ConspiracyPlanet: Al Martin: Prepared for Bush-Cheney Terror?

"The unexplained and unprecendented expansion of the M3 money supply has resulted in speculation regarding the intent of the Federal Reserve. Is the doubling of the money supply necessary to preserve liquidity in the capital markets if another terrorist incident is staged before the November election?
Political-economic analyst Al Martin reports that "there are more U.S. 10-year notes now sold short than there are 10-year notes in the float to cover those positions, and that is an enormous negative implication because the only time that the ‘smart money’ sells U.S. Treasury paper short in such size is when they expect an economic debacle. To have a record short position in the Treasury bonds," Martin continues,"means that a) you expect another market debacle; b), that debacle is going to be either something to do with inflation (an inflationary debacle), a sudden surge of inflation, or a sudden fall in the U.S. dollar. This is the kind of short position that, combined with the very same people massively liquidating U.S. stocks, and massively purchasing gold (Greenspan has on several occasions noted the mass accumulation of gold by ‘smart money’ in the United States) -- these are things that the people who are doing it must be under the impression that there is going to be, not just a meltdown, but an economic collapse.
"It’s interesting how these pro-Bush pundits try to fudge and maneuver around the truth. But we are now seeing market positions never before seen, a record short position in long-dated U.S. Treasury paper, which means somebody expects an inflationary surge and a debacle. There is also a record amount of insider selling, (selling of previously restricted stock now free to sell by corporate officers, principals, and directors) which is a proxy for ‘smart money’ selling."
Insider selling is now running at 53-to- 1 on a dollar-volume basis. These are incredible amounts of money. The insider selling alone is now accounting for about $50 billion a month coming out of U.S. equities. The only reason equities haven’t felt it is because of, a) derivative long positions, and, b), because of the increase that we’ve seen in the last 2 months in public buying from mutual funds and the so-called small retail ‘sucker buying.’‘Sucker buying’ is keeping it all afloat."

Hopelessly naive or a benediction? "An Open Letter to the Anti-War Community and Public-at-Large on Nick Berg and the War"

"To All Fellow Anti-War Activists, and the Public at Large,

A few days ago a respected fellow anti-war activist in Chicago by the name of Daniel Romero posted a message to our discussion list after he had viewed the decapitation video of Nicholas Berg. Although I very much did not want to watch it, I found myself unable to shake Daniel’s words out of my head:
“I convinced myself that by seeing ALL of this…illegal war I might somehow gain a new and profound insight. That the experience of seeing Nick Berg beheaded would magically elevate and deepen my understanding of the causes and consequences of war.”
So I watched it.
There is something in the scream of any animal that knows it is being killed that is unmistakable. It bores through you to the worst parts of your being and just guts you. Every mother on earth who heard that scream had to have doubled over in pain; it is that scream that causes our hearts to race and our bodies to tremble like they do. It’s a primal flight response. And in remembering this as I write this letter, I feel the same elevated response. I imagine I will feel this for quite some time now.
It was probably the worst thing I have ever seen. But I am grateful that I forced myself to view it, and I think that everyone should watch it, no matter how sickening it may be.
I fully realize that is an unrealistic wish and will never happen. But if it ever did, I firmly believe it would change the course of events. I have no doubt that the anti-war movement can benefit tremendously from the marketing of this video. Unfortunately, I am equally convinced it will also fan the xenophobic fans of hatred in ways they have never been by the extremists, in ways Hannity and Limbaugh are already doing.
I have a very hard time with moral language. I don’t like the word “evil”. I don’t believe it exists, I think it is a human construct used by some, generally religious adherents, to constrain and explain “the Shadow”, which is that part of our psyche where all our shame and negative experiential emotions are kept, the things that lead to psychotic breaks, which generally lead to violence and killing. I believe all human beings have an equal capacity for what is known as “good” and “evil”. I like to put it this way: Evil is something you do, not something you are.
However we understand the concept of “evil” behavior, we must acknowledge that humanity’s capacity for hatred directed at each other seems to have no limit, and these acts were on the surface seemingly “unmitigated evil.” But we must keep perspective and recognize things for what they are.
What the Americans are doing to Muslims all over the world is unspeakable, but it is not borne out of evil, it is borne out of sublimely clever calculation, and colossal blundering. And likewise with the Arab/Iraqi resistance. Whoever concocted this gruesome message was savvy with media and politics. They knew that if what they were doing were to actually be seen by the people, this one pointed death would rock the world. Somehow they understood all too clearly that this would become an archetype for this war.
This video has become an archetype for the War in Iraq in the same way that the footage of a Viet Cong soldier being shot in the head by a South Vietnamese officer became one of the two main archetypal images (along with the naked girl running from the napalm strike) of the Vietnam War. It expressed the horror and the inhumanity in the same way, and it reflects the cultural schism that exists between our two worlds in the same way. It also showcases the extent both sides will go to make their point. Two individual acts of summary execution become the representative symbols of two nightmarish illegal and imperial wars.
My heart breaks for the Berg family, and I hope they did not have to see the video. This nation owes them. George Bush owes them. He wanted a “crusade”, he told them to “bring it on”, and that’s exactly what they did. I lay Nick’s blood and the blood of thousands of others at his feet. And for what? For our schizophrenic addiction to the oil which powers the engines of trade liberalization? A line must be drawn.
In the days since I viewed the video, I have felt a profound shift within myself and my views. The anti-war movement is plagued with internecine struggles between factions of people who all generally support the same overall anti-war idea but cannot accept each other’s individual politics. I admit at times I was one of the worst culprits. And as I got on the phone and began talking to my friends in the movement around the country and around the world, they all recount the same story. This movement has the same problems from coast to coast and across borders too. Entitlement, ideological conflicts, sectarianism, bickering, gossip, cliques, what have you. As I lay in bed that night I thought to myself, we are perhaps the most narcissistic peace movement in history.
It suddenly dawned on me that if Nick Berg’s parents could see or hear the bickering and resentment that goes on in what purports to be the anti-war movement, well, they might wither and die from the sheer loss of hope. We are all to blame for this, no one is immune. But we have not been effective.
The guilt and remorse I felt for my own part in it was a powerful motivator for change. It is now clear that what is needed in this movement, what is so desperately needed, is unity, growth, respect, insight, and commitment to seeing this cause through. It needs to grow into a true broad-based coalition that represents the voice of the people, and more people need to be made to feel welcome and they need to be constructively educated to the issues, not torn down for what they believe in. Beneath our ideological and cultural personas, we are at our core people just trying to survive.
In the wake of this realization it became clear that we have truly passed a tipping point. Because of the actions of a few in power, this nation is hated in ways it never has been, and as Malcolm X said forty years ago about the Kennedy assassination, the “chickens have come home to roost”. I don’t want to be naïve; I really think things are going to get a whole lot worse everywhere before they get any better. Knowing that, I also know I certainly don’t have the time to waste in divisive behavior. For me, that meant letting go of a lot of hang-ups and controls, and making peace with myself on a number of fundamental issues. I can’t speak for what anyone else should do, but it is my hope that my words help someone be more reflective.
The war has finally penetrated my own selfish motives and had rooted in my soul. For whenever I may slide off my vigilant post and slip back into selfishness, I will invariably hear the screams of Nick Berg as he died for our sins.
It is my sincere hope that this movement becomes what it needs to be, and I certainly will do my part to make it so."

Brave New World: Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness

"A sweeping mental health initiative will be unveiled by President George W Bush in July. The plan promises to integrate mentally ill patients fully into the community by providing "services in the community, rather than institutions," according to a March 2004 progress report entitled New Freedom Initiative (www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/newfreedom/toc-2004.html). While some praise the plan's goals, others say it protects the profits of drug companies at the expense of the public. . . .
Jones points out that the companies that helped to start up the Texas project have been, and still are, big contributors to the election funds of George W Bush. In addition, some members of the New Freedom Commission have served on advisory boards for these same companies, while others have direct ties to the Texas Medication Algorithm Project.
Bush was the governor of Texas during the development of the Texas project, and, during his 2000 presidential campaign, he boasted of his support for the project and the fact that the legislation he passed expanded Medicaid coverage of psychotropic drugs.
Bush is the clear front runner when it comes to drug company contributions. According to the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP), manufacturers of drugs and health products have contributed $764 274 to the 2004 Bush campaign through their political action committees and employees—far outstripping the $149 400 given to his chief rival, John Kerry, by 26 April.
Drug companies have fared exceedingly well under the Bush administration, according to the centre's spokesperson, Steven Weiss.
The commission's recommendation for increased screening has also been questioned. Robert Whitaker, journalist and author of Mad in America, says that while increased screening "may seem defensible," it could also be seen as "fishing for customers," and that exorbitant spending on new drugs "robs from other forms of care such as job training and shelter programmes." "

Lessons in democracy: Scrooge & Marley, Inc. -- The True Conservative Agenda

"That liberty [is pure] which is to go to all, and not to the few or the rich alone."
--Thomas Jefferson to Horatio Gates, 1798.

"There is nothing "normal" about a nation having a middle class, even though it is vital to the survival of democracy.
As twenty-three years of conservative economic policies have now shown millions of un- and underemployed Americans, what's "normal" in a "free and unfettered" economy is the rapid evolution of a small but fabulously wealthy ownership class, and a large but poor working class. In the entire history of civilization, outside of a small mercantilist class and the very few skilled tradesmen who'd managed to organize in guilds (the earliest unions) like the ancient Masons, the middle class was an aberration.
If a nation wants a middle class, it must define it, desire it, and work to both create and keep it.
This is because a middle class is the creation of government participation (conservatives call it "interference") in the marketplace, by determining the rules of the game of business and of taxation, and by providing free public education to all. And it wasn't until 1776, when Thomas Jefferson replaced John Locke's right to "life, liberty and property" with "life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" that the idea of a large class of working people having the ability to "pursue happiness" - the middle class - was even seriously considered as a cornerstone obligation of government.
(That was also the first time in history that "happiness" had ever appeared in any nation's formative documents. As Jefferson wrote in 1817 to Dr. John Manners, "The evidence of this natural right, like that of our right to life, liberty, the use of our faculties, the pursuit of happiness is not left to the feeble and sophistical investigations of reason, but is impressed on the sense of every man.")
Thomas Jefferson laid out in an 1816 letter to Samuel Kerchival what today would be a blistering attack on the conservative/corporate war on labor and Bush's union-busting planned privatization of over 700,000 government positions.
"Those seeking profits," Jefferson wrote, "were they given total freedom, would not be the ones to trust to keep government pure and our rights secure. Indeed, it has always been those seeking wealth who were the source of corruption in government. No other depositories of power have ever yet been found, which did not end in converting to their own profit the earnings of those committed to their charge."
He added: "I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom. ... We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. ... [Otherwise], as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, ... and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers."
A totally "free" market where corporations reign supreme, just like the oppressive governments of old, Jefferson said could transform America "...until the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. Then begins, indeed, the bellum omnium in omnia, which some philosophers observing to be so general in this world, have mistaken it for the natural, instead of the abusive state of man." "

Straight.com: George Bush's Ideology Is Downright Orwellian

" "Some 55 years ago, George Orwell was near death and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was being prepared for publication in the U.S. On being informed of plans to present his book in North America as an attack on socialism, Orwell dictated a statement to his English publisher, Fredric Warburg.
"The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere," Orwell rasped to Warburg from fluid-filled lungs through a throat that had been damaged by a bullet in the Spanish Civil War more than a decade before, when Orwell was fighting alongside anarchists.
"Specifically the danger lies in the structure imposed on Socialist and on Liberal capitalist countries by the necessity to prepare for total war....But danger lies also in the acceptance of a totalitarian outlook by intellectuals of all colours." Orwell predicted the coming totalitarian ideologies of our age would be careful to avoid association with those that had just caused so much destruction in the Second World War and would come up with new names for themselves.
"The name suggested in Nineteen Eighty-Four is of course Ingsoc [English Socialism, in the 'newspeak' of the novel], but in practice a wide range of choices is open. In the U.S.A. the phrase 'Americanism' or 'hundred per cent Americanism' is suitable and the adjective is as totalitarian as anyone could wish."
It really is too bad that Orwell never had the opportunity to alter his novel in order to make it more understandable to the people of the U.S. by changing "Ingsoc" to "Amercorp", but his provisional designation of "hundred per cent Americanism" still resonates after more than half a century and likely would have no trouble getting an endorsement from U.S. President George Bush. There is plenty of evidence that the U.S. government conforms to the philosophy of Orwell's Ingsoc and sees the purpose of power as being to perpetuate, increase, and exercise power for its own sake."

Must read: Jim Lobe: Bush Team Tries to Brazen It Out

''The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaeda'', U.S. President George W Bush told reporters Thursday, is ''because there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda''.
This is what logicians call a tautology -- a ''useless repetition'' is how the dictionary defines it -- but it is also an indication of how the Bush administration is defending itself against a growing number of scandals and deceptions in which it is enmeshed.
Repetition and blaming the media, an old standby -- of which Vice President Dick Cheney and Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld are particularly fond, dating back to their service under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford 30 years ago -- are back in vogue..
Thus it was that Cheney, the most aggressive administration proponent of the theory that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had not only been working hand in glove with al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden for years, but that he was also behind the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York in 1993, complained that New York Times' coverage of the 9/11 Commission's finding that no such link existed was ''outrageous'' and probably ''malicious''.
And thus it was that Rumsfeld charged that media coverage of the abuses of detainees held by the United States in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere was not only wrong, but dangerous.
''The implication that's out there is the United States government is engaging in torture as a matter of policy, and that's not true'', he declared, despite the cascading leaks of Pentagon, Justice Department and White House memoranda suggesting ways in which domestic and international bans on torture can be circumvented or ignored in the ''war on terror''. . . .
''At this point, the White House position is just frankly bizarre'', Daniel Benjamin, a senior counter-terrorism official in the administration of Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton told the 'Los Angeles Times' in response to Bush's declaration about al-Qaeda and Hussein. ''They're just repeating themselves, rather than admit they were wrong''.
Bush, of course, was responding to the finding by the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that while bin Laden ''explored possible cooperation with Iraq'' when he was based in Sudan through 1994, ''Iraq apparently never responded'', and no ''collaborative relationship'' was ever established. Proceeding from his tautology, Bush insisted ''this administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.”
That rendition, of course, raises a host of questions, among them definitional -- does the existence of ''numerous contacts'' amount to a ''relationship'', particularly when one side fails to respond to the other?
"When I was 15 and kept asking Mary Beth for a date, and she would always politely refuse, I think I would have been hard put to describe that as a 'relationship' as much as I wanted to brag about one'', suggested one congressional aide this week."

Baghdad Burning: 'Here in Baghdad, you can't tell the puppets without a program'

"Iyad Allawi is completely America and Britain’s boy. He has been on the CIA’s payroll for quite some time now and I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised when he was made Prime Minister. The cabinet of ministers is an interesting concoction of exiled Iraqis, Kurdish Iraqis who were in the northern region and a few Iraqis who were actually living inside of Iraq. Of the 37 members of the new government, 11 were actually living inside of Iraq. Of those 11, one or two are known to be quite competent. The rest are either unknown or generally infamous.
Several of the new government actually have more than one nationality. Now don’t get me wrong- I hold nothing against people with dual or triple or whatever number of nationalities. I do, however, have something against people with dual nationality being a part of government. It makes one wonder how many Americans would actually agree to having a senator or minister with, say, a French or German passport along with the American one.
While I don’t have any definite numbers, I can assure the world that we have *at least* 20 million Iraqis, both inside and outside of Iraq, who have only a single nationality. I can even go further to assure the world that the majority of those Iraqis with a single nationality actually have lived inside of Iraq for most of their lives. However bizarre the statistics may seem, I do believe that out of those millions of Iraqis, 37 competent ones could have been found. True, they might not have CIA alliances, bank accounts in Switzerland, armed militias or multimillion dollar companies in Saudi Arabia… but many of them actually have a sense of national pride and an anxiety for their country and for the future of their children and their children’s children inside of said country."

Matthew Rothschild: Bush and Cheney Won't Give Up the Lie

"[The 9-11 commission] finding undercuts one of the major rationales the Bush Administration put forward for the war against Iraq. Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, and George Bush himself all played up the alleged links between Al Qaeda and Iraq. But the links, in any operational way, did not exist.
In October 2002, Bush said, "Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases." That was false.
Bush said, in his January 2003 State of the Union address, "Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda." That was false.
Bush said, on February 8, 2003, "Iraq has also provided Al Qaeda with chemical and biological weapons training." That was false.
Powell, in his U.N. speech prior to the Iraq War, talked of the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al-Qaeda terrorist network." False again.
On May 3, 2003, in his infamous end-of-major-combat-operations speech, Bush said, "We have removed an ally of Al Qaeda." False again.
On September 14, 2003, Vice President Cheney repeated Bush's claim that Iraq and Al Qaeda were involved together in training with chemical and biological weapons, and added that the Iraqis were "providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the Al Qaeda organization." False again.
On October 10, 2003, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation, Cheney said, "Saddam had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons, gases, making conventional weapons." False again.
This Monday, June 14, Cheney said Saddam "had long established ties with Al Qaeda."
And Bush on Thursday, June 17, said, "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and Al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda."
Note how slippery Bush and Cheney are getting. Now they are talking about amorphous "ties" and "a relationship." But before they were talking about specifics, scary specifics, like joint work on chemical and biological weapons.
All of their falsehoods served a purpose: to scare the American people into going along with the Iraq War.
Now that their falsehoods have been exposed, they are way out on a limb of lies."

NYTimes: Leaders of 9/11 Panel Ask Cheney for Reports

"The leaders of the Sept. 11 commission called on Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday to turn over any intelligence reports that would support the White House's insistence that there was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
The commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, said they wanted to see any additional information in the administration's possession after Mr. Cheney, in a television interview on Thursday, was asked whether he knew things about Iraq's links to terrorists that the commission did not know.
"Probably," Mr. Cheney replied.
Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said that, in particular, they wanted any information available to back Mr. Cheney's suggestion that one of the hijackers might have met in Prague in April 2001 with an Iraqi intelligence agent, a meeting that the panel's staff believes did not take place. Mr. Cheney said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday that the administration had never been able to prove the meeting took place but was not able to disprove it either.
"We just don't know," Mr. Cheney said.
Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton made the requests in separate interviews with The New York Times as the White House continued to question the findings of a staff report the commission released on Wednesday and to take exception to the way the report was characterized in news accounts. The report found that there did not appear to have been a "collaborative relationship" between Iraq and the terrorist network.
That finding appeared to undermine one of the main justifications cited by Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney for invading Iraq and toppling Mr. Hussein.
Mr. Cheney has also continued to cite a disputed report that Mohamed Atta, a ringleader of the hijacking plot, met in April, 2001, in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, raising the possibility of a direct tie between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks, a tie that the commission's staff report found no evidence to support.
Mr. Cheney also said in the television interview that after Osama bin Laden had requested "terror training from Iraq, the Iraqi intelligence service responded; it deployed a bomb-making expert, a brigadier general." The commission's report concluded that Mr. bin Laden's requests went unanswered.
"It sounds like the White House has evidence that we didn't have," Mr. Hamilton said in an phone interview. "I would like to see the evidence that Mr. Cheney is talking about." "

SeattleTimes: A war sold on deception

"Two crucial rationales used by President Bush to justify a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein have crumbled. Now it falls to the American people to judge whether the war was sold on falsehoods or wishful exaggerations.
One goes to the credibility and veracity of the White House and the other to fundamental competence to manage the might of a superpower.
None of the justifications invoked by the administration before and after the war, and as recently as this week by Vice President Cheney, has survived bipartisan scrutiny.
On Wednesday, the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks said it had found no credible evidence of cooperation between Iraq and al-Qaida in the specific assault, or broader collaboration between Saddam Hussein and terrorist networks.
The finding was presented without partisan equivocation by commission members, and endorsed by senior officials of the Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI.
Yet as recently as Monday, Cheney told an audience of Saddam's long-established ties with al-Qaida. In February 2003, the president talked of Saddam's longstanding, direct and continuing ties to terrorist networks. That has been the pattern.
Bush pressed for Saddam's removal with a case built on imminent danger, lethal capacity and a willingness to supply terrifying weapons to enemies of the United States and its allies. Doubters were ignored and international relationships — those forged in world war and nurtured for half a century — were sacrificed. Iraq has been turned inside out, but no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found. Saddam may have indeed destroyed them as ordered by the United Nations. Something may yet turn up, but a device buried deep in a cave does not suggest imminent danger to the U.S.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who argued persuasively before the United Nations General Assembly about mobile production of chemical and biological weapons, said last January he does not now believe they exist.
Bush gave his war cause immediacy and psychological impact by linking Saddam to al-Qaida, whose demonstrated hatred of America was well-established. The White House and civilian leadership of the Pentagon said they had evidence of terrifying weapons and ties to groups that wanted to use them against us.
The arguments represented a powerful, one-two punch for opponents to overcome in their own minds, let alone convince a shell-shocked public of their improbability.
Yesterday, in the face of substantial findings by the 9-11 commission, the White House was trying to parse words about Saddam and terrorists. The public relations, or self-deception, are part of the history of this war.
President Bush has an extraordinary burden to assure Americans that intelligence was not skewed to sell the war on Iraq. As the national election approaches it is all the more important."

NYTimes: Congress's Embarrassment of Pork

"With all the subtlety of finger-painters, the House produced a masterpiece of bad legislation this week: a study in grease, pork and blubber, to use lawmakers' descriptions of a stunning special-interest bonanza for all manner of American businesses. The blubber — a tax break affecting native Alaskan whalers — was a last-minute inclusion in a bill that began as a simple $5 billion fix for a tariff problem but was transformed into a $143 billion juggernaut of special-interest favors.
The frisson of lobbyists was palpable as goodies were voted for bow-and-arrow makers, dog-track owners, sonar fish-finder makers and scores of other businesses that have nothing to do with the trade issue at hand. That problem — a modest substitute for a tax subsidy for exporters that was ruled illegal by world trade courts — remains uncorrected. So the meter has been running since March as the European Union levies billions of dollars in retaliatory sanctions on a wide range of American products.
The penalties grow each month, yet the outlook is for even more pork-barrel bargaining. The Senate's rival $167 billion business cornucopia awaits a compromise with the House version, and lawmakers estimate that September is their earliest chance to haggle seriously over the final product.
All sense of urgency and proportion has been lost in Congress's frenzy. The House even dared to adopt an unjustifiable payoff of almost $10 billion for tobacco farmers, whose deadly products can no longer be propped up by price supports. One $3.6 billion amendment lets residents of states with no income taxes start deducting their sales and local taxes on federal returns.
The Bush administration has stood by as Congress seized the tariff issue to bend the business tax code out of shape. Clearly, the two houses' dueling Christmas trees should be scrapped in favor of a simple, limited tariff fix. But Congress shows no will to do that as long as there is one more corporate lobbyist to be comforted and campaign coffers beckon."

Reuters: Russia Says It Warned U.S. Saddam Planned to Attack

"Russia warned the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that Iraq's Saddam Hussein planned to hit targets on U.S. soil, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday.
Putin's remarks looked certain to help President Bush (news - web sites), but officials at the State Department expressed surprise, saying they knew of no such information from Russia.
Putin said Russian intelligence had been told on several occasions that Saddam's special forces were preparing to attack U.S. targets inside and outside the United States.
"After the events of September 11, 2001, and before the start of the military operation in Iraq, Russian special services several times received information that the official services of the Saddam regime were preparing 'terrorist acts' on the United States and beyond its borders," he told reporters.
"This information was passed on to our American colleagues," he said. He added, however, that Russian intelligence had no proof that Saddam's agents had been involved in any particular attack.
State Department spokesman Adam Ereli told reporters he did not know anything about the information that Putin said Russia passed on. No such information was communicated from Russia through the State Department, he said.
"Everybody's scratching their heads," said one State Department official, who asked not to be named.
But the Kremlin leader's comments seemed certain to bolster Bush, whose campaign for re-election in November is under pressure from the Iraq crisis.
Bush has been on the defensive at home for insisting -- against the findings of an independent commission -- that Saddam had links with al Qaeda, the militant group behind the 2001 airline attacks in the United States that killed nearly 3,000 people and prompted the U.S. war on terrorism.
Putin's remarks were all the more unusual since Russia had diplomatic relations with Saddam's Iraq and sided with France and Germany in opposing the invasion."

Guardian: Bush told he is playing into Bin Laden's hands: Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in office

"A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the war against al-Qaida and that an "avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration: that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are "on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has made America safer.
In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as "Anonymous", described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than it was in 2001, and predicted that it would "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and try to use them.
He said Bin Laden was probably "comfortable" commanding his organisation from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan."

Must read: MotherJones: Public Information, Private Profit?

"Established by an act of Congress in 1979, the Federal Procurement Data System was a rare island of public information, the only complete record of federal contracts. Using the database, journalists, auditors and federal investigators could review the million or so agreements with corporations Uncle Sam signed each year. They could find the companies reaping the largest awards, track the rise in no-bid deals, and measure the recent drive to replace federal employees with corporate employees. But under a new contract, the General Services Administration has now turned over responsibility for collecting and distributing information on government contracts to a beltway company called Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.
In signing the $24 million deal, the Bush Administration has privatized not only the collection and distribution of the data, but the database itself. For the first time since the system was established, the information will not be available directly to the public or subject to the Freedom of Information Act, according to federal officials. "It's a contractor owned and operated system," explains Nancy Gunsauls, a project manager at GCE. "We have the data."
With the compiled database under private control, journalists, corporate consultants, and even federal agencies will be barred from independently searching copies of it. Instead, GCE has pledged only to produce a set of public reports required by the government, and to provide limited access to the entire database for a yet-to-be-determined fee.
"It seems that something quite inappropriate has been done here," says Angela Styles, who served until last year as President Bush's chief procurement official, noting that Congress requires the government to compile and share this information. "They have ceded their responsibility."
Experts in federal contract law worry that the new system could cripple public scrutiny of federal contracts. "This is the ultimate metaphor for the administration's view of contracting out," says Paul Light, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, who has used the procurement database for his own work. "It insulates the process from inspection, which I think is exactly what this administration prefers. They don't want people digging. They don't want people looking." Similarly, Charles Tiefer, a professor at Baltimore Law School who wrote a textbook on contract law, described the change as a political move. "They are covering up," he said. "They are making it more difficult to know that we have less competition."
A federal official close to the contracting process admits that all users -- even those seeking limited access -- will probably pay more. Just how much more is unclear, as the pricing structure has yet to be established. Under the agreement, GCE can sell unlimited access to clients on an individual basis for "market value." But Paul Murphy, president of the private consulting firm, Eagle Eye Publishers Inc., says a GCE representative told him he would have to pay $35,000 for data he once got for about $1,500. . . .
In fact, the new system appears designed to virtually eliminate unfettered public access. Under the Freedom of Information Act, all records created by federal agencies are available to the public for modest reproduction fee, with a few specific exceptions. By allowing GCE to directly collect contract data from each agency, the Bush Administration has effectively bypassed the Act, because the compiled records are never directly controlled by any government agency. Drabkin, who has already rejected such requests for the data, says the public can still get access to the raw information by approaching each individual agency.
"It's an insult to the public to tell citizens they must pay to find out the identities of private companies receiving billions of taxpayer dollars," says Dan Guttman, an expert in federal contracting who teaches at Johns Hopkins University. "That's like saying that the public will have to pay to find out the names and phone numbers of its federal officials." Guttman points out that this is not the first time contractors have been used to restrict public access to information. There is no way, for example, to know who is doing most of the reconstruction work in Iraq, because it is being handled by subcontractors, who never work directly for the taxpayers. Rather, they report to companies like Halliburton and Bechtel, which have been awarded giant umbrella contracts, and are not subject to the Freedom of Information Act.
Without direct access to the raw data, groups like Investigative Reporters and Editors, a popular source of government databases for reporters, may no longer be able to offer the information to its members. "I'm a little bit concerned about the next go-round, and whether we are going to be gouged in terms of cost," says Jeff Porter, the database editor at IRE. Aron Pilhofer, who manages databases at the Center for Public Integrity, said he was withholding judgment on the new system until he found out the price for non-profits and journalists. "If they plan to charge $35,000 for what we used to pay $500 for, they are in for a lawsuit," he said."
(courtesy of d)

Conspiracy theories from the fringe: Henry Makow: The 'Jewish' Conspiracy Is British Imperialism

"Conspiracy theorists like myself believe modern history reflects a long-term conspiracy by an international financial elite to enslave humanity.
Like blind men examining an elephant, we attribute this conspiracy to Jews, Illuminati, Vatican, Jesuits, Freemasons, Black Nobility, and Bildersbergs etc.
The real villains are at the heart of our economic and cultural life. They are the dynastic families who own the Bank of England, the US Federal Reserve and associated cartels. They also control the World Bank and IMF. Their identity is kept secret but Rothschild is certainly one of them.
England is in fact a financial oligarchy run by the "Crown" which refers to the "City of London" not the Queen. The City is run by the Bank of England, a /private/ corporation. The City is a sovereign state located in the heart of greater London. Considered the "Vatican of the financial world," the City is /not/ subject to British law.
On the contrary, the Bank of England dictates to the British Parliament. In 1886, Andrew Carnegie wrote that, "six or seven men can plunge the nation into war without consulting Parliament at all." Vincent Vickers, a director of the Bank of England from 1910-1919, blamed the City for the wars of the world. ("Economic Tribulation" (1940) cited in /Knuth, The Empire of the City, 1943, p 60) /
The British Empire was an extension of bankers' financial interests. Indeed, all the non-white colonies (India, Hong Kong, Gibraltar) were "Crown Colonies." They belonged to the City and were not subject to British law although Englishmen were expected to conquer and pay for them.
The Bank of England assumed control of the United States during the T.R. Roosevelt administration (1901-1909) when its agent J.P. Morgan took over 25% of American business. http://www.savethemales.ca/000426.html
According to the "American Almanac," the bankers are part of a network called the "Club of the Isles" which is an informal association of European royalty including the Queen. The Club of the Isles commands an estimated $10 trillion in assets. It lords over such corporate giants as Royal Dutch Shell, Imperial Chemical Industries, Lloyds of London, Unilever, Lonrho, Rio Tinto Zinc, and Anglo American DeBeers. It dominates the world supply of petroleum, gold, diamonds, and many other vital raw materials; and deploys these assets not merely in the pursuit of its geopolitical agenda.
Its goal: to reduce the human population from its current level of over 5 billion people to below 1 billion people within the next two to three generations; to literally ``cull the human herd'' in the interest of retaining their own global power and the feudal system upon which that power is based. http://members.tripod.com/~american_almanac/fallhous.htm
Historian Jeffrey Steinberg could be referring to the US, Canada and Australia when he writes, "England, Scotland, Wales, and, especially, Northern Ireland, are today little more than slave plantations and social engineering laboratories, serving the needs of ...the City of London...
These families constitute a financier oligarchy; they are the power behind the Windsor throne. They view themselves as the heirs to the Venetian oligarchy, which infiltrated and subverted England from the period 1509-1715, and established a new, more virulent, Anglo-Dutch-Swiss strain of the oligarchic system of imperial Babylon, Persia, Rome, and Byzantium...."

The Australian: 'House-sized' meteorite hits

"A METEORITE reportedly the size of a house fell on the NSW south coast overnight, exploding in a bright flash, police have said.
A driver on the Hume Highway shortly after 9pm (AEST) near Menangle reported an object the size of a house falling from the sky.
The object fell east of the Hume Highway, possibly in an escarpment near the top of a hill at Bulli, police were told.
The meteorite was described as glowing silver in colour and similar to an artillery shell when it exploded with a bright flash on impact.
Workers at the Sydney Airport Tower said they saw a meteorite about 9pm, police said.
No other reports were received by police and extensive police patrols of the area for more than an hour did not turn up the space debris."

Perfect Misfits: Armed with a good dose of Russian stoicism, Woody Allen's New York-style neurotics make themselves at home on the Moscow stage.

"Most of the show's first half passes in fits and starts as the characters bicker with one another, complain about the bad play they are performing and suddenly slip into ruminations about sex when meaninglessness and the inevitability of death overwhelm them. The actress, crushed by the realization that there is no God, goes into the audience seeking someone to give her a reassuring hug -- and at least is able to find that much. When Trichinosis unveils his deus ex machina, a wooden horse on which a god can ride down from the heavens to solve any knotty problem, it seems there may be hope for this crazy play after all.
Hepatitis' play, "The Slave," tells the tale of a man who is happy to remain an indentured servant until he learns that the Jewess of his dreams will not consider sleeping with him until he gains his freedom. All he must do is deliver a message to the king, and, encouraged by his awakening sense of dignity and his increasingly nagging libido, he sets off to win his liberty and claim the girl. How this all pans out is best left undescribed, although it doesn't take a scholar to realize that Allen has plenty of tricks in store for both mortals and divinities.
Perhaps one of Shamirov's shrewdest moves was to steer clear of the trademark Woody Allen neurosis. The people in Shamirov's version of "God" are half-baked and fully confused, but there is something distinctly Russian about their bewilderment. These are not Allen's fragile urban intellectual psycho cases, but rather rough-edged, tough-skinned Moscow-dwelling skeptics. Everything else fits perfectly: the penchant for big questions and grand statements, the willingness to self-destruct to make a point and the desire to repent and take it all back.
Shamirov, playing the writer inside the play, takes on a more suitable role when the author who claims to have created him in the first place puts in an appearance -- he sits off to the side and grumpily directs the action. His lack of expression, his utter colorlessness and his mastery of understatement make for some hilarious scenes, especially when he works in tandem with Kutsenko's jaded actor. Kutsenko, who also impersonates the slave, brings to his work the ideal comic combination of total conviction laced with heavy loads of self-parody."

Ashcroft may face prison over 9/11 cover-up, says Daniel Ellsberg

"In a statement, Edmonds called Ashcroft's legal moves anti-freedom of speech and anti-due process.
Ellsberg's common cause with Edmonds is founded on his own battle to make public a top secret study of US decision-making in Vietnam, known as the Pentagon Papers.
In an exclusive interview with BreakForNews.com he said that Ashcroft's legal actions against Edmonds were: "clearly intended to keep her from bringing out in public information that could lead.... to criminal indictments and possible convictions of major political figures."
Ellsberg says that if Edmonds' allegations are confirmed, the current Attorney General could be judged obstructive and share the fate of A.G. John Mitchell --who in Ellsberg v. Mitchell famously tried to squelch Ellsberg's 1971 revelations, and served prison time over the affair.
"John Ashcroft may well sleep eventually in the same cell as John Mitchell," Ellsberg said."

Strange Comet Unlike Anything Known

"A detailed analysis of the comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt 2") has left astronomers astounded at an object that has no known peers in the solar system.
The comet, examined in a close flyby in January by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, has towering protrusions and steep-walled craters that seem to defy gravity. More than a dozen jets of material shoot out from its insides. Dust swirls around the comet in unexpectedly dense pockets.
Among the bizarre features are two depressions with flat floors and nearly vertical walls that resemble giant footprints. They aren't structured like typical impact craters. The features have been named Left Foot and Right Foot in a new map of the comet, which is roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) wide.
Only two other comets have been seen up close, but both appeared fairly smooth and were nowhere near so heavily cratered. Nor do the pockmarked surfaces common to asteroids and moons bear much stylistic resemblance to the shapes seen on Wild 2.
"So far, as far as we know Wild 2 is a unique object," said Donald Brownlee, an astronomy professor at the University of Washington and Stardust's principal investigator.
Brownlee told SPACE.com that Wild 2 could represent a unique class of comet. He and his colleagues had expected it to be relatively featureless with a dusty, charcoal-like coating. Instead they found a place riddled with apparently ancient impact craters. Broad mesas and steep canyons stand out clearly.
It is more likely, Brownlee added, that Wild 2 will turn out to be a garden variety comet once more of them are studied up close."

New Information Shows Bush Indecisive, Paranoid, Delusional

"The carefully-crafted image of George W. Bush as a bold, decisive leader is cracking under the weight of new revelations that the erratic President is indecisive, moody, paranoid and delusional.
“More and more this brings back memories of the Nixon White House,” says retired political science professor George Harleigh, who worked for President Nixon during the second presidential term that ended in resignation under fire. “I haven’t heard any reports of President Bush wondering the halls talking to portraits of dead Presidents but what I have been told is disturbing.”
Two weeks ago, Capitol Hill Blue revealed that a growing number of White House aides are concerned about the President’s mental stability. They told harrowing tales of violent mood swings, bouts with paranoia and obscene outbursts from a President who wears his religion on his sleeve.
Although supporters of President Bush dismissed the reports as “fantasies from anonymous sources,” a new book by Dr. Justin Frank, director of psychiatry at George Washington University, raises many similar questions about the President’s mental stability.
"George W. Bush is a case study in contradiction," Dr. Frank writes in Bush On The Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.  "Bush is an untreated ex-alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies.". . .
Supporters of President Bush dismiss Frank’s book as the work of a Democrat who once headed the Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, but his work has been praised by other prominent psychiatrists, including Dr. James Grotstein, Professor at UCLA Medical Center, and Dr. Irvin Yalom, MD, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University Medical School.
Dr. Carolyn Williams, a psychoanalyst who specializes in paranoid personalities, is a registered Republican and agrees with most of Dr. Frank’s conclusions.
“I find the bulk of his analysis credible,” she said in an interview. “President Bush grew up dealing with an absent but demanding father, a tough mother and an overachieving brother. All left indelible impressions on him along with a desire to prove himself at all cost because he feels surrounded by disapproval. He behavior suggests a classic paranoid personality. Additionally, his stated belief that certain actions are 'God's Will' are symptomatic of delusional behavior.”
Ryan Reynolds, a childhood friend of Bush, concurs.
“George wanted to please his father but never felt he measured up, especially when compared to Jeb,” Reynolds said.
Dr. Williams wonders if the Iraq war was not Bush’s way of “proving he could finish something his father could not by deposing Saddam Hussein.”. . .
Harleigh says it is not unusual for White House staffers to refuse to go public with their concerns about the President’s behavior.
“We saw the same thing in the Nixon years,” he says.  “What is unusual is that the White House has not been able to trot out even one staffer who is willing to go public and say positive things about the President’s mental condition. That says more than anything else.”
Dr. Frank, the Democrat, says the only diagnosis he can offer for the President’s condition is removal from office.
Dr. Williams, the Republican, says she must “reluctantly agree.”
“We have too many unanswered questions about the President’s behavior,” she says. “You cannot have those kinds of unanswered questions when you are talking about the leader of the free world.”

Jamey Hecht: Conspiracy and the State of the Union

John Judge: "Call me a conspiracy theorist if you like, so long as you call yourself a coincidence theorist."
          Coalition On Political Assassinations (COPA) presentation, 2002

"The United States is extraordinary. The idealism of our founding documents proceeded straight from the 18th Century's Enlightenment principles of the universal rights of human beings. Though the Indian genocide, the genocidal African slave trade, and the lack of women's suffrage tore gaping holes in the American application of these principles, our Constitution remained among the world's best hopes for the achievement of equality, opportunity, and civic peace. The French Revolution emulated our own; the 1994 post-apartheid Constitution of South Africa - one of the most beautiful documents of hope ever conceived - was modeled on these same American documents, and as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out, national liberation movements the world over (including post-French Vietnam in 1945) have taken our Declaration of Independence as the template of their own Declarations. Rather than list each of the remarkable advances our democracy has made - from the Bill of Rights to the Progressive legislation of the Roosevelt, Taft, and Wilson administrations, to Robert Kennedy's Civil Rights Act of 1964 - let me point out that each significant improvement was driven by popular participation in civic life: in a word, democracy. . . .
Yet the forces of violence, reaction, and American exceptionalism can claim a long series of epochal triumphs, of which I will name only the most egregious: Operation Paperclip, which brought the Nazi Intelligence "community" into the nascent CIA (thereby rescuing the most depraved murderers in history from certain death at the hands of British military tribunals); the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA as a secret society of military adventurism and political sabotage under the guise of an intelligence-gathering body; the murders of President Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, which issued in a disastrous Vietnam War that killed up to three million people and pitched the U.S. economy into a permanent free-fall of debt; the Savings and Loan Robbery, which did so much to bankrupt the vanishing middle class; the 1990's three trillion dollar theft under the auspices of the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which motivated America's international creditors to begin withdrawing their confidence from the dollar; and the "velvet coup" of the fraudulent presidential election of 2000, which openly discredited the residual myth of popular sovereignty. But perhaps 11-22-63 and 9-11-01 are the deepest wounds they have inflicted upon the body politic so far. These represent two seizures of state power by the most violent elements of the longstanding elites who make policy in the absence of popular sovereignty and genuine legislative oversight. In the meantime, they have consolidated their power and expanded their domain of operations and propaganda with an inexorable momentum. . . .
Policy is no longer driven by leadership figures, but by consortia of mutually interested elites. Like the forty years since 11-22, the three years since 9-11 have seen exponential growth in defense spending as a portion of the USG's annual budget. Between forty-six and fifty-three cents of every tax dollar we pay goes to military debt payments, salaries, deployments, and weapons stockpiling. This flood of capital into the arms industry drives a domestic policy of despair and a "foreign" policy of violence. Weapons are expended so that they can be replaced; their manufacture enriches Lockheed-Martin, the largest purveyor of lethal weapons in the world, and its competitive partners. In pursuit of new raw materials to seize and new markets to monopolize, corporations and their clients drive policy toward aggressive expansionism. CIA is the spearhead of the war process, so its activity has been cloaked from all genuine Congressional interference. The beauty of the CIA's position is that it apparently always takes its orders from the President, but for the most part it also insures that the President orders roughly what CIA wants. When he doesn't do so, and seeks to replace their programs with his own initiative, he is murdered; when he insists on forming his own intelligence apparatus inside the White House or the Pentagon - as in the Nixon and G. W. Bush administrations, respectively - the CIA is likely to destroy the administration. Whenever the latter occurs, the administration is unseated on the strength of some nonviolent crime like a "third rate burglary" or the disclosure of a CIA operative's identity. Bombing Vietnam and Cambodia or Afghanistan and Iraq at the cost of thousands of lives never ranks as an impeachable offense."

Bob Fitrakis: Ronald Reagan: a legacy of crack and cheese

"The mainstream media spent an entire week mythologizing Ronald Wilson Reagan. Why did the corporate for-profit media spend so much time creating a cult of personality around a former President with an estimated 105 IQ? Because the actual historical reality of Reagan’s life are so shockingly reactionary you need the pageantry, majesty and imagery of a Hollywood-scripted finale to cover up the thousands of damning facts.
Reagan was a snitch during his Hollywood years. As Anthony Summers makes clear in his book Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, the “Gipper” had his own code name – “T-10” – and regularly provided the FBI with information on Communists, real, imagined and manufactured. Victor Navasky’s Naming Names documents as well how Reagan, then the head of the Screen Actors Guild, kept the FBI well informed about “disloyal” actors. During Reagan’s Moscow Summit, the President met with Russian students to discuss communism and capitalism. In a speech too simple to be included in Communism for Idiots, the President dusted off his old theoretical writings from Reader’s Digest and Boy’s Life and told the students why Marx was evil and unbridled capitalism good.
As his B-actor career faded, Reagan became a mouthpiece for General Electric, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers. Reagan’s one clear talent was the ability to read a Teleprompter or memorize his lines on the glories of free enterprise. While his skills were sub-par by Hollywood standards, he was able to parlay bad acting into good politics. Reagan understood the uncritical nature of the American public and their appetite for neo-American hokum. As E.L. Doctorow pointed out in his 1980 article, “The Rise of Ronald Reagan”: “…his tenure as GE spokesman overlapped the years in which the great electrical industry price-fixing scandal was going on.”
“While Reagan extolled the virtues of free enterprise in front of the logo, G.E., along with Westinghouse, Allis-Chalmers and other giant corporations, was habitually controlling the market by clandestine price fixing and bid rigging agreements, all of which led, in 1960, to grand jury indictments, in what was characterized by the Justice Department as the largest criminal case ever brought under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act,” Doctorow noted.
As a child I watched Reagan pitch the joys of 20-mule team Borax on Death Valley Days, two reoccurring themes on the Old West show were the joys of imperialist conquest and genocide against indigenous people. All of it was served up by the smiley-faced Gipper. Bertrand Gross would later assess the Reagan administration as “friendly fascism.”
Caught up in the Goldwater conservative movement, Reagan realized that he could deliver the right-wing reactionary script better than the much more intellectual Senator from Arizona. Thus, in 1966, Reagan took his highly-honed hokum and became the ultimate shill for the far right. As the New Republic pointed out during his 1966 campaign for Governor of California, “Reagan is anti-labor, anti-Negro, anti-intellectual, anti-planning, anti-20th century.” Reagan campaigned against the civil rights movement, the peace movement, the student rights movement and the Great Society. In his fantasy world, Reagan equated giant price-fixing corporations with small town entrepreneurs. As every long-hair in the late 60s knew, Ronald Reagan was “the drugstore truck-drivin’ man, the head of the Ku Klux Klan.” He said if the students at Berkeley wanted a bloodbath, he would give them one. James Rector was shot dead soon after.
The real legacy of Reagan can be found in Philadelphia, Mississippi where he announced his candidacy for the Presidency in 1980. Previously, the most important political event in Philadelphia had been the deaths of civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Cheney in 1964. Reagan appeared, sans hood, to talk in those well-known racist code words about “state’s rights.” This was no mistake or misunderstanding. Reagan was signaling the right-wing movement that he would carry their racist agenda. Remember in 1984, his political operatives accused Walter Mondale of being “a San Francisco-style Democrat.”
Reagan reached out and embraced the racist apartheid government of South Africa through his policy of so-called “constructive engagement.” Reagan’s solution to the de-industrialization of America was to build the prison industrial complex. His centerpiece was a racist so-called “War on Drugs” while his friends in the CIA used narcotics peddlers as “assets.” And then Reagan’s El Salvadorian Contra buddies began bringing in crack.
Reagan's response to the 1981-1982 recession, the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, was to declare ketchup a vegetable, release federal cheese surpluses, and shackle the strike leaders of the air traffic control union hand and foot and lead them off to jail. My most pronounced memories of the Reagan years are the three hour cheese line and the German care packages to unemployed workers in Detroit.
In the first two years of the Reagan administration, his policy was a forced economic recession and de-industrialization of the United Stated. He cut federal low income housing funds by 84%; his tax cuts for the rich, his “trickle-on” the poor and working class economics ended up tripling all previously existing U.S. government debt. So, when I think of the Reagan legacy, I think of urban decay, crack, homelessness, racism, rampant corporatism and the destruction of the American dream. Amidst the growing homelessness and despair, I remember seeing graffiti all over inner-city Detroit that simply said: “Ronald Wilson Reagan 666.” Reagan’s policies so marked him as “the beast” in Detroit, blue-collar workers actually cheered when he was shot. The hottest song on underground radio was “Hinckley had a Vision.” The song’s refrain, “He knew, he knew.”
When the mainstream media was analyzing Reagan's legacy and actively participating in the mythologizing of the 40th president, they conveniently ignored volumes of work by mainstream reporters. Wall Street Journal reporter Jane Mayer and Los Angeles Times reporter Doyle McManus documented Reagan's diminishing mental capacity in Landslide:
In March 1987 a memo was written by Jim Cannon to Howard Baker, Reagan's new Chief of Staff. His first recommendation: "Consider the possibility that section four of the 25th amendment might be applied." The amendment allows for the removal of the president when "the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office." Mayer and McManus reported that staffers told Cannon in confidence that Reagan had become "inattentive and inept ... He was lazy; he wasn't interested in the job ... he wouldn't read the papers they gave him - even short position papers and documents ... he wouldn't come over to work - all he wanted to do was watch movies and television at the residence." Scholarly works have been written on Reagan's confusion of facts with Hollywood images.
The problem with the great communicator was the content of his messages. Reagan was a paid shill of the plutocrats, who used his charm and acting skills to hawk, like soap, mean spirited social policies and sell a fantasy version of the American Dream  to common folk that trusted him."

BostonGlobe: America's Hidden Issue of Poverty

"The great hidden issue in America is the scandal that tens of millions of Americans who work full time -- often more than full time -- barely get by and can't get ahead, while CEOs get zillions. The blue-collar middle class jobs are vanishing; what's taking their place are retail and service jobs that top out at $10 an hour or less. You can't live decently on that.
For chapter and verse, read Barbara Ehrenreich's modern classic, "Nickeled and Dimed." She recounts trying to survive on take-home pay of about $1,200 a month when rent consumes $800. It can't be done. Many of her co-workers, clinging to middle-class work ethic values, live in their cars.
Bernie Sanders, the lefty Vermont congressman, recently told me something interesting. He gets a lot of his votes not from the Birkenstock crowd but from lower income, blue-collar men -- the very voters many Democrats consider hopelessly lost to NASCAR, Limbaugh, flag-waving, and fundamentalism.
Why do they support a militant like Sanders? Because he engages their pocketbook issues -- fighting for ground rules that enable working people to make a decent living, get good health care, and live in affordable housing. "I'm not a liberal," says Sanders. "I'm a progressive."
Progressive politics is not about charity and soup kitchens. It's about power, and putting issues considered almost unspeakable in polite company back into the national conversation.
The people Barbara Ehrenreich interviewed for "Nickeled and Dimed" have pretty much given up on politics -- because politics has given up on them. Few big-league politicians are talking about subjects that could make a real difference in their lives, like maybe a $12 minimum wage or universal health insurance. . . .
Lately, Washington sages have been promoting a new and entirely misleading conceit about what ails American politics -- polarization: Pundit John Tierney wrote, "It's not voters but the political elite of both parties who have become more narrow minded and polarized." Columnist David Brooks sniffed, "You can't understand the current bitter polarization without appreciating how it is inflamed or even driven by the civil war within the educated class."
To read these guys, you'd think Republican leaders were charging to the right and Democrats to the left. But the Democratic Party has become steadily more centrist, especially on pocketbook issues, as the GOP has become more radical. By making the problem seem like a symmetrical polarization, these right-wing pundits give a free pass to both Bush's plain extremism and the Democrats' capture.
A vibrant politics has to be about making sure that capitalism gives ordinary people a fair shake. Otherwise regular people turn to spectacle rather than democracy, politics becomes a sport for the elite, and the best we can hope for is charity."

Independent: Why is Art not Reflecting World Events? There is no Artistic Engagement with the big, Threatening Issues that Hang over Us

"What has art done to give us an antidote to the terrible images that flashed around the world of the Twin Towers collapsing, of the naked man on a leash in Abu Ghraib, of the American having his throat cut?
These acts of violence and inhumanity are now fixed in all our minds, on all continents. They have created history more effectively than hundreds of articles or books. Neither Bush, nor the Islamic world will be able to shed the implications of them, whatever moderates may do to remind us that those acts do not exemplify our respective cultures.
These pictures are masterpieces of horror, more famous now than the Mona Lisa, Sunflowers, Picasso's Guernica. The barbarism that they communicate has undone decades of humanist development, of painstakingly nurtured belief in the rights of man and the rule of law, of dialogue between nations.
It is impossible to overestimate the power of images to shape history. For example, we all know what the piles of bodies in the Nazi death camps looked like, but we have nothing comparable for the gulags, so many people think that Hitler was crueler than Stalin.
How are the artists responding today? As individuals, many in the US have shown considerable moral courage in speaking out against the war and the Bush administration, even last year when public opposition was guaranteed to bring them sack-loads of hate mail from "patriots", and dissenters, particularly in the performing arts, risked being boycotted commercially.
The painter Chuck Close is currently organizing a sale on 29 June to which artists, collectors and galleries have donated blue-chip works by the likes of Sol LeWitt, Roy Liechtenstein, Wahl and de Kooning. Called "Buy art, bye-bye Bush" this is to raise money for the Democratic campaign.
But where is the artistic engagement with the huge, threatening issues that hang over us? One would have expected an intense blast of production if artists wanted to live up to the role in which they have been cast for over a century - as exponents of humane and liberal values, as revolutionaries, gadflies, the ones who see further than ordinary mortals.
A great deal of the prestige of contemporary art has been because of this role: think of the veneration paid to Joseph Beuys by bourgeois Germans of the 60s and 70s for whom he was a kind of safety valve, through whom they could vicariously live out a nobler, freer existence.
It is not that there is not any topical art around. The British conceptual art duo, Langlands & Bell, have been official war artists, sent out to Afghanistan by the Imperial War Museum. Their virtual recreation of the house in which Osama bin Laden lived has been shortlisted for the Turner Prize and it is indeed jolly interesting to steer yourself round his rooms and garden with the joystick, but the artistic experience is entirely cerebral.
The American, Sue Coe, a particularly outspoken critic of Bush, is doing a dark - in both senses - series of drawings called Bully: Master of the Global Merry-go-round, but in their expressionistic, slightly caricatured style, they simply cannot compete with the photos of actual events.
Here is the problem. So much art is currently dependent on ideas, so accustomed to being a fleeting metaphor that it is hardly visual at all. It is like trying to oppose the image of the Twin Towers with a pun.
Art today is also immensely self-referential. Jake and Dinos Chapman take Goya's etchings, the Miseries of War, in their time unprecedented and shocking denunciations of warfare, and recreate them with shop-window dummies dripping blood. This is high camp, grand guignol, and nobody thinks for a moment that they have to take it seriously. The images of Abu Ghraib, however, are not susceptible to irony.
Perhaps it is more satisfactory for everyone if artists give up trying to deal with events of such enormity and concentrate on aesthetics or more poetic states of being. For example, this year's biennial at the Whitney Museum was full of floral pieces, cheerful 60s revivals, and a magical room of mirrored surfaces and points of light by Yayoi Kusama - in short, delicious escapism and probably just what New Yorkers needed.
But if we are going back to an idea of art for art's sake where "fine art" is concerned, it is reasonable to ask where the most powerful visual expressions of the role of critic and conscience of society are now. Where are the true successors to paintings such as David's Death of Marat, which played a real part in the French Revolution, or Gericault's Raft of the Medusa, with its desperate depiction of shipwrecked sailors and passengers, who, as everyone at the time knew, were reduced to cannibalism to survive?
The documentary recently shown in Paris about the killings under Pol Pot is an excellent example of what I mean, a work of art that has proved its usefulness and power in Cambodia, where there has been a long struggle to see justice done for the victims, against much deliberate amnesia on the part of the authorities.
Rithy Panh, the director, was himself in a labor camp, although only a child, during the period in the 70s when two million Cambodians were murdered. His film is called S-21, the death machine of the Khmer Rouge and it is about the torture center where 17,000 died and only seven were saved, among them the artist Vann Nath, who was useful because he could paint portraits of Pol Pot, and Chum Mey, who knew how to repair the typewriters on which the jailers wrote the reports about the prisoners.
If art has a moral purpose, then this art certainly aims high and hits its target.
I am not being very original in suggesting that the documentary can now be considered as part of fine art or, at any rate, the rightful heir to the aspirations art used to have for itself.
Documenta, the huge survey of contemporary art that happens every four years in the German town of Kassel, was dominated in 2002 by video and film. Its curator, Okwui Enwezor, took the aspirations of art to be world changing at face value and made an exhibition that at every turn reflected and attacked the evils and anxieties affecting us in the post 11 September world. It was full of movies that were not video art but documentaries of a more or less overtly political sort: why violence cannot solve India's border disputes; the aftermath of the Rwanda massacres; a woman searching for her mother's concentration camp number; the Balkans falling apart; the Inuits' culture dying out.
No individual images came out of Documenta powerful enough to rival 11 September or the Iraq horrors to come, but cumulatively that event at least managed to defend the dignity and fitness of art to be taken seriously."

Merle Borg: National IQ test

"All groups have their extremists. They are responsible for much of the humor and tragedy of life. Vegetarians have their vegans. Believers have their martyrs. On our political scene, democrats have their "anti-business" environmentalists and their "share the riches" reformers, liberal egg-heads who see corporate America and all disparity in wealth as evil. Republicans have their flag waving, gun worshipping, bible thumping extremists, suspicious red-necked fundamentalists who cannot exist without an enemy. Political extremists are intolerant and are able to simplify complex issues and arouse base or lofty passions. Though their numbers are small, they are extremely dangerous as current events in America will sadly verify.
Mainstream democrats comprise the conscience of America. Unhampered by fundamentalist doctrine, they are responsible for notable advances in civil and women's rights, environmental protection, and fairness in labor and housing. Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" flirted frighteningly close to the left, however. It set up "project" housing and "permanent" welfare entitlements, costly failures that will take generations to dismantle. The excesses have been recognized and limits on welfare, free trade agreements, and balanced budgets are the result of more recent democratic administrations. This moderate thinking holds throughout much of the industrial world where various forms of free enterprise are eagerly competing with each other. The myth of a powerful liberal left exists primarily on talk radio as a bogey man in the minds of the extreme right.
Mainstream republicans have historically kept America's industrial engine humming. Fierce defenders of unfettered trade and practical hard-headed enterprise, they revel in freedom and individualism and jealously guard the other half of our greatness. Recently, however, their paranoid fringe has been resurrected. The last major outburst reached its peak fifty years ago when Joseph McCarthy led our nation in a fervent hunt for "godless communists." When communism was quietly discarded in Russia and China, the "right" lost its arch opponent and its reason for being. Paranoia, however, finds an enemy and it fastened on some vague internal threat. A small but grisly American episode culminated in the fiery and self-fulfilling "Waco" disaster, followed by the even more tragic Oklahoma City bombing. America's current paranoia unfortunately is larger and more sinister in scope."

Must read: Club of Rome Update: Facing the Limits to Growth

"From 1970-72 I directed a project at MIT, supported by an international group called the Club of Rome. My colleagues and I developed a computer model about the long-term causes and consequences of growth in population and the physical economy of the globe. The research produced three books. One of them, Limits to Growth, caused a huge storm of controversy that has continued until the present. The work pointed out that prevailing policies would almost certainly lead to overshoot and collapse of the global society sometime in the 21st century.
One cannot predict the future with any confidence. But our computer model, known as World3, produce a set of scenarios that showed different possibilities for major global trends out to the year 2100. Most of them manifested collapse. Some of them showed the possibility of sustainable development.
The book was translated into over 30 languages, became a best-seller in many nations, and was eventually voted one of the 10 most important environmental books of the 20th century.
It has also been bitterly attacked, right up to the present. For example a recent advertisement in the Wall Street Journal stated, "In 1972, the Club of Rome published Limits to Growth, questioning the sustainability of economic and population growth. .... the Club of Rome was wrong."
It has been astonishing to me that many politicians and economists can continue to deny the evidence of limits that is announced with ever more frequency and urgency in the daily papers and the evening news. The world's use of materials and energy has grown past the levels that can be supported indefinitely. Pressures are mounting from the environment that will force a reduction. Rising oil prices, climate change, declining forests, falling ground water levels -- all of these are simply symptoms of the overshoot.
It is also a source of sadness for me to see so much energy invested in denial and almost none put into making the changes that would let humanity survive on this beautiful planet in good order more or less indefinitely. For our research clearly points out that feasible changes in cultural norms and goals would let us ease back down to sustainable levels, fulfill basic human needs, and structure an orderly society more or less indefinitely.
Because of the long time horizon involved in our studies, we always realized it would require several decades to get any perspective on the accuracy of our forecasts. Now, three decades later, we are into the 21st century within 20 years of the time when our scenarios suggest that growth will near its end. The basic conclusions are still the same. We have modified our model only a little to reflect some better data about the effects of technology on land yields and birth rates. And we have spent much more time elaborating on the structural features of the global system -- delays, growth, and limits -- that predispose it to overshoot and collapse. . . .
Any population-economy-environment system that has feedback delays and slow physical responses; that has thresholds and erosive mechanisms; and that grows rapidly is literally unmanageable. No matter how fabulous its technologies, no matter how efficient its economy, no matter how wise its leaders, it can't steer itself away from hazards. If it constantly tries to accelerate, it will overshoot.
By definition, overshoot is a condition in which the delayed signals from the environment are not yet strong enough to force an end to growth. How, then, can society tell if it is in overshoot? Falling resource stocks and rising pollution levels are the first clues. Here are some other symptoms:

* Capital, resources, and labor diverted to activities compensating for the loss of services that were formerly provided without cost by nature (for example, sewage treatment, air purification, water purification, flood control, pest control, restoration of soil nutrients, pollination, or the preservation of species).
* Capital, resources, and labor diverted from final goods production to exploitation of scarcer, more distant, deeper, or more dilute resources.
* Technologies invented to make use of lower-quality, smaller, more dispersed, less valuable resources, because the higher-value ones are gone.
* Failing natural pollution cleanup mechanisms; rising levels of pollution.
* Capital depreciation exceeding investment, and maintenance deferred, so there is deterioration in capital stocks, especially long-lived infrastructure.
* Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor used by the 176 World3: The Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World military or industry to gain access to, secure, and defend resources that are increasingly concentrated in fewer, more remote, or increasingly hostile regions.
* Investment in human resources (education, health care, shelter) postponed in order to meet immediate consumption, investment, or security needs, or to pay debts.
* Debts a rising percentage of annual real output.
* Eroding goals for health and environment.
* Increasing conflicts, especially conflicts over sources or sinks.
* Shifting consumption patterns as the population can no longer pay the price of what it really wants and, instead, purchases what it can afford.
* Declining respect for the instruments of collective government as they are used increasingly by the elites to preserve or increase their share of a declining resource base.
* Growing chaos in natural systems, with "natural" disasters more frequent and more severe because of less resilience in the environmental system.

Do you observe any of these symptoms in your "real world"? If you do, you should suspect that your society is in advanced stages of overshoot."

Must read: LAWeekly: Humvee Hell: Evan Wright talks about his two months riding with the Marines in Iraq, and his new book, Generation Kill

"One of the issues is the embedding process. With the exception of the ground’s-eye view in this book, there’s been a real failure of bearing witness.

They would assign you to a unit, and let’s say they assign you to, like, a frontline unit such as the one I was in. The typical process was, the reporter would then hang out with the officers in a headquarters and support unit, which is to the rear of everybody else. And then they would sort of shoot forward and do temporary embeds with the fighting Marines or soldiers.

Do as you were told.

It was often the reporters themselves, for the reason that you still usually needed to have your satellite phone, your modem uplink and all the equipment to charge your batteries. And if you’re carrying all that stuff, they don’t want you riding in a front unit. So the media did a lot of self-censorship. The Pentagon actually gave a lot of latitude to the individual commanders. Since I was one of only two people writing for a magazine that was embedded with the entire first Marine division — which is kind of shocking — and I didn’t have a daily deadline, I did some horse-trading, and that’s why I got to go with this front team. And it’s why I was with these guys for a month and never saw any other reporters and seldom saw the officers. But the overall phenomenon of how reporters erroneously reported this war? I think that it’s because in America, television networks almost have — with Fox — branded themselves for their political bias, so that it was almost considered political if you asked a question that seemed to question the war effort itself. Although we have the image of hard-hitting, questioning-authority people, by and large reporters are the biggest bunch of kiss-asses on Earth. They gravitate toward power because power is where the information flows from. I would see these groups of reporters in Kuwait before the war started, kissing up to the officers and the guys in charge, and if the guy made an awful joke, they’d laugh at it. It was grotesque. . . .

Did a lot of reporters leave after experiencing combat?

I’ve heard now that some of them tried to leave. I was just talking to a Marine from a different battalion, and this reporter had a nervous breakdown, and they couldn’t get him to leave the armored vehicle. A lot of reporters were endangered. I thought I was going to freak out, and I was always amazed when I didn’t.

Was part of you geeked on the adventure aspect?

Totally. I was totally geeked out, and the weird thing is that violence and destruction is so fucking cool. That’s why war is so horrible, because people are drawn into it. The people doing the shooting, they love it, you know? They hate it too, but they love it. It’s like heroin.

Obviously, many came into this adventure one way and came out another.

Within the Marine Corps there’s a particular psychology they sort of revel in, which is: If there’s gonna be a bunch of people fucked over in battle, outnumbered and surrounded by bad guys, it’ll be us. And that’s part of their lore. So they almost are looking forward to that. But, all of that said, once the war started . . . In the book, I describe only two scenes where the guys I was with started crying, but actually that was very common. It was just impossible to not react to the things they were participating in. Like the shooting of children or, you know, any civilian. And they changed.
It is that it’s so intense. You can have a moment like we did in Baquba up north of Baghdad. We were getting shot at continually for like 30 hours, and then had this breakout moment where the clouds lifted and the Air Force and the Marine helicopters came and just bombed the fuck out of the surrounding area. And then we had to drive into this flaming village, and initially everyone was really triumphant. The ground was littered with Republican Guard uniforms. The guys that had been shooting us fled or were blown up. There were bodies everywhere. And then this little girl comes, carried out of a culvert. She wasn’t injured, but she and her family were in shock. And then everyone realized, Oh my God, we Americans just burned down their village and bombed it. Some of the Marines I was with went from literally killing people to crying — and then five minutes later they’re back in combat. They had read about the horrors of war, but they were also really sensitive to it. They didn’t lose their humanity.

Did a lot of reporters leave after experiencing combat?

I’ve heard now that some of them tried to leave. I was just talking to a Marine from a different battalion, and this reporter had a nervous breakdown, and they couldn’t get him to leave the armored vehicle. A lot of reporters were endangered. I thought I was going to freak out, and I was always amazed when I didn’t.

Was part of you geeked on the adventure aspect?

Totally. I was totally geeked out, and the weird thing is that violence and destruction is so fucking cool. That’s why war is so horrible, because people are drawn into it. The people doing the shooting, they love it, you know? They hate it too, but they love it. It’s like heroin.

Obviously, many came into this adventure one way and came out another.

Within the Marine Corps there’s a particular psychology they sort of revel in, which is: If there’s gonna be a bunch of people fucked over in battle, outnumbered and surrounded by bad guys, it’ll be us. And that’s part of their lore. So they almost are looking forward to that. But, all of that said, once the war started . . . In the book, I describe only two scenes where the guys I was with started crying, but actually that was very common. It was just impossible to not react to the things they were participating in. Like the shooting of children or, you know, any civilian. And they changed.
It is that it’s so intense. You can have a moment like we did in Baquba up north of Baghdad. We were getting shot at continually for like 30 hours, and then had this breakout moment where the clouds lifted and the Air Force and the Marine helicopters came and just bombed the fuck out of the surrounding area. And then we had to drive into this flaming village, and initially everyone was really triumphant. The ground was littered with Republican Guard uniforms. The guys that had been shooting us fled or were blown up. There were bodies everywhere. And then this little girl comes, carried out of a culvert. She wasn’t injured, but she and her family were in shock. And then everyone realized, Oh my God, we Americans just burned down their village and bombed it. Some of the Marines I was with went from literally killing people to crying — and then five minutes later they’re back in combat. They had read about the horrors of war, but they were also really sensitive to it. They didn’t lose their humanity.
Outside this town called Ar Rifa one time, we had to wait for like six hours, and we were getting all these gunshots from the town. There were only 40 of us in this immediate position, and there’s tens of thousands of people in this town 15 meters away. My impulse was: Guys, call in the artillery strike. Just level this corner of the town. There’s probably like 15,000 people who live in this corner. Level it. And if I had been in charge, I would have had that impulse. They didn’t do that. And they could have. . . .

You get the sense that you were surrounded by idiosyncratic and iconoclastic people.

I’d been embedded with the Army in the past and then with the Marines, and the Marines actually struck me as much more competent than the Army. But the interesting paradox is that the Marines are really brainwashed when they go through training. And the Army is supposedly less brainwashed. It’s harder to do stories on Army guys in general because they’re much more institutionalized. They don’t have a lot of — well, if they have original thoughts, they’re not eager to share them. But you could have dropped me into any group of Marines, and you would have found, like, the same level of insanity. They say that the Army sells job skills, and the Marines sell, you know, “Become a warrior.” It’s a fantasy. A lot of them are really big fuck-ups, and the Marine Corps is what straightened them out. But they’re still, in their souls, iconoclasts.

The thing is that they’re also trained to violate the ultimate taboo of society — to kill people. As Sergeant Espera says in the book, “If we’d done this shit back in L.A., we’d all be in prison now.” And I think one of the ways they both deal with it and condition themselves for it is to violate every other taboo they can think of.

And yet it’s the commanders that seem callous to the killing.

The enlisted guy’s psychology is to operate much more as sort of a sensitive humanitarian individual, even though he’s also the one pulling the trigger and doing the hands-on killing. Commanders were much more callous about civilian deaths than the enlisted guys. They were pretty much happy with the road-block situation that we were operating under, where all these women and children and unarmed men were shot. [But] the enlisted men had this little mini-rebellion, where they’re like, “No, we’re gonna fire smoke grenades to warn them off.” The commanders were against that because they thought it was less aggressive and the Marines were putting their own lives in danger. Of course, it’s the commander’s job. He’s the one who sends people into battle, and he’s the one that actually sees the big picture and knows, I will lose this number of people today. But in a moral sense, to be a commander you do have to be a sociopath, you know?

They’re under pressure from above too, right?

The side story of the book is about the commander of First Recon, Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Ferrando. He was a heartless motherfucker, and everyone hated him. He wanted to deny medical treatment to the kids they shot. It was only [after] a rebellion that the men fomented against his command that he relented and gave medical treatment. But he was one of the more successful battalion commanders in all of Iraq because the welfare of the men didn’t seem like a priority. And the [missions] he sent them on were insane. I mean, sending First Recon through that first ambushed town of Al Gharraf in open Humvees . . .

There’s also the leveling of villages with bombs. Did you see a lot of indiscriminate bombing?

The indiscriminate bombing I saw was a bomb here and there from a lone F16. Everyone thinks of indiscriminate bombing as from airplanes. It’s the fucking artillery. The Marines in particular were using so much artillery that I have no idea what kind of killing we did. I tried to do little estimates with Nasiriyah. We were dropping these DPICM’s [dual-purpose improved conventional munitions] with cluster munitions. One round has between 60 and 90 rounds, and 15 percent of those don’t blow up until a kid picks it up later on and steps on it or plays with it because they’re brightly colored. I went back and I interviewed the artillery units and asked them how many rounds they fired on the city? It turns out we dropped 10,000 of those on one little city. It’s appalling.

Were there other situations where you found yourself feeling similarly appalled?

One thing I didn’t get to include in the book for space reasons was a scene in the beginning when these Iraqis surrendered to the unit I was with, and then we realized there were too many. So we had to unsurrender them and let them go even though they were begging for protection. Because they said there were Fedayeen death squads hunting them down and killing them — which everyone in the Marines, in the higher-ups, believed was true. They were carrying little leaflets saying we [the U.S. military] would protect them if they surrendered.

And we let them go. We said, “You’re no longer our prisoners. Bye, good luck, have fun on the road.” I did not know this at the time, but it was a Marine officer who later told me that that was a strict violation of a Geneva Convention.

I remembered [Major] General [James N.] Mattis [telling] me and other reporters before the war [that we’d] take all these surrenders, process them, treat them humanely. We didn’t do that because our stripped-down military did not have the personnel to process them. We betrayed them. I’m sure that those guys, if they survived, later became insurgents. You know, we lost their trust. Some of them probably turned into criminals. The other thing I didn’t report, or underreported in the book, was that we sped past mountains of munitions. Like RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades], AK-47s. In Baghdad, some of the civilians were complaining to us that the price of an AK had dropped to the cost of a pack of cigarettes. I interviewed our explosive-ordinance-disposal technicians, who talked about 50,000 AKs in one hospital that we were unable to destroy. We would be digging holes and finding these Dragunovs, the best sniper rifle in the world, still sealed in their plastic bags. The Marines would just toss them out because it wasn’t their job to dispose of them. All of this stuff just flooded into Iraq.

Were there repercussions for your unit after the articles were published?

When the articles came out, the Marines were severely punished for what they said to me, and one guy was kicked out of the battalion. They got into a lot of shit, and were given a new commander and a new call sign. The company had been known as “Hit Man.” And they were to give it a new name. Part of it was just routine, but part of it was to erase their ugly history, as they saw it, with the Rolling Stone articles. And so they said, can you think of any new names? And according to my sources, Corporal Person, who was the driver of my Humvee, raised his hand and said, “How about ‘Baby Killer?’”. . .

That might be the most heroic thing they’ve done.

Fuck yeah. It’s better than any celebrity I’ve written about who, you say one little thing that they find offensive, and they threaten to sue you. Oh, here’s a great story: The Marines, they’re getting busted down. They put their lives on the line. They’re accused of cowardice for what they said in my articles. The one person who’s infuriated by my articles and is threatening all these horrific things is Justin Timberlake. Because one of the Marines dissed him. And Justin Timberlake’s people threatened all these horrible things because Corporal Person mocked Justin Timberlake’s musical abilities in the articles. It’s just a perfect comment on our culture."

Must read: Bill Moyers: This is the Fight of Our Lives

"The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's 'Invisible Hand.' This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us."
-- Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

. . .Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans -- eight out of ten of them in working families -- are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.
Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it's been in 50 years -- the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn't expect it -- among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward. . . .
For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.
Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that's not the case. As the economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. "The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means." You can find many sources to support this conclusion. I like the language of a small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor "are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life."
Household economics is not the only area where inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn't mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society where money is not the sole arbiter of status or comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth will be valued even as individual wealth is encouraged.
Let me make something clear here. I wasn't born yesterday. I'm old enough to know that the tension between haves and have-nots are built into human psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it has been a factor in every society. But I also know America was going to be different. I know that because I read Mr. Jefferson's writings, Mr. Lincoln's speeches and other documents in the growing American creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas Jefferson about human equality being self-evident. Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that ringing but ambiguous declaration: "All men are created equal"? Two things, possibly. One, although none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn Tinder), that's the basis for thinking we are by nature kin.
Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those words through the experience of the slave who was his mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands that wrote "all men are created equal" also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the only slaves freed by his will when he died -- the one request we think Sally Hennings made of her master. Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness.
In his book on the Declaration, my late friend Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever things are really good for any human being are really good for all other human beings. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long sufferance -- perhaps it was all she sought from what may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love -- was that he let her children go. "Let my children go" -- one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long been the promise of America -- a broken promise, to be sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.
We were going to do these things because we understood our dark side -- none of us is good -- but we also understood the other side -- all of us are sacred. From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two notions in our collective head -- that we are worthy of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and knowing the other, we created a country where the winners didn't take all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth. We believed equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors, often the relatively poor, against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than held for the elite. The government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters' rights. The court challenged monopoly -- all in the name of we the people.
In my time we went to public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and stopped to rest in state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative years, always subject to struggle, constantly vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion of America as a shared project has been the central engine of our national experience.
Until now. I don't have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls "a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power." From land, water and other natural resources, to media and the broadcast and digital spectrums, to scientific discovery and medical breakthroughs, and to politics itself, a broad range of the American commons is undergoing a powerful shift toward private and corporate control. And with little public debate. Indeed, what passes for 'political debate' in this country has become a cynical charade behind which the real business goes on -- the not-so-scrupulous business of getting and keeping power in order to divide up the spoils.
We could have seen this coming if we had followed the money. The veteran Washington reporter, Elizabeth Drew, says "the greatest change in Washington over the past 25 years -- in its culture, in the way it does business and the ever-burgeoning amount of business transactions that go on here -- has been in the preoccupation with money." Jeffrey Birnbaum, who covered Washington for nearly twenty years for the Wall Street Journal, put it more strongly: "[campaign cash] has flooded over the gunwales of the ship of state and threatens to sink the entire vessel. Political donations determine the course and speed of many government actions that deeply affect our daily lives." Politics is suffocating from the stranglehold of money. During his brief campaign in 2000, before he was ambushed by the dirty tricks of the religious right in South Carolina and big money from George W. Bush's wealthy elites, John McCain said elections today are nothing less than an "influence peddling scheme in which both parties compete to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."
Small wonder that with the exception of people like John McCain and Russ Feingold, official Washington no longer finds anything wrong with a democracy dominated by the people with money. Hit the pause button here, and recall Roger Tamraz. He's the wealthy oilman who paid $300,000 to get a private meeting in the White House with President Clinton; he wanted help in securing a big pipeline in central Asia. This got him called before congressional hearings on the financial excesses of the 1996 campaign. If you watched the hearings on C-Span you heard him say he didn't think he had done anything out of the ordinary. When they pressed him he told the senators: "Look, when it comes to money and politics, you make the rules. I'm just playing by your rules." One senator then asked if Tamraz had registered and voted. And he was blunt in his reply: "No, senator, I think money's a bit more (important) than the vote."
So what does this come down to, practically?
Here is one accounting:
"When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed."
I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time magazine. Time's premier investigative journalists -- Donald Bartlett and James Steele -- concluded in a series last year that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many." Economic inequality begets political inequality, and vice versa.
I know, I know: this sounds very much like a call for class war. But the class war was declared a generation ago, in a powerful paperback polemic by William Simon, who was soon to be Secretary of the Treasury. He called on the financial and business class, in effect, to take back the power and privileges they had lost in the depression and new deal. They got the message, and soon they began a stealthy class war against the rest of society and the principles of our democracy. They set out to trash the social contract, to cut their workforces and wages, to scour the globe in search of cheap labor, and to shred the social safety net that was supposed to protect people from hardships beyond their control. Business Week put it bluntly at the time: "Some people will obviously have to do with less....it will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big business can have more."
The middle class and working poor are told that what's happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand." This is a lie. What's happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.
To create the intellectual framework for this takeover of public policy they funded conservative think tanks -- The Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution, and the American Enterprise Institute -- that churned out study after study advocating their agenda.
To put political muscle behind these ideas they created a formidable political machine. One of the few journalists to cover the issues of class -- Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post -- wrote: "During the 1970s, business refined its ability to act as a class, submerging competitive instincts in favor of joint, cooperate action in the legislative area." Big business political action committees flooded the political arena with a deluge of dollars. And they built alliances with the religious right -- Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority and Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition -- who mounted a cultural war providing a smokescreen for the class war, hiding the economic plunder of the very people who were enlisted as foot soldiers in the cause of privilege.
In a book to be published this summer, Daniel Altman describes what he calls the "neo-economy -- a place without taxes, without a social safety net, where rich and poor live in different financial worlds -- and [said Altman] it's coming to America." He's a little late. It's here. Says Warren Buffett, the savviest investor of them all: "My class won." "