RobsRealNews

My thoughts for 2/1/05

Fox news and Rush Limbaugh need to be taken off the air if one wishes to have democracy.

The reason Japan, Europe and SE Asia developed is because conservative government in this country was too
stupid to know what they were up to. For this reason they were free to plan their economies and in the process
take one industry after the other from the US. This started to change under Clinton when the US started forcing
their failed ideology on the world, causing a depression in SE Asia that impoverished a billion people and forcing a
recession on Europe and Japan from which they have barely recovered.

The Bush administration is like a house of cards wanting to fall over propped up by the corrupt justice department
which is a part of this criminal Bush administration and Jews like Karl Rove who should have been exterminated
a long time ago. All it takes is the will of the powers that be to do the right thing and initiate impeachment
proceedings.

The insane rulers of this country don’t understand economics or human nature. The US or the US through
another entity like the EU or IMF ruins every economy that allows them to implement the economic theories of
Milton Friedman, their real Jew God. They persist in doing it even after one failure after another. Before the
invasion of Iraq I said the Iraqi people would be worse off if Saddam was deposed because I knew the conservative
crackpots track record whenever they got hold of an economy. The results of these economic policies have made
the Bush administration worse than Stalin or Hitler. Read the article below and you’ll understand why the Bush
administration should be treated like war criminals and handed over to the Iraqi insurgents. The war in Iraq won’
t end for the simple reason the US fucked up their economy and now all the people hate the US more than they
ever hated Saddam. Before this war started I said the reason Bush wanted war is because Israel wanted absolute
control of the Middle-East.

This country was established with the industrial strategy of people like John D Rockefellor, Carnegie and JP
Morgan and the planned US economy of WW2 and the cold war. The people who ran the American economy back
then believed laissez faire was for fools. Now our tin-pot conservative dictators force laissez faire on the world to
assure no economy develops in the same manner the US used to develop.

I believe G B Shaw said something about the shock therapy the Bolshevics forced on Russia. He said they were
fools to nationalize anything until they had a better use for it. The Chinese have surplus population they don’t
need for their system so they gave them to the capitalist countries in the form of enterprise zones. China thrives
because they don’t allow the corrupt brain dead capitalists to fuck up their economy like they did to the Soviet
Union, Latin America and now Iraq

This article explains that Americans will continue to die in Iraq because American right wing crackpots ruined
their economy. They US should have helped modernize state industry and add new private industry where there
was a need not being satisfied by the state. They should never privatize anything. And they should be repairing
damage from the war and improving the Iraqi infrastructure. Just how many times do these economists from
these famous universities have to be proven wrong till someone takes them out and shoots them.

Iraqi’s will only be worse of because the Bush administration doesn’t understand nation building. After WW2
McAurthur established a planned economy in Japan and inacted a maxmum income. No one was allowed to earn
more than that amount in order to prevent inequality.

With regards to the neocon’s belief in the need for preemptive attacks, back in the 90’s during genocide in
Bosnia I wondered why genocidical madmen were allowed to get to the point where they could murder masses of
people. The solution I was contemplating was not an invasion but an assassination attempt on perpetuators of
genocide. Whether or not it is feasible to assasinate leaders of genocide such as occurred in Rawanda, Bosnia,
Cambodia, Uganda etc. I don’t know.

Could Saddam have been knocked off by an assasine after gassing the Kurds? The US put Saddam in power and
encouraged him to kill masses of Iranians. The US gave him the weapons. So it was the US that was guilty of
genocide. The US didn’t care about his genocide till he interrupted the strategic balance in the Middle East with
the invasion of Kuwait. The CIA doesn’t assassinate tyrants like Saddam. They help put people like that in power.
The CIA assassinates people like the democratically elected Allende who strove to help the his people. That’s
because sadistic Jews like Henry Kissinger who control US foreign policy wanted him dead.

The CIA doesn’t assassinate genocidal leaders like Saddam for fear of political instability. Do they think if they
would have had Saddam bumped off it would have caused more political and economic instability than what we
have now in Iraq. They are out of their minds. There must be a cost benefit analysis of such actions. The cost of
the invasion of Iraq in American lives and money has yet to be discerned. If the decision makers were spending
their money or lives the invasion would never had taken place.
Nothing in the media has presented a cost benefit analysis of the invasion of Iraq. If the American people
understood the cost and benefits of the Bush administrations actions they would be demanding Bush’s head on a
platter.

Considering Israel is doing it’s best to create conflict in the middle east I would assist Iran in developing a
nuclear weapon. Maybe that would encourage the people of Israel to move to an island somewhere where they
won’t bother anyone.

Baghdad Year Zero
Pillaging Iraq in pursuit of a neocon utopia by Naomi Klein.

Niomi Klein is the author of No Logo and writer/producer of The Take, a new documentary on Argentina's
occupied factories.

It was only after I had been in Baghad for a month that I found what I was looking for. I had traveled to Iraq a
year after the war began, at the height of what should have been a construction boom; but after weeks of
searching had not seen a single piece of heavy machinery apart from tanks and humvees. Then I saw it: I
construction crane. It was big and yellow and impressive, and when I caught a glimpse of it around a corner in a
busy shopping district I thought that I was finally about to witness some of the reconstruction I had heard so
much about. But as I got closer I noticed that the crane was not actually rebuilding any thing. Not one of the
bombed out government buildngs that still lay in rubble all over the city, nor one of the many power lines that
remained in twisted heaps even as the heat of summer was starting to bear down. No, the crane was hoisting a
giant billboard to he top of a three-story building. SUNIULAH: HONEY 100% NATURAL, made in Saudi Arabia.
Seeing the sign, I couldn't help but think about something Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq,
he said, is "a huge pot of honey that's attracting a lot of flies." The flies McCain was referring to were the
Halliburtons and Bechtels, as well as the venture capitalists who flocked to Iraq in the path cleared by Bradley
Fighting Vehicles and laser guided bombs. The honey that drew them was not just no-bid contracts and Iraq's
famed oil wealth but the myriad investment opportunities offered by a country that had just been cracked wide
open after decades of being sealed off, first by the nationalist economic policies of Saddam Hussein, then by
asphyxiating United Nations sanctions.
Looking at the honey billboard, I was also reminded of the most common explanation for what has gone wrong in
Iraq, a complaint echoed by every one from John Kerry to Pat Buchanan: Iraq is mired in blood and deprivation
because George W. Bush didn't have "a postwar plan." The only problem with this theory is that it isn't true. The
Bush Administration did have a plan for what it would do after the war; put simply, it was to layout as much
honey as possible, then sit back and wait for the flies.
The honey theory of Iraqi reconstruction stems from the most cherished belief of the
logical architects: that greed is good, not good just for them and and their friends but good for humanity, but
certainly good for Iraqis. Greed creates profit, which creates growth, _which creates jobs and products and
services and everything else anyone could possibly need or want. The role of good government is to create the
optimal conditions for corporations to pursue their bottomless greed, so they In turn can meet the needs of the
society. The problem is that governments, even neoconservative governments, rarely get the chance to prove
their sacred theory right: despite their enormous ideological advances, even George Bush's Republicans are, in
their own minds, perennially sabotaged by meddling Democrats, intractable unions, and alarmist
environmentalists.
Iraq was going to change all that. In one place on Earth, the theory would finally be put into practice in its most
perfect and uncompromised form. A country of l5 million would not be rebuilt as it was before the war; it would be
erased, disappeared. In its place would spring forth a gleaming showroom for laissez faire economics, a utopia
such as the world had never seen. Every policy that liberates multinational corporations to pursue their quest for
profit would be put into place: a shrunken state, a flexible workforce, open borders, minimal taxes, no tariffs, no
ownership restrictions. The people of Iraq would, of course, have to endure some short-term pain: assets,
previously owned by the state, would have to be given up to create new opportunities for growth and investment.
Jobs would have to be lost and, as foreign products flowed across the border, local businesses and family farms
would, unfortunately, be unable to compete. But to the authors of this plan, these would be small prices to pay for
the economic boom that would surely explode once the proper conditions were in place, a boom so powerful the
country would. practically rebuild itself.
The fact that the boom never came and Iraq continues to tremble under explosions of a very different sort should
never be blamed on the absence of a plan. Rather, the blame rests with the plan itself, and the extraordinarily
violent ideology upon which it is based.
Torturers believe that when electrical shocks are applied to various parts of the body simultaneously subjects are
rendered so confused about where the pain is coming from that they become incapable of resistance. A
declassified CIA "Counterintelligence Interrogation" manual from 1963 describes how a trauma inflicted on
prisoners opens up "an interval-which may be extremely brief-of suspended animation, a kind of psychological
shock or paralysis. ... [A]t this moment the source is far more open to suggestion, far likelier to comply." A
similar theory applies to economic shock therapy, Of "shock treatment," the ugly term used to describe the rapid
implementation of free
market reforms imposed on Chile in the wake of General Augusto Pinochet's coup. The theory is that if painful
economic "adjustments" are brought

(IRAQ WAS MEANT TO BE A GLEAM ING SHOWROOM FOR LAISSEZ-FAIRE ECONOMICS, A UTOPIA
SUCH AS TH WORLD HAD NEVER SEEN)

in rapidly and in the aftermath of a seismic social disruption like a war, a coup, or a government collapse, the
population will be so stunned, and so preoccupied with the daily pressures of survival, that it too will go into
suspended animation, unable to resist. As Pinochet's finance minister, Admiral Lorenzo Gotuzzo, declared, "The
dog's tail must be cut off in one chop."
That, in essence, was the working thesis in Iraq, and in keeping with the belief that private companies are more
suited than governments for virtually every task, the White House decided to privatize the task of privatizing
Iraq's state-dominated economy. Two months before the war began, USAID began drafting a work order, to be
handed out to a private company, to oversee Iraq's "transition to a sustainable market-driven economic system."
The document states that the winning company {which turned out to be the KPMG offshoot Bearing Point} will
take "appropriate advantage of the unique opportunity for rapid progress in this area presented by the current
configuration of political circumstances." Which is precisely what happened. L. Paul Bremer, who led the U.S.
occupation of Iraq from May 2, 2003, until he caught an early flight out of Baghdad on June 28, admits that when
he arrived, "Baghdad was on fire, literally, as I drove in from the airport." But before the fires from the "shock
and awe" military onslaught were even extinguished, Bremer unleashed his shock therapy, pushing through more
wrenching changes in one sweltering summer than the International Monetary Fund has managed to enact over
three decades in Latin America. Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel laureate and former chief economist at the WorId Bank,
describes Bremer's reforms as "an even more radical form of shock therapy than pursued in the former Soviet
world."

The tone of Bremer's tenure was set with his first major act on the job: he fired 500,000 state workers, most of
them soldiers, but also doctors, nurses, teachers, publishers, and printers. Next, he flung open the country's
borders to absolutely unrestricted imports: no tariffs, no duties, no inspections, no taxes. Iraq, Bremer declared
two weeks after he arrived, was "open for business."
One month later, Bremer unveiled the centerpiece of his reforms. Before the invasion, Iraq's non oil related .
economy had been dominated by 200 state-owned companies, which produced everything from cement to paper to
washing machines. In June, Bremer flew to an economic summit in Jordan and announced that these firms would
be privatized immediately. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands," he said, "is essential for
Iraq's economic recovery." It would be the largest state liquidation sale since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
But Bremer's economic engineering had only just begun. In September, to entice foreign investors to come to
Iraq, he enacted a radical set of laws unprecedented in their generosity to multinational corporations. There was
Order 37, which lowered Iraq's corporate tax rate from roughly 40 percent to a flat 15 percent. There was Order
39, which allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of Iraqi assets outside of the natural-resource sector.
Even better, investors could take 100 percent of the profits they made in Iraq out of the country; they would not
be required to reinvest and they would not be taxed. Under Order. 39, they could sign leases and contracts that
would last for forty years. Order 40 welcomed foreign banks to Iraq under the same favorable terms. All that
remained
of Saddam Hussein's economic policies was a law restricting trade unions and collective bargaining.
If these policies sound familiar, it's because they are the same ones multinationals around the world lobby for
from national governments and in international trade agreements. But while these reforms are only ever enacted
in part, or in fits and starts, Bremer delivered them all, all at once. .
Overnight, Iraq went from being the most isolated country in the world to being, on paper, its widest
open market.
At first, the shock-therapy theory seemed to hold: Iraqis, reeling from violence both military and economic, were
far too busy staying alive to mount a political response to Bremer's campaign. Worrying about the privatization of
the sewage system was an unimaginable luxury with half the population lacking access to clean drinking water;
the debate over the flat tax would have to wait until the lights were back on. Even in the international press,
Bremer's new laws, though radical, were easily upstaged by more dramatic news of political chaos and rising crime.
Some people were paying attention, of course. That autumn was awash in "rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, in
Washington, London, Madrid, and Amman.
The Economist described Iraq under Bremer as "a capitalist dream," and a flurry of new consulting firms were
launched promising to help companies get access to the Iraqi market, their boards of directors stacked with well
connected Republicans. The most prominent was New Bridge Strategies, started by Joe Allbaugh, former
BushCheney campaign manager. "Getting the rights to distribute Procter & Gamble products can be a gold
mine," one of the company's partners enthused. "One well-stocked 7 -Eleven could knock out thirty Iraqi stores;
a WalMart could take over the country."
Soon there were rumors that a McDonald's would be opening up in downtown Baghdad, funding was almost in
place for a Starwood luxury hotel, and General Motors was planning to build an auto plant. On the financial side,
HSBC would have interlinked power struggles, one among Iraqi exiles advising the White House on its postwar
strategy, the other within the White House itself.
As the British historian Dilip Hiro has shown, in Secrets and Lies: Operation 'Iraqi Freedom' and After, the Iraqi
exiles pushing for the invasion were divided, broadly, into two camps. On
one side were "the pragmatists," who favored getting rid of Saddam and his immediate entourage, securing
access to oil, and slowly introducing free market reforms. Many of these exiles were part of the State
Department's group was preparing to offer substantial loans guaranteed against future sales of Iraqi oil, and the
bell was going to ring on a New York-style stock exchange in Baghdad any day.
In only a few months, the postwar plan to turn Iraq into a laboratory for the neocons had been realized. Leo
Strauss may have provided the intellectual framework for invading Iraq preemptively, but it was that other
University of Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, author of the antigovernment manifesto Capitalism and
Freedom, who supplied the manual for what to do once the country was safely in America's hands. This
represented an enormous victory for the most ideological wing of the Bush Administration. But it was also
something more: the culmination of two Future of Iraq Project, which generated a thirteen-volume report on how
to restore basic services and transition to democracy after the war. On the other side was the "Year Zero" camp,
those who believed that Iraq was so contaminated that it needed to be rubbed out and remade from scratch. The
prime advocate of the pragmatic approach was Iyad Allawi, a former high-level Baathist who fell out with Saddam
and started working for the CIA. The prime advocate of the Year Zero approach was Ahmad Chalabi, whose
hatred of the Iraqi state for expropriating his family's assets during the 1958 revolution ran so deep he longed to
see the entire country burned to the ground--everything, that is, but the Oil Ministry, which would be the nucleus
of the new Iraq, the cluster of cells from which an entire nation would grow. He called this process "de-
Baathification."
A parallel battle between pragmatists and true believers was being waged within the Bush Administration. The
pragmatists were men like Secretary of State Colin Powell and General Jay Gamer, the first U.S. envoy to
postwar Iraq. General Garner's plan was straightforward enough: fix the infrastructure, hold quick and dirty
elections, leave the shock therapy to the International Monetary Fund, and concentrate on securing U.S. military
bases on the model of the Philippines. "I think we should look right now at Iraq as our coaling station in the
MiddIe East," he told the BBC He also paraphrased T. E. Lawrence, saying, "It's better for them to do it
imperfectly than for us to do it for them perfectly." On the other side was the usual cast of neoconservatives:
Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (who lauded Bremer's "sweeping reforms"
as "some of the most enlightened and inviting tax and investment laws in the free world"), Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz, and, perhaps most centrally, Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. Whereas the
State Department had its Future of Iraq report, the neocons had USAID's contract with Bearing Point to remake
Iraq's economy: in 108 pages, "privatization" was mentioned no fewer than fifty_one times. To the true believers
in the White House, General Garner's plans for postwar Iraq seemed hopelessly unambitious. Why settle for a
mere coaling station when you can have a model free market? Why settle for the Philippines when you can have
a beacon unto the world?
The Iraqi Year Zeroists made natural allies for the White House neoconservatives: Chalabi's seething hatred of
the Baathist state fit nicely with the neocons' hatred of the state in general, and the two agendas effortlessly
merged. Together, they came to imagine the invasion of Iraq as a kind of Rapture: where the rest of the world
saw death, they saw birth-a country redeemed through violence, cleansed by fire. Iraq wasn't being destroyed by
cruise missiles, cluster bombs, chaos, and looting; it was being born again. April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, was
Day One of Year Zero.
While the war was being waged, it still wasn't clear whether the pragmatists or the Year Zeroists would be handed
control over occupied Iraq. But the speed with which the nation was conquered dramatically increased the
neocons' political capital, since they had been predicting a "cakewalk" all along. Eight days after George Bush
landed on that aircraft carrier under a banner that said MISSION ACCOMPLISHED, the President publicly
signed on to the neocons' vision for Iraq to become a model corporate state that would open up the entire region.
On May 9, Bush proposed the "establishment of a U.S. Middle East free trade area within a decade"; three days
later, Bush sent Paul Bremer to Baghdad to replace Jay Garner, who had been on the job for only three weeks.
The message was unequivocal: the pragmatists had lost; Iraq would belong to the believers.

A Reagan-era diplomat turned entrepreneur, Bremer had recently proven his ability to transform rubble into gold
by waiting exactly one month after the September 11 attacks to launch Crisis Consulting Practice, a security
company selling "terrorism risk insurance" to multinationals. Bremer had two lieutenants on the economic
front: Thomas Foley and Michael Fleischer, the heads of "private sector development" for the Coalition
Provisional Authority (CPA). Foley is a Greenwich, Connecticut, multimillionaire, a longtime friend of the Bush
family and a BushCheney campaign "pioneer" who has described Iraq as a modem California "gold rush."
Fleischer, a venture capitalist, is the brother of former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Neither man had
any high-level diplomatic experience and both use the term corporate "turnaround" specialist to describe what
they do. According to Foley, this uniquely qualified them to manage Iraq's economy because it was "the mother
of all turnarounds."
Many of the other CPA postings were equally ideological. The Green Zone, the city within a city that houses the
occupation headquarters in Saddam's former palace, was filled with Young Republicans straight out of the
Heritage Foundation, all of them given responsibility they could never have dreamed of receiving at home. Jay
Hallen, a twenty-four-year-old who had applied for a job at the White House, was put in charge of launching
Baghdad's new stock exchange. Scott Erwin, a twenty-one-year-old former intern to Dick Cheney, reported in an
email home that "I am assisting Iraqis in the management of finances and budgeting for the domestic security
forces." The college senior's favorite job before this one? "My time as an ice-cream truck driver." In those early
days, the Green Zone felt a bit like the Peace Corps, for people who think the Peace Corps is a communist plot. It
was a chance to sleep on cots, wear army boots, and cry "incoming"-all while being guarded around the clock by
real soldiers.
The teams of KPMG accountants, investment bankers, think-tank lifers, and Young Republicans that populate
the Green Zone have much in common with the IMF missions that rearrange the economies of developing
countries from the presidential suites of Sheraton hotels the world over. Except for one rather significant
difference: in Iraq they were not negotiating with the government to accept their "structural adjustments" in
exchange for a loan; they were the government.
Some small steps were taken, however, to bring Iraq's U.S.-appointed politicians inside. Yegor Gaidar, the
mastermind of Russia's mid-nineties privatization auction that gave away the country's assets to the reigning
oligarchs, was invited to share his wisdom at a conference in Baghdad. Marek Belka, who as finance minister
oversaw the same process in Poland, was brought in as well. The Iraqis who proved most gifted at mouthing the
neocon lines were selected to act as what USAID calls local "policy champions"-men like Ahmad a1 Mukhtar, who
told me of his countrymen, "They are lazy. The Iraqis by nature, they are very dependent. . . . They will have to
depend on themselves, it is the only way to survive in the world today." Although he has no economics
background and his last job was reading the English_language news on television, al Mukhtar was appointed
director of foreign relations in the Ministry of Trade and is leading the charge for Iraq to join the World Trade
Organization.
I had been following the economic front of the war for almost a year before I decided to go to Iraq. I attended the
"Rebuilding Iraq" trade shows, studied Bremer's tax and investment laws, met with contractors at their home
offices in the United States, interviewed the government officials in Washington who are making the policies. But
as I prepared to travel to Iraq in March to see this experiment in free market utopianism up close, it was
becoming increasingly clear that all was not going according to plan. Bremer had been working on the theory that
if you build a corporate utopia the corporations will come-but where were they? American multinationals were
happy to accept U.S. taxpayer dollars to reconstruct the phone or electricity systerms, but they weren't sinking
their own money into Iraq. There was, as yet, no McDonald's or Wal-Mart in Baghdad, and even the sales of state
factories, announced so confidently nine months earlier, had not materialized.
Some of the holdup had to do with the physical risks of doing business in Iraq. But there were other more
significant risks as well. When Paul Bremer shredded Iraq's Baathist constitution and replaced it with what The
Economist greeted approvingly as "the wish list of foreign investors," there was one small detail he failed to
mention: It was all completely illegal. The CPA derived its legal authority from United Nations Security Council
Resolution 1483, passed in May 2003, which recognized the United States and Britain as Iraq's legitimate
occupiers. It was this resolution that em
powered Bremer to unilaterally make laws in Iraq. But the resolution also stated that the U.S. and Britain must
"comply fully with their obligations under international law including in particular the Geneva Conventions of
1949 and the Hague Regulations of 1907." Both conventions were born as an attempt to curtail the unfortunate
historical tendency among occupying powers to rewrite the rules so that they can economically strip the nations
they control. With this in mind, the conventions stipulate that an occupier must abide by a country's existing laws
unless "absolutely prevented" from doing so. They also state that an occupier does not own the "public buildings,

(INTERNATIONAL LAW PROHIBITS OCCUPIERS FROM SELLING STATE ASSETS BUT DOESN'T SAY
ANYTHING ABOUT PUPPET GOVERNMENTS)

real estate, forests and agricultural assets" of the country it is occupying but is rather their "administrator" and
custodian, keeping them secure until sovereignty is reestablished. This was the true threat to the Year Zero plan:
since America didn't own Iraq's assets, it could not legally sell them, which meant that after the occupation
ended, an Iraqi government could come to power and decide that it wanted to keep the state companies in public
hands, or, as is the norm in the Gulf re- gion, to bar foreign firms from owning 100 percent of national assets. If
that happened, investments made under Bremer's rules could be expropriated, leaving firms with no recourse
because their investments had violated international law from the_ outset.
By November, trade lawyers started to advise their corporate clients not to go into Iraq just yet, that it would be
better to wait until after the transition. Insurance companies were so spooked that not a single one of the big
firms would insure investors for "political risk," that high-stakes area of insurance law that protects companies
against foreign governments turning nationalist or socialist and expropriating their investments.
Even the U.S.-appointed Iraqi politicians, up to now so obedient, were getting nervous about their own political
futures if they went along with the privatization plans. Communications Minister Haider aI-Abadi told me about
his first meeting with Bremer. "I said, 'Look, we don't have the mandate to sell any of this. Privatization is a big
thing. We have to wait until there is an Iraqi government.'" Minister of Industry Mohamad Tofiq was even more
direct: "I am not going to do something that is not legal, so that's it."         Both al-Abadi and Tofiq told me about
a meeting-never reported in the press-that took place in late October 2003. At that gathering the twenty-five
members of Iraq's Governing Council as well as the twenty-five interim ministers decided unanimously that they
would not participate in the privatization of Iraq's state-owned companies or of its publicly owned inttastructure.
But Bremer didn't give up. Intemational law prohibits occupiers from selling state assets themselves, but it
doesn't say anything about the puppet governments they appoint. Originally, Bremer had pledged to hand over
power to a directly elected Iraqi government, but in early November he went to Washington for a private meeting
with President Bush and came back with a Plan B. On June 30 the occupation would officially end-but not really.
It would be replaced by an appointed government, chosen by Washington. This government would not be bound by
the international laws preventing occupiers from selling off state assets, but it would be bound by an "interim
constitution," a document that would protect Bremer's investment and privatization laws.
The plan was risky. Bremer's June 30 deadline was awfully close, and it was chosen for a less than ideal reason:
so that President Bush could trumpet the end of Iraq's occupation on the campaign trail. If everything went
according to plan, Bremer would succeed in forcing a "sovereign" Iraqi
government to carry out his illegal reforms. But if something went wrong, he would have to go ahead with the
June 30 handover anyway because by then Karl Rove, and not Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, would be calling
the shots. And if it came down to a choice between ideology in Iraq and the electability of George W. Bush,
everyone knew which would win.
At first, Plan B seemed to be right on track. Bremer persuaded the Iraqi Governing Council to agree to
everything: the new timetable, the interim government, and the interim constitution. He even managed to slip
into the constitution a completely overlooked clause. Article 26. It stated that for the duration of the interim
government, "The laws, regulations, orders and directives issued by the Coalition Provisional Authority. . . shall
remain in force" and could only be changed after general elections are held.
Bremer had found his legal loop hole: There would be a window seven months--when the occupation was officially
over but before general elections were scheduled to take place. Within this window, the Hague and Geneva
Conventions' bans on privatization would no longer apply, but Bremer's own laws, thanks to Article 26, would
stand. During these seven months, foreign investors could come to Iraq and sign forty-year contracts to buy up
Iraqi assets. If a future elected Iraqi government decided to change the rules, investors could sue for
compensation.
But Bremer had a formidable opponent: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani, the most senior Shia cleric in Iraq. al
Sistani tried to block Bremer's plan at every turn, calling for immediate direct elections and for the constitution
to be written after those elections, not before. Both demands, if met, would have closed Bremer's privatization
window. Then, on March 2, with the Shia members of the Governing Council refusing to sign the interim
constitution, five bombs exploded in front of mosques in Karbala and Baghdad, killing close to 200 worshipers.
General John Abizaid, the top

(MANY .OF THE BUSINESSMEN WHOS        COMPANIES ARE THREATENED BY
BREMER'S INVESTMENT LAWS HAVE INVESTMENTS IN THE RESISTANCE)

U.S. commander in Iraq, warned that the country was on the verge of civil war. Frightened by this prospect, al
Sistani backed down and the Shia politicians signed the interim constitution. It was a familiar story: the shock of
a violent attack paved the way for more shock therapy.
When I arrived in Iraq a week later, the economic project seemed to be back on track. All that remained for
Bremer was to get his interim constitution ratified by a Security Council resolution, then the nervous lawyers and
insurance brokers could relax and the sell_off of Iraq could finally begin. The CPA, meanwhile. had launched a
major new P.R. offensive designed to reassure investors that Iraq was still a safe and exciting place to do
business. The centerpiece of the campaign was Destination Baghdad Exposition, a massive trade show for potential
investors to be held in early April at the Baghdad International Fairgrounds. It was the first such event inside
Iraq. and the organizers had branded the trade fair "DBX,'" as if it were some sort of Mountain Dew_sponsored
dirt_ bike race. In keeping with the extreme sports theme_ Thomas Foley traveled to Washington to tell a
gathering of executives that the risks in Iraq are akin "to skydiving or riding a motorcycle, which are, to many.
very acceptable risks."
But three hours after my arrival in Baghdad, I was finding these reassurances extremely hard to believe. I had
not yet unpacked when my hotel room was filled with debris and the windows in the lobby were shattered. Down
the street, the Mount Lebanon Hotel had just been bombed, at that point the largest attack of its kind since the
official end of the war. The next day, another hotel was bombed in Basra, then two Finnish businessmen were
murdered on their way to a meeting in Baghdad. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt finally admitted that there was
a pattern at work: "the ex
tremists have started shifting away from the hard targets. . . [and] are now going out of their way to specifically
target softer targets." The next day, the State Department updated its travel advisory: U.S. citizens were
"strongly warned against travel to Iraq." -.
The physical risks of doing business _ in Iraq seemed to be spiraling out of control. This, once again, was not part
_ of the original plan. When Bremer first arrived in Baghdad, the armed resistance was so low that he was able to
walk the streets with a minimal security entourage. During his first four months on the job, 109 U.S. soldiers,
were killed and 570 were wounded. In the following four months, when Bremer's shock therapy had taken effect,
the number o fU$. casualties almost doubled, with 195 soldiers killed and 1,633 wounded. There are many In Iraq
who argue that these events are connected-that Bremer's reforms were the single largest factor leading to the rise
of armed resistance.        I :
Take, for instance, Bremer's first casualties. The soldiers and workers he I laid off without pensions or severance
pay didn't all disappear quietly. Many of them went straight into the muja- . hedeen, forming the backbone of the
armed resistance. "Half a million people are now worse off, and there you have the water tap that keeps the
insurgencygoing. It's alternative employment," says Hussain Kubba, head of the prominent Iraqi business group
Kubba ConsuIting. Some of Bremer's other economic casualties also have failed to go quietly. It turns out that
many of the businessmen whose companies are' threatened by Bremer's investment laws have decided to make
investments of their own-in the resistance. It is partly their money that keeps fighters in Kalashnikovs and RPGs.
These developments present a challenge to the basic logic of shock therapy: the neocons were convinced that if
they brought in their reforms quickly and ruthlessly, Iraqis would be too stunned to resist. But the shock appears
to have had the opposite effect; rather than the predicted paralysis, it jolted many Iraqis into action, much of it
extreme. Haider al-Abadi, Iraq's minister of communication, puts it this way: "We know that there are terrorists
in the country, but previously they were not successful, they were isolated. Now because the whole country is
unhappy, and a lot of people don't have jobs. . . these terrorists are finding listening ears."
Bremer was now at odds not only with the Iraqis who opposed his plans but with U.S military commanders charged
with putting down the insurgency his policies were feeding. Heretical questions began to be raised: instead of
laying people off, what if the CPA actually created jobs for Iraqis? And instead of rushing to sell off Iraq's 200
state-owned firms, how about putting them back to work?
From the start, the neocons running Iraq had shown nothing but disdain for Iraq's state-owned companies. In
keeping with their Year Zero-apocalyptic glee, when looters descended on the factories during the war, U.S. forces
did nothing. Sabah Asaad, managing director of a refrigerator factory outside Baghdad, told me that while the
looting was going on, he went to a nearby u.s. Army base and begged for help. "I asked one of the officers to send
two soldiers and a vehicle to help me kick out the" looters. I was crying. The officer said; 'Sorry, we can't do
anything, we need an order
from President Bush back in Washington, Donald Rumsfeld shrugged. "Free people are free to make mistakes
and commit crimes and do bad things."
To see the remains of Asaad's football-field-size warehouse is to understand why Frank Gehry had an artistic
crisis after September 11 and was briefly unable to design structures resembling the rubble of modem buildings.
Asaad's looted and burned factory looks remarkably like a heavy-metal
version of Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, with waves of steel, buckled by fire, lying in terrifyingly
beautiful golden heaps. Yet all was not lost. "The looters were good-hearted," one of Asaad's painters told me,
explaining that they left the tools and machines behind, "so we could work again." Because the machines are still
there, many factory managers in Iraq say that it would take little for them to return to full production. They need
emergency generators to cope with daily blackouts, and they need capital for parts and raw materials. If that
happened, it would have tremendous implications for Iraq's stalled reconstruction, because it would mean that
many of the key materials needed to rebuild--cement and steel, bricks and furniture could be produced inside the
country.
But it hasn't happened. Immediately after the nominal end of the war, Congress appropriated $2.5 billion for the
reconstruction of Iraq, followed by an additional $18.4 billion in Gaober. Yet as of July 2004, Iraq's state owned
factories had been pointedly excluded from the reconstruction contracts. Instead, the billions have all gone to
Western companies, with most of the materials for the reconstruction imported at great expense from abroad.
With unemployment as high as 67 percent, the imported products and foreign workers flooding across the borders
have become a source of tremendous resentment in Iraq and yet another open tap fueling the insurgency. And
Iraqis don't have to look far for reminders of this injustice; it's on display in the most ubiquitous symbol of the
occupation: the blast wall. The ten-foot-high slabs of reinforced concrete are everywhere in Iraq, separating the
protected-the people in upscale hotels, luxury homes, military bases, and, of course, the Green Zone from the
unprotected and exposed. If that wasn't injury enough, all the blast walls are imported, from Kurdistan, Turkey,
or even further a field, this despite the fact that Iraq was once a major manufacturer of cement, and could easily
be again. There are seventeen state-owned cement factories across the country, but most are idle or working at
only half capacity. According to the Ministry of Industry, not one of these factories has received a single contract
to help with the reconstruction, even though they could produce the walls and meet other needs for cement at a
greatly reduced cost. The CPA pays up to $1,000 per imported blast wall; local manufacturers say they could make
them for $100. Minister Totiq says there is a simple reason why the Americans refuse to help get Iraq's cement
factories running again: among those making the decisions, "no one believes in the public sector.'"

,. Tofiq did say that several U.S. companies had expressed strong interest in buying the state-owned cement
factories. This supports a widely held belief in Iraq that there is a deliberate strategy to neglect the state firms so
that they can be sold more cheaply-a practice known as "starve then sell."

This kind of ideological blindness has turned Iraq's occupiers into prisoners of their own policies, hiding behind
walls that, by their very existence, fuel the rage at the U.S. presence, thereby feeding the need for more walls. In
Baghdad the concrete barriers have been given a popular nickname: Bremer Walls.
As the insurgency grew, it soon became clear that if Bremer went ahead with his plans to sell off the state
companies, it could worsen the violence. There was no question that privatization would require layoffs: the
Ministry of Industry estimates that roughly 145,000 workers would have to be fired to make the firms desirable
to investors, with each of those workers supporting, on average, five family members. For Iraq's besieged
occupiers the question was: Would these shock-therapy casualties accept their fate or would they rebel?
The answer arrived, in rather dramatic fashion, at one of the largest state-owned companies, the General
Company for Vegetable Oils. The complex of six factories in a Baghdad industrial zone produces cooking oil, hand
soap, laundry detergent, shaving cream, and shampoo. At least that is what I was told by a receptionist who gave
me glossy brochures and calendars boasting of "modem instruments" and "the latest and most up to date
developments in the field of industry." But when I approached the soap factory, I discovered a group of workers
sleeping outside a darkened building. Our guide rushed ahead, shouting something to a woman in a white lab
coat, and suddenly the factory scrambled into activity: lights switched on, motors revved up, and workers-still
blinking off sleep-began filling two liter plastic bottles with pale blue Zahi brand dishwashing liquid.
I asked Nada Ahmed, the woman in the white coat, why the factory wasn't working a few minutes before. She
explained that they have only enough electricity and materials to run the machines for a couple of hours a day,
but when guests arrive_would-be investors, ministry officials, journalists-they get them going. "For show," she
explained. Behind us, a dozen bulky machines sat idle, covered in sheets of dusty plastic, and secured with duct
tape.
In one dark corner of the plant, we came across an old man hunched over a sack filled with white plastic caps.

With a thin metal blade lodged in a wedge of wax, he carefully whittled down the edges of each cap, leaving a pile
of shavings at his feet. "We don't have the spare part for the proper mold, so we have to cut them by hand," his
supervisor explained apologetically. "We haven't received any parts from Germany since the sanctions began." I
noticed that even on the assembly lines that were nominally working there was almost no mechanization: bottles
were held under spouts by hand because conveyor belts don't convey, lids once snapped on by machines were
being hammered in place with wooden mallets. Even the water for the factory was drawn from an outdoor well,
hoisted by hand, and carried inside.
The solution proposed by the U.S. occupiers was not to fix the plant but to sell it, and so when Bremer announced
the privatization auction back in June 2003 this was among the first companies mentioned. Yet when I visited the
factory in March, nobody wanted to talk about the privatization plan; the mere mention of the word inside the
plant inspired awkward silences and meaningful glances. This seemed an unnatural amount of subtext for a soap
factory, and I tried to get to the bottom of it when I interviewed the assistant manager. But the interview itself
was equally odd: I had spent half a week setting it up, submitting written questions for approval, getting a signed
letter of permission from the minister of industry, being questioned and searched several times. But when I
finally began the interview, the assistant manager refused to tell me his name or let me record the conversation.
"Any manager mentioned in the press is attacked afterwards," he said. And when I asked whether the company
was being sold, he gave this oblique response: "If the decision was up _to the workers, they are against
privatization; but if it's up to the highranking officials and government, then privatization is an order and orders
must be followed."
I left the plant feeling that I knew less than when I'd arrived. But on the way out of the gates, a young security
guard handed my translator a note. He wanted us to meet him after work at a nearby restaurant, "to find out
what is really going on with privatization." His name was Mahmud, and he was a twenty-five-year-old with a neat
beard and big black eyes. (For his safety, I have omitted his last name.) His story began in July, a few weeks after
Bremer's privatization announcement. The company's manager, on his way to work, was shot to death. Press
reports speculated that the manager was murdered because he was in favor of privatizing the plant, but Mahmud
was convinced that he was killed because he opposed the plan. "He would never have sold the factories like the
Americans want. That's why they killed him."
The dead man was replaced by a new manager, Mudhfar Ja'far. Shortly after taking over, Ja'far called a meeting
with ministry officials to discuss selling off the soap factory, which would involve laying off two thirds of its
employees. Guarding that meeting were several security officers from the plant. They listened closely to Ja'far's
plans
and promptly reported the alarming news to their coworkers. "We were shocked," Mahmud recalled. "If the
private sector buys our company, the first thing they would do is reduce the staff to make more money. And we
will be forced into a very hard destiny, 'because the factory is our only way of living."
Frightened by this prospect, a group of seventeen workers, including Mahmud, marched into Ja'far's office to
confront him on what they had heard. "Unfortunately, he wasn't there, only the assistant manager, the one you
met," Mahmud told me. A fight broke out: one worker struck the assistant manager, and a bodyguard fired three
shots at the workers. The crowd then attacked the bodyguard, took his gun, and, Mahmud said, "stabbed him with
a knife in the back three times. He spent a month in the hospitaL" In January there was even more violence. On
their way to work, Ja'far, the manager, and his son were shot and badly injured. Mahmud told me he had no idea
who was behind the attack, but I was starting to understand why factory managers in Iraq try to keep a low
profile.
At the end of our meeting, I asked Mahmud what would happen if the plant was sold despite the workers'
objections. "There are two choices," he said, looking me in the eye and smiling kindly. "Either we will set the
factory on fire and let the flames devour it to the ground, or we will blow ourselves up inside of it. But it will not
be privatized."
If there ever was a moment when Iraqis were too disoriented to resist shock therapy, that moment has definitely
passed. Labor relations, like everything else in Iraq, has become a blood sport. The violence on the streets howls
at the gates of the factories, threatening to engulf them. Workers fear job loss and managers, in turn, fear their
workers, a fact that makes privatization distinctly more complicated than the neocons foresaw.*
* It is in Basra where the connections between economic reforms and the rise of the resistance was put in
starkest terms. In December the union representing oil workers was negotiating with the Oil Ministry for a
salary increase. Getting \nowhere, the workers offered the ministry a simple choice: increase their paltry salaries
or they would all join the armed resistance. They received a substantial raise.
As I left the meeting with Mahmud, I got word that there was a major demonstration outside the CPA
headquarters; Supporters of the radical young cleric Moqtada al Sadr were protesting the closing of their
newspaper, al Hawza, by military police. The CPA accused al Hawza of publishing "false articles" that could "pose
the real threat of violence." As an example, it cited an article that claimed Bremer "is pursuing a policy of
starving the Iraqi people to make them preoccupied with procuring their daily bread so they do not have the
chance to demand their political and individual freedoms." To me it sounded less like hate literature than a
concise summary of Milton Friedman's recipe for shock therapy.
A few days before the newspaper was shut down, I had gone to Kufa during Friday prayers to listen to al Sadr at
his mosque. He had launched into a tirade against Bremer's newly signed interim constitution, calling it "an
unjust, terrorist document." The message of the sermon was clear: Grand Ayatollah Ali al Sistani may have
backed down on the constitution, but al Sadr and his supporters were still determined to fight it-and if they
succeeded they would sabotage the neocons' careful plan to saddle Iraq's next government with their "wish list"
of laws. With the closing of the newspaper, Bremer was giving al Sadr his response: he wasn't negotiating with
this young upstart; he'd rather take him out with force.
When I artived at the demonstration, the streets were filled with men dressed in black, the soon-to-be legendary
Mahdi Army. It struck me that if Mahmud lost his security guard job at the soap factory, he could be one of
them. That's who al Sadr's foot soldiers are: the young men who have been shut out of the neocons' grand plans
for Iraq, who see no possibilities for work, and whose neighborhoods have seen none of the promised
reconstruction. Bremer has failed these young men, and-everywhere that he has failed, Moqtada al Sadr has
cannily set out to succeed. In Shia slums from Baghdad to Basra, a network of Sadr Centers coordinate a kind of
shadow reconstruction. Funded through donations, the centers dispatch electricians to fix power and phone lines,
organize local garbage collection, set up emergency generators, run blood drives, direct traffic where the
streetlights don't work. And yes, they organize militias too. Al Sadr took Bremer's economic casualties, dressed
them in black, and gave them rusty Kalashnikovs. His militiamen protected the mosques and the state factories
when the occupation authorities did not, but in some areas they also went further, zealously enforcing Islamic law
by torching liquor stores and terrorizing women without the veil. Indeed, the astronomical rise of the brand of
religious fundamentalism that al Sadr represents is another kind of blowback from Bremer's shock therapy: if
the reconstruction had provided jobs, security, and services to Iraqis, al Sadr would have been deprived of both his
mission and many of his newfound followers.
At the same time as al Sadr's followers were shouting "Down with America" outside the Green Zone, something
was happening in another part of the country that would change everything. Four American mercenary soldiers
were killed in Fallujah, their charred and dismembered bodies hung like trophies over the Euphrates. The attacks
would prove a devastating blow for the neocons, one from which they
would never recover. With these images, investing in Iraq suddenly didn't look anything like a capitalist dream;
it looked like a macabre nightmare made real.
The day I left Baghdad was the worst yet. Fallujah was under siege and Brig. Gen. Kimmitt was threatening to
"destroy the at-Mahdi Army." By the end, roughly 2,000 Iraqis were killed in these twin campaigns. I was
dropped off at a security checkpoint several miles from the airport, then loaded onto a bus jammed with
contractors lugging hastily packed bags. Although no one was calling it one, this was an evacuation: over the next
week 1,500 contractors left Iraq, and some governments began airlifting their citizens out of the country. On the
bus no one spoke; we all just listened to the mortar fire, craning our necks to see the red glow. A guy carrying a
KPMG briefcase decided to lighten things up. "So is there business class on this flight?" he asked the silent bus.
From the back, somebody called out, "Not yet."
Indeed, it may be quite a while before business class truly arrives in Iraq. When we landed in Amman, we learned
that we had gotten out just in time. That morning three Japanese civilians were kidnapped and their captors were
threatening to burn them alive. Two days later Nicholas Berg went missing and was not seen again until the snuff
film surfaced of his beheading, an even more terrifying message for U.S. contractors than the charred bodies in
Fallujah. These were the start of a wave of kidnappings and killings of foreigners, most of them businesspeople,
from a rainbow of nations: South Korea, Italy, China, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Turkey. By the end of
June more than ninety contractors were reported dead in Iraq. When seven Turkish contractors were kidnapped
in June, their captors asked the "company to cancel all contracts and pull out employees from Iraq." Many
insurance companies stopped selling life insurance to contractors, and others began to charge premiums as high
as $10,000 a week for a single Western executive-the same price some insurgents reportedly pay for a dead
American.

For their part, the organizers of DBX, the historic Baghdad trade fair, decided to relocate to the lovely tourist city
of Diyarbakir in Turkey, "just 250 km from the Iraqi border." An Iraqi landscape, only without those frightening
Iraqis. Three weeks later just fifteen people showed up for a Commerce Department conference in Lansing,
Michigan, on investing in Iraq. Its host, Republican Congressman Mike Rogers, tried to reassure his skeptical
audience by saying that Iraq is "like a rough neighborhood any where in America." The foreign investors, the
ones who were offered every imaginable free_market enticement, are clearly not convinced; there is still no sign
of them. Keith Crane, a senior economist at the Rand Corporation who has worked for the CPA, put it bluntly: "I
don't believe the board of a multinational company could approve a major investment in this environment. If
people are shooting at each other, it's just difficult to do business." Hamid Jassim Khamis, the manager of the
largest soft_drink bottling plant in the region, told me he can't find any investors, even though he landed the
exclusive rights to produce Pepsi in central lraq. "A lot of people have approached us to invest in the factory, but
people are really hesitating now." Khamis said he couldn't blame them; in five months he has survived an
attempted assassination, a carjacking, two bombs planted at the entrance of his factory, and the kidnapping of his
son.
Despite having been granted the first license for a foreign bank to operate in Iraq in forty years, HSBC still
hasn't opened any branches, a decision that may mean losing the coveted license altogether. Procter & Gamble
has put its joint venture on hold, and so has General Motors. The U.S. financial backers of the Statwood luxury
hotel and multiplex have gotten cold feet, and Siemens AG has pulled most staff from Iraq. The bell hasn't rung
yet at the Baghdad Stock Exchange-in fact you can't even use credit cards in Iraq's cash_only economy. New
Bridge Strategies, the company that had gushed back in October about how "a Wal-Mart could take over the
country," is sounding distinctly humbled. "McDonald's is not opening anytime soon," company partner Ed Rogers
told the Washington Post. Neither is Wal-Mart. The Financial Times has declared Iraq "the most dangerous place
in the world in which to do business." It's quite an accomplishment: in trying to design the best place in the world
to do business, the neocons have managed to create the worst, the most eloquent indictment yet of the guiding
logic behind deregulated free markets.

The violence has not just kept investors out; it also forced Bremer, before he left, to abandon many of his central
economic policies. Privatization of the state companies is off the table; instead, several of the state companies
have been offered up for lease, but only if-the investor agrees not to lay off a single employee. Thousands of the
state workers that Bremer fired have been rehired, and significant raises have been handed out in the public
sector as a whole. Plans to do away with the food-ration program have also been scrapped-it just doesn't seem like
a good time to deny millions of Iraqis the only nutrition on which they can depend.
The final blow to the neocon dream came in the weeks before the handover. The White House and the CPA were
rushing to get the UN. Security Council to pass a resolution endorsing their handover plan. They had twisted arms
to give the top job to former CIA agent Iyad Allawi, a move that will ensure that Iraq becomes, at the very least,
the coaling station for U.S. troops that Jay Garner originally envisioned. But if major corporate investors were
going to come to Iraq in the future, they would need a stronger guarantee that Bremer's economic laws would
stick. There was only one way of doing that: the Security Council resolution had to ratify the interim constitution,
which locked in Bremer's laws for the duration of the interim government. But al Sistani once again objected, this
time unequivocally, saying that the constitution has been "rejected by the majority of the Iraqi people." On June
8 the Security Council unanimously passed a resolution that endorsed the handover plan but made absolutely no
reference to the constitution. In the face of this far reaching defeat, George W. Bush celebrated the resolution as
a historic vicory, one that came just in time for an election trail photo op at the G-8 Summit in Georgia.
With Bremer's laws in limbo, Iraqi ministers are already talking openly about breaking contracts signed by the
CPA. Citigroup's loan scheme has been rejected as a misuse of Iraq's oil revenues. Iraq's communication
minister is threatening to renegotiate contracts with the three communications firms providing the country with
its disastrously poor cell phone service. And the Lebanese and U.S. companies hired to run the state television
network have been informed that they could lose their licenses because they are not Iraqi. "We will see if we can
change the contract," Hamid al-Kifaey, spokesperson for the Governing Council, said in May. "They have no idea
about Iraq." For most investors, this complete lack of legal certainty simply makes Iraq too great a risk.
But while the Iraqi resistance has managed to scare off the first wave of corporate raiders, there's little doubt
that they will return. Whatever form the next Iraqi government takes nationalist, Islamist, or free market-it will
inherit a shattered nation with a crushing $120 billion debt. Then, as in all poor countries around the world, men
in dark blue suits from the IMF will appear at the door, bearing loans and promises of economic boom, provided
that certain structural adjustments are made, which will, of course, be rather painful at first but well worth the
sacrifice in the end. In fact, the process has already begun: the IMF is poised to approve loans worth $2.5-$4.25
billion, pending agreement on the conditions. After an endless succession of courageous last stands and far too
many lost lives, Iraq will become a poor nation like any other, with politicians determined to introduce policies
rejected by the vast majority of the population, and all the imperfect compromises that will entail. The free
market will no doubt come to Iraq, but the neoconservative dream of transforming the country into a free
market utopia has already died, a casualty of a greater dream-a second term for George W. Bush.
The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock, therapy reforms that were
supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that
ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer's reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted
nor could hope to control,
from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves.
These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a
corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia. where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned
alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For
the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than
greed itself.
Iraq was to the neocons what Afghanistan was to the Taliban: the one place on Earth where they could force
everyone to live by the most literal, unyielding interpretation of their sacred texts. One would think that the
bloody results of this experiment would inspire a crisis of faith: in the country where they had absolute free reign,
where there was no local government to blame, where economic reforms were introduced at their most shocking
and most perfect, they created, instead of a model free market, a failed state no right, thinking investor would
touch. And yet the Green Zone neocons and their masters in Washington are no more likely to reexamine their
core beliefs than the Taliban mullahs were inclined to search their souls when their Islamic state slid into a
debauched Hades of opium and sex slavery. When facts threaten true believers, they simply close their eyes and
pray harder.
Which is precisely what Thomas Foley has been doing. The former head of "private sector development" has left
Iraq, a country he had described as "the mother of all turnarounds," and has accepted another turnaround job, as
Co-Chair of George Bush's reelection committee in Connecticut. On April 30 in Washingron he addressed a
crowd of entrepreneurs about business prospects in Baghdad. It was a tough day to be giving an upbeat speech:
that morning the first photographs had appeared out of Abu Ghraib, including one of a hooded prisoner with
electrical wires attached to his hands. This was an' other kind of shock therapy, far more literal than the one
Foley had helped to administer, but not entirely unconnected. "Whatever you're seeing, it's not as bad as it
appears," Foley told the crowd. "You just need to accept that on faith."

Murdering two of the democrats Senators wasn’t enough
Injudicious

The Senate judiciary Committee has long been partisan. But with recess appointments and the GOP stealing
computer files, it’s now also rigged
BY HEIDI PAUKEN

WITH CIVIL RIGHTS, REPRODUCTIVE rights, environmental protections,
Workrs rights, and yes, even the presidency (see Bush v. Gore) at stake, it's no surprise that the Senate
Committee on the Judiciary is a hot spot for politics-not the handshaking politics of the campaign trail but a
passionate, big_ picture politics where senators duke it out over the ideological balance of our nation's courts.
The committee, which vets the president's nominees for the federal bench, has surely seen excitement over the
years, but it was always still the Senate-navy suits, cordial_ smiles, professional conduct.
Not anymore. In their latest pusuits to pack the courts, Republicans have bent, twisted, and broken the rules,
spawning unmatched acrimony, a criminal investigation, and some really angry Democrats.
According to George W. Bush, we lave only the Democrats' "unprecetented obstructionist tactics" to blame. But
how obstructed can the process be when committee Republicans outnumber Democrats 10 to 9 and a majority vote
ends a nominee to the Senate floor? Moreover, the Senate has already confirmed 171 Bush-backed judges,
includlng 71 since January 2003-more than any year between 1995 and 2000 of Bill Clinton's presidency and
almost double the yearly average during those years.

How are they managing it, despite the president's controversial nominees, a slim Senate majority, and
Democratic protests? Lift the hood and you'll see that the Senate Judiciary Committee is not so much a well-run
machine as a well rigged one, built by the White House to generate a steady stream of federal judges, as Bush
promised, in the mold of Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
The Judiciary Committee has "always been a cockpit of really bitter social battles," says Herman Schwartz,
American University law professor and author of the forthcoming Right Wing Justice: The Conservative
Campaign to Take Over the Courts. But when Schwartz worked as chief counsel to Democrats on the Senate's
antitrust subcommittee, he witnessed a collegiality that has since disappeared. "The [committee] debates were
sharp but they were witty        The quips, the sharp digs, usually quite good humored, were always there. ... It was
very different." So were the committee rules. During the six Clinton years that Republicans controlled Congress,
Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch faithfully administered the "blue-slip" policy, which allowed home-
state senators to effectively veto nominees by not returning their evaluation forms to :the committee, the- slips
carried language stating that "no further proceedings on this nominee will be scheduled until both blue slips have
been returned by the nominee's home state senators."
Today Hatch still reigns, but the blue-slip policy doesn't: The Utah republican announced early in 2003 that the
slips were merely advisory, claiming that that had always been the case. "He'll come up with these really
contorted reasons for why [a nominee] is moving over the objection of their home-state senators," says Marcia
Kuntz, director of the Judicial Selection Project at the Alliance for Justice, an association of advocacy groups. In
the case of Henry Saad, Bush's 6th Circuit nominee with Federalist Society credentials and a distaste for workers'
rights, Hatch argued that even though Michigan's two Democratic senators hadn't returned blue slips, Saad would
have a hearing because the senators received "White House consultation." As Kuntz explains, "Consultation
from the White House consists of simply telling you
that 'this is what we're going to do.'"
-- - Repubiican rule bending reached new heights in February 2003 when committee Democrats, feeling that they
had not had sufficient time to consider two nominees at hand, refused to participate in a rushed vote, invoking
Rule IV, which says that at least one member of the minority must agree to end discussion. "[Y]ou have no right
to continue a filibuster in this committee," Hatch told Democrats, and unilaterally forced the vote.
Hatch played fast and loose with the rules again last July, that time to speed along Alabama Attorney General
William Pryor Jr.'s nomination to the 11 th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, disregarding a pending investigation
into concerns that Pryor had solicited contributions from state businesses for the Republican Attorneys General
Association. Pryor's nomination ultimately met a filibuster on the Senate floor, in no small part because, as a
Washington Post editorial put it, Pryor "is a parody of what Democrats imagine Mr. Bush to be plotting for the
federal courts."
Not to be deterred, Bush celebrated this year's Martin Luther King Jr. Day recess by invoking his constitutional
power to make "recess appointments,"
putting Charles Pickering Sr. on the 5th Circuit. Pickering, another of 2003's six filibustered nominees, has a
civil-rights record that's questionable at best. Then, during the Presidents' Day recess, Bush installed Pryor
despite his incomplete investigation and loudly trumpeted views that Roe v. Wade is "the worst abomination" in
the history of constitutional law. Both recess appointments will probably last until the end of 2005, when
Pickering and Pryor face the confirmation process once more.
    Past presidents have made more than 300 recess appointments, but few in recent years. Neither George Bush
Senior nor Ronald Reagan made one, and Clinton's sole recess appointment, Roger Gregory, racially integrated
the 4th Circuit and filled a seat that had been vacant for almost 11 years. The Senate reconfirmed Gregory in the
summer of 2001, with just one dissenting vote (from Trent Lot, who opposed the idea of a "recess appointment").
As the Prospect goes to press, the extent of Republicans' ruthless tactics on
the Judiciary Committee are coming to light. On March 4, Senate Sergeant at Arms William Pickle concluded a
four month investigation and released a 65page report confirming that at least two GOP Judiciary Committee
staffers, preying on a security weakness, had accessed and downloaded 4,670 internal Democratic memos from a
shared server.
According to the report, nominations clerk Jason Lundell began hacking into Democratic files in the fall of 2001.
At the direction of Judiciary counsel Manuel Miranda, who later moved to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's
office, Lundell continued to survey and steal documents for 18 months. According to the report, Miranda told
Lundell that "Senator Hatch wanted the staff to use any means necessary to support President Bush's
nominees." Hatch disavows any knowledge of the theft. Once stolen, the memos found their way onto the
conservative Coalition for a Fair Judiciary's Web site, as well as the November 14, 2003, Wall Street journal
editorial page.
While Hatch called the theft "improper, unethical, and simply unacceptable," we have yet to learn who disributed
the memos or to which level they traveled. The White House? The justice Department? Pending nomilees? Pickle
had little success chasing those answers. The Wall Street journal and the Coalition for a Fair Judiciary reused to
be interviewed for the investi:ation, and Miranda wouldn't provide he names of his White House legislaive
contacts, or his friend who made a backup disk of the Democratic files.

Dem0crats want answers-and a criminal investigation. As, ranking _member Patrick Leahy of Vermont explained
to the committee, "Someone who is removed from politics is essential." On March 12, six committee democrats
and Republicans sent a letter to the Justice Department requesting the appointment of a professional prosecutor
"or, if appropriate, a special counsel-who ... will not be removable from this assignment except in case of
extraordinary improprieties." If one is appointed, his or her discoveries could _certainly intensify tensions on the
comlittee. "What we're talking about," warns American University's Schwartz about the committee's functioning,
"is a rubber band that's being stretched very far, and the question is when will that rubber band break."
If you talk to some Democrats, it's already broken. And the committee is not likely to be functioning well
anytime soon. Bush's 2004 strategy, sure to include pushing right-wing jurists anyway he can, will certainly add
more rancor to the mix.

WHAT DEMOCRACY?
The case for abolishing the United States Senate
By Richard N. Rosenfeld
Richard N. Rosenfeld is the author of American Aurora: A Democratic-Republican Returns. The Suppressed
History of Our Nation's Beginnings and the Heroic
Newspaper That Tried to Report It, which recounts the battle for civil liberties and a
more democratic federal constitution in the early American republic.

Americans believe in the idea of democracy. We fight Wars in its name and daily pledge allegiance to its
principles. Curiously, the fervor with which we profess our faith in democracy is matched only by the contempt
with which we regard our politics and politicians. How interesting that we should so dislike the process that we
claim to revere. Perhaps, however, our unhappiness with politics points to something significant; perhaps
Americans dislike the daily reality of their political system precisely because it falls short of being a proper
democracy. Indeed, in the last presidential election, we saw a man take office who did not win the popular vote.
Money above all else shapes our political debate and determines its outcome, and in the realm of public policy,
even when an overwhelming democratic majority expresses its preference (as for national health insurance),
deadlocks, vetoes, filibusters, and "special interests" stand in the way. No wonder so few people vote in national
elections; we have become a nation of spectators, not citizens.
The United States of America is not, strictly speaking, a democracy; indeed, the U.S. Constitution was
deliberately designed to prevent the unfettered expression of the people's will. Yet the Founders were not, as
some imagine, of one mind concerning the proper shape of the new American
union, and their disputes are instructive. The political dysfunction that some imagine to be a product of recent
cultural decadence has been with us from the beginning. In fact, the document that was meant to prevent
democracy in America has bequeathed the American people a politics of minority rule in which our leaders must
necessarily pursue their unpopular aims by means of increasingly desperate stratagems of deceit and persuasion.
Yet hope remains, for if Americans have little real experience of democracy, they remain a nation convinced that
the best form of government is by and for the people. Growing numbers of Americans suspect that all is not right
with the American Way. Citizens, faced with the prospect of sacrificing the well-being of their children and
grandchildren on the altar of supply-side economics, the prospect of giving up new schools and hospitals so that
the colony in Iraq might have zip codes and modern garbage trucks, have begun to ask hard questions. Politics,
properly understood as the deliberate exercise of citizenship by a free people, appears to be enjoying a
renaissance, but the hard point must be made nonetheless that tinkering with campaign-finance reform is
unlikely to be sufficient to the task. True reform becomes possible only if Americans are willing to return to the
root of our political experiment and try again. And if democracy is our aim, the first object of our constitutional
revision must be the United States Senate.
In America today, U.S. senators from the twenty-six smallest states, representing a mere 18 percent of the
nation's population, hold a majority in the United States Senate, and, therefore, under the Constitution,
regardless of what the President, the House of Representatives, or even an overwhelming majority of the
American people wants, nothing becomes law if those senators object. The result has been what one would expect:
The less populous states have extracted benefits from the rest of the nation quite out of proportion to their
populations. As Frances E. Lee and Bruce I. Oppenheimer have demonstrated in their Sizing Up the Senate, the
citizens of less populous states receive more federal funds per capita than the citizens of the more populous
states. * And what happens if the larger states, with a majority of the people, object? Not much. Today, the nine
largest states, containing a majority of the American people, are represented by only 18 of the 100 senators in the
United States Senate.

* Many federal entitlement programs, once distributed to the American people in proportion to their needs and
entitlements, have been converted to block grants for lump-sum distributions to the states, disguising the fact
that citizens of smaller states get more of these benefits per caPita than an equitable "entitlement" would allow.

The fact that a Senate majority reflects a majority of states rather than
a majority of the people originated in what is erroneously and euphemistically called the "Great Compromise,"
which small states extracted from larger states in 1787 at the federal Constitutional Convention. All states, large
and small, wanted each state's vote in the House of Representatives to be proportioned to the size of its
population. Small states wanted an equal vote for every state represented in the Senate, regardless of population.
What followed was hardly a compromise, just the unhappy acquiescence of larger states to an undemocratic
demand by smaller states, which were otherwise refusing to be part of a 'new national government.
When we look back on this so-called compromise, we should be wary of exaggerating the enthusiasm of the
drafters or the public. When the proposal for an equal vote for each state in the U.S. Senate came before the
federal Constitutional Convention on July 16, 1787, three states (New York, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island)
failed to cast a vote; four states (Virginia, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Georgia) voted against the proposal;
the Massachusetts delegation split evenly (thereby dividing their state's vote pro and con); and only a minority of
five of the thirteen states (Delaware, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut) carried the day.
Furthermore, as the census of 1790 would later confirm, the plurality of five states that carried the day actually
represented a smaller portion of the American people than the four states that voted against the proposal. The
yea saying states represented less than 33 percent of the nation's non-slave population (and no greater
percentage if one counted slaves). Unfortunately, voting at the federal Constitutional Convention was as
undemocratic as voting in the United States Senate is today. Each state had an equal vote, regardless of the
state's population. As convention delegate James Wilson observed, "Our Constituents, had they voted as their
representatives did, would have stood as 2/3 against the equality, and 1/3 only in favor of it."
In the aftermath of the federal Constitutional Convention, many naysayers became yeasayers in persuading the
thirteen states to ratify the final document. James Madison, who had argued vigorously against states having
equal votes in the u.s. Senate, performed a lawyerlike pirouette in The Federalist Papers, as he propagandized for
ratification of the final document. The states agreed in the end, and the Union was created. Today, however, we
are not thirteen but fifty states, all of which (except the original thirteen) accepted the Senate's undemocratic
voting system not as a concession to get smaller states to form a union but rather as a constitutional fact of life.
Furthermore, except for Texas and California, the additional thirty-seven states were not independent before they
became part of the Union; they were sections of territory that the United States already owned or claimed to own.
Consequently, the inhabitants of the other states were already u.s. citizens before Congress allowed them to
become citizens of the new states, which were created by Congress. There is thus no reason to apply the rationale
of the Great Compromise to the vast majority of states that are part of this nation today. So what rationale shall
we apply for our Senate?
To understand the antidemocratic history and unsatisfactory logic that gave rise to American senates (both
federal and state), one must start with the century preceding that of the American Revolution, when the people of
England rose up in a fit of regicide, civil war, and tumult to end the absolutism of their Stuart kings
("accountable to none but God only") and to shift sovereignty from the king to "the king-in-parliament,"
meaning to a king whose actions depended on the approval of two branches of parliament. This new arrangement
was basically a recognition of property classes in Britain, balancing the king (Britain's largest property owner),
the hereditary House of
Lords (Anglican bishops and titled aristocrats, "Lords Spiritual and Temporal," also representing vast land
holdings), and a House of Commons (which represented a rising mercantile class of property owners whose
demands for representation gave rise to this "Glorious Revolution"). Yet the British also came to see this balance
as a protection of liberty, finding justification in the writings of the Greek and Roman philosophers, most notably
in those of Polybius, who divided the forms of government into rule by one (monarchy), by the few (aristocracy),
and by the many (democracy) but insisted that each of these forms, unless balanced by the other two, would
degenerate into tyranny, oligarchy, or mob rule, respectively. Thus it was, in the minds of most Britons, a
protection against tyranny that their constitution embraced the one (the king), the few (the aristocratic House of
Lords), and the many (the more representative House of Commons). As Britain's most famous jurist, William
Blackstone, argued in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, "If ever it should happen that the independence
of anyone of the three should be lost, or that it should become subservient to the views of either of the other two,
there would soon be an end of our constirution." As
Britain's leading political philosopher, John Locke, summarized at the end of the century, the purpose of
government was to secure everyone's "lives, liberties, and estates."
In the century that followed England's "Glorious Revolution," philosophers in France, politicians in America, and
Whig critics within England itself had much to say about the British constitution and whether its balances secured
or threatened liberty. Chief among them was the French philosopher Charles Montesquieu, who, in his Spirit of
the Laws, accepted the balance among the one, the few, and the many but found a more important protection of
liberty in the separation of executive, legislative, and judicial functions. As France and America approached the
time of their own revolutions, most democrats accepted Montesquieu's theory of separation, but many totally
rejected the British balance among monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. These critics argued, as many Whigs
in England did, that the monarch's power of appointment and expenditure could (and did) corrupt the British
Parliament and prevented Parliament from representing the people it was supposed to represent. Looking
despondently at these developments, English Whig James Burgh wrote, in his Political Disquisitions, that William
Blackstone had "placed the sovereignty wrong, viz. in the government; whereas it should have been in the
people." Suffering "intolerable" and "coercive" acts of the British government, many in America agreed.
America fired its opening shot at the British constitution in January of 1776, when Thomas Paine came out with
his revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense, urging Americans to declare their independence from Britain and to
distance themselves from the British constitution (under which they had lived for generations). "I know it is
difficult," he wrote, "to get over local or long standing prejudices, yet if we will suffer ourselves to examine the
component parts of the English constitution, we shall find them to be the base remains of two ancient tyrannies,
compounded with some new republican materials.'" Paine condemned Britain's three-way balance as, "First. - The
remains of monarchical tyranny in the person of the king. Secondly. - The remains of aristocratical tyranny in
the persons of the peers [the House of Lords]. Thirdly. - The new republican materials, in the persons of the
commons, on whose virtue depends the freedom of England." He urged that any American government consist of
only one democratically elected legislative chamber, with no aristocratic or kingly branch. to veto its decisions
(the executive branch would be appointed by and answer to the legislature). Quoting Burgh, Paine urged "a large
and equal representation," meaning a large number of representatives (so that each will answer to a small
constituency) and a large number of voters (meaning that neither property nor any other special interest should
limit the right to vote and thus limit equal representation). "A small number of electors, or a small number of
representatives," Paine warned, "are equally dangerous. But if the number of the representatives be not only
small, but unequal, the danger is increased."
The most virulent response to Paine's Common Sense came from New Englander John Adams, who introduced
the phrase "checks and balances" into the American language and condemned Paine's plan of government as "so
democratical, without any restraints or even an Attempt at any Equilibrium or Counterpoise." Adams countered
Common Sense in April with his own pamphlet, Thoughts on Government, which argued that any American
government should have its on three-way balance-specifically, two separate legislative chambers and a separate
chief executive, each with the power to veto the other two. In such a government, he wrote, "equal interests
among the people should have equal interests in it." Adams enumerated his arguments against a single-chamber
legislature as follows:

1. A single assembly is subject to fits of humor, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities, or prejudice,
and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments. ...2. A single assembly is apt to be avaricious,
and in time will not scruple to exempt itself from burdens, which it will lay, without compunction, on its
constituents. 3. A single assembly is apt to grow ambitious, and after a time will not hesitate to vote itself
perpetual. ...4. A representative assembly... is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential
properties, secrecy and dispatch. 5. A representative assembly is still less qualified for the judicial power, because
it is too numerous, too slow, and too little skilled in the laws. 6. . . . [A) single assembly, possessed of all the
powers of

* Paine made similar comments about America's new federal Constitution, observing, "As the Federal
ConstitutiOn is a copy, though not quite so base as the original, of the form of the British Government, an
imitation of its vices was naturally to be expected."

government, would make arbitrary laws for their own interest, execute all laws arbitrarily for their own interest,
and adjudge all controversies in their own favor.

If these were the only arguments in favor of two chambers in the legislature, one could easily dismiss them, if
only by questioning why having two chambers wouldn't simply double the problems of one chamber. If
representatives of the people couldn't resolve their passions, discard their prejudices, control their greed, etc., in
one deliberative body, why would a second group of representatives, arguing over the same matters, do any
better? And if that second chamber were to reach a different conclusion from the first chamber, why would we
believe that this second slice of humanity had reached a better conclusion than the first? Or, if we knew that the
second chamber were better or would reach a better conclusion than the first, why would we not make the second
chamber the only chamber and avoid the risks of the first chamber's mistakes?"

" As Benjamin Franklin put it; "If one Part of the Legislature may control the Operations of the other, may not
the Impulses of Passion, the Combinations of Interest, the Intrigues
of Faction, the Haste of Fony, or the Spirit of Encroachment in the one of those Bodies

Paine's democratic message of january found its echo in July, when Thomas' Jefferson drafted the Declaration of
Independence, shifting American sovereignty from Britain's king-in-parliament to the American people.
Proclaiming that "all men are created equal," Jefferson declared that government rested on "the consent of the
governed" and that its purpose was to secure inalienable rights, among them "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness." Jefferson did not use John Locke's phrase "lives, liberties and estates," which would have tied
America's political rights to property ownership, as in Britain's three-way balance. Jefferson opposed property
qualifications for office-holding or voting. "I have not observed men's honesty to increase with their riches," he
wrote.
After the Declaration of Independence, America's former British colonies began to draft new state constitutions,
choosing between Paine's model of government and John Adams's. In September, Paine joined Franklin in
propagating the nation's most democratic state constitution-that of Pennsylvania-which called for a single-
chamber legislature without wealth or property qualifications for voters or representatives and with a weak plural
executive that had no power to initiate or veto legislation. Franklin opposed the idea of a three-way balance,
observing, "The Division of the Legislature into two or three Branches in England, was it the product of Wisdom,
or the Effect of Necessity, arising from the preexisting Prevalence of an odious Feudal System?" He spoke openly
at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention against a two-chamber legislature, which he likened to "putting
one horse before a cart and the other behind it, and whipping them both. If the horses are of equal strength, the
wheels of the cart, like the wheels of government,
. will stand still" For Paine and Franklin,' two legislative chambers were a prescription for deadlock, and, with the
advantage of hindsight, who among us would disagree?
If the arguments about the number of legislative chambers had simply been about the mechanics of decision-
making, Paine and Franklin might well have had their way, but it wasn't, which is why they lost their argument.
For eighteenth-century Americans as well as for the English, the purpose of a second chamber was really to
protect wealth and aristocracy from the demands of a democratic majority. As historian Jackson Main has
written, "The theory of balanced government suited colonial political figures because it justified their resistance
to both monarchy and democracy, and at the same time it also justified upper-class rule."
In all this, Adams was an American exemplar, drafting a first constitution for his home state of Massachusetts
that divided legislative power among a house of representatives (members were required to possess at least 100
pounds in property), a senate (senators, at least 300 pounds in property), and a governor (at least 1,000 pounds in
property), each with the power to veto the other two and each to be elected by constituencies meeting specified
qualifications for wealth or property. In describing the Massachusetts senate to its citizenry, the state's
constitutional convention wrote, "The House of Representatives is intended as the Representative of the Persons,
and the Senate of the property of the Commonwealth." In his own defense of Massachusetts's two-chamber
legislature, Adams extolled a "natural aristocracy," which he found "formed partly by genius, partly by birth, and
partly by riches." He asked rhetorically, "How shall the legislator avail himself of their influence for the equal
benefit of the public?" Then without hesitation, "I answer, by arranging them all, or at least the most
conspicuous of them, together in one assembly, by the name of a senate."
When delegates gathered to draft a new federal constitution in 1787, most states had a senate or legislative
council as a check on their more representative lower houses. With few exceptions, states imposed higher
property qualifications on those who voted for or served in state senates than they did on those who voted for or
served in state lower houses. Coupled with religious tests for holding public office (Le;, Christianity in Delaware,
Maryland, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, specifically Protestantism in New Hampshire, New Jersey, North
Carolina, South Carolina, Vermont, Connecticut, and Georgia), these property qualifications elevated many state
senates to the functional equivalent of the British House of Lords, meaning a bastion of "spiritual and temporal"
aristocracy. Therefore, when the federal Constitutional Convention decided in 1787 that US: senators would be
appointed by state legislatures rather than elected by the people at large, the drafters were actually placing the
choice of U.S. senators in the control of state leaders who had met their states' highest qualifications for property
and religion.
Today, these property and religious qualifications are likely to strike us as quaint historical oddities. By the
middle of the nineteenth century, all states had disestablished their Protestant churches and had eliminated
religious tests for holding public office as well as wealth and property qualifications for voting and office-holding.
In 1913 the nation amended the federal Constitution to remove the choice of U.S. senator from party bosses and
greedy capitalists who were controlling state legislatures, and instead placed the election of U.S. senators directly
in the hands of the American people. In these things, Americans spoke loudly in favor of democracy.
Yet the United States Senate stands today as a grotesque monument to that antidemocratic legacy; it remains
largely a preserve of wealthy white male aristocrats drawn from an entirely different economic class than the
people they purport to represent. Because the United States failed to heed Paine's warnings against a small and
unequal representation, 40 to 50 percent of U.S. .
senators are millionaires (as opposed to less than 1 percent of the general population), with massive wealth
requirements for those who wish to be senators. In election year 2000, wealthy candidates spent $107,700,000 of
their own money in seeking election to the U.S. Senate, and the average cost of a successful campaign was more
than $7 million. Notably, a successful run for the House of Representatives cost about one tenth as much.
Because the u.s. House of Representatives has a large and equal representation drawn from relatively small
congressional voting districts, a congressional representative is more likely to be drawn from, to know, and to be
known by the ordinary people he or she is supposed to "represent." For this reason, he or she will need less
money to communicate with voters and will find money less productive (sometimes even counterproductive) in
influencing what voters think. Not so for the u.s. Senate. Because the Senate is a small body drawn from large
and unequal statewide constituencies, senatorial candidates often need vast sums of money (or family or friends
with access to vast sums of money) to reach and influence as many as 10 million, or 20 million, or, in the case of
California, more than 30 million people who may have little or no idea of who a candidate is. Needless to say, this
disadvantages women, blacks, the young, and other groups with a smaller percentage of millionaires. And the
situation will only get worse. As state populations grow, the cost of reaching those populations will also grow,
adding to the advantage of personal wealth for those who wish to run for the Senate.
The Senate's "small and unequal" representation discriminates not only on the basis of wealth, sex, and age but
also on the basis of race and religion. James Madison recognized in 1787 that an equal vote for each state in the
Senate did not properly distinguish states with predominantly white populations from those with large African-
American slave populations (whose numbers were counted, though at 60 percent, in apportioning seats for the
House of Representatives). He could make a similar observation today. Today, African Americans and Hispanics
make up only 11 percent of the population in the twenty-six smallest states constituting a majority in the U.S.
Senate, though they are 30 percent of the population in the nine largest states, holding a majority of the people.
Similarly, Catholics are only 16 percent and Jews less than 1 percent in the smallest states with a majority in the
u.s. Senate, but they are 28 percent and more than 3 percent, respectively, of the largest states with a majority of
the people. For Muslims, Asian Americans, the poor, and virtually every other group and category of voter, there
may be important differences between the demographics of the smallest states and those of the largest states or
of the average state or of the median state, so that an equal vote for every state in the Senate is not only
increasingly undemocratic. It is increasingly unrepresentative as well.
The statewide election of senators (as opposed to the election of representatives by small congressional voting
districts) works a further discrimination against minorities, denying them the ability to elect "one of their own"
and thereby to have a voice in Senate debate. Even if blacks, for example, make up more than a third of a state's
population (as they do in Mississippi), they could still find their voice in the Senate to be someone like Mississippi
Republican Senator Trent Lott, who has supported racially segregated schools and opposed a national holiday to
honor Martin Luther King Jr. To the shame of us all, the Senate's "small representation" and correlatively large
(statewide) voting constituencies mean that it will remain a singularly white institution, even as the House of
Representatives continues to reflect changes in the nation's racial complexion.
The "small and unequal representation" of the u.s. Senate infects the judicial and executive branches as well as
the legislative branch. Because the Senate is the only institution whose "consent" is constitutionally required for
presidential appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court, the undemocratic and unrepresentative nature of the
Senate can skew the bias of the nation's highest court. In the case of the appointment of the highly controversial,
conservative, and arguably sexist Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, for example, the Senate confirmed
Thomas's appointment (by a margin of four votes, 52-48), despite the fact that the senators who voted against him
represented 7 million more people than the senators who voted for him. In that case, senators from the nine
largest states with a majority of the people voted two-to-one against the Thomas confirmation (their vote was 12-
6), while senators from the twenty -six smallest states with a majority in the Senate gave Thomas his fourvote
margin of victory (they favored him 28-24).
Because the number of each state's presidential electors is the sum
of its two U.S. senators plus the number of its representatives in the House, the unfairness of an equal number of
senators for every state also corrupts the entire presidential election process, which in election year 2000 awarded
271 electors to George W. Bush and only 266 to Al Gore, despite the fact that Gore was the popular favorite by a
margin of more than 500,000 votes. Had the number of each state's electoral votes simply been the number of its
representatives in the House (and, therefore, been proportioned to the size of its population), Gore would have
enjoyed an electoral vote victory of 225 to 211, consistent with the preference of the American people. In 2000 the
smallest states constituting a majority in the Senate cast their electoral votes nearly two-to-one for Bush, while
the largest states boasting a majority of the people cast their electoral votes two-to-one for Gore.
The corruption of our political process does not stop with the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of
government in their normal functioning, however; it undermines "the sovereignty of the people" as well.
Although "we, the people of the United States" have retained the right to amend the Constitution with a two-
thirds vote of the Congress and a three quarters vote of the states, today this means that small-state senators
representing only 8 percent of the people or the thirteen smallest states with fewer than 5 percent of the people
can scuttle any amendment. Conversely (and perversely), if today's thirty-eight smallest states-with 40 percent of
the people-want to change the Constitution (say, to prohibit gay marriage), they have the required three quarters
to amend, regardless of what a democratic majority of the people might prefer. It is difficult to see how this is
"government by the people," but it's not clear whether the drafters would have cared. .
The men who wrote our federal Constitution were mostly concerned that democracy, without checks and balances,
might turn into mob rule. Shortly before the federal convention, John Adams circulated the first volume of his
monumental Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States, which defended constitutions built
on his Massachusetts model against the unicameral ideas of Paine and Franklin. In his Defence, Adams returned
to the arguments of Polybius (among others) and to the ancient theory of the one, the few, and the many,
declaring, "If I should undertake to say, there never was a good government in the world that did not consist of
the three simple species of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, I think I may make it good." In the end, he
did make it good, reviewing ancient and modem constitutions to conclude that "the English constitution is, in
theory, both for the adjustment of the balance and the prevention of its vibrations, the most stupendous fabric of
human invention." Many at the federal Constitutional Convention agreed.
Alexander Hamilton proclaimed, on the floor of the convention, that "the British Government was the best in the
world; and that he doubted whether anything short of it would do in America." John Dickinson argued for "the
Senate to consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of
property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible." James Madison declared
that "the Senate ought to come from, and represent, the Wealth of the nation." Edmund Randolph wanted the
"number of Members for the Senate. . . to be less than the House of Commons. . . to restrain, if possible, the
fury of democracy." Benjamin Rush predicted, at the start of the convention, "Mr. Adams's book has diffused
such excellent principles among us, that there is little doubt of our adopting a vigorous and compounded federal
legislature." And so they did.
But haven't times changed? The British themselves no longer subscribe to the Polybian balance or to the theory
of the one, the few, and the many. The British now vest all legislative authority in the British House of Commons
(their single chamber "of the many") and even allow the House of Commons to appoint their nation's executive
branch in the person of the prime minister and his cabinet. By the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949, the House
of Lords can no longer veto acts of the House of Commons and can no longer delay legislation for more than a
year. Although the British monarchy retains a theoretical veto over acts of the British Parliament, no monarch
has dared to exercise that prerogative for nearly three hundred years. Today, the House of Commons reigns
supreme on legislative and executive matters. The monarch and the House of Lords have merely advisory roles.
American views also have changed. Many drafters at the Constitutional Convention saw U.S. senators as agents
of the state legislatures that would elect them, and thus as defenders of the residual powers of the states. Since
then the Seventeenth Amendment took the power to appoint U.S. senators away from state legislatures.
Americans gave their lives in the Civil War to confirm that the nation is not a confederation of independent
sovereign states but rather a union "of, by, and for the people." Since the Civil War (and especially after the
Fourteenth Amendment), it has been the federal judiciary, not the Senate or the House, that enforces our Bill of
Rights freedoms (even against the states) and the U.S. Supreme Court that delimits the Tenth Amendment's
mandate that "powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States,
are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Finally, one must note that federalism carries no
requirement that we have a senate or that less populous states have an equal vote in a senate. Federalism is
concerned with what powers the federal government does or does not have vis-a.-vis the states, not with how the
federal government exercises those powers it legitimately has.
But what about protecting small states against large states, farmers against manufacturers, "old country values"
against "the corruption of the city"? Pure mythology. Rhode Island and Delaware, among the smallest states,
have less farmland and fewer farmers than either California or New York, two of the largest states. Nevada's
small population is concentrated in Las Vegas and Reno, giving it a special interest in gambling, not farming.
Besides, why should farmers have a greater say than manufacturers on questions of energy policy or airline
deregulation? Why should country folk have a greater say than. city folk on decisions about defense
appropriations or funding AIDS research? If small states represent special interests and values, do such interests
and values justify giving those states a veto over every national question?
But what about "the tyranny of the majority," that insidious and arguably oxymoronic phrase that French
aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville added to our vocabulary in 1835? The answer is that democracy is itself a
protection against tyranny, whether by the one (autocracy) or by the few (oligarchy). In assuring that our
representative democracy works properly, we must be vigilant that Paine's "two ancient tyrannies" don't
insinuate themselves into our remedies. Furthermore, we must distinguish between tyrannical decisions and
unwise decisions. We insulate ourselves from tyrannical decisions by declaring certain rights of individuals and
minorities to be inalienable and by enshrining those rights, as we have, in the US. Bill of Rights. So long as the
democratic majority respects those rights, a majority's decisions may prove unwise but should not be considered
tyrannical.
What about occasions when the U.S. House of Representatives has been "wrong" and our undemocratic and
unrepresentative Senate has been "right"? But what about the opposite, when the Senate was wrong? And
doesn't such a judgment depend on one's political viewpoint? If, as a matter of experiment, we were to allow a roll
of the dice, the chirp of a parakeet, or a phase of the moon to veto the decisions of the House of Representatives,
there would also be times when the dice, the bird, or the moon would be right and the House of Representatives
would be wrong. What would this prove? And what would we do about it? Would our response be to turn the dice,
the bird, or the moon into a permanent part of the government? Or would we simply work to improve the
decision-making procedures of the House of Representatives by requiring extensive public hearings, large
supermajorities, or a "cooling off" period followed by a second vote on important questions such as amendments
to the Constitution, so that future decisions would be better informed and better deliberated?        .

Most Americans would not want monarchy or aristocracy to substitute for the will of the democratic majority. In
this Age of Information, they simply expect today's democratic majority or its representatives to inform
themselves on the issues and to act thoughtfully and carefully, with a readiness to change course if they find they
have made a mistake. If the House, acting alone, were to make a mistake, the House would presumably correct
itself, or, if it didn't, the people who elected wrongheaded representatives would elect new representatives to take
their place. Here, too, the Senate is woefully deficient, because a wrongheaded senator has to answer to the voters
only once in six years. As Thomas Jefferson observed, "A government is republican in proportion as every
member composing it has his equal voice . . . by representatives chosen by himself and responsible to him at short
periods." "In the General Government," he charged, "the House of Representatives is mainly republican; the
Senate scarcely so at all"
How, then, does one abolish the Senate? The small states that forced the drafters to accept an undemocratic and
unrepresentative U.S. Senate did their best to prevent any change. Article Five of the U.S. Constitution reads,
"No State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate," suggesting that we may not
be able to reform the U.S. Senate, unless every state, including the smallest, agrees. Not a likely prospect!
An ironic alternative to outright abolition might be possible, however, which could prove to be a new "Great
Compromise." Perhaps, in tribute to the drafters who so admired the British constitution, we could allow the
Senate to continue in the footsteps of the British House of Lords, retaining its undemocratic, unrepresentative,
and aristocratic membership (Le., "equal suffrage" for each state, large and small) but with greatly reduced
powers, so that it might, as in Britain, inform and delay, but not defeat, measures of "the people's house," which,
in this country, means the House of Representatives. By conferring final lawmaking authority on the House of
Representatives, we would thereby enhance the prestige and importance of our most democratic and
representative branch, attracting more qualified ("wiser") candidates to its membership and encouraging greater
citizen attention to its work.
Why would those citizens who live in small states support such an amendment? Because they, like all Americans,
believe in "one person, one vote," fair representation, justice, equality, and democracy. As Thomas Paine wrote
in January of 1776, "We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest, purest
constitution on the face of the earth." More than two centuries later, we still know that to be true.        '
In the centuries that have passed since "our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived
in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal,'" we, the' children of these Founders,
have slogged a long and difficult path toward a place of greater liberty. Along this path, we have disestablished the
Founders' state churches, removed their wealth, property, and religious qualifications from voting or office-
holding, abolished their enslavement of African Americans, ended their second-class treatment of women, paid
compensation for their abuses of Native Americans, deprived their elites in state legislatures of the power to
appoint presidential electors and U.S. senators, and made the Bill of Rights a guarantee not merely against
actions of their new federal government but against actions of their old state governments as well. Along this
path no principle of equality or democracy has been more important than that of "one person, one vote," and yet
the U.S. Senate remains a glaring exception to this rule, a relic of Paine's two ancient tyrannies that continues to
infect our political system. Today, we must resume the historic struggle to bring forth democracy in America: We
must do away with our small and unequal Senate. This is America's next step.

You may contact Robert Jastrebski at:
Rjastrebski@peoplepc.com

Take Back America
The first thing Bush should have done is raise wages, regulate energy and pass a national healthcare
program with price controls. As a general rule, any politician opposed to national healthcare with price
controls should be shot dead on sight. You name it, Bush has made it worse. For that reason he is
Wanted
Dead
along with the following:
Karl Rove
Douglas Feith
Paul Wolfowitz
Newt Gingrich
Ahmed Chalabi
Naor Gilon of the Israeli Embassy
Morris Amitay at AIPAC, JINSA vice chair
Raymond Tanter
Frank Gaffney at CSP
Ariel Sharon and leaders of the Licud Party
David Steinmann, chairman of JINSA
Dore Gold, adviser to Sharon
Natan Sharansky, Chairman of One Jerusalem
Gary Bauer-American Values, Christian Zionists
Roberta Combs-Christain Coalition,
Daniel Pipes-Middle East Forum
Mort Klein -ZOA
Members of ZOA-Zionist Organization of America
all those at AIPAC
Sharansky
Rob Sobhani
Meyrav Wurmser
Uri Lubrani
Joshua Muravchik
John Bolton
Law Firm of Feith and Zell
Those at CDI, Center for democracy in Iran
George Will
Richard Harwood
Meg Greenfield
Richard Scaife
Bill OReilly
Matt Drudge
Milton Freidman
Charles Murray
Samuel Huntington
Henry Kissinger
William O. DeWitt
Bushs recent choice to head the CIA
Elliot Abrams
Richard L. Armitage
William Bennett
Jeffrey Bergner
John Bolton
Paula Dobriansky
Francis Fukuyama
Robert Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad
William Kristol
Richard Perle
Peter W. Rodman
Donald Rumsfeld
William Schneider Jr.
Vin Weber
R. James Woolsey
Robert B Zoellick
George Gilder
Michael Novak
William Tucker
Philip Terzian
Peter Weyrich
Paul Weyrich
Irving Kristol
Plutarch
Gibbon
Edmund Burke
Jerry Falwell
Norman Podhoretz
Rupert Murdoch
Gordon Liddy
Ralph Reed
Oliver North
Peggy Noonan
David Gelernter
Robert Bork
Marvin Olasky
Pat Robertson
Richard Mellon Scaife
Richard John Neuhaus
Myron Magnet
Dinesh D'souza
Tom DeLay
Allen Greenspan
Lawrence Franklin
Harold Rhode
Michael Ledeen
Members of the following organizations:
Business Roundtable
The Bradley Foundation
Smith Richardson Foundation
Scaife Family Foundations
John M Olin Foundations
Koch Family Foundation
Castel Rock Coors Foundation
JM Foundation
Philip M McKenna Foundation
The Federalist Society
The American Spectator
The Heritage Foundation
Accuracy in the Media
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
The CATO Institute
Jewish Institute for National Security
The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Center for Security Policy
The Zionist Organization of America
AIPAC
CSP
Project for the New American Century
American Enterprise Institute
Hoover Institute
Hudson Institute
Manhattan Institute
Citizens for a Sound Economy
Center for Democracy in Iran
Reason Foundation
National Center for Policy Analysis
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Free Congress Foundation
Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis
Those responsible for forcing Bill Clinton to cut welfare, AFDC, corporate taxes and Capital Gains Taxes
Everyone at Fox News and the Rush Limbaugh Show
Bush and his adminstration
All those who supported Bushs tax cuts for the wealthy
Kenneth Star and all those responsible for the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton
All those reponsible for forcing Europe to cut social welfare and taxes on the wealthy
All those who deregulated american industries
The CEO's of america's oil companies
All those responsible for manipulating the energy market in California in order to force the state to sign
energy contracts at inflated prices
All those who prevented them from renegotiating those contracts
All those who prevented the Clinton administration from passing national healthcare
All those opposed opposed to complete regulation or nationalization of the healthcare industry including
the pharmaceudical industry
All those opposed to making the healthcare not-for-profit
Those reponsible for shock therapy anywhere
Those responsible for privatizations anywhere
Those responsible for telling any country to cut social welfare and cut taxes for the wealthy
The people who forced Dan Rather to retire because he told the truth
All conservative judges
MSNBC Scarborough Country
Cal Thomas Commentary

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