Proof of a Conspiracy? Bilderberg and the Silent Media

"While Bilderberg meetings are reported in the foreign press, they are completely ignored by the U.S. media. A search of America’s leading newspapers reveals that the word Bilderberg appears very rarely, perhaps once or twice a year. When mentioned, Bilderberg is usually found in a non-news article, such as a book review or a satirical article about conspiracy theories.
Occasionally Bilderberg is mentioned in connection with an individual. The Washington Post, for example, ran a May 24 article about Richard Perle, and how he used his government position to enrich himself. The article, entitled “The Ultimate Insider,” reported: Perle joined Hollinger’s board in 1994, having met [Conrad M.] Black at an annual Bilderberg Conference, where members of the international business and foreign policy elite meet to network and discuss issues. . . .
Asked about the avoidance of Bilderberg in the U.S. press, Tucker surmised that the leading national newspapers had pressured the wire services to stop reporting on Bilderberg. Reuters, Associated Press (AP), and UPI all reported on Bilderberg in the 1960s and 70s. However, since these wire services dropped Bilderberg, most U.S. newspapers are left in the dark. Asked about the change in their coverage of Bilderberg, John Hendel, UPI’s American Desk Editor, said, “We were much larger then in terms of manpower.”
The recent UPI story on Sen. Edwards attending Bilderberg, he said, had been put together from outside news sources. Jack Stokes in AP’s Corporate Communications office said AP would report on Bilderberg “if news comes out of it.”
The Chicago Tribune, which has avoided Bilderberg for 30 years, reported in 1965 how then Rep. Gerald R. Ford (R-Mich.) had attended two Bilderberg meetings, in 1962 and 1964. Ford had been attacked for belonging to a “secret group” after he said there was no place in the Republican Party for a secret organization such as the John Birch Society.
“My district is 65 per cent Dutch ancestry,” Ford said. “Just mention that and say that Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands sponsors the meetings. I don’t care what else you write.”
The Tribune piece noted that during the 1964 campaign, the Bilderberg meetings were described as gatherings of “king makers.”

Sibel Edmonds: State Dept. Quashed 9/11 Links To Global Drug Trade

"Even as a judge prepares to permanently silence her, a former FBI translator of intelligence has implicated the US State Department in quashing investigations which had linked the 9/11 terrorist network to a global drug trafficking ring.
Sibel Edmonds, whose closed-door revelations to Congressional inquiries have been declared state secrets, says that as a result, FBI investigations were ordered terminated.
"There are certain points..., where you have your drug related activities combined with money laundering and information laundering, converging with your terrorist activities," Ms. Edmonds told BreakForNews.com.
(Interview - 7:00 min.)
"Certain investigations were being quashed, let's say per State Department's request, because it would have affected certain foreign relations [or] affected certain business relations with foreign organizations," she said in an exclusive interview. (Interview - 4:00 min.)"

Why are some of the capital’s most influential power players hanging out with a bizarre Korean billionaire who claims to be the Messiah?

"Should Americans be concerned that on March 23rd a bipartisan group of Congressmen attended a coronation at which a billionaire, pro-theocracy newspaper owner was declared to be the Messiah – with royal robes, a crown, the works? Or that this imperial ceremony took place not in a makeshift basement church or a backwoods campsite, but in a Senate office building?
The Washington Post didn't think so. For a moment on April 4, a quote from the keynote speech was in the Web version of its "Reliable Sources" column. The speaker: Sun Myung Moon, 84, an ex-convict whose political activities were at the center of the 1976-8 Koreagate influence-peddling probe. That's when an investigation by Congress warned that Moon, after having befriended Richard Nixon in his darkest hour, was surrounding himself with other politicians to overcome his reputation: as the leader of the cult-like Unification Church, which recruited unwary college students, filled Madison Square Garden with couples in white robes, wed them in bulk and demanded obedience.
That was before he launched the Washington Times – "in response to Heaven’s direction," as he would later say – and a 20-year quest to make his enemies bow to him. He has also claimed, in newspaper ads taken out by the Unification Church, that Jesus, Confucius, and the Buddha have endorsed him. Muhammad, according to the 2002 ad, led the council in three cries of "mansei," or victory. And every dead U.S. president was there, too – because Moon's gospel is inseparable from visions of true-blue American power.
Now, this March, Moon was telling guests at the Dirksen Senate Office Building that Hitler and Stalin, having cleaned up their acts, had, in a rare public statement from beyond the grave, called him "none other than humanity's Savior, Messiah, Returning Lord and True Parent." "

Must read: Chris Floyd: Global Eye

"Reagan officially launched his successful 1980 presidential campaign in Philadelphia -- not the Quaker "city of brotherly love" in Pennsylvania, but a small town in the piney swamps of Mississippi, where three young civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by local officials in 1964 for the heinous crime of registering black people to vote. This was the famous "Mississippi Burning" case, a stark symbol of the era of violent race-hatred and government-sanctioned oppression. The decades-long struggle to bring full constitutional liberty into this system was fiercely resisted under the rubric of "states' rights" -- a codeword for the preservation of white privilege and black subjugation. Every Southerner raised in that system (including your correspondent) understood this secret language.
To win in the South -- and counterbalance the heavy black vote for Democrats elsewhere -- Republican elitists adopted this ugly, divisive code. Their deliberate stirring of base emotions was also aimed at preventing working-class whites from making common cause with blacks and other minorities against the elite's systematic destruction of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" social contract, which had placed a few mild restraints on the worst excesses of corporate greed.
Reagan, a long-time shill for corporate sugar-daddies, was a master at playing the race-card game on their behalf. Of course, he couldn't actually come out and say, "We're gonna put these darkies back in their place." But he didn't have to. Instead, he chose to stage the symbolic kick-off of his campaign in the symbolic city of Philadelphia, where -- to make his intent unmistakably clear -- he declared in the symbolic language of race hatred: "I believe in states' rights." This was a great communication indeed: Reagan carried every Southern state but one -- against a Southerner, the tepid New Dealer Jimmy Carter.
Once in power, Reagan slashed civil rights protections and supported the use of public money for private "religious" colleges that discriminated against blacks. He decimated housing, health, education and economic development programs for the poor. He helped flood the nation's ghettos with cheap cocaine through his criminal Iran-Contra scam, where the CIA countenanced -- and sometimes facilitated -- drug running by the Central American ganglords that Reagan employed to funnel illegal arms to his terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua -- as the CIA itself admitted in 1998, Consortiumnews.com reports.
Reagan then championed draconian drug laws and "mandatory sentencing" rules that transformed the American justice system into a vast gulag-state that imprisons more people than any nation on earth. When Reagan took office, there were approximately 300,000 people in prison; when he left, the figure was 800,000. Now, under his ideological soulmate, George W. Bush, the number has topped 2 million, Reuters reports. Incredibly, one in every 75 American men is now incarcerated; 68 percent of these are racial minorities."

Chicago Sun-Times: Is U.S. like Germany of the '30s?

"The historical question remains. I leave aside the question of the guilt of the whole German people (a judgment beyond my competence because I am not God) and ask what explanations might account for what happened. Hitler turned the German economy around in short order. He was crazy, of course, a demagogic mystic sensitive to aspirations of the German spirit. He appealed skillfully to the dark side of the German heritage. Anti-Semitism was strong in Germany, as it was in most European countries, but not violent until Hitler manipulated it. He stirred up the memories of historic German military accomplishments and identified himself with Frederick the Great -- thus placating the Prussian ethos of the German army. He promised glory to a nation still smarting from the disaster of 1918. Germany was emerging from the ashes, strong and triumphant once again. He also took control of the police apparatus. The military might have been able to dump him till 1937. After that he was firmly in power. The path lay open to holocaust.
Can this model be useful to understand how contemporary America is engaged in a criminally unjust war that has turned much of the world against it, a war in which torture and murder have become routine? Has the combination of the World Trade Center attack and a president who believes his instructions come from God unleashed the dark side of the American heritage?
What is this dark side? I would suggest that it is the mix of Calvinist religious righteousness and ''my-country-right-or-wrong'' patriotism that dominated our treatment of blacks and American Indians for most of the country's history. It revealed itself in the American history of imperialism in Mexico and after the Spanish-American War in the Philippines. The ''manifest destiny'' of America was to do whatever it wanted to do, because it was strong and virtuous and chosen by God."

NEW CESR REPORT DOCUMENTS EXTENSIVE U.S. WAR CRIMES IN IRAQ

" "Torture is only the tip of the iceberg," said Roger Normand, an international lawyer who directs the Center. "From unlawful killings, mass arrests, and collective punishment to outright theft and pillage, the U.S. is violating almost every law intended to protect civilians living under foreign military occupation."
The report blames the Bush Administration for misusing the war against terrorism to exempt itself from the Geneva Conventions and other legal norms, creating a climate of impunity in which ordinary soldiers feel free to torture and abuse Iraqis. Rather than scapegoat those caught on camera, the report recommends that George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and other responsible U.S. officials be held accountable for war crimes resulting from their policies."

Interview w/Ralph Nader: Conservatively Speaking

Pat Buchanan: Let me start off with foreign policy—Iraq and the Middle East. You have seen the polls indicating widespread contempt for the United States abroad. Why do they hate us?

Ralph Nader: First of all, we have been supporting despots, dictators, and oligarchs in all those states for a variety of purposes. We supported Saddam Hussein. He was our anti-Communist dictator until 1990. It’s also cultural; they see corporate culture as abandoning the restraints on personal behavior dictated by their religion and culture. Our corporate pornography and anything-goes values are profoundly offensive to them.
The other thing is that we are supporting the Israeli military regime with billions of dollars and ignoring both the Israeli peace movement, which is very substantial, and the Palestinian peace movement. They see a nuclear-armed Israel that could wipe out the Middle East in a weekend if it wanted to. They think that we are on their backs, in their house, undermining their desire to overthrow their own tyrants.

PB: Then you would say it is not only Bush who is at fault, but Clinton and Bush and Reagan, all the way back?

RN: The subservience of our congressional and White House puppets to Israeli military policy has been consistent. Until ’91, any dictator who was anti-Communist was our ally. . . .

TAC: You often mention corporations. What is the theory behind this or what are the alternatives to corporate economic power? I presume you are not talking about state ownership or socialism, or perhaps you are …

RN: Well, that is what representative government is for, to counteract the excesses of the monied interests, as Thomas Jefferson said. Because big business realizes that the main countervailing force against their excesses and abuses is government, their goal has been to take over the government, and they do this with money and politics. They do it by putting their top officials at the Pentagon, Treasury, and Federal Reserve, and they do it by providing job opportunities to retiring members of Congress. They have law firms that draft legislation and think-tanks that provide ready-made speeches. They also do it by threatening to leave the country. The quickest way to bring a member of Congress to his or her knees is by shifting industries abroad.
Concentrated corporate power violates many principles of capitalism. For example, under capitalism, owners control their property. Under multinational corporations, the shareholders don’t control their corporation. Under capitalism, if you can’t make the market respond, you sink. Under big business, you don’t go bankrupt; you go to Washington for a bailout. Under capitalism, there is supposed to be freedom of contract. When was the last time you negotiated a contract with banks or auto dealers? They are all fine-print contracts. The law of contracts has been wiped out for 99 percent of contracts that ordinary consumers sign on to. Capitalism is supposed to be based on law and order. Corporations get away with corporate crime, fraud, and abuse. And finally, capitalism is premised on a level playing field; the most meritorious is supposed to win. Tell that to a small inventor or a small business up against McDonald’s or a software programmer up against Microsoft.
Giant multinational corporations have no allegiance to any country or community other than to control them or abandon them. So what we have now is the merger of big business and big government to further subsidize costs or eliminate risks or guarantee profits by our government.

A Media Circus Worthy of Contempt

"No doubt, it would be in terrible taste to recall that the now lionized Ronald Reagan had almost nothing to do with undermining the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War. Rather, it was Jimmy Carter who authorized his National Security Advisor Zbignew Brezjinski to conduct, through the CIA, the biggest covert operation in Afghanistan to create a Vietnam War for the Soviets. It was also Jimmy Carter who in 1979 authorized the placement of Pershing II nuclear missiles aimed at the Kremlin to get the Soviets to the nuclear disarmament bargaining table.
Facts, as Reagan used to say, are annoying little devils. Reagan preferred myth. And today public myth says Jimmy Carter did not accomplish anything; he was a presidential failure, and his administration was a national disgrace. With the media orgy over Ronald Reagan now in full swing, who can say anything good about Jimmy Carter? Who can ever say anything good about Jimmy Carter? After all, that would require a reliance upon fact, not myth. . . .
What Reagan can be given credit for is assisting in the covert slaughter of South American peasants accused of being “rebels” and “communists” so that their land, the oil under it, and the lumber on top of it, so that their hopes for the future, could all be stolen from them. Never mind the Reagan cruelty of calling homeless Americans “urban campers” and instead of sending nutritious foods he sent surplus catsup to poor school children, referring to catsup as a “vegetable.” Never mind, because amnesiac America is being put deeper to sleep by a Republican led media circus that has no time for facts."

Prisoner abuse in Iraq just tip of the iceberg

" "We see a consistent pattern of the Pentagon claiming to work for democracy," says Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch, "while in their prisons and training centers, reports of torture and human rights abuses continue to surface."
More than 64,000 Latin American soldiers have been trained in combat skills and psychological warfare at the School of the Americas. Graduates are consistently involved in human rights abuses and atrocities.
In 1996, the Pentagon, under intense public pressure, released the classified training manuals used at the School of the Americas. The Washington Post, in a story headlined "U.S. Instructed Latins in Executions, Torture," reported on Sept. 21, 1996, that the manuals promoted executions, torture, blackmail and other forms of coercion.
The manuals recommended the imprisonment of family members of those who support "union organizing or recruiting," those who distribute "propaganda in favor of the interest of workers," those who "sympathize with demonstrations or strikes," and those who make "accusations that the government has failed to meet the basic needs of the people." The training manuals are available on the SOA Watch Web site, www.soaw.com.
"Why the great surprise over Abu Ghraib?" asked Jennifer Harbury, a human rights lawyer whose husband, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, was tortured for two years and then was either dismembered or thrown from a helicopter by Guatemalan military officials receiving generous CIA payments. "This has been standard operating procedure for years." "

The Observer: Michael and me

"[Michael] Moore dropped out of university and, after stints as a hippie DJ, and a period running a crisis centre for teenagers, he set-up an alternative newspaper, the Flint Voice. He edited it with such verve, exposing corrupt officials and racist businesses, that in 1986 the San Francisco-based magazine Mother Jones asked him to become its editor. But just a few months after taking up the position, he was fired. According to the owner of the magazine, the staff said that he was impossible to work with. As far as Moore was concerned, he lost his job because he was set against a piece that was critical of the Sandinistas' record on human rights.
Either way, he won $58,000 damages in a suit for wrongful dismissal, sold his house and put all the money into making Roger and Me . The documentary was a notable critical, if not spectacular commercial, success. Thereafter Moore moved to New York and television, making zany political series such as TV Nation and The Awful Truth, which were full of Moore's trademark stunts designed to mock greed and ignorance and humbug.
Behind the scenes, however, a different picture was forming. Moore's employers were confronted with ever more regal demands. He insisted that Channel 4 house him at the Ritz when he worked in England on The Awful Truth, a fact he now portrays as the revenge of the working class against corporate might. Meanwhile employees grumbled. 'He's a jerk and a hypocrite and didn't treat us right and he was false in all of his dealings,' said one former worker. His former manager, Douglas Urbanski, has said that Moore 'was the most difficult man I've ever met... he's money-obsessed'."

Noam Chomsky: The Apotheosis of Ronald Reagan: Divinity Through Marketing

"There was something similar after the JFK assassination, but of course the assassination of a living president is quite different. I don't recall anything else remotely similar, perhaps since FDR, in the midst of a war, and of course he really was a significant figure, whatever one's judgment of him. Reagan is another story: mostly a PR creation in the first place, and massively so in recent years.
During his years in office, Reagan was not particularly popular. Gallup just published poll figures comparing him during office with other presidents. His average ratings during his years in office were below Kennedy, Johnson, Bush I, and Clinton; above Nixon, Ford, Carter. This is averages during their terms in office. By 1992 he was ranked just next to Nixon as the most unpopular living ex-president. Since then there has been an immense PR campaign to convert him into a revered and historic figure, if not semi-divine, and it's doubtless had an effect, radically shifting the rankings. Not on the basis of facts: rather, extremely effective marketing. The current performance is reminiscent of the death of Hirohito and Soviet leaders. One of the more depraved moments of US media. The lying is quite impressive, even by people who surely know better."

Molly Ivins: The day the Constitution died: June 8, 2004: Ashcroft's coronation of George W. Bush

"When, in the future, you find yourself wondering, "Whatever happened to the Constitution?" you will want to go back and look at June 8, 2004. That was the day the attorney general of the United States -- a.k.a. "the nation's top law enforcement officer" -- refused to provide the Senate Judiciary Committee with his department's memos concerning torture. . . .
In order to justify torture, these memos declare that the president is bound by neither U.S. law nor international treaties. We have put ourselves on the same moral level as Saddam Hussein, the only difference being quantity. Quite literally, the president may as well wear a crown -- forget that "no man is above the law" jazz. We used to talk about "the imperial presidency" under Nixon, but this is the real thing. The damage is incalculable. When America puts out its annual report on human rights abuses, we will be a laughingstock. I suggest a special commission headed by Sen. John McCain to dig out everyone responsible, root and branch. If the lawyers don't cooperate, perhaps we should try stripping them, anally raping them and dunking their heads under water until they think they're drowning, and see if that helps.
And I think it is time for citizens to take some responsibility, as well. Is this what we have come to? Is this what we want our government to do for us? Oh and by way, to my fellow political reporters who keep repeating that Bush is having a wonderful week: Why don't you think about what you stand for?"

What recovery? Working poor struggle to pay bills

" "There is a systematic ratcheting down of jobs that once could support a family," says Greg Denier, a spokesman with the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union. "The real question is, what does this mean for the future of the American worker?"
The fate of the working poor is becoming a major issue for politicians, union groups and activists who are now calling for reform. Unions are launching membership drives and protests - part of an effort to preserve benefits and boost pay for service-sector jobs in much the same way that union muscle helped raise the standard of living for manufacturing workers in the mid-20th century.
The rise in low-wage workers is also a catalyst for activists who are waging campaigns to pass living-wage ordinances, which are local laws that require some businesses to pay employees more than the federal minimum wage of $5.15 an hour. The grass-roots effort is having an impact. So far, more than 120 ordinances mandating living wages have been passed. In San Francisco, a citywide wage of $8.50 an hour went into effect in February.
The increase is shaping new public dialogue about poverty in America. Philip Coltoff, who is chief executive of the philanthropic Children's Aid Society, looks out of the window of his Park Avenue South office in New York. Bike messengers, taxi drivers and street vendors hawking hot dogs and ball caps populate the street. These people, he says, are the new faces of the working poor.
"This is a very interesting sociological change. We've created a new class of poor. There is this huge group of people who want to work, who are working, but it's a form of being indentured," Coltoff says. "America has always been built on the belief that you can do better, but we have shut down the ladder to the middle class." "

Jim Hightower: The ugly economics of privatized war

"The first question reveals the ugly fact that the military itself has become a for-profit enterprise. Corporations not only provide the weaponry, but increasingly they also provide the war personnel –– everyone from armed troops to essential supply squadrons. This is rationalized on the basis that a Halliburton can do it cheaper. But do they? To get people to go to Iraq, Halliburton pays $80,000 to $100,000 a year for a truck driver or mess cook, plus health care and life insurance. Not to mention the overhead and guaranteed profit that Halliburton tacks onto each of the pay stubs it submits to us taxpayers. A soldier doing comparable work is paid a fourth of that.
The second question speaks volumes about America's ugly economic policies. By deliberately pushing outsourcing, union-busting, and low-wage Wal-Mart jobs, our corporate and political leaders have created a huge pool of the working poor. These are the people who, out of necessity, will take Halliburton's pay check, even though it means separation from family, 14-hour days seven days a week, and exposure to kidnapping, torture, and death. Unlike soldiers, these contract workers are poorly prepared –– they get only one week of training.
What we have here is an immoral system of war profiteering at the expense of taxpayers, the working poor... and America's democratic values."

Must read: Reagan: The Great White Redeemer

"With the death of Reconstruction, the great American leap into social modernity was aborted. What followed was not only a descent into Jim Crow hell for Black folks, but the arrested development of the United States as a civilized society. For the next 60 years, American politics was dominated by a national corporate oligarchy and a one-party apartheid political order in the South, armed with congressional veto power over federal social legislation. For three generations, until the Great Depression of the 1930s made the conversation unavoidable, American rulers more or less successfully suppressed the mere discussion of a social contract between capital and labor and among citizens. How could it have been otherwise, since white America had rejected the equality clause of Reconstruction’s proposed contract with Black America?. . .
A quarter century later, the Reaganite momentum shows no signs of having exhausted itself. As journalist Joe Davidson puts it:

During his two terms in office, Reagan captured, solidified and came to personify America’s move to the political right. His greatest legacy is as leader of that swing in the American political spectrum. That shift made “liberal” a dirty word and Democrats cower. What had been conservative became moderate. What was moderate was pushed to the left wing. The shift was so pronounced and profound that black America giddily embraced Bill Clinton despite his promotion of programs, criminal justice and welfare policies in particular, that would have been called racist and reactionary under Reagan. . . .

Persons not enthralled at the pageantry of Reagan’s sendoff wonder, what is this national display really about?
It is white Americans deeply engaged in the rituals of self-worship – a heresy and abomination that usually portends great violence in the fires of “Redemption.” "

We'll still be paying for Reagan's legacy for decades

"DON'T be surprised if Ronald Reagan's death inspires members of Congress to try once again to put his face on the dime, replacing Franklin Roosevelt.
Hard currency, though, isn't the best place for Reagan's likeness.
A credit card would be a more fitting homage.Reagan reshaped our popular view of economics, and with it, our view of debt. He transformed us from the world's largest creditor to its largest debtor.
His vision is still with us. It lives on in the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts enacted by the current administration, in the record deficits that have surpassed Reagan's own and in the feel-good projections that the country's finances will sort themselves out in about 10 years and everything will be OK.
Reagan's policies sparked an unprecedented economic expansion, but it came at a price. We got so enamored with the prosperity, we forgot the meter was running.
Reagan didn't invent the buy now, pay later approach to public policy, of course. In the 1960s, Lyndon Johnson ladled on social programs like Medicare and food stamps while at the same time paying to wage war in Vietnam, all without raising taxes.
That ignited inflation in the 1970s and left the economy vulnerable to spikes in oil prices."

United States: Poor Version of Democracy

"While the United States wages war to expand democracy around the world, how is our own democracy doing? Not very well, says a group of distinguished scholars.
"[T]he voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally," declares a task force of the American Political Science Association. "The privileged participate more than others and are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average citizens and the least affluent."
Disparities in political participation, the report says, "ensure that ordinary Americans speak in a whisper while the most advantaged roar.". . .
While the United States wages war to expand democracy around the world, how is our own democracy doing? Not very well, says a group of distinguished scholars. . . .
Since the early 1970s, the report says, we have seen "a massive mobilization into politics of advantaged groups that had not previously been active in Washington." With the decline in union membership, "the already privileged are better organized through occupational associations than the less privileged."
If the golden rule means that those who have the gold make the rules, that principle is alive and well in our campaigns. The task force, chaired by Lawrence Jacobs of the University of Minnesota, notes that while "[o]nly 12 percent of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000," 95 percent of the donors who made "substantial contributions" to political activity were in those wealthy households."

Gorby had the lead role, not Gipper

"It was his arms buildup, Republican admirers say, and his menacing rhetoric that brought the Soviets to their knees and changed the world forever. He was a pleasant man, the 40th president, which makes this fairy tale easier to swallow than some of history's other canards. Truth be known, however, the Iron Curtain's collapse was hardly Ronald Reagan's doing.
It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice -- actors don't like to be upstaged -- but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.
As a journalist based first in Washington, then in Moscow, I was fortunate to witness the intriguing drama from both ends. . . .
The recasting of the story now suggests that President Reagan's defence-spending hikes -- as if there hadn't been American military buildups before -- somehow intimidated the Kremlin into its vast reform campaign. Or that America's economic strength -- as if the Soviets hadn't always been witheringly weak by comparison -- made the Soviet leader do it. . . .
But [Gorbachev] had decided that the continuing clash of East-West ideologies was senseless, that his sick and obsolescent society was desperate for democratic air. His historic campaign that followed wasn't about Ronald Reagan. It would have happened with or without this president. Rather, it was about him, Mikhail Gorbachev: his will, his inner strength, his human spirit. As for the Gipper, he was bold and wise enough, to shed his long-held preconceptions and become the Russian's admirable companion in the process."

Paul Krugman: An Economic Legend

"Here's a sample version of the legend: according to a recent article in The Washington Times, Ronald Reagan "crushed inflation along with left-wing Keynesian economics and launched the longest economic expansion in U.S. history." Actually, the 1982-90 economic expansion ranks third, after 1991-2001 and 1961-69 — but even that comparison overstates the degree of real economic success.
The secret of the long climb after 1982 was the economic plunge that preceded it. By the end of 1982 the U.S. economy was deeply depressed, with the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression. So there was plenty of room to grow before the economy returned to anything like full employment.
The depressed economy in 1982 also explains "Morning in America," the economic boom of 1983 and 1984. You see, rapid growth is normal when an economy is bouncing back from a deep slump. (Last year, Argentina's economy grew more than 8 percent.)
And the economic expansion under President Reagan did not validate his economic doctrine. His supply-side advisers didn't promise a one-time growth spurt as the economy emerged from recession; they promised, but failed to deliver, a sustained acceleration in economic growth.
Inflation did come down sharply on Mr. Reagan's watch: it was running at 12 percent when he took office, but was only 4.5 percent when he left. But this victory came at a heavy price. For much of the Reagan era, the economy suffered from very high unemployment. Despite the rapid growth of 1983 and 1984, over the whole of the Reagan administration the unemployment rate averaged a very uncomfortable 7.5 percent.
In other words, it all played out just as "left-wing Keynesian economics" predicted." "

David Corn: Reagan and the Media: A Love Story

"What is it about Republicans and their distrust of the mainstream media? As most news outlets are portraying the dead Ronald Reagan as an iconic and heroic figure, the Pew Research Center has released a survey that shows GOPers trust the major media organizations much less than Democrats. Only 15 to 17 percent of Republicans believe the network news shows are credible. Even Fox News Channel is trusted by only 29 percent of Republicans; CNN is trusted by 26 percent of this band. About a third of Democrats said they have faith in the networks, and 45 percent said they consider CNN credible. (Only one in four Democrats considered Fox a trustworthy news source.) The Pew report notes, "Republicans have become more distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four years, while Democratic evaluations of the news media have been mostly unchanged." "

An American in The Hague?

"The Bush administration has yet to accept much responsibility for the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. True, the president has apologized for the abuse on Arab television, and several top military officials in Iraq — including the general in charge of the prison and her boss — have been quietly suspended or will soon be transferred. But so far, legal responsibility has fallen exclusively on the seven court-martialed soldiers who were directly involved. Administration officials have argued that they themselves are not liable, since the incidents were the work of a few bad actors.
This may or may not be true. Even if no smoking gun is ever found to directly link American officials to the crimes, however, they could still find themselves in serious jeopardy under international law. Under the doctrine of command responsibility, officials can be held accountable for war crimes committed by their subordinates even if they did not order them — so long as they had control over the perpetrators, had reason to know about the crimes, and did not stop them or punish the criminals.
This doctrine is the product of an American initiative. Devised by Allied judges and prosecutors at the Nuremberg tribunals, it was a means to impute responsibility for wartime atrocities to Nazi leaders, who often communicated indirectly and avoided leaving a paper trail."

Wealthy U.S. investors avoiding stocks -survey

Wealthy U.S. investors are optimistic about the outlook for the stock market but worries about terrorism and other geopolitical factors have kept them from opening their wallets, according to a survey released on Tuesday,
The survey, sponsored by United States Trust Co., polled a sample considered among the wealthiest 1 percent of the population, based on adjusted gross income of more than $325,000 per year or a net worth greater than $5.9 million.
The respondents said they expect annualized stock market returns of 10 percent over the next three years and over the next 10 years. Their expectation over a one-year period was 8 percent.
But the optimism did not match the behavior of wealthy investors, said Paul Napoli, executive vice president and head of personal wealth management for U.S. Trust.
"They have taken a very defensive, very conservative posture," Napoli said in a telephone interview. The wealthy investors have about 40 percent of their portfolios in cash and bonds. About 33 percent is allocated to domestic equities. . . .
But the index's measurement of the U.S. economic outlook for the next 12 months fell dramatically from 40 in April to 15 in May -- the same level seen shortly after the 9/11 attacks. . . .
Questioned about their attitudes toward various financial advisers, only 19 percent rated stockbrokers or brokerage firms as very trustworthy. Insurance companies fared only a little better with 20 percentage rating them very trustworthy, and mutual fund companies were third from the bottom with 21 percent saying they were very trustworthy."

Ice cores unlock climate secrets

"Over the last 800,000 years the Earth has, on the whole, been a pretty chilly place. Interglacials - or warm spells - have come every 100,000 years and have generally been short-lived. Over the last 400,000 years, interglacials have lasted about 10,000 years, with climates similar to this one. Before that they were less warm, but lasted slightly longer.
We have already been in an interglacial for about 10,000 years, so we should - according to the pattern - be heading for an ice age. But we are not.
The Epica team has noticed the interglacial period of 400,000 years ago closely matches our own - because the shape of the Earth's orbit was the same then as it is now. That warm spell lasted a whopping 28,000 years - so ours probably will, too.
"The next ice age is not imminent," said Dr Wolff, "and greenhouse warming makes it even less likely - despite what The Day After Tomorrow says." "

House OKs Pre-emptive U.S. Attack Against Iran

"Undeterred by the results of pre-emptive war in Iraq, the House of Representatives passed a non-binding resolution May 6 authorizing pre-emptive military strikes against Iran. The vote was 376-3. . . .
House members said the legislation is in line with the Bush Doctrine of preventive war, and creates a legal framework for later sanctions and “military options” against Iranian nuclear sites. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) and Pete Stark (D-Calif.) both condemned the bill, noting its similarity to the law that permitted a preemptive war on Iraq.
The bills’ adoption capped a year of anti-Iranian efforts in Congress. . . .
British and American intelligence and special forces units have been put on alert for an Iran conflict within 12 months, according to British news sources. Also. the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz recently revealed that a special Mossad unit has been activated to draw up “Osirik II” (a reference to the 1981 Israeli bombing raids that destroyed the Osirak nuclear complex near Baghdad).
Mossad chief Meir Dagan declared Iranian nuclear capability to be the greatest threat ever faced by Israel. In December 2003, he informed the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that an operation to annihilate Iran’s facilities had been finalized."

MotherJones: Interview w/Paul Roberts: The End of Oil

"Not since the OPEC embargo of the 1970s have Americans been forced to take such a hard look at the nation’s reliance on oil, particularly the Middle Eastern variety. With gas selling at more than $2 a gallon, and a barrel of oil trading at $40 or more, the U.S. economy is feeling the pain at every level. And of course, the need to secure a reliable supply of oil from the Middle East explains, in large part, the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Now comes Paul Roberts to tell us in his new book, The End of Oil, that crude, besides being at the core of a host of political and economic problems, is getting harder to find, both in the Middle East and (especially) outside it -- meaning that high prices are here to stay, and that the United States can expect to become more, not less, dependent for its oil on volatile Middle Eastern countries.
Roberts says that Americans are “energy illiterate” -- we only think about the nation’s energy policy when oil prices hit us hard in the pocket. If the high price of oil keeps up, it may be just be the rude awakening needed for us to pressure politicians and in turn, the energy industry, to undertake massive investment in the alternatives to oil. If we don’t, the consequences will be disastrous: economic recession, environmental devastation, and further upheaval in the Middle East."

Must read: WashingtonPost: Class Warrior

"In his efforts to return capitalism to its previously unlamented Hobbesian past, Reagan had plenty of company. His helpmate Maggie Thatcher made similar changes on her side of the pond. Throughout the advanced capitalist nations, the power of workers weakened as the old industrial economies ceased to expand and global investment began to outrun the constraints of the state. But nowhere was the force of investment stronger and the force of labor weaker than in the United States. The explosion of the trade deficit, no less than the budget deficit, dates to Reagan's morning in America.
Reaganomics reflected the rise of Sunbelt capitalism -- of right-to-work-state businessmen who, unlike their Northern counterparts, had never cottoned at all to unions or regulations. From Reagan's dictum that government is the problem to Tom DeLay's equation of the Environmental Protection Agency with the Gestapo, the idea that there are higher purposes than private profit, or gainful pest extermination, has been banished from modern Republicanism. And though Reaganomics may have begun in the backwaters of American capitalism, it soon spread to Wall Street, which has rewarded our current Reaganaut, George W. Bush, with more money for his campaign than any other sector. Scrap the taxes on dividends, and that musty financial oversight, and watch finance become the political clone of the oil bidness.
By letting business be business in its pre-New Deal mold -- free to speculate and shed longtime employees -- Reagan and his acolytes not only transformed the classic Northeastern capitalists. They also drove from their ranks the Willkie-Eisenhower-Rockefeller-Nixon Republicans who were the traditional GOP's political tribunes. In this the Reaganites succeeded all too well."

Sidney Blumenthal: The u-turn that saved the Gipper: After Iran-contra, Reagan ditched the right and embraced Gorbachev

"Ronald Reagan's presidency collapsed at the precise moment on November 25 1986 when he appeared without notice in the White House briefing room, introduced his attorney general, Edwin Meese, and instantly departed from the stage. Meese announced that funds raised by members of the national security council and others by selling arms to Iran had been used to aid the Nicaraguan contras. Anti-terrorism laws and congressional resolutions had been wilfully violated. Eventually 11 people were convicted of felonies. In less than a week, Reagan's approval rating plunged from 67% to 46%, the greatest and quickest decline ever for a president.
On December 17 1986, William Casey, the director of the CIA, was scheduled to testify before the Senate intelligence committee. But he collapsed into a coma, suffering from brain cancer, never to recover. Lt Col Oliver North, Casey's action officer on the NSC, explained to a select congressional investigation that Casey had been the mastermind in creating an "overseas entity ... self-financing, independent", that would conduct "US foreign policy" as a "stand-alone". Called "the Enterprise", it was the apotheosis of the Reagan doctrine, the waging of a global war for the rollback of communism."

Monsters Inc.: Agent Orange, Kathie Lee sweatshops, and an eco-friendly CEO: You'll find it all in 'The Corporation'.

"Early on, the film is organized around an intriguing conceit: A speedy history introduces the legal development that helped launch the meteoric rise of the corporation; after the Civil War, lawyers began to argue that corporations were “people.” Therefore, the 14th Amendment, created to ensure the equal rights of freed slaves, was also applicable to their clients. As legally recognized “persons,” corporations thus deserved the same rights and safeguards. So, the filmmakers ask, if a corporation is a person, just what kind of person are we dealing with here?
An insane one, it turns out. Through a series of case studies on pollution, exploitative labor practices, and deceptive marketing strategies, the filmmakers make a convincing argument for putting the corporation in a straitjacket. The corporation is relentlessly selfish; its primary goal, to the exclusion of all others, is to turn a profit for its shareholders. Using up and leaving the cheap labor forces of poor countries? “An incapacity to maintain enduring relationships,” according to the psychoanalysist’s diagnostic guide, the DSM-IV. Spraying DDT all over people or lying much about antibiotics in milk? “Reckless disregard for the safety of others.”
The corporation, the film argues, suffers from a debilitating lack of empathy, an inability to accept responsibility for its actions or to feel sorrow or remorse for the consequences of what it does. The filmmakers’ verdict: According to the DSM-IV, the corporation is … a prototypical psychopath."

Interview w/Gore Vidal: The Last Noble Defender of the American Republic

"Juan Gonzalez: You talk about President Bush throwing matches or lighting matches in the forest. Your book, I thought, some of the most powerful parts were when you go into all of the outright lies of the Bush administration, and you spend quite a bit of time on his Healthy Forest Initiative and his response to wildfires. Can you expound a little bit on this?

Gore Vidal: Well, part of imperial America is just sort of a list of the lies that he has told us, and there's a special law against people who lie to the American people, whether they're in the Legislative Branch of the government, Judiciary or the Executive, like the president. He has now told so many lies that he knew to be lies, and that we know to be lies about everything that he can be on, I think it's 12 counts – he can be impeached immediately, without much fuss, if you had a majority of people who wanted to impeach him in the House of Representatives. Then we go on trial in the senate as poor Bill Clinton found when he lied about sex, which in my day that is what gentlemen were supposed to do."

Agence France Presse: Reagan Played Decisive Role in Saddam Hussein's Survival in Iran-Iraq War

"A May 9, 1984 memo unearthed by the National Security Archive, a Washington research organization, noted that US policy for the sale of dual-use equipment to Iraq's nuclear program also was reviewed.
The memo said its "preliminary results favor expanding such trade to include Iraqi nuclear entities."
By March 1985, the United States was issuing Baghdad export permits for high tech equipment crucial for its weapons of mass destruction programs, according to Pollack. . . .
The aid came despite clear evidence as early as mid-1983 that Iraq was using chemical weapons on Iranian forces.
Washington said nothing publicly, but noted "almost daily" Iraqi use of chemical weapons in internal reports.
"We have recently received additional information confirming Iraqi use of chemical weapons," a November 1, 1983 State Department memo said. "We also know that Iraq has acquired a CW production capability, primarily from western firms, including possibly a US foreign subsidiary."
It said "our best present chance of influencing cessation of CW use may be in the context of informing Iraq of these measures."
Washington did not publicly denounce Iraqi use of chemical weapons until March, 1984 after it was documented in a UN study.
The Reagan administration opened full diplomatic relations with Baghdad in November, 1984. Iraqi chemical attacks continued not only on Iranian forces but also on Kurdish civilians, notably at Hallabja in 1987.
For its support, Pollack wrote, Washington got a bulwhark against Iran, cheap oil and Iraqi support for peace negotiations with Israel."

The children of the garbage fields in Phnom Penh

"The air was hot, thick and sickeningly sweet, with countless odors of decay. Smoke rose up from the putrid waste. Sameth, my Khmer stringer, and I stepped off the motorcycle, and sank several inches into foul mud. Garbage was piled stories high, covering the kilometers long dump site. People, the wretchedly poor, clad only in rags, swarmed over the heaps of refuse, like ants, searching out the saleable morsels, that would keep them alive, to pick trash another day.
"I told you they were poor," said Sameth, as if I hadn't believed him. And, in a way, I hadn't. We've all read about the desperate poor who comb the trash heaps of Sao Paolo and Rio. But somehow, the depth, the sheer magnitude of human suffering could only be appreciated when experienced first hand.
We had only been in the dump a few minutes, and I was already nauseous. Sameth was choking back bile. We would be leaving soon. But to the dwellers of the trash dump at Stung Mien Jai, this was their home. And, like prisoners on a life sentence, they would never be leaving. Trying to imagine what depths of poverty would drive human beings to such a desperate existence, it seemed ironic, that we were only 70 km from the posh hotels and foreigner hangouts of Phnom Penh. . . .
"Man holds in his mortal hands, the power to annihilate all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life." -- JFK
My words and my photos seemed a weak medicine against the virus of poverty. But it was all I had. I had to try."

A Nicaraguan Priest Remembers the CIA's Contra War: Reagan was the Butcher of My People

"First of all, let me start out by saying that, of course, Reagan is now dead. And I, for one, would like to say only nice things about him. I'm not insensitive to the feelings of many U.S. people mourning President Reagan, but as I pray that God in his infinite mercy and goodness forgives him for having been the butcher of my people, for having been responsible for the deaths of some 50,000 Nicaraguans, we cannot, we should not, ever forget the crimes he committed in the name of what he falsely labeled "freedom and democracy."
More perhaps than any other U.S. President, Reagan convinced many around the world that the U.S. is a fraud, a big lie. Not only was it not democratic, but, in fact, the greatest enemy of the right of self-determination of peoples. Reagan was known as the "great communicator" and I believe that that is true only if one believes that to be a great communicator means to be a good liar. That he was for sure. He could proclaim the biggest lies without even as much as blinking an eyelash. Hearing him talk about how we were supposedly persecuting Jews and burning down non-existent synagogues, I was led to believe really, that Reagan was possessed by demons. Frankly, I do believe Reagan at that time as much as Bush today was indeed possessed by the demons of manifest destiny."

In Mayfield case, fingers are pointing

"When the FBI went through Brandon Mayfield's possessions to investigate his connection with the Madrid train bombings, agents seized what they called "miscellaneous Spanish documents."
As The New York Times reported, Mayfield's family later identified the documents as his children's Spanish homework. . . .
But by April 13, according to the Times, the Spanish told the FBI that the match was "conclusively negative." In a meeting with the FBI in Spain April 21, Spanish officials insisted there was no match, while FBI agents insisted there was -- but never asked to see the actual bag.
By then, the FBI had found that Mayfield was a Muslim convert, that he was often seen driving to the Bilal Mosque, and that he had represented, in a child custody suit, one of the Portland Seven convicted terrorists.
It's understandable that these discoveries -- or the fingerprint match itself -- would set off alarms. The question is whether the discoveries about Mayfield began to overwhelm the weaknesses the Spanish kept noting in the fingerprint match.
The claim of probable cause, says federal public defender Steven Wax, was based on "some sort of guilt by association with people who may have had contacts with other people the government had concerns about."
And then, Mayfield's possession of "miscellaneous Spanish documents."

RALLBLOG: Rush Declares Jihad On Your Humble Narrator!

[Ted} RALL: (taped quote) Well, I have more sympathy for the 290 million Americans who are living worse lives under a worse economy, being paid less with worse health care, with more homelessness, with more poverty than there would have been had Ronald Reagan never become president. So for me, you're right, I don't have that much sympathy for him.

RUSH [Limbaugh]: Folks, seriously, what am I supposed to do with this? This is so asinine that it is beneath all of our dignity to even set it straight. But I know some of you want, okay, homelessness, health care, wages, economy, 290 million Americans living worse today because of Reagan. What is sad about this is that such an imbecile and such an ignoramus ends up as a prominent cartoonist in major newspapers. This guy could not pass a basic civics test. This guy could not pass a recent American history test. This guy could not get a college diploma today. He couldn't get a high school diploma with what his view of history is.

(RALL: Columbia University, Rush. Class of 1991. Major: history. With honors. Sorry, try again. Thanks for playing.)

Worse and worse: Country in crisis

"In Salon.com | The Reagan legacy, Rick Perlstein writes:

"It is a quirk of American culture that each generation of nonconservatives sees the right-wingers of its own generation as the scary ones, then chooses to remember the right-wingers of the last generation as sort of cuddly. In 1964, observers horrified by Barry Goldwater pined for the sensible Robert Taft, the conservative leader of the 1950s. When Reagan was president, liberals spoke fondly of sweet old Goldwater."

I think Republican administrations actually have been worse each time, moving farther and farther to the right as well as into greater illegalities. I think this reflects the extent to which their party has been increasingly taken over by this far-right, post-Bircher, Scaife-funded, fanatical cult-like corporate/Christian/libertarian "movement conservatism."
Nixon had to resign for things that Reagan picked up and did from day 1 without apology. . . .
I believe that had Clinton recognized that the Republican Party has truly changed into a dangerous revolutionary movement intent on overthrowing our form of government, and taken action, purged the government of far-right ideologues and begun an investigation into his predecessor's political crimes as well as how money was siphoned out of the Treasury under Reagan and Bush, he would not have gone through the impeachment, and we would not be facing the national and international disaster we face now."

Utne: A Dirty Dozen: Sub-cabinet policy operatives actually run government

"Wheeze! Hack! Gasp! Gag! Bleeeeecch!
If America's air, water, global warming, and other enviro policies seem to you like they're coming right out of a corporate smokestack, that's because they are.
Bush has not merely put our government in service to polluters and plunderers, he has put it directly into their hands. It's not just a matter of the corporate-hugging, cabinet-level sparklies at the top of Washington's environmental pyramid -- Gale Norton (Interior), Mike Leavitt (EPA), Spencer Abraham (Energy), Ann Veneman (Ag). Rather, the daily dirty work is being done by dozens of industry no-names, trusted lobbyists, and ideological hacks whom Bush has installed in key positions deep inside the innards of the pyramid, where they quietly but zealously are re-engineering the flow of national policy from pure public protection to poisonous private profits."

'A Time To Weep'

"This is not a speech. Two weeks ago I set aside the speech I prepared. This is a cry from the heart, a lamentation for the loss of this country's goodness and therefore its greatness. Future historians studying the decline and fall of America will mark this as the time the tide began to turn -- toward a mean-spirited mediocrity in place of a noble beacon. 
For me the final blow was American guards laughing over the naked, helpless bodies of abused prisoners in Iraq. "There is a time to laugh," the Bible tells us, "and a time to weep." Today I weep for the country I love, the country I proudly served, the country to which my four grandparents sailed over a century ago with hopes for a new land of peace and freedom. I cannot remain silent when that country is in the deepest trouble of my lifetime. 
I am not talking only about the prison abuse scandal -- that stench will someday subside. Nor am I referring only to the Iraq war -- that too will pass -- nor to any one political leader or party. This is no time for politics as usual, in which no one responsible admits responsibility, no one genuinely apologizes, no one resigns, and everyone else is blamed. 
The damage done to this country by its own misconduct in the last few months and years, to its very heart and soul, is far greater and longer lasting than any damage that any terrorist could possibly inflict upon us. The stain on our credibility, our reputation for decency and integrity, will not quickly wash away."

China: Beware the petrodragon's roar

"The decision last week by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to raise oil output by 2.5 million barrels per day  was largely aimed at countering market fears of an impending oil shock. With crude-oil prices hovering in the high-US$30 price range, way above OPEC's alleged benchmark $22-$28 price range, everybody from the Thai government to the airline industry has been muttering about the negative impact of high oil prices on economic performance. . . .
Chinese demand so far has been dizzying. When OPEC met earlier in the year it had no intention of raising output, but its hand was in effect forced on the back of Chinese demand, which accounts for nearly half of this year's surge in demand, and US concerns over rising gasoline prices. Energy demand in the Pearl River Delta and Shanghai region is so strong that power is already being rationed, and many factories have taken to installing generators to hedge against blackouts. This in turn has resulted in shortages of diesel as companies stockpile supplies for the peak energy-consumption period this summer. Various oil companies are falling over themselves to supply the hydrocarbon frenzy in the world's second-largest oil importer. The current situation of high prices and strong demand has been further aggravated by China's low inventories and the pegging of its currency to a weak US dollar."

BBC: Is the world's oil running out fast?

The adherents of the peak oil theory warn the decline of world oil output will force oil prices higher for good, and that the knock on effects could be catastrophic.
"In my opinion, unfortunately, there will be no linear change," says Iran's Ali Bakhtiari. "There will only be sudden explosive change."
"The people who will be least affected will be the super poor, who already have no access to energy, and the super rich who do not care if oil is $100 a barrel.". . .
He pinned his hopes for an increase in production squarely on troubled Saudi Arabia.
"If Saudi does not increase supply by 3 million barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times. They must invest."
Can Saudi deliver? But even Mr Birol admitted that Saudi production was "about flat". Three million extra barrels a day would mean a huge 30% leap in output in just a few months. . . .
And the number of major new oil fields discovered around the world fell to zero for the first time in 2003, despite an obvious increase in technological expertise.
"We need transparency with the figures," says Dr Campbell. "This avoids profiteering from shortages, the collapse of poor countries and it will stimulate alternatives.". . .
"Consumer countries need to be able to audit fields, but at the same time 'flat earth' economists who believe in endless growth need to change their ideas." And Dr Campbell has a dire warning: "If the real figures were to come out there would be panic on the stock markets, in the end that would suit no one." "

I've had just about enough deification for one day: No Praise for Reagan

"Spare me the heapings of praise for Ronald Reagan.
He was one of the worst presidents we've ever had.
In fact, he should have been impeached for the Iran-Contra scandal, and he might have been had Congress and the media just done their jobs. Reagan misappropriated funds, and then he lied about it. He traded with Iran, an enemy of the United States, and he lied about that, too.
But Congress went weak in the knees when Ollie North showed up strutting in his uniform.
And the media fell down, too. Katherine Graham, owner of The Washington Post, said the country couldn't handle another impeachment crisis, and so the Post downplayed it.
Let's be clear on Reagan's record."

Bush to the US Constitution: Drop Dead

Q: Is the Convention Against Torture (CAT) a treaty?
A: Yes.
Q: Did the president sign it?
A: Yes, President Reagan signed it on April 11, 1988 and the senate ratified it on October 21, 1994.
Q: Why did it take so long to be ratified?
A: Because on signing the treaty the US made a list of several reservations including this one: "That the United States declares that the provisions of articles 1 through 16 of the Convention are not self-executing."
Q: What did that mean?
A: That meant that specific laws had to be passed and signed into law which essentially made torture a crime under United States Law and provided for jurisdiction by the US regardless of where torture is committed provided either the "the alleged offender is a national of the United States; or the alleged offender is present in the United States, irrespective of the nationality of the victim or alleged offender." This law is commonly referred to as either the CAT implementing legislation or the Torture Statute.
Q: So the terms of the Convention Against Torture is the law of the land in the United States, right?
A: Yes it is, with the exception of the few reservations the US made.
Q: Aren't there exceptions when torture can be justified?
A: No, Article 2 Paragraph 2 states "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."

'Harry Potter' Producer condemns Hollywood films

"The Mexican producer of the third Harry Potter film has called Hollywood movies worthless.
"Hollywood is a machine, 90% of whose product is garbage," said Alfonso Cuaron, the producer credited with the success of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. . . .
He went on to say that although there are some good things about Hollywood, it makes the worst cinema in the world. . . .
Cuaron came to prominence in 1991 with Solo Con tu Pareja (Only with Your Partner), then in 1995 with the Hollywood production A Little Princess, and in 2001 with the road movie Y tu Mama Tambien."

Police to monitor chat rooms to thwart paedophiles

"Police are to monitor conversations on internet chat rooms in a bid to prevent paedophiles from grooming victims on the web. Officers in the UK, US and Australia will monitor the sites 24 hours a day, the BBC reported. The National Crime Squad in the UK is to play a key role in the setting up the surveillance operation, along with the FBI in America.
One of the proposals for deterring paedophiles is to flash up a symbol on computer screens to let chat rooms users know they are being watched. Police could then intervene if someone is asked for their name and address online."

Ted Rall: REAGAN'S SHAMEFUL LEGACY: Mourn for Us, Not the Proto-Bush

"Reagan's defenders, people who don't know the facts or choose to ignore them, claim that "everybody" admired Reagan's ebullient personality even if some disagreed with his politics. That, like the Gipper's tall tales about welfare queens and "homeless by choice" urban campers, is a lie. Millions of Americans cringed at Reagan's simplistic rhetoric, were terrified that his anti-Soviet "evil empire" posturing would provoke World War III, and thought that his appeal to selfishness and greed--a bastardized blend of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand--brought out the worst in us. We rolled our eyes when Reagan quipped "There you go again"; what the hell did that mean? Given that he made flying a living hell (by firing the air traffic controllers and regulating the airlines), I'm not the only one who refuses to call Washington National Airport by its new name. His clown-like dyed hair and rouged cheeks disgusted us. We hated him during the dark days he made so hideous, and, with all due respect, we hate him still."
(courtesy of d)

Scientific American: Bush-League Lysenkoism: The White House bends science to its will

"Starting in the 1930s, the Soviets spurned genetics in favor of Lysenkoism, a fraudulent theory of heredity inspired by Communist ideology. Doing so crippled agriculture in the U.S.S.R. for decades. You would think that bad precedent would have taught President George W. Bush something. But perhaps he is no better at history than at science. . . .
Let us offer more examples of our own. The Department of Health and Human Services deleted information from its Web sites that runs contrary to the president's preference for "abstinence only" sex education programs. The Office of Foreign Assets Control made it much more difficult for anyone from "hostile nations" to be published in the U.S., so some scientific journals will no longer consider submissions from them. The Office of Management and Budget has proposed overhauling peer review for funding of science that bears on environmental and health regulations--in effect, industry scientists would get to approve what research is conducted by the EPA. . . .
Blind loyalists to the president will dismiss the UCS report because that organization often tilts left--never mind that some of those signatories are conservatives. They may brush off this magazine's reproofs the same way, as well as the regular salvos launched by California Representative Henry A. Waxman of the House Government Reform Committee [see Insights] and maybe even Arizona Senator John McCain's scrutiny for the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation. But it is increasingly impossible to ignore that this White House disdains research that inconveniences it."

The Angry Arab: A Post from Lebanon

"When in Rome: subvert the Romans, oppose the Romans, and go against the Romans, always.
There is so much racism in Lebanon. At nice restaurants, they now have a woman who sit outside the restrooms to clean them regularly. She is ALWAYS either Sri Lankan or African. I wrote once a piece on Sri Lankan maids in Lebanon; it will be coming out in a book on Women and Human Rights. Just heard this guy at the Internet cafe where I am say this: "I have nothing against Gay people; I am just disgusted by them, that is all." There is so much income inequality in Lebanon largely due to the programs of the disgusting Prime Minister billionaire Rafic Hariri--this is funny, as I just realized that I am looking at his massive palace through the glass window. More on that dude later. ME and US are the areas with the most income inequality worldwide; China is catching up soon due to capitalist "reforms." There is also so much racism in Lebanon against the poor and impoverished Syrian workers. When I criticize the Lebanese, by the way, I am referring to Upper Class Lebanese who--like in every society--are responsible for the dissemination of values, mores, and ideas in the larger society. Anti-Americanism in the Middle East is a complicated issue. You do not really encounter racist blanket hatred of all Americans here, much to the dismay of Bin Laden kooks. Last night, I saw in the downtown area of Beirut where it is very crowded around mid-night, a Lebanese man walking with an American flag shirt. Nobody even noticed. Another guy had a T-Shirt which had "CIA" on the back. Kid you not. Nobody noticed. There is however widespread detestation of Bush and for American wars around the world. I asked my 13-year old nephew about the political views of his classmates, and he said: "Of course, everybody is opposed to the US." They distinguish here between their fierce opposition to US government and wars, and between the American people, culture, etc."

Bush is No Reagan: Getting Reagan Wrong

"Ronald Reagan himself wouldn't recognize the Ronald Reagan today's conservatives are peddling. Back in the day, he could vex the right as well as the left. As we rewrite the late Gipper into our history books, the pundits claim Dubya to be Reagan's political heir.
But they're only half right. Bush the Lesser emulates Reagan's weaknesses, while discarding his virtues. Reagan's chief virtue is that he was never as naive or as stubborn as George W. Bush.
Today's GOP is the party of all tax cuts, all the time. The current administration has cut taxes every year since they came to power, promising more of the same. According to Dick Cheney, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter." But Reagan himself might beg to differ.
As bad as Reagan's deficits were, they'd have been much worse if he hadn't had the sense to realize when he'd made a mistake. Government revenues fell sharply following his 1981 tax cut--exactly the opposite of what "supply-side economists" had predicted. So Dutch signed a bill that repealed fully a third of the original cut.
Reagan, in fact, raised taxes four times in his first term alone. That includes the largest tax increase in history. Republicans like to claim that title for Bill Clinton's 1993 tax bill, but if you use constant dollars, Ron's 1983 package comes out ahead. Of course, Clinton raised taxes for the wealthy and then later cut taxes on working folks, while Reagan did just the op! po! site.
After his initial tax cuts heavily favored the wealthy, Reagan signed off on a regressive payroll tax increase that plugged the actuarial hole in the Social Security program. As a result, the trust fund is solvent until the year 2042, but 80% of the population pays more in payroll taxes than in income taxes. The Reagan administration was then able to mask the true size of their deficits by borrowing from the Baby Boomers' retirement funds--just as Bush is doing today."

MICKEY Z.: Good Mourning, America: Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions

"I see Dubya and raise him this: I declare Friday, June 11 a national day of mourning for Raygun's victims. As Bill Blum says, Ronnie's "biggest crimes were the bloody military actions to suppress social and political change in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Afghanistan." Raygun called the Nicaraguan contras "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers" and this noble group of "freedom fighters" regularly attacked civilians, cutting off women's breasts and men's testicles, gouging out eyes, beheading infants, using children for target practice, and slitting throats and pulling the victim's tongue out through the slit.
Let us mourn then for the 14-year-old Nicaraguan girl who was gang-raped and decapitated by Raygun's moral heroes...her head placed on a stake as a warning to government supporters in her village. (The chairman of Americas Watch and Helsinki Watch concluded "the US cannot avoid responsibility for these atrocities.")"

The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will the Earth Accept His Corpse?

"[Reagan's Secretary of Interior James] Watt had doomed himself by denouncing the members of the federal coal-leasing commission as "a black, a woman, two Jews and a cripple." The commissioners had shown the audacity to resist Watt's demented shale-oil scheme, which sought to transform the Great Plains into a moonlike landscape of craters and toxic slush ponds. So like Earl Butz before him, Watt's political obituary was written with a racist slur. It's probably fitting that he fell from such a self-inflicted trifle. After all, he was an unrepentent bigot, just like his boss Ronnie. Ask any Apache.
Of course, the Christian fundamentalist and apostle of strip-mining from Wyoming nearly lost his job over another bone-headed misdemeanor: his attempt to bar the Beach Boys from performing at a 4th of July concert on the National Mall. Reagan had to intervene personally on behalf of that All-American band, whose music could have provided the soundtrack for the sunny brand of trickle-down utopianism the president was trying to force-feed the country in those days. The Gipper, who, if nothing else, always demonstrated a keen pr sense, may well have lost confidence in Watt at that precise moment.
But the Interior Secretary, who once declared that the end of the Earth was so close at hand that there was no reason to fret about conserving ecosystems for the long haul, had been on the ropes from the beginning of his tenure, due in large part to the Dump Watt campaign initiated by Brower and his group Friends of the Earth only weeks after Watt's nomination was confirmed by the US senate. Within a few months, Friends of the Earth had gathered more than two million signatures on a petition calling for Watt's removal. In those days, the right to petition the government still seemed to stand for something.
Watt's approach to the plunder of the planet seethed with an evangelical fervor. He brought with him to Washington a gang of libertarian missionaries, mostly veterans of the Coors-funded Mountain States Legal Foundation, who referred to themselves as the Colorado Crazies. Their mission: privatize the public estate. Many of them were transparent crooks who ended up facing indictment and doing time in federal prison for self-dealing and public corruption. They gave away billions in public timber, coal and oil to favored corporations, leaving behind toxic scars where there used to be wild forests, trout streams and deserts. These thieves were part of the same claque of race-baiting zealots who demonized welfare mothers as swindlers of the public treasury. . . .
Watt, who was himself charged with 25 felony counts of lying and obstruction of justice, never hid his rapine agenda behind soft, made-for-primetime rhetoric. He never preached about win-win solutions, ecological forestry or sustainable development. From the beginning, James Watt's message was clear: grab it all, grab it now. God wills it so. The message was so high-pitched and unadulterated that it provoked a fierce global resistance that frustrated Watt at nearly every turn. In the end, he achieved almost nothing for the forces of darkness."

Slums a breeding ground for al-Qaeda amid Saudi splendour

"The slum south of Riyadh where an Irish cameraman was killed and a British BBC reporter critically wounded is a short drive from the bright neon lights, towering skyscrapers, massive gated palaces and walled residential compounds of one of the world's wealthiest capitals.
But, as the impoverished epicentre of the kingdom's new Islamic insurgency, it is a world away from the Saudi capital's veneer of 21st-century modernity.
The Al-Suwaidi district has a reputation as a bastion of strict Wahhabism even among the other residents of the ultra-conservative Islamic kingdom.
It attracts a steady stream of villagers from the surrounding countryside in search of a better life in the city.
The more than half-a-million people already crammed into the district live in a massive entanglement of narrow lanes, potholed roads and open sewers, and suffer frequent power and water outages.
They are the people most attracted by al-Qaeda's call to rid the kingdom of corruption and decadence, and the slum has predictably become a fertile breeding ground for Islamic extremism."

What Price Freedom? How Big Brother Is Watching, Listening and Misusing Information About You

"You’re on your way to work in the morning and place a call on your wireless phone. As your call is relayed by the wireless tower, it is also relayed by another series of towers to a microwave antenna on top of Mount Weather between Leesburg and Winchester, Virginia and then beamed to another antenna on top of an office building in Arlington where it is recorded on a computer hard drive.
The computer also records your phone's digital serial number, which is used to identify you through your wireless company phone bill that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency already has on record as part of your permanent file.
A series of sophisticated computer programs listens to your phone conversation and looks for “keywords” that suggest suspicious activity. If it picks up those words, an investigative file is opened and sent to the Department of Homeland Security.
Congratulations. Big Brother has just identified you as a potential threat to the security of the United States because you might have used words like “take out” (as in taking someone out when you were in fact talking about ordering takeout for lunch) or “D-Day” (as in deadline for some nefarious activity when you were talking about going to the new World War II Memorial to recognize the 60th anniversary of D-Day).
If you are lucky, an investigator at DHS will look at the entire conversation in context and delete the file. Or he or she may keep the file open even if they realize the use of words was innocent. Or they may decide you are, indeed, a threat and set up more investigation, including a wiretap on your home and office phones, around-the-clock surveillance and much closer looks at your life.". . .
“We have a police state far beyond anything George Orwell imagined in his book 1984,” says privacy expert Susan Morrissey. “The everyday lives of virtually every American are under scrutiny 24-hours-a-day by the government.”
Paul Hawken, owner of the data information mining company Groxis, agrees, saying the government is spending more time watching ordinary Americans than chasing terrorists and the bad news is that they aren’t very good at it.
“It’s the Three Stooges go to data mining school,” says Hawken. “Even worse, DARPA is depending on second-rate companies to provide them with the technology, which only increases the chances for errors.” "

Reagan's Legacy in Afghanistan Debated

"While Afghanistan did become a magnet for "Arab bad boys," Islamic extremists were already active before they arrived, Beardon said. Also, Reagan's administration did not give weapons to Arab "volunteers" but focused on Afghan factions, experts said.
Nevertheless, Clarke said, when Washington engaged Saudi Arabia and other Arab states in the anti-Soviet fight, "America sought (or acquiesced in) the importation into Afghanistan and Pakistan of an army of 'Arabs' without considering who they were or what would happen to them after the Soviets left."
Nobody predicted these tacit U.S. allies would later turn so threatening toward America. "I think it would have been very difficult to forsee," said Katzman.
Critics complain the United States should have given its funding to moderate Afghan tribal groups and accuse Washington of being beholden to Pakistan's intelligence service, which channeled U.S. aid to the most extreme Afghan factions.
More broadly, experts fault Reagan's successor, father of the current president, and President Bill Clinton, for "walking away" from Afghanistan and Pakistan after the Soviet departure, allowing extremists to find havens there."

What Would Reagan Do?

"I'm certainly not going to try to appropriate Reagan as an antiwar icon; his record puts the lie to that. Yet, despite several unfortunate interventions – and the blowback those interventions nourished – Reagan's record also gives the lie to his appropriation by the neocons. For while they shriek of awful tomorrows that can only be avoided by sacrificing freedom for power, Reagan spoke calmly and confidently of the better days to come if only we believed in the power of freedom. The man had his shortcomings, to be sure, but his successors – especially the last two – have made him look like a giant. As Tom Engelhardt at the leftist Nation Institute put it, summarizing exactly what libertarians should be saying:

"At least Reagan promised a new 'morning in America' (whatever he actually delivered). It's striking that the Bush administration in its speeches promises only a drumbeat of fear, terror, and war to eternity.". . .

And while we're imagining things, can you picture Reagan's ostensible heir, George W. Bush, extemporaneously invoking Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Frederic Bastiat? More importantly, can you imagine Dubya handling the (grossly inflated) Soviet threat back in the '80s? The Earth would be pockmarked with nuclear craters from Moscow to Miami. . . .
Yes, he had his faults – plenty of 'em – but he was far different from the gang that has claimed his mantle since. As he said in that '92 speech, "Whatever else history may say about me when I'm gone, I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears; to your confidence, not to your doubts."

Ministry of Fudge: Fake Job Numbers from the Bush Administration Paint a Rosy Picture

"As staggering as the assumption about new companies was in March, the Labor Department got even more brazen in April. Last Friday, it was disclosed that these imaginary jobs had been increased by 117,000 to 270,000 for the latest month - because, I guess, the stat jockeys got a vision from the gods of spring.
Without those extra 117,000 make-believe jobs, the total growth for April would have been just 171,000 - sub-par for an economy that's supposed to be growing at more than 4 percent a year, but right on the pros' targets. Take away all 270,000 make-believe jobs and, well, you have the sort of pessimism that the political pollsters are seeing."

Michael Kane: "9/11 War Games – No Coincidence"

" “I have an on-the-record statement from someone in NORAD that on the day of 9/11 The Joint Chiefs of Staff (Richard B. Myers) and NORAD were conducting a joint, live-fly, hijack Field Training Exercise (FTX) which involved at least one (and almost certainly many more) aircraft under US control that was posing as a hijacked airliner”. Mike Ruppert – June 5, 2004, editor of FTW www.fromthewilderness.com . . . .
On September 11, 2001, the Air Force was in its second day of annual wargame drills, titled VIGILANT GUARDIAN, designed to test national air response systems, which incidentally involved hijacking scenarios. In addition the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) which is staffed by military and CIA personnel, and is in charge of most American spy satellites, was running a drill for the scenario of an errant aircraft crashing into its headquarters. NRO headquarters also happens to be located just four miles from Washington’s Dulles airport – where Flight 77 (the flight said to have hit the Pentagon) originated. . . . .
It is possible that Phillip Zelikow, the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, has classified certain wargames running on 9/11 so the Commission can’t address them publicly. The fact that the war games are open source, having been reported in mainstream publications including the Associated Press, UPI, and Aviation Weekly Magazine would make such a classification part & parcel to a cover-up. Hopefully the Commission will address, in public hearing, the impact these wargames apparently had on the NORAD response on 9/11. . . .
Officials at NORAD have stated when the hijackings first occurred they initially thought it was part of the Vigilant Guardian drills running that morning. Despite some confusion, once Flight 11 struck the World Trade Center at 8:45 am, everyone should have known it was not a test. However, this is still an assumption because we do not know what the fighter jocks in the air at the time did and did not know, we do not know the full extent of the orders they received and it has yet to be explained why scrambled fighter jets were unable to intercept even one of the 4 hijacked airliners. . . .
Standard operating procedure of both FAA & NORAD dictates that once an aircraft is off course and/or its transponder is not responding, within 10 minutes Air Force jets are scrambled to re-establish physical contact with the wayward plane.
Scrambling Air Force interceptors does not mean shooting down any aircraft. It simply means that an Air Force jet is dispatched to fly next to the off course aircraft, attempt to communicate with the its pilots, look inside the cockpit, see who is in control of the plane and report back to flight control what is actually happening. In the year prior to 9/11 this automatic procedure was triggered a total of 67 times (AP, 8/13/02). On the morning of 9/11, it was not successfully applied even once in the well over an hour-long period in which the four separate hijackings occurred."

Let's Bury Reaganomics With Its Founder

"In this week of eulogies for Ronald Reagan, we often hear that he made America "feel good about itself". No one asks whether boosting the nation's self-esteem was a good thing.
Reagan's unashamed wielding of US power and money may have hastened Soviet collapse. But at home, what he really made Americans feel good about was getting rich, no matter the social cost. This ethos still reigns in America. Increasingly, it seems to be Australia's creed as well.
When Reagan won office in 1980, I'd just begun work as a union organizer in rural Mississippi. This wasn't as doomed a career choice as it seems today. The '70s, derided as a decade of bad music and worse fashion, were a time of deep social change.
Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford oversaw school integration, rises in minimum wages and pioneering environmental laws. The income gap narrowed between rich and poor, blacks and whites, men and women. When Jimmy Carter urged citizens to turn down their thermostats to save energy, most did. The US, humbled by Vietnam, Watergate and the oil shock, was taking baby steps towards living more equitably, and within its means.
But Carter, preachy and dour, didn't make America feel good about itself. Buoyant Reagan did. He promised to free our inner Rockefellers by slashing taxes, busting unions and gutting social welfare - even attacking subsidies for school lunches by reclassifying tomato sauce as a vegetable when counting nutrients. Environmental standards fell; trees, Reagan said, caused pollution.
Wall Street soared (along with deficits), greed became good, and guilt was for wimps. Reagan's economists insisted the riches flowing to those at the top would "trickle down" to the "deserving poor", rather than being wasted on "welfare queens".
I watched much of this from afar, having married an Australian and spent most of the '80s away. Returning to the US, I sensed how much things had changed. Business schools were bursting. The Marxist mate I'd followed into union organizing had taken a job at Fortune magazine. A small inheritance from my grandfather, invested in 1982, had grown into a sizeable nest egg. My future seemed secure through no real effort of my own.
Those without assets had to fend for themselves. With cuts to food stamps and other aid, and the minimum wage frozen during the boom, the ranks of working poor rose 44 per cent. Middle-class flight to suburbs and private schools deepened the divide, draining cities' tax bases and sealing off the affluent. When I wrote a piece for The Wall Street Journal about factory workers who hunted game on payday because their wages didn't cover food costs, readers asked if I'd invented the story. Many of the paper's well-off subscribers had no idea such people existed.
Tellingly, the same readers raised $US60,000 to help the families I'd profiled. Americans have a strong social conscience, when it's pricked. But Reagan's electoral success created an enduring mantra in US politics: always make America feel good about itself. So the nation's ego keeps super-sizing, along with its cars, tax breaks and waistlines. Much has changed since 1980, but the small-government, big-business dogma that Reagan championed still thrives.
The US, in a sense, was ever thus. Reagan reinvigorated stale nostrums from the Gilded Age and Roaring '20s. The same can't be said for Australia, which I've visited and lived in for two decades. Taken together, my annual stays form an album of time-lapse snapshots. The unscientific impression I've formed is that Australia feels more like Reagan's America each year."

George Monbiot: Break out the bicycles: Oil is Running Out, But the West Would Rather Wage Wars than Consider Other Energy Sources

"To understand what is going to happen, we must first grasp the core fact of existence. Life is a struggle against entropy. Entropy can be roughly defined as the dispersal of energy. As soon as a system - whether an organism or an economy - runs out of energy, it starts to disintegrate. Its survival depends on seizing new sources of fuel.
Biological evolution is driven by the need to grab the energy for which other organisms are competing. One result is increasing complexity: a tree can take more energy from the sun than the mosses on the forest floor; a tuna can seek out its prey more actively than a jellyfish. But the cost of this complexity is an enhanced requirement for energy. The same goes for our economies.
They evolved in the presence of a source of energy that was both cheap to extract and cheap to use. There is, as yet, no substitute for it. Everything else is either more expensive or harder to use. Without cheap oil the economy would succumb to entropy.
But the age of cheap oil is over. If you doubt this, take a look at the BBC's online report yesterday of a conference run by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil. The reporter spoke to the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. "In public, Mr Birol denied that supply would not be able to meet rising demand ... But after his speech he seemed to change his tune: 'For the time being there is no spare capacity. But we expect demand to increase by the fourth quarter by 3m barrels a day. If Saudi does not increase supply by 3m barrels a day by the end of the year we will face, how can I say this, it will be very difficult. We will have difficult times.'" The reporter asked him whether such a growth in supply was possible, or simply wishful thinking. "'You are from the press?' Birol replied. 'This is not for the press.'" So the BBC asked the other delegates what they thought of the prospects of a 30% increase in Saudi production. "The answers were unambiguous: 'absolutely out of the question'; 'completely impossible'; and '3m barrels - never, not even 300,000'. One delegate laughed so hard he had to support himself on a table." And this was before they heard that two BBC journalists had been gunned down in Riyadh.
The world's problem is as follows. We now consume six barrels of oil for every new barrel we discover. Major oil finds (of over 500m barrels) peaked in 1964. In 2000, there were 13 such discoveries, in 2001 six, in 2002 two and in 2003 none. Three major new projects will come onstream in 2007 and three in 2008. For the following years, none have yet been scheduled."

The Great Prevaricator: The Reaction from Those of Us Who Came of Age During the Reagan Presidency -- and Found It Inexplicably Horrific

"Excuse me while I barf.
I'm in no mood to join the joyful eulogies upon the passing of Ronald Reagan -- remembrances that prove, once again, the staggering size of our country's memory hole.
I missed the '60s. I grew up in Middle America, with Watergate, barely, and the benign buffoonery of Ford and Carter. When Ronald Reagan was elected president, it was an inexplicable, savage turn for a country that I'd never realized was capable of such things.
It's not just that George W. Bush would have been impossible without Reagan. The presidency of Ronald Reagan himself was so bad, on so many levels, that as young adults a sizeable number of us could only sputter in impotent rage, a rage summed up nicely by the Crucif***s song "Hinckley Had A Vision." It simply made no sense that an entire country could be run by sinister thugs, all because its spokesperson was a washed up actor with the professional training to deliver the most ridiculous, venal lies with a calming, "Great Communicator" demeanor.
Great Communicator, my ass. Tens of thousands of us died of AIDS on his watch, and he never even once mentioned the word. He also refused to adequately fund AIDS research -- a critical delay that, we now know, could have saved countless lives. We seem to have forgotten that. . . .
Last week in this space, I mourned the passing of David Dellinger, a contemporary of Reagan's who exemplified, far better than Ronnie ever could, courage and integrity and compassion. Dellinger spent his adult life speaking truth to power; Reagan spent it making things up for an audience. One was an apostle of selfless love; the other presided over the Me Decade.
Not all of us spent that decade obsessing over our investments and stepping over the homeless. For much of my twenties, I helped organize protests of hundreds of thousands of people on the Mall and at the Pentagon and elsewhere in Washington. Most of us are still around. Most of us still remember the profound sense of shock as we watched our country become a place we didn't recognize, led by a genial, seemingly clueless man with an agenda that was on many levels simply evil.
Sound familiar? Forget the obituaries; I can hardly wait to unseat Ronald Reagan's heir in November."

Dissident Voice: This is What Murdochracy Looks Like

"A while back CNN ran one of those non-scientific polls asking its viewers if they were “concerned that a small number of companies own all cable, TV, radio and web properties.” 96% of the viewers responded “yes”. There was genuine astonishment in Lou Dobb’s voice as he reported the figures to his viewers.  He said something to the effect that it was the most lop sided poll results in CNN history. 
In the last two decades an epic revolution has transformed America’s political landscape. A combination of two separate mega forces has morphed into a monster that has steadily eroded the very foundations of democracy in America. Cable TV and a few high caliber think tanks have combined forces to seize the reigns of power in Washington. 
The Orwellian paranoia of state controlled media is a thing of the past. 1984 is long behind us and we are now at a stage of history were the biggest threat is a media controlled super power. A new political system, Murdochracy, has gradually degraded the political landscape of America and made it hostage to the whims of a few unelected media barons. The mass media conglomerates now dictate public agendas and determine policy outcomes. . . .
It should be evident by now that political power has shifted in America. The sooner peace activists come to grips with this new reality, the better they will serve the cause of peace and freedom. A new era demands new tactics. Directly confronting the warmongers at FOX, CNN and The New York Times should be given priority over demonstrating in front of deserted Capitol Hill buildings or a vacant White House. Systematically disbanding these ruinous mass media franchises is essential to resurrecting democratic institutions that have served America well for over two centuries. Restoring America’s vibrant democratic traditions requires public awareness of what it means to live under the rule of a media controlled state. As news consumers, we have potent options to confront and reverse Murdochracy. We can turn off FOX and CNN and tune in to fair and balanced alternative journalism or let the nation and the world taste more of the bitter fruit of Murdochracy."

Rant from Prague: Reagan was a madman

"Ronald Reagan is dead, and the world is no worse off for it. At the best of times, he was an ineffectual dunce. At the worst, he was a dangerous madman who threatened humanity’s very survival. He destroyed any residual respect for the presidency left over from Nixon, his moral predecessor. He created unprecedented deficits while simultaneously gutting the principles of the New Deal and the Great Society. He presided over a White House famously unable to govern properly because of his abysmal ignorance and tolerance of a Byzantine mess of corrupt internal fiefdoms. His endless rotation of advisers was a contemptible assortment of thieves, quacks, hypocrites and imbeciles who regularly broke the law of the land, lied shamelessly to Congress and the American people, and hopelessly ensnared themselves in ugly webs of shady and illicit dealings. Reagan claimed to be leading a conservative revolution, but he left the presidency with America mired in debt, more authoritarian, militarized and centralized than ever before, and with a foreign policy that was the laughing-stock of the civilized world."

Paul Krugman: The Great Taxer

"Over the course of this week we'll be hearing a lot about Ronald Reagan, much of it false. A number of news sources have already proclaimed Mr. Reagan the most popular president of modern times. In fact, though Mr. Reagan was very popular in 1984 and 1985, he spent the latter part of his presidency under the shadow of the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton had a slightly higher average Gallup approval rating, and a much higher rating during his last two years in office.
We're also sure to hear that Mr. Reagan presided over an unmatched economic boom. Again, not true: the economy grew slightly faster under President Clinton, and, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, the after-tax income of a typical family, adjusted for inflation, rose more than twice as much from 1992 to 2000 as it did from 1980 to 1988.
But Ronald Reagan does hold a special place in the annals of tax policy, and not just as the patron saint of tax cuts. To his credit, he was more pragmatic and responsible than that; he followed his huge 1981 tax cut with two large tax increases. In fact, no peacetime president has raised taxes so much on so many people. This is not a criticism: the tale of those increases tells you a lot about what was right with President Reagan's leadership, and what's wrong with the leadership of George W. Bush.
The first Reagan tax increase came in 1982. By then it was clear that the budget projections used to justify the 1981 tax cut were wildly optimistic. In response, Mr. Reagan agreed to a sharp rollback of corporate tax cuts, and a smaller rollback of individual income tax cuts. Over all, the 1982 tax increase undid about a third of the 1981 cut; as a share of G.D.P., the increase was substantially larger than Mr. Clinton's 1993 tax increase.
The contrast with President Bush is obvious. President Reagan, confronted with evidence that his tax cuts were fiscally irresponsible, changed course. President Bush, confronted with similar evidence, has pushed for even more tax cuts."

From the archives: The Press Slept While Reagan Rambled

"The national press corps, inflamed by President Clinton's personal failings, has howled like a wolfpack at the White House for over a year now.
Things were a bit different during the Reagan era.
In her new book "Reporting Live," former CBS White House correspondent Lesley Stahl writes that she and other reporters suspected that Reagan was "sinking into senility" years before he left office. She writes that White House aides "covered up his condition"-- and journalists chose not to pursue it.
Stahl describes a particularly unsettling encounter with Reagan in the summer of 1986: her "final meeting" with the President, typically a chance to ask a few parting questions for a "going-away story." But White House Press Secretary Larry Speakes made her promise not to ask anything.
Although she'd covered Reagan for years, the glazed-eyed and fogged-up President "didn't seem to know who I was," writes Stahl. For several moments as she talked to him in the Oval Office, a vacant Reagan barely seemed to realize anyone else was in the room. Meanwhile, Speakes was literally shouting instructions to the President, reminding him to give Stahl White House souvenirs.
Panicking at the thought of having to report on that night's news that "the president of the United States is a doddering space cadet," Stahl was relieved that Reagan soon reemerged into alertness, recognized her and chatted coherently with her husband, a screenwriter. "I had come that close to reporting that Reagan was senile."
Stahl wasn't the only reporter to hold back. Nor were her bosses at CBS the only ones to pressure journalists to soften their coverage of Reagan, both of his policies and his person."