greatest threat before humanity is the possibility of a sudden W.M.D. attack. Not wanting nuclear technology to go to North Korea, Iran or Libya, the White House demanded tighter controls on black-market sales of W.M.D., even while praising its good buddy Pakistan, whose scientists were running a black market like a Sam's Club for nukes, peddling to North Korea, Iran and Libya. Mr. Bush likes to present the world in black and white, as good and evil, even as he's made a Faustian deal with General Musharraf, perhaps hoping that one day maybe even on an October day the cagey general will decide to cough up Osama. The president is spending $1.5 billion to persuade more Americans to have happy married lives, but plans to keep gay Americans from having happy married lives. Mr. Bush said he wouldn't try to overturn abortion rights. But John Ashcroft is intimidating women who had certain abortions by subpoenaing records in six hospitals in New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere. The president set up the intelligence commission (with few intelligence experts) because, he said, the best intelligence is needed to win the war on terror. Yet he doesn't want us to get the panel's crucial report until after he's won the war on Kerry. Mr. Bush said he had balked at giving the 9/11 commission the records of his daily briefings from the C.I.A. until faced with a subpoena threat because it might deter the C.I.A. from giving the president good, honest information. Wasn't it such good, honest information that caused him to miss 9/11 and mobilize the greatest war machine in history against Saddam's empty cupboard? Mr. Bush says he's working hard to create new jobs in America, while his top economist says it's healthy for jobs to be shipped overseas. The president told Tim Russert that if you order a country to disarm and it doesn't and you don't act, you lose face. But how does a country that goes to war to disarm a country without arms get back its face? Mr. Bush said he was troubled that the Vietnam War was a political war, because civilian politicians didn't let the generals decide how to fight it. But when Gen. Eric Shinseki presciently told Congress in February 2003 that postwar Iraq would need several hundred thousand U.S. soldiers to keep it secure and supplied, he was swatted down by the Bush administration's civilian politicians. Yes, it all makes perfect sense, through the Bush looking glass. E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Speculating on Kerry
On Sat, 7 Feb 2004 Michael Perelman wrote: The electability phenomenon has the potential to allow small bits of information to cascade into huge consequences. It also means that when people learn about the problems with Kerry, they will be more easily discouraged. No on both counts. You seem to be making Kinsleys' mistake, i.e. mistaking this for a stock price system, where (a) the voters are competitors and (b) the price can change at any moment -- and people have an interest in it changing. Here we have the convergent system with cooperative actors. Everyone is trying to agree on one candidate, and everyone knows the sooner he is picked the better, and everyone knows there can only be one. The cascade functions to rush the crowd to one point and to make it more impossible to to change from that point with every passing day, because if winning is the only value to be maximized, the rate at which any other choice becomes senseless accelerates for every rational actor. New information will make no difference. The converse of only caring about winning is we don't fucking care who he is. Info is irrelevant. In addition, the chances are low of there being any new info on someone who's been in public life for 35 years. And was in a very public bare-knuckles drag-out election only four years ago. And is a corpse. Michael
Re: Speculating on Kerry
On Sat 7 Feb, 2004, Slate's Michael Kinsley was quoted as saying: The process the Democrats are putting themselves through resembles John Maynard Keynes' famous description of the stock market. The game isn't to figure out which stocks are most likely to do well, but to figure out which stocks other investors think are most likely to do well. That's a very good description of the mechanism of what's happening. But his conclusion that the result is unstable is completely wrong. There is a difference between a feedback mechanism that has no end point -- i.e. a price, which can always change -- and a feedback mechanism that has a single endpoint -- i.e., a choice for the nomination, where everyone knows that in the end there can be only one. In the later case, feedback mechanisms typically produce a quick arrival at a stable final equilibrium Kinsley is also completely wrong that Democrats don't know what they want. They know exactly what they want. They want to win. They want Bush out. And everything else is secondary. They aren't voting for Kerry because they've become more moderate. They are voting for Kerry because they are so thoroughly united by desparation that nothing else matters. All this makes this a unique national primary. The truism has always been that primary voters (and especially early primary voters) don't vote strategically -- that is, they don't vote for anyone other than the person they really want. But that's exactly what's going on here. And saying that electability is more important than usual doesn't capture the uniqueness of it. Electability is a traditional primary concern. It means, Can this guy *conceivably* win? That's always been important to a lot of primary voters. So they'd make a cut and then choose the guy they liked best above that line. It was by nature a secondary concern. But the difference now is that winning is the primary concern -- that primary voters are choosing the guy who has the best chance of winning even if his if his positions are several people away from their favorite. And they are doing it from the getgo. That's unprecedented. The result has been a cascade effect. The only proof that you can win an election is that you've won and election. People voted for Kerry in New Hampshire because he won in Iowa. And they voted for him in the seven state primary because he won in Iowa and New Hampshire. And they'll vote for him in the primaries to come for the same reason. A reason which only gets stronger. Unstable this mechanism is not. Personally I feel the reason Kerry won in Iowa had nothing to do with him. It was because Gephardt took down Dean in the electoral equivalent of a suicide bombing, going so negative that it was almost guaranteed to hurt him more than it hurt Dean. And when they both fell, Kerry and Edwards were standing behind them in line. But all that's a footnote in history now. When the primary comes to New York, I'll vote for Kerry for the same reason that everyone has -- and for the same reason I supported Dean in the first place. I want the junta of madmen gone. Then we can start to think about other things. BTW, the silver lining for me in Dean's demise is that if the internet model of politics is ever going to be important for the left -- if it is ever going to be more than a new kind of money chute for the Democratic Party -- it is going to be something that proves itself after the election. It is only then that we will see if it can produce pressure that actually affects policies. And for such a thing to happen, it would probably be better if the internat activist network is separate from the candidate's machine. In addition, the potentially most innovative and transforming use of the internet will not be its power to collect money, but its power to move bodies into borderline states as it becomes clear which ones are in play. And so far, the people who have done the most advanced work on that front is MoveOn. Michael
FT: Growing old gracefully
[The argument in a nutshell: longevity is rising even faster than forecast (and the forecasts were already unbelievable in historical context). But the elderly are also becoming much healthier than forecast -- to the point where it is likely that the average period of disability before death will go down rather than up as the average age gets older; and that people who live to 90 don't require more in healthcare than people who live to 70.] [Thus pension systems may require even more fundamental changes than are now being contemplated (perhaps along the lines of the Swedish Solution they describe, which has lots of progressive possibilities). But the idea that aging will cause a healthcare crisis could be completely wrong.] Financial Times; Jan 18, 2004 Growing old gracefully by Norma Cohen and Clive Cookson Prince Charles has been waiting more than 50 years to become monarch of the United Kingdom. And his prospects for immediate accession do not look good. For his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was one of a remarkable group born in 1926. Britons born that year, and in others close to it, are part of a golden cohort whose lifespan is increasing dramatically. In Japan, demographers have discovered an even more startling step change in longevity among women born in 1910. Since 1960, they have added one year of post-50 life expectancy every four years. Before 1960, they had gained a year every 18 years. Gains are not limited to the developed world. Mortality rates in Mexico, for instance, were twice those of the US in 1930. By 2010, they are projected to be roughly similar. Actuaries and gerontologists are still unclear why these changes are taking place. In the UK, theories range from a decline in smoking after the 1960s to the use of antibiotics in fighting disease. But one thing is certain. Policymakers and electorates alike are only beginning to grasp what these profound changes may entail. To take one example: in the year Prince Charles was born - 1948 - the corporate predecessor of British Airways set up a pension scheme. Back then, the cost to the company did not seem that great: retirement was at 65 and the average age of death was 68. Now, the average British Airways employee lives past 80, a fivefold increase in years in retirement. The pension funds have combined assets about three times bigger than the company's market capitalisation - yet BA faces additional annual contributions of £133m ($246m, E191m) to eliminate its deficit. Some believe that the 'baby-boom' generation may not respond to advertising. But rising numbers of elderly customers do not necessarily spell trouble for the corporate sector. Individuals also tend to underestimate how long they will live. As Eric Lofgren, global director of the benefits consulting practice at Watson Wyatt in the US, notes, among private pension holders who choose to take a lump sum rather than an annuity, roughly 55 per cent run out of money before they die, leaving them to eke out their days on social security. Pension provision is becoming a source of political and workplace friction in most industrialised economies. The challenges posed by fast- changing demographics will be high on the agenda at this week's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Ageing societies are also forcing companies and markets to examine some fundamental assumptions. For thousands of years, human life expectancy remained broadly stable; until the start of the 20th century it was about 40 years. Over the past 100 years it has more than doubled - a trend that, in retrospect, will be seen as a defining characteristic of the age. That life expectancy is now improving in every age group is remarkable. But what is truly extraordinary is the speed at which longevity is rising among the oldest people. Globally, according to the United Nations, the over-80s comprise the fastest growing segment. The world's population aged 60 and over was roughly 600m in 2000, about triple that of 50 years earlier. In the next 50 years, the number is likely to triple again to more than 2bn. In developed countries, the percentage of older people (defined as the over-60s) will rise from the current fifth of the population to a third by 2050. Yet a growing number of demo-graphers and medical experts now believe that life expectancy is improving even faster than most official estimates allow. This month, the UK's government actuary dramatically raised its forecast of life expectancy for those reaching 65 and 80 by 2025. Longevity is now expected to improve by 1.0 per cent annually, not by 0.75 per cent as forecast only two years ago. And although the rate of improvement will slow, it is expected to take 25 years, not 10, before that improvement slows to half its current rate. James Vaupel, a professor of demography and a founder of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany, says statisticians tracing the rise in worldwide longevity over the past 160 years
Janes: U.S. Might Strike Hezbollah in Bakaa
Published on Friday, January 23, 2003 by UPI Janes: U.S. Might Strike Hezbollah in Bakaa by Lou Marano WASHINGTON -- The prospect of the United States attacking Hezbollah bases in southern Lebanon is no idle threat, the editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest said Friday. URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0123-11.htm
Canadian Sues US for Deporting Him to Syria for Torture
Friday, January 23, 2003 Agence France Presse Canadian Sues US for Deporting Him to Syria for Torture NEW YORK - A Syrian-born Canadian filed a lawsuit in US federal court, accusing Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top officials of deporting him to Syria in the knowledge he would be tortured. URL: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0123-03.htm
Re: Dean and the Iowa primary
On Wed, 21 Jan 2004, Louis Proyect wrote: Now that Dean has come in third in the first primary, the media smells blood and won't be happy until he is out of the race. Yeah, but that could play to his advantage. If he wins the next few -- which he well might, since Iowa is in everyway an outlier -- he'll be the comeback kid. Which suits him better than the front runner. Dean didn't self-destruct in Iowa. He was shoot at by everyone else. It was the result of a strategic decision that turned out to be wrong. He over reached. He didn't need to campaign big in Iowa at all. He could have left it to Gephardt to win. Gephardt would have stayed alive but probably never left the pack. But once polls put him in first, Dean decided he could eliminate Gephardt, which would be useful in itself, and enhance his status as the unbeatable candidate. It completely backfired. Gephardt fought like he was fighting for his political life, which he was and everyone else piled on. Dean fought back and they both creamed each other. And meanwhile Kerry and Edwards' had both made the strategic decision that Iowa was just as make it or break for them as it was for Gephardt -- but since no one had given them a change a month ago, no attacked them. And from Kerry it was unexpected, because everyone thought he'd make New Hampshire his make or break. That element of surprise helped him enormously. All in all, it was kind of a nice exercise in game theory. But it was not a big loss to Dean. The big losers were Gephardt -- and Clark. Because the re-rise of Kerry is very bad news for Clark. Now the two of them will fight for the same turf. Or rather the four of them: Clark, Kerry, Edwards, and Lieberman. So that bad news for Clark is good news for Dean. So the immediate effects of Iowa are a wash. And if Dean wins New Hampshire, Iowa will turn out to have been a plus for him. He will be a candidate that has been tested and responded or learned from his mistakes. And he will be able to portray himself again as an insurgent battling against the odds, which suits im better in every way. Now if Dean loses New Hampshire, that would be a serious and perhaps crippling blow. But right now I suspect the media's current consensus wisdom to will turn out to be be a great example of how the consensus is wrongest exactly when it's surest. Michael
Re: Bush spacey science
On Fri, 16 Jan 2004, michael wrote: Here is a quiz. Who can find something that this adminstration has done right? Our policy towards Libya and Sudan has changed for the better. They're kind of exceptions that prove the rule -- they both happened for weird and perverse reasons and won't become the models going forward that they should -- but still. There was also the scuttling of that Bolivian oil pipeline a couple of months ago because of its adverse impact on the environment. It's so counterintuitive that I keep thinking there has to be a hidden motives but I haven't seen it yet. But I see your point. It's really hard to believe how one-sided the balance sheet is. You really have to look far afield. And the amount of duplicity and stupidity that they've managed to pack into this Mars thing, and the openness with which they've done it, is just staggering. It's like they're trying to top themselves just for the sake of it. Like mendacity is their art form. Michael
Brazil Pays Parents to Help Poor Be Pupils, Not Wage Earners
[One cheer for Lula deparment] January 3, 2004 The New York Times Brazil Pays Parents to Help Poor Be Pupils, Not Wage Earners By CELIA W. DUGGER F ORTALEZA, Brazil Vandelson Andrade, 13, often used to skip school to work 12-hour days on the small, graceful fishing boats that sail from the picturesque harbor here. His meager earnings helped pay for rice and beans for his desperately poor family. But this year he qualified for a small monthly cash payment from the government that his mother receives on the condition that he shows up in the classroom. I can't skip school anymore, said Vandelson, whose hand-me-down pants were so big that the crotch ended at his knees and the legs bunched up around his ankles. If I miss one more day, my mother won't get the money. This year, Vandelson will finally pass the fourth grade on his third try a small victory in a new breed of social program that is spreading swiftly across Latin America. It is a developing-country version of American welfare reform: to break the cycle of poverty, the government gives the poor small cash payments in exchange for keeping their children in school and taking them for regular medical checkups. I think these programs are as close as you can come to a magic bullet in development, said Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development, a nonprofit research group in Washington. They're creating an incentive for families to invest in their own children's futures. Every decade or so, we see something that can really make a difference, and this is one of those things. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a former factory worker who took office last January as a champion of the poor, is consolidating an array of cash transfer programs, sharply expanding his version of the model, named Family Grant, and tripling the average monthly benefit, to about $24. By 2006, Family Grant will reach 11.4 million families more than 45 million people, about a quarter of Brazil's population. That would be by far the world's largest such program. Ana Fonseca, the director who reports directly to the president and his chief of staff called Family Grant the payment of an old debt the country has to its poor citizens. Mr. da Silva's moves are popular with constituencies that include the poor a bedrock of his political base as well as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, big supporters of the model, which are putting up $3 billion in loans for the program. Its total cost over the president's four-year term will be close to $7 billion. Its annual cost about a third of 1 percent of Brazil's gross domestic product will be more than offset by savings Mr. da Silva's administration has squeezed out of the civil service pension system, said Joachim Von Amsberg, the World Bank's lead economist for Brazil. But the program has also won wide public acceptance here, surviving from government to government in large part because it is not simply a handout. Mr. da Silva's Workers' Party can claim credit for being among the first in the world to experiment with this model in the federal district of Brasília in 1995. The idea was to pay the families to bring their children to school rather than put them to work, said Cristovam Buarque, an economist who was then Brasília's governor and is now Mr. da Silva's education minister. But it is equally telling that Mr. da Silva's political rival and predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, adopted the approach and turned it into a national program in 2001. His party had also tested the model in the city of Campinas in the mid-1990's. The spread of this approach across Latin America has been fueled by impressive results from a raft of studies in Nicaragua, Honduras and, most influentially, Mexico, whose program now reaches more than 20 million people. The rigorous Mexico evaluation, conducted by the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute, found that the children who took part were healthier and better nourished and stayed in school longer than those in a control group. Poor Brazilians, in recent interviews, made clear that the bits of money that seem trivial by rich-country standards loom large for families living, as millions here do, on less than a dollar per person a day. From a sprawling favela built on the sand dunes of this seaside city by the poor from the parched rural interior, people said the government money paid for beans, rice, carrots, potatoes, eggs, mangoes, cooking oil, haircuts and school supplies. Children whose families get the grants say the fear of losing the money makes them more serious about school. Most still have jobs, too, but outside school hours. Carla dos Santos, 12, like Vandelson, is in fourth grade at the
Re: RES: [PEN-L] Brazil Pays Parents to Help Poor Be Pupils, Not Wage Earners
On Sun, 4 Jan 2004, Renato Ribeiro Pompeu wrote: [One cheer for Lula deparment] As a matter of fact, these programs began long before Lula became president. They were initiated principally by municipal governments. That's why he gets one cheer instead of three. But he is increasing them substantially, and using national (and hence redistributive) funds to do so. It isn't socialism, but it isn't what you normally find in an austerity budget, and it does seem like a good thing. No? Michael
Alterman quip
URL: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040112s=alterman George W. (You can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror) Bush cannot pretend to defend deceiving the nation into war anymore. When ABC's Diane Sawyer pressed him in an interview about whether Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction or merely would have liked to have them, Bush replied contemptuously, What's the difference? (Try this, Mr. President: I shot that man, Your Honor, because he pointed a gun at me and was about to pull the trigger, or I shot that man, Your Honor, because he looked like he was thinking about getting a gun.)
AP: Trouble brewing in the model transitional government
The New York Times In America December 31, 2003 Karzai Refuses Deal on 18th Day of Afghan Talks By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 2:36 p.m. ET KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- President Hamid Karzai's insistence on a powerful presidency under Afghanistan's new constitution is driving a dangerous wedge between his Pashtun kinsmen and smaller ethnic groups, delegates and analysts warned Wednesday. With marathon talks on the new charter at a stalemate, opponents said the strong Pashtun -- and American -- flavor of Karzai's support risked a backlash among minorities whose militias still control much of the country. ``If they don't include our ideas in the constitution, we won't give up our weapons,'' said Habiba Danish, an ethnic Tajik delegate to the ongoing loya jirga in Kabul. ``If they want national unity, we want equal rights.'' The council is in disarray amid open feuding over Karzai's reluctance to share power in a country he says needs strong leadership because it is fractured by ethnic mistrust. Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group and traditional rulers, have rallied behind Karzai -- a boost for a leader maligned here as the ``mayor'' of Kabul for his lack of influence beyond the capital. But smaller groups from farther north including Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras protest that Pashtuns are ignoring their demands, such as recognizing their languages and sharing more influential government posts. Karzai allies, confident they have a majority, are pressing for a vote on dozens of articles still contentious in an already amended draft. Minorities want a consensus hammered out in advance. Karzai has said even a slim majority of the 502 delegates is enough to pass the constitution. But council leaders and Western diplomats acknowledge that the charter could be stillborn if it doesn't command broad support. Officials said they would try again Thursday, Day 19 of the gathering in a huge tent on a Kabul college campus, to begin voting on proposed amendments. There was no sign of a let up in the rancor. ``The Pashtuns were in power for years and should now behave like equal brothers under the umbrella of democracy,'' said Mohammed Hashim Mehdawi, a Hazara delegate. Pashtuns are equally indignant -- railing at attempts to sideline former king Zaher Shah, a Pashtun, and insert the name of Tajik resistance hero Ahmad Shah Massood into the charter. Delegates insist the acrimony of the past must be overcome, but the current fault lines are uncomfortably familiar. Militias from the north fought a losing battle against the Pashtun-dominated Taliban militia until the United States weighed in two years ago to punish the Taliban for sheltering Osama bin Laden. Karzai, with strong American backing, was installed at the resultant peace conference in Bonn, Germany, on an understanding that he would try to reunite the country. But the struggle over the constitution ``may sound alarm bells'' among minorities that they are once again slipping under Pashtun hegemony, said Vikram Parekh, an analyst in Kabul for the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. Warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, for instance, has pressed in vain for regional devolution and for the Uzbek language to be used in schools in the areas where his group is strongest. Tajiks, meanwhile, are incensed that under the current draft the national anthem will be sung only in Pashto -- not Dari, the Farsi-related lingua franca of much of northern Afghanistan. ``I don't think (the splits) will lead to civil war, but they could throw up road blocks to the Bonn process and efforts to extend the central government's control,'' Parekh said. That process was supposed to culminate in national elections under the new constitution next summer. But the United Nations warns security must first improve -- and has made the disarming of the armed factions, most of them ethnically rooted, a priority. Hedayatullah Hedayat, an Uzbek delegate from Faryab province, predicted warlords would regain power in his region if the minorities don't get their way. ``We are against the warlords. But if they don't recognize our languages, those warlords will get angry and the people will follow them,'' he said. Observers are at pains to name a candidate who could present a serious challenge to Karzai in a presidential vote. Still, they said his credibility as a national figurehead had taken a knock. ``He should be neutral, despite his Pashtun ethnicity,'' said Christopher Langton of the Institute for International Institute for Strategic Studies. ``The emergence of a Pashtun bloc is good. It is the close linkage to Karzai that is not so good.'' Copyright 2003 The Associated Press | Home | Privacy Policy | Search |
FT op-ed: Pakistan's moderate islamicists vs. its extremists
[The argument that the MMA has substantially moderated in a relatively short time since taking power is interesting] Financial Times; Dec 29, 2003 A perfect moment to secure peace in Kashmir By Mansoor Ijaz Early next month, Pakistan is due to host the annual South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation summit in Islamabad. If all goes well, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, should meet Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Indian prime minister, to discuss the dispute over Kashmir. But the run-up to the summit has been far from smooth. Events in the past month have brought to the surface the struggle between Pakistan's increasingly pragmatic parliamentary Islamists, their more militant brethren and Gen Musharraf's US-backed moderates for control of two vital policy areas: how to make peace with India over Kashmir and who should control Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme. The prospects for peace looked good in November, when Pakistan announced a ceasefire along Kashmir's line of control. Gen Musharraf was emboldened by support from an unlikely source - the coalition of Islamist parties in Pakistan's deadlocked parliament that make up the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal. The MMA has been a thorn in Gen Musharraf's side since winning elections and forming governments in Pakistan's two western provinces last year. It also won enough votes at the federal level to block Gen Musharraf's plan to consolidate his position as army chief and president, with the power to dissolve any government he did not like. Winning at the ballot box, however, seemed to infuse a new sense of responsibility into the fundamentalists. Maulana Fazlur Rehman, for example, one of the most important MMA leaders, went to New Delhi this summer to meet Indian diplomats. It was a successful visit. India's intelligence chief told me at the time that he found Mr Rehman reasonable enough for there to be sustained dialogue with Pakistan's fundamentalists over Kashmir. Back at home, Mr Rehman persuaded his fellow MMA members of the long-term electoral benefits that would accrue from standing side-by-side with Gen Musharraf as peacemakers rather than with extremists who were in any case losing the struggle in Kashmir. The strategy paid dividends last Wednesday when Gen Musharraf agreed to MMA demands by announcing that he would step down as army chief at the end of 2004 and would not dismiss any government formed during the remaining three years of his term as president without the consent of Pakistan's Supreme Court. But the accommodation between the president and the Islamists is threatened by the extremists, who fear that the Musharraf-Vajpayee meeting could produce real peace in Kashmir. They are also angered by Gen Musharraf's reaction to the International Atomic Energy Agency's discovery of evidence that Pakistan has transferred nuclear technology to Iran. In response to international pressure, Gen Musharraf ordered the interrogation, in the presence of US intelligence, of, among others, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the so-called father of Pakistan's nuclear programme and a man revered in Pakistan's radical circles. The result: a Christmas Day assassination attempt on Gen Musharraf's life, the second in 11 days. The knowledge shown of the president's movements has raised fears in army circles that extremists may have infiltrated his security apparatus. That fear is also shared in the capitals of the Saarc countries. Cancellation of Mr Vajpayee's visit on security grounds cannot be ruled out. At the same time, there has been much press speculation that Pakistan is just one assassination away from falling into the hands of nuclear-armed fanatics. Such views are mistaken. While tussling with the Islamists in parliament this year, Gen Musharraf has quietly been appointing his successors. In the event of his death, continuity of government is assured. Besides, Gen Musharraf's reaction to the IAEA intelligence would have been unthinkable without the full support of the army and the more moderate Islamists. Pakistan is maturing, not crumbling. That is why Mr Vajpayee must go to Islamabad and meet the Pakistani leader. The prospects for peace have seldom been better. Gen Musharraf can at once undermine the extreme Islamists, whose survival depends on fuelling unrest in Kashmir, conciliate their parliamentary counterparts and allay western concerns over one of the world's nuclear flashpoints. It is a chance that must not be missed. The writer jointly authored the blueprint for the ceasefire in Kashmir between Mujahideen fighters and Indian security forces in July 2000
FT: Modest success of secular schools in Pakistan
Financial Times; Dec 30, 2003 BACK PAGE - FIRST SECTION: Secular education chalks up success with Pakistan's poor By Farhan Bokhari In one of the poorest areas of Pakistan's biggest city, it is no surprise to see walls plastered with graffiti calling for volunteers to join a Taliban-style Islamic organisation. More startling is the sight of Karachi's children lining up to go to school underneath the freshly daubed slogans. Goth Dhani Bukhsh, a suburb near the city's airport, would once have been an ideal recruitment ground for militant groups, which rely on poor, under-privileged boys with few prospects. But today the enthusiasm of students in Goth Dhani Bukhsh is palpable. Unlike the poorly resourced government establishments, their school, run by The Citizen's Foundation, offers uniforms, libraries, computer and science laboratories and subsidised tuition fees. Moreover, boys and girls are educated together, which is highly unusual in Pakistan. As Muslims, we have the responsibility to teach good moral values and equip people with ways to earn a living, says Ahsan Saleem, a Pakistani industrialist with interests in banking and textiles, who chairs the TCF. Our programme is secular in that it is mainstream, but we don't claim to be secular. Without confronting anyone else we want to give good education. The foundation, which was established by six businessmen in the mid-1990s with the objective of taking education to Pakistan's poorest, has so far built 140 schools and has ambitious plans to increase that to 1,000. To raise funds and cover running costs, the TCF has expanded its chapters offshore, through a network of Pakistani expatriates from the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, parts of Europe including the UK, the US and Canada. Students such as Mohmmad Tariq, a 10-year-old and the eldest of nine siblings, know the value of the TCF school from personal experience. He works for three hours at a local shop in the evening to subsidise his family's income. My mother stays at home to look after my eight brothers and sisters and my father is a porter at the airport, he says. The only way that I could go to school came through TCF. Maimoona Qayyum, the school's head girl, appreciates the difference between a government school and her own. My father is a school teacher at a government school. But he sent me here because he knew that I would get a good education. I want to be a doctor when I grow up. Until the TCF was set up, an Islamic madrassah, or religious school, would have been more typical in Pakistan's most impoverished areas. It would offer religious education only for boys. Girls would have either stayed at home or received no more than primary education. The success of the TCF is viewed by many Pakistanis as an antidote to the spread of such a sectarian education. In the past two decades, up to 10,000 madrassah schools have sprung up across Pakistan, offering the incentive of a free education and the eventual opportunity of a job - even if that means a wage earned through activism for a hardline group. The influence of madrassah schools largely went unnoticed until the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, which prompted a number of western countries to begin pressing Pakistan for a clampdown on their network. But senior Pakistani officials warn that a tough approach could prompt a backlash from Islamic groups. But in neighbourhoods where a TCF school has been set up, it is becoming less likely that a madrassah will be established, or that students will leave their TCF school for an alternative. One of our successes is that students who come to TCF know that all their needs are going to be met by the foundation, says Salma Majid, a TCF school principal. Mrs Majid, who joined the school a year ago, quit her job at a large school in the heart of Karachi, attracted not only by the success of the TCF experiment but also by the support extended to teachers as well as students. She and her colleagues, for example, are picked up and dropped off by school vans every day. Mr Saleem notes that in a country of 145m people, the TCF's efforts rank as no more than a modest experiment. The road to any society's success must lie in reducing illiteracy, he says. We may be just beginning something new.
Weapons of Mass who cares?
From the Today's Papers newsletter for December 18th: quote The Post says all the way on A42 that the head of the weapons of mass destruction search team, David Kay, is quitting. It's not exactly clear when Kay is going to clean out his desk, but the WP says he might not be back after the holidays and might not be around for his group's next interim report let alone the final one. Many staffers on Kay's team have already been reassigned to counter-insurgency duties. As the Post notes, when the president was asked in an ABC News interview Tuesday whether he still believes that Saddam had actual weapons of mass destruction as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons, Bush replied, So what's the difference? endquote
Re: Wolf on Renminbi Flexibility
On Sun, 14 Dec 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [I thought this was a surprising good discussion that covered all the bases.] Interesting though, that the general principle that in a fixed rate system the burden of adjustment falls on the deficit country, is completely ignored; ie the entire problem is framed as a question about what *China* will do ... That's completely true. But aren't Chinese production and US demand now such a symbiotic whole that the opposite course -- fixing the US current account deficit by deflating the US -- would hurt China badly? Not to mention the fact that the present system presents China with a $350 bln opportunity cost in the form of dollar reserves that are doing nothing. And that at this rate it will need a little deflationary pressure soon. So cet. par. and ignoring the difficulties, it seems that China might end up deciding to implement something like Wolf's medium term strategy even if it consulted only its self interest. Do you think not? Theoretically, the coherence of the principle that adjustment should always fall on the deficit country seems to need the presupposition that what happens to the country in question will have a negligible effect on the other members of the world economy. In cases where that assumption clearly doesn't hold because the economy in question is too large, it seems like it's been standard practice, at least since the death of the gold standard, to set that principle aside for more mutualistic approach, whether back in the day of the dollar/mark/yen negotiations, or in the now-speculated-about future of dollar/euro/yen/renminbi adjustments. Admittedly this institutionalized exception -- mutualism for us, adjustment for you -- institutionalizes unfairness to the weak and poor. But that's capitalism in a nutshell. And as far as China is concerned, it's being treated here at least in the abstract as one of Us: as a major world economic force that has to be reckoned with. Michael
Texas redistricting fairness
From today's Washington Post: Judge Patrick Higginbotham, of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit and one of three federal judges hearing the case, seemed skeptical of the Democrats' suggestion that redistricting had ever been a scrupulously fair undertaking. He recalled that former Texas governor William P. Hobby, a World War I-era Democrat, once likened redistricting to a religious experience in which majority-party lawmakers (then the Democrats) fell to their hands and knees over a state map, and drew new congressional boundaries to reward their friends and punish their enemies. When did this tradition of fair play across the aisles come to Texas? the judge asked to scattered guffaws around the courtroom. Well, judge, I would hope it would start today, said one of the Democratic lawyers, Richard Gladden. Now that would be a religious experience, the judge said.
Urgent appeal: US soldiers raid Iraqi trade union HQ
[passed on to me from a friend in the SEIU DC office] [As if to thicken the irony, today is International Human Rights Day] === We have just received an urgent appeal from the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions which we feel needs to be passed on to the largest possible number of trade unionists in the next several days. On Saturday, dozens of US troops in ten armoured cars raided the IFTU temporary headquarters in Baghdad, smashing windows, seizing documents, and even tearing down posters and banners condemning terrorism. Eight IFTU leaders were arrested, but were released the following day, unharmed. No reason or explanation was given for the raid. The IFTU is calling on President Bush to conduct a full investigation of the raid and to ensure that it will not be repeated. The United States must respect the right of workers under international law to have free and independent trade unions. Please visit this page and send on your protest to the White House today: http://www.labourstart.org/cgi-bin/solidarityforever/show_campaign.cgi?c=22 Please pass on this message to all your lists. Thanks very much. Eric Lee
Colmes loses argument to nephew
From last week's The Onion Alan Colmes Loses Argument With Nephew NEW YORK--Alan Colmes, the liberal co-host of the Fox News debate program Hannity Colmes, lost an argument to his nephew Bryan while babysitting the 8-year-old Monday. I wanted to stay up late to watch television, but Uncle Alan said, ' 'There's already too much self-parenting in America,' Bryan said. So I started screaming, 'Mom lets me, Mom lets me,' real loud. He gave in after, like, 20 seconds. In the past two years, Bryan has won arguments with Colmes on the subjects of Pokémon cards, Crunch Berries cereal, and steel tariffs.
Wolf on Renminbi Flexibility
[I thought this was a surprising good discussion that covered all the bases.] Financial Times, December 2, 2003 China must move to a flexible currency -- eventually By Martin Wolf To float or not to float, that is the question. To be more precise, it is one of the questions. The Chinese authorities could also repeg the renminbi at a higher rate. My recent visit has convinced me that the leadership will not change what they see as a successful regime in the near future. But it will also not last forever. When and how might it change? Since the Chinese seem willing to accumulate foreign currency reserves without limit, the leverage of its partners is limited. This is a decision China will make, on its own terms. Nevertheless, the starting point must be whether the currency is undervalued. Many Americans assume it is, pointing to their country's vast, and growing, bilateral trade deficits. But these tell us nothing. What matters is the overall balance of payments. Over the past seven years, China has been running current account surpluses of about $10bn to $40bn a year (see chart). The International Monetary Fund forecasts the surplus this year at $25bn, a little under 2 per cent of gross domestic product.* But China also has a huge net inflow of foreign direct investment. If one takes the sum of these two elements, the surplus this year will be a good 5 per cent of GDP. Until 2001, however, China also had a balancing outflow in the rest of its capital account. Overall, therefore, the country did not accumulate substantial foreign currency reserves. But this has changed. The balancing capital outflow has become a huge inflow. Between the end of 2000 and September 2003, foreign currency reserves rose by $218bn. At least until 2001, surpluses on the current account and FDI were offset by other capital outflows. The currency was not undervalued. Strong upward pressure has emerged since then, but much of this may be speculative. On balance, the IMF's board of directors has concluded that there is no clear evidence that the renminbi is substantially undervalued. Nevertheless, two offsetting points must be made. The first is that global payments are significantly out of balance, with a huge US current account deficit offset by surpluses elsewhere. A real appreciation of the renminbi must be a necessary element in global adjustment. The second point is that the prices of China's exports are falling, in dollars. If many of the world's currencies appreciate against the dollar (and so also the renminbi), prices of a wide range of manufactures must fall in their domestic currencies. That would strengthen the charge that China is exporting deflation. It would be better if, instead, the dollar prices of China's exports were rising. My conclusion is that the case for an appreciation of the Chinese real exchange rate has merit, from a global perspective. But the argument looks very different to the Chinese themselves. For them, the dollar peg has many advantages: it provides stability for both exporters and Hong Kong, whose currency is also pegged to the dollar; and it has given a framework in which the economy has performed excellently. More important, the disadvantages of allowing the currency to appreciate are significant. It would represent a concession to pressure from the US authorities and speculators; it would lower domestic prices of tradeable goods in a country that already has very low inflation, with particularly severe effects on farmers; and it might reveal substantial weaknesses in the balance sheets of Chinese businesses. It is also unclear what the right alternative regime would be. If the currency were repegged at a higher rate, speculators might well try again. If it were floated, it might overshoot. In the presence of exchange controls, it would also be difficult for companies to hedge foreign currency risk. But lifting exchange controls would expose bankrupt and ill-managed financial institutions to the temptations of the global capital markets. All these seem cogent reasons not to consider changing policy. But there is also a reason to do so: the monetary consequences of current reserve accumulation. Money and credit have been growing far faster than nominal GDP this year. That means excessive investment now and still more non-performing loans in the years to come. Yet even this is not an overwhelming worry, at present. That is partly because the authorities believe they are bringing credit growth under control, partly because the government welcomes the high growth and partly because inflation is non-existent. Somewhat higher inflation could even be a helpful way to lower the mountain of bad debt in the financial system. The conclusion is that the authorities will not change policy soon. In the short term, the aim, instead, will be to lower the pressure. Policies can -- indeed, already do -- include further liberalisation of capital outflow and imports, along with special programmes to
Downgrading Ahnold
[He can rant all he wants about a referendum next November (now that he's missed the deadline for March). His money runs out in June] Financial Times; Dec 11, 2003 Moody's downgrade deepens Californian budgetary woes By Christopher Parkes in Los Angeles Moody's Investors Service, a top credit rating agency, this week downgraded almost $40bn (E32.7bn, £22.9bn) worth of Californian bonds by a notch, raising the pressure for a solution to the state's budget woes. The downgrade, from A3 to Baa1, marked Moody's third devaluation of California's debt this year. It came on Tuesday, just as tentative talks restarted on the governor's plan for borrowing up to $15bn, coupled with a strict spending cap. Moody's new rating is one notch above that of Standard Poor's and two levels below the Fitch agency's. The recent move by Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's Republican governor, to cut vehicle licence fees had raised the general fund's expected cash shortfall through to June 2005 from $22bn to $29.5bn, Moody's noted. The ratings agency also said California's credit outlook remained negative, based on risks that the state might have to refinance $14bn of short-term notes and warrants that mature next June. That is when California will run out of cash if nothing is done, according to state officials. 'Given this, we expect the state will remain reliant on significant financial assistance from the capital markets, Moody's said. The agency called the recent move to raise, not lower, the general fund's cash consumption, and the state's political disagreements, not encouraging. Moody's rating change came one day after the state treasury delayed issue of $1.5bn in general obligation bonds, reflected growing uncertainty over the fate of Mr Schwarzenegger's California Recovery Plan. Although accord on one key element - some $15bn in long-term borrowing - appeared close last weekend, talks in the legislature broke down over the governor's insistence on a spending cap. Today's action by Moody's is an ominous sign that California is headed for a financial meltdown unless responsible actions are taken to balance our budget, Phil Angelides, state treasurer, said. So far, the governor is going the wrong way. As Moody's indicated, he has deepened our budget deficit. And, the governor's current proposals - a massive borrowing plan and a spending cap - merely create the illusion of a solution.
Shop 'til you drop
URL: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3249574.stm BBC NEWS Woman crushed in rush at DVD sale A US store chain has apologised to a woman knocked unconscious as shoppers rushed for a sale of DVD players. Patricia VanLester was knocked to the ground in the frenzied dash for a $29 DVD player at a Wal-Mart SuperCenter in Orange City, Florida. The 41-year-old had been first in the queue when the post-Thanksgiving sale opened at 6am local time on Friday. She got pushed down, and they walked over her like a herd of elephants, said her sister, Linda Ellzey. Paramedics called to the store found VanLester unconscious on top of a DVD player, surrounded by shoppers seemingly oblivious to her, Mark O'Keefe, a spokesman for EVAC Ambulance, told Associated Press. Doctors at the hospital which admitted Ms VanLester said she had suffered a seizure after being knocked down and would probably remain in care for the rest of the weekend. 'Stop stepping on her!' Ms Ellzey said some shoppers had tried to help her sister, and one employee helped rescue the woman, but most people just continued their rush for deals. All they cared about was a stupid DVD player, she said. I told them, 'Stop stepping on my sister! She's on the ground!' Ms Ellzey said Wal-Mart officials called later to ask after her sister, and the store apologised and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her. Wal-Mart Stores spokeswoman Karen Burk said she had never heard of a such a melee during a sale. We are very disappointed this happened, she said. We want her to come back as a shopper. The day after Thanksgiving - the last Thursday of November - is traditionally the beginning of the Christmas season in the US. Story from BBC NEWS: http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/americas/3249574.stm Published: 2003/11/29 16:25:32 GMT © BBC MMIII
The Iraqi councils
[So this is the basis of democracy, huh?] New York Times November 30, 2003 BUILDING DEMOCRACY Iraqis Learn Bureaucracy at Town Hall Meetings By JOEL BRINKLEY B AGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 29 They are the vanguard of democracy in Iraq, and they like to say they are a most unhappy lot. I resent my work; it's very frustrating, said Imad Salih, shaking his head, I hate it. Mr. Salih is among more than 800 men and women who were elected, or selected, to serve on 88 Baghdad neighborhood councils, nine district councils and one city council, at the encouragement of the American occupation authorities. They have no authority, no budget, no real power. And for many Iraqis, that is demeaning, if not insulting. The national Governing Council ignores them. Government ministers will not see them. The City Council members do not merit much respect even at City Hall. A few days ago the lobby receptionist told the City Council chairman he did not recognize him and at first refused to let him in the building. On top of those problems, some local council members have become targets for anti-American guerrillas. One member of the Mansour council reported during a meeting last week that he had found a hand grenade in his house along with a note ordering him to stop working for the council. Now the council members, and others like them chosen by the Americans in cities and towns across Iraq, are part of the acrimonious debate over the future of the American plan to speed up the transition to self-rule. Under the American plan, the council members are to play a role in choosing the transitional assembly that is to select the next interim government, though some of the council members hope to remain on the ensuing councils. Hardly anyone, however, seems to think playing a role in the transition is a good idea. These people who have been appointed, we can't say all of them are loyal to the new Iraq, said Jalal Talabani, who is the current head of the Governing Council. Mowaffak al-Rubaie, another council member, said some members are former Baathists, referring to the party of Saddam Hussein. No one anticipated this. When they set up the local councils, the Americans appeared to have believed that they were performing an important civic function for the Iraqi people. It is the Americans who pay them: City Council members get $296 a month; those on the district council receive $176; and the neighborhood council members are paid $104. Even with their frustrations, many of the Iraqis chosen to serve say they have been proud to be part of the experiment. What is more, many of those council members' friends and neighbors are clamoring to be on the councils, too. And even those council members who clench their fists as they complain about their lack of any real power will begrudgingly admit that they appreciate the opportunity. Most Iraqis don't know the meaning of democracy, said Yaquob Yousiff al-Bakhatti, who is on the Baghdad City Advisory Council. So this is a good thing. It is above good. The American military, in concert with civilian occupation authorities, created the city's elaborate council system last summer out of need and civic ambition. The purpose was to lay the foundation for local democratic governance, but at the same time, the military needed people to communicate with, said Lt. Col. Joe Rice, a former small-town mayor from Colorado who helped create the councils and continues to work with them. A look at the councils' work may provide a glimpse of what democracy in Iraq will look like. At a Baghdad City Council meeting last week, 27 council members 23 men and four women were ranged around a large rectangular table in a formal meeting hall at City Hall. The council chairman, Adnan Abdul Sahid, sat at a raised dais. To his right, at the short end of the rectangle, sat a group of American military and civilian officers, including Colonel Rice, each with a translator whispering in his ear. Late in the morning the council plunged headlong into a discussion of national health-care financing. In capsule form they articulated problems that, in the United States, have consumed millions of hours of study and debate over the last decade. The Iraqis disposed of them quickly. We have been trying to finance the system from our own revenues, one councilman explained. But it isn't working. The prices are too high for the citizens, but they aren't enough for the hospitals. The minister of health has ordered prices reduced by 50 percent. But we should cancel this whole system of self-financing. We need a system that makes sure everyone gets complete medical care. Without dispute, the council agreed to send a letter to the Health Ministry calling for the abolition of free-market
