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Minnesota who was assasinated before the 2002
election by the conservative white trash that rules
this country so they could take control of the
senate and ram their agenda down the throats of
the american people
Missouri who was assasinated right
before the 2000 election on behalf of
criminal conservatives who have taken
over our government in order to pass
legislation on behalf of criminals in the
energy and healthcare industries and
force their ideology on the world. Their
agenda is to have an income distribution
like Latin America. Watch the movie
Seven Days in May.
defrauded the government billions of dollars via
Tenet Healthcare. I meant to say HCA
Healthcare. See article below. After pulling off
such a successful scam the senate criminals
decided he was worthy to be their fearless leader.
agent that might represent me please contact me.
The Bad Doctor
Bill Frist’s long record of corporate vices
by Doug Ireland
While TV gushed last week over the Republicans’ new Senate majority leader, Bill Frist, intervening in a
traffic accident, portraying the former heart surgeon as a "Good Samaritan," in truth the GOP has simply
replaced a racist with a corporate crook.
Frist was born rich, and got richer — thanks to massive criminal fraud by the family business. The basis of
the Frist family fortune is HCA Inc. (Hospital Corporation of America), the largest for-profit hospital chain
in the country, which was founded by Frist’s father and brother. And, just as Karl Rove was engineering the
scuttling of Trent Lott and the elevation of Frist, the Bush Justice Department suddenly ended a near-
decadelong federal investigation into how HCA for years had defrauded Medicaid, Medicare and Tricare (the
federal program that covers the military and their families), giving the greedy health-care behemoth’s
executives a sweetheart settlement that kept them out of the can.
The government’s case was that HCA kept two sets of books and fraudulently overbilled the government. The
deal meant that HCA agreed to pay the government $631 million for its lucrative scams — which, on top of
previous fines, brought the total government penalties against the health-care conglomerate to a whopping
$1.7 billion, the largest fraud settlement in history, breaking the old record set by Drexel Burnham.
The deal also meant that HCA can continue to participate in Medicare. And, as part of the Bushies’ deal
shutting down what Deputy Assistant FBI Director Thomas Kubic called "one of the FBI’s highest-priority
white-collar crime investigations," no criminal charges were brought against the top HCA execs who presided
over the illegal bilking of federal programs designed to aid the poor — and that includes Senator Frist’s
brother, Thomas, HCA’s former CEO (and current director), who’s been described by Forbes magazine as
"one of the richest men in America," with a personal fortune estimated at close to $2 billion.
What did HCA do? It inflated its expenses and billed the government for the overrun; it billed the
government for services ineligible for reimbursement (like advertising and marketing costs). HCA violated
both law and medical ethics when, as Forbes put it, "the company increased Medicare billings by exaggerating
the seriousness of the illnesses they were treating. It also granted doctors partnerships in company hospitals
as a kickback for the doctors’ referring patients to HCA. In addition, it gave doctors ‘loans’ that were never
expected to be paid back, free rent, free office furniture — and free drugs from hospital pharmacies."
This is the ethical climate that reigned in the Frist family’s money machine. In an unguarded moment,
Senator Frist told the Boston Globe that conversations with his doctor father about the family calling were
like "benign versions of the Godfather and Michael Corleone." Apparently the senator considers defrauding
the government "benign." So too does the Bush White House, which dictated the Justice Department deal
with HCA that let the crooks escape jail just as Frist was being anointed the Senate’s majority leader. A
pure coincidence in timing, of course.
The senator has always claimed no current connection to HCA because the $26 million he and his wife hold in
the company’s stock is in a so-called "blind trust." But it was the family’s dirty money that bought Frist a
place in the Senate. In 1994, Frist — who’d never bothered to vote before first running for the Senate
that year — spent some $3.4 million of his personal fortune to buy the seat from Tennessee (HCA’s
headquarters) that he now occupies. Moreover, "In the Senate, Frist has used his influence to further HCA’s
cause by stopping a strong patients’ bill of rights, gridlocking a mandatory Medicare prescription-drug
benefit, and promoting caps on damages for victims who sue negligent hospitals like HCA’s," points out Jamie
Court, executive director of the Santa Monica–based Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, who
adds, "The Senate should not replace a racist with a principal backer of one of the largest corporate
swindles ever perpetrated against the American public. If Frist was a patriot first, he would have sold his
HCA stock long ago."
But Frist’s pandering to the lobbyists of the voracious health-care industry knows no bounds. "Frist isn’t the
senator from Tennessee — he’s the senator from the state of Health Care Industry Influence — he’s gotten
more than $2 million from the health-care sector, giving him the dubious distinction of raising more cash
from health-care interests than 98 percent of his colleagues," says Nick Nyhart, executive director of
Public Campaign.
Consider the special servicing he gave to pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly. In another example of his
"patriotism," Frist engineered the insertion into the Homeland Security bill of a provision that would protect
Eli Lilly from lawsuits over Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative used in its vaccines. Thousands of
lawsuits have been filed against Lilly by parents who believe Thimerosal caused autism and other neurological
maladies in their kids. The Frist-authored rider shields Lilly by forcing those lawsuits into a special "vaccine
court," where they can be easily scuttled, potentially saving Lilly hundreds of millions. The pharmaceutical
industry was the largest single contributor to the National Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee that
Frist chaired, ladling out some $4 million — and Lilly was the single biggest contributor to the GOP from that
industry, having given $1.6 million in the last election cycle, 79 percent of it to Republicans.
The good Dr. Frist voted against patients’ rights to sue their HMOs for failure to provide adequate
treatment, and voted to give tax subsidies to HMOs and insurance companies to offer prescription drugs to
seniors, rather than providing them through Medicare. Frist has, of course, personally raked it in from the
interested industries, gobbling up $123,750 in campaign cash from the HMOs and $265,023 from the
pharmaceutical industry. Frist also took $130,204 from the food-processing industry — and then helped kill
a bill putting teeth into the USDA’s authority to crack down on processing plants that violate federal
standards for bacterial and viral infection of meat and poultry.
There’s a lot more, like this — so much that it leads to an inescapable conclusion: In the Senate, "Good
Samaritan" Frist has almost daily violated the injunction of the physicians’ Hippocratic oath: "First, do no
harm."
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Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?
By Michael I. Niman, AlterNet. Posted October 28, 2002.
Paul Wellstone Dies in Tragic Plane Crash
The death of the Minnesota senator, the conscience of the Senate, will have a major impact on American
politics.
Paul Wellstone was the only progressive in the U.S. Senate. Mother Jones magazine once described him as,
"The first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. senate." He was also the last. Since defeating incumbent
Republican Rudy Boschowitz 12 years ago in a grassroots upset, Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most
persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration.
In a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another
Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats
and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party,
who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year.
Various White House figures made numerous recent campaign stops in Minnesota to stump for the ailing
campaign of Wellstone's Republican opponent, Norm Coleman. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however,
polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing
George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Coleman and moving toward a victory that would
both be an embarrassment to the Bush administration and to Democratic Quislings such as Hillary Clinton who
voted to support "the president."
Then he died.
Wellstone now joins the ranks of other American politicians who died in small plane crashes. Another recent
victim was Missouri's former Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks
before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first
dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft,
despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush. Investigators
determined that Carnahan's plane went down due to "poor visibility."
Carnahan was the second Missouri politician to die in a small plane crash. The first was Democratic
Representative Jerry Litton, whose plane crashed the night he won the Democratic nomination for senate in
1976. His Republican opponent ultimately captured the seat from his successor in November.
While an article in the New York Times on Saturday pointed out the danger politicians face due to their
heavy air travel schedules, the death of a senator or member of Congress is still relatively rare, with only
one other sitting U.S. Senator, liberal Republican John Heinz, dying in a plane crash since World War II.
Heinz, who entered office as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, later emerged as a strong
proponent of health care, social services, public transportation and the environment. He also urged
reconciliation with Cuba. He died when the landing gear on his small plane failed to function, and a helicopter
dispatched to survey the problem crashed into his plane.
One former senator, John Tower, also died in a small plane crash. Tower was best known as the chair of the
Tower Commission, which investigated the Reagan/Bush era Iran/Contra scandal.
Another member of a prominent government commission who died in a small plane crash was former
Democratic representative and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. Boggs was best known as one of the seven
members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The
commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone when he killed the president. Boggs, it turns out,
had "strong doubts" that Oswald acted alone, but went along with the commission findings. Later, in 1971
and 1972, he went public with his doubts. He was presumed dead after the small plane carrying him and
Democratic Representative Nicholas Begich disappeared in 1972.
Texas Democratic Representative Mickey Leland also died in a plane crash. In his case, the six-term
member of Congress and outspoken advocate of sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa,
died while traveling in Ethiopia. Another American politician to die overseas in a plane crash was the Clinton
administration's Commerce Secretary, Ronald Brown, whose plane went down in the Balkans.
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I
wasn't alone in my initial reaction at this week's horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that
Wellstone had lived this long. Perhaps it's just my anger and frustration at losing one of the few reputable
politicians in Washington, but I also felt shame. Shame for not writing in my column, months ago, that I felt
that Paul Wellstone's life, more so than any other politician in Washington, was in danger. I felt that such
speculation was unprofessional and would ultimately undermine my credibility. In the end, my own self-
interest triumphed, and I never put my concerns into print. Neither did any other mainstream journalist,
though I know of many who shared my concern.
When I heard Wellstone's plane went down, I immediately thought of Panamanian General Omar Torrijos,
who in 1981 thumbed his nose at the Reagan/Bush administration and threatened to destroy the Panama
Canal in the event of a U.S. invasion. Torrijos died shortly thereafter when the instruments in his plane
failed to function upon takeoff. Panamanians speculated that the U.S. was involved in the death of the
popular dictator, who was replaced by a U.S. intelligence operative, Manuel Noreiga, who previously worked
with George Bush Senior.
There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however,
is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by
an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at
this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into
the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed
an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.
Dr. Michael I. Niman teaches journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College
When I was in Europe last time the CIA assasinated Pim Fortuyn, the candidate that was just about to win
the presidency in the Netherlands. In Germany Schroder was first elected because he promised the
policies of his Finance minister, Oskar LaFontaine. After Schroders victory the CIA told Lofontaine they
would try to kill him again if he didn't step down and this time they would make sure he didn't recover like
he did after they tried to kill him the first time. I was in Germany in the late 80's when the CIA blew up
the armored plated Mercedes of the head of the German Federal reserve because they didn't like his
monetary policy. The CIA assasinated the Swedish finance minister. Anyone interested in real democracy in
Europe can research these assasinations and Lofontaines history in Schroders government. Thats what these
sick fuckers from Texas call democracy.
Former Prime Minister of Saarland & Federal Minister of Finance a.D.
Oskar Lafontaine, born in 1943 and educated at the universities of Bonn and Saarbrücken, joined the SPD
(Social Democratic Party) in 1966. From 1970 to 1975 he was member of the SPD in Saarland. From 1974
to 1985 he became mayor of the town Saarbrücken and from 1977 to 1996 he was Chairman of the SPD in
Saarland. Since 1979 he has been a member of the Federal Board of the SPD.
In March 1985 he was first elected Prime Minister of Saarland and then re-elected in 1990 and 1994.
In June 1987 he was elected Deputy Chairman of the SPD and led the Commission "Fortschritt ‘90", which
developed the party programme for the elections in 1990. During this election Oskar Lafontaine stood as the
main candidate for his party.
On 25 April 1990 he was critically injured during an assassination attempt.
From 1991 to 1994 he was the Representative for cultural issues for the Bundesrepublik Germany within the
frame of the Treaty for German and French co-operation. From November 1992 until 31 October 1993 he
was President of the Federal Council (Upper House). From May 1995 until January 1996 Oskar Lafontaine
became Chairman of the Mediation Committee of the Federal Council (Upper House) and the ‘Bundestag’
(Lower House).
In November 1995 he became chairman for the SPD and was re-elected in December 1997.
In September 1998 he was elected as member of the German Bundestag.
After winning the elections, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, appointed him Minister of Finance on
28 October 1998. On the 18 March 1999 Oskar Lafontaine stood down from this position.
Why did GM pull a successful electric car off the market in California a few months ago. A few months ago
the following article was in the Financial Times. It describes how Volkswagon was working on a car that would
258 miles per gallon and they just decided to stop development of the car. They justified their decision
saying nobody wants to pay $25,800 for a car that get 258 miles per gallon.
VW cancels its 'one-litre car project
Volkswagen, Europe's biggest car maker, has cancelled one of its most high-profile projects, Bernd
Pischetsrieder, the group's chief executive, announced yesterday.
The car, which would have needed only one litre of fuel to travel 100 km, would cost too much to produce,
according to Mr Pischetsrieder.
The model, which would have cost at least €20,OOO
($25,800) to buy, would have been too expensive for most customers, according to the group. The
disappointing sales of the Audi A2 3L and Lupo, which need three
litres of fuel for 1oo km, have not justified the cost of developing the cars and the
group hopes to avoid a similar scenario with the one.litre car. In spite of the high petrol
"prices and environment tax, customers are reluctant to pay €15,000 for the Lupo or €19,OOO for the A2..
"Everyone thinks it is good that the three-litre engine cars are available but no one drives one," a
spokesperson for VW said.
Guido Reinking, Hamburg'
05.17.2005 Charlie Cray
Questions for Halliburton CEO David Lesar
Halliburton, king of corporate war profiteers, conducts its annual shareholders' meeting Wednesday in
Houston.
There will certainly be a lot to discuss. Bribery in Nigeria and Iraq, accounting fraud, contract fraud in the
Balkans and Iraq, dealing with former CEO Cheney's "Axis of Evil" (Iran), etc.
It's hard to keep track. That's why CorpWatch and Halliburton Watch have produced an annual report for
shareholders who want the truth: Houston We Still Have a Problem. (For PDF version, go here.)
Shareholders who read the report will want to ask Halliburton CEO David Lesar some interesting questions,
like:
1. Just how many Justice Department criminal investigation cases involving the company and/or current and
former employees are currently pending?
2. Exactly how much of this year's dividends are coming out of the "Iraqi people's" oil revenues?
3. Halliburton disclosed it may have criminally rigged bids on foreign contracts and the Department of Justice
has opened an investigation into the matter. Which foreign countries are involved and what you have done to
prevent this activity in the future?
4. A senior Army contracting employee has indicated that one month before the invasion of Iraq began, KBR
executives were in attendance at some of the meetings of Pentagon officials who were deciding whether to
award contracts to KBR or its competitors. Who were those KBR employees and do they still work for the
company?
5. Isn't it true that the company still under investigation for conducting business in Iran?
6. Pentagon auditors recently announced that KBR had overcharged U.S.
taxpayers by $174 million for importing gasoline from Kuwait to Iraq. Why has the Kuwaiti government
complained about KBR’s “lack of cooperation” in its investigation?
7. Did any company executives attend meetings with Vice President Dick Cheney or his staff in 2001 to
discuss U.S. energy policy? If so, can you inform the shareholders what was discussed?
8. Is it true that the company has used employees driving trucks as "decoys" in Iraq, resulting in
unnecessary death?
Also, there are reports that employees who come back from Iraq are not eligible for workmen's compensation
because they are technically employed by a Cayman Islands subsidiary called Service Employees
International. Why is the company using an offshore haven subsidiary to hire U.S. employees for its work in
Iraq?
9. The Department of Justice has reportedly indicted a Halliburton manager for an taking kickbacks under
the LOGCAP troop support contract. Have you answered Rep. Waxman, who asked the company why it told
the House Committee on Government Reform that the individuals involved were not managers but
“administrative people”?
10. Has the company investigated the alleged gang-beating of KBR employee Ronald Chavez by a group of
fellow employees, known as the "Red Neck Mafia," at the Baghdad airport where he worked as a security
coordinator for KBR? Were those employees fired?
11. The company admitted last year that it may have made illegal payments to the Nigerian government to
win the Bonny Island
contract. The French government says the payments totaled $132 million and were paid during your
employment as Halliburton’s chief financial officer and chief executive. Did you have any knowledge of these
payments when they were being made? If not, how could you, the company’s chief accountant, fail to notice
such a large sums of money being paid in Nigeria?
a) Have you personally provided testimony under oath to any government regarding the payments to Nigeria?
If so, to whom was the testimony given?
b) Has the company discovered any potentially illegal payments to
government officials in countries other than Nigeria?
c) It's been reported that the company hired James Doty of the Baker Botts law firm to conduct an internal
investigation of the Nigeria case. Is Mr. Doty's investigation finished? Are the documents already discovered
in his preliminary investigation available for shareholders to scrutinize?
They wouldn’t be doing the following unless they were being forced to do this and once enough property is
purchased to implement monopoly pricing all this funds will join together to drive up housing prices and rental
rates. Even the US doesn't sell the land the White House or Capital is built on. This is the handiwork of the
conservative crackpots.
Soros Unit May Invest `Billions' of Euros in German Real Estate
April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Billionaire financier George Soros plans to step up investment in German residential
real estate as public and private landlords seek to raise money by selling as many as 4 million homes worth
200 billion euros ($259 billion).
Apellas Property Management GmbH, a company in which Soros has a 95 percent stake through the Grove
Capital fund, is ``very keen'' to add to the 5,000 homes it owns in Berlin, said Ulrich Weber, the unit's
managing director, in an interview.
Grove Capital plans to spend ``billions'' of euros on housing after losing out in a bid for 65,000 homes last
year, said Weber in an interview. Depressed housing prices ``and sturdy confidence in a resurgent economy''
are behind Berlin-based Apellas's interest in German real estate, Weber said.
Prices for municipal housing in Germany are being driven higher by foreign-based funds counting on a rebound
in the real- estate market. Apellas faces competitors such as New-York Fortress Investment LLC, which
this year increased its European fund.
The German government's plan to introduce U.S.-style real- estate investment trusts may add to
competition for housing lots. Slow revenue growth and near-record unemployment are raising pressure on the
public sector to speed up asset sales. The country's six leading economic institutes this week halved their
forecast for growth this year to 0.7 percent.
Fortress and U.K. financier Guy Hands's Terra Firma Partners Ltd. are this year vying to become
Germany's biggest private residential landlords, bidding as much as 6 billion euros for 150,000 homes owned
by E.ON AG. Once government-owned, the Essen- based utility is selling homes held in Viterra AG to focus
on its main business.
Home Ownership
Apellas's plan to increase investment is partly based on a bet that Germans will turn to bricks and mortar as
a financial cushion for their old age amid a perceived weak performance by alternative investments, Weber
said. At just 40 percent of all housing, the level of home ownership in Germany is among the lowest in Europe.
Foreign-based funds are bullish on the outlook for Germany, Europe's largest economy, to recover from the
cost of unification in 1990, as well as the growing expense of compulsory pension and health programs, said
Weber, who owned a Berlin-based construction company before merging it with Soros's unit in 2003.
Last year's 2 billion-euro sale of 80,000 homes owned by Gagfah Gemeinnutzige AG to Fortress helped close
a gap in the country's compulsory pension fund. Fortress said this month it may sell shares in Gagfah to the
public to finance expansion.
Berlin Homes
Apellas last year lost out in a contest to acquire GSW GmbH, the owner of 65,000 homes in the German
capital. The winners of the bid, Cerberus Capital Management LP, a U.S.-based fund, and Goldman, Sachs &
Co.'s Whitehall fund, paid 405 million euros.
The senior official in charge of finance in the Berlin city government, Thilo Sarrazin, said in an interview last
year he has ``no objections'' to foreign funds buying the capital's municipal housing.
Sarrazin, a member of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party, needs to sell assets to help
the city of 3.4 million ease a debt crisis as its economy grew last year for the first time since 1990. The
city government owns 300,000 homes managed by six companies.
Foreign-based funds are also betting that Germany will sell its municipal housing more quickly than neighboring
countries, said Michael Schroeder, an executive at Vivacon AG, a Cologne- based property company that buys
and develops housing from funds before reselling it.
The U.K., a pioneer of public housing sales in Europe, took 25 years to 2003 to halve its publicly owned stock
to 3.1 million units, or 12.5 percent of all homes, according to York University's U.K. Housing Review, an
annual survey of ownership.
Bank Loans
Apellas is looking across Germany to spend most of Soros's money, said Weber. Funds are using bank loans on
top of their capital to fund as much as two thirds of purchases, before selling on again within five years, he
said.
Foreign funds take a different view of risk in the German real-estate market to German-based funds, said
Matthias von Debschitz, spokesman for Wiesbaden-based DID GmbH, a company that monitors real-estate
prices.
German funds, typically holding no more than 10 percent of their portfolios in housing, are ``wary of fickle
politics'' that may tighten protection for tenants, he said. ``So far, the foreign funds' robust disregard of
risk is paying off.''
The DID German residential property index showed a 5.2 percent return on investment in 2003, after 3.1
percent a year earlier, and ``is clearly marked for further gains,'' said Debschitz in an interview. DID
German property-market data for 2004 will be released May 25.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Brian Parkin in Berlin at bparkin@bloomberg.net;
Thomas Bauer in Berlin at tbauer@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: April 29, 2005 04:55 EDT
Financial Times May 19th
German State to Study E800m Property Sale
The German state of Hessen has appointed advisers to explore the sale of more than €800m ($lbn) in
publicly owned office property, a move likely to prompt a fresh scramble for assets by foreign private eguity
groups. _The disposals, which are likely to take the form of sale and leasebacks, will support a state which
is expected to run a budget deficit of €30bn this year. Hessen, home of Frank,furt', Germanys financial
capital', has appointed , CB Richard ,Ellis, PwC Corporate Finance and Clifford Chance to assist in the
property sales. It is understood that talks with suitors will begin next month: and the sell-off could be
completed by the autumn. The buildings include the' state's finance ministry and I its police headquarters.
The Buildings are likely to be on leases of 30 years. Compared with a national average of about five years.
It is understood that the state of 'Baden Wirttenberg, home "to Stuttgart, is also considering a similar-
sized sale of office property. The ,move istlre latest property sale to US and: UK private equity groups
by the German pubic sector and companies keen 'to reduce debt. 'The,largest deals are in the residential
sector,Deutche Bank forecasts deals involving about' a million more flats in the next couple of years.
Commiercial property is in the throes of an investment boom across most of-Europe. German, by contrast is
still stuck in a property recession, partly because of very'high vacancy levels in many cities.Yet international
property groups and opportunity funds are taking a closer look at. German property assets as it becomes
more difficult to place money in other markets.The most active firms have been Terra Firms, Cerberus
Capilat Management;Fortress Investment Group,Corpus, Blackstone. and\George Soros Apellas Property
Management.Last year an ,estimated €lObn of German flats were sold,' including the €3.5,bn purchase of
the Gagfah portfolio by Fortress., 'The pace of the sell-offs is showing no signs of slowing given that
Germany has oneof the lowest levels of private property ownership in t Europe at about 43 per cent. ,1,
NoraLB, the Landesbank has said that 42'groups explessed an interest in Nileg, a 30000 strong portfolio of
homes valued at €lbn. m_, Industry observers expect some of the portfolios to be floated in a year or two
per- haps as German 'real estate investment trusts. The structure is expected to be approved for launch
in 2006.
OK I'll put my two cents in on the days events. It was criminals backed by Alan Greenspan that pushed for
the deregulation of the S&Ls. Now the sham Labor government in Great or not so Great Britain want to
deregulate on behalf of the business community. I think most legit business people like rules and regulations
so I have to suppose that Gordon Brown proposes to deregulate on behalf of CIA officials who get their kicks
forcing countries to impliment the ideology of the Chicago School of Economics. Maybe Brown can give England
their own S&L crisis or do for England what Jeffery Sacks shock therapy did for the former Soviet Union.
There must be a few middle class people left in England after Margeret Thatcher which can be driven into
poverty.
Now, as I said before, I had an econ course at the local community college so I'm uniquelly qualified to
advise the EU regarding their new treaty to be voted on May 29 in France by the crazy French. As the
Begians say, the only thing wrong with France is the French people. But I don't agree on that point. Bush
had proved the US now has the monopoly on crazy people. As Colin Power described Bush and Rumsfeld,
"they're fuckin crazies" and appointments like Negraponte and Bolton lets the world know that the US only
allows fuckin crazies in positions of power. As far as I'm concerned the EU is a creation of the US. It's
purpose is to make it easier for the conservative crackpots in the US to impose trickle down economics on
the world. The new treaty will make it easier for them to dictate monetry policy for the EU, to destroy
organized labor and social welfare, to control all media outlets for the benefit of their ideology, to impliment
structural adjustment which redistribute wealth upward and destroy the middle class. This will inevitably
lead to depression like it did in the 1920s. Berlosconies conservative goverment is half way there already.
During the 1930's FDR solution was for each country to put its own house in order using monetary/ fiscal
policies, industrial strategies, wage supports, labor laws, National Recovery Acts, Fascism, Communism,
whatever. And it worked. EU policies will prevent countries from putting their own house in order. The best
performing economy in Europe is the Swedish economy and they don't have to abide by EU economic policies.
A new treaty could lead Europe toward the Swedish model but instead I think, if the US has anything to say
about it, it will inevitably lead toward the Latin American model. I think the CIA had Pinochet's Chilie
impliment the ideal of the Chicago School of Econ.
In the post war period socialist germany had no unemployment problem, high wages, high growth but then
came Ronald Reagan, Thatcher, monetarism, free trade and trickle down and the end of democracy. It's
inevitable that history repeats itself.
Ownership and Government
President Bush’s proposed ownership society invites a history lesson: The great American middle class is the
fruit of social investment.
By Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 05.06.05
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“Ownership,” President Bush told the Republican national convention last August, “brings security, and dignity,
and independence.” It is an assertion few Americans would dispute -- and one that we should welcome. For it
turns out that Bush’s proposed policies would frustrate his stated goal.
Bush’s version of an ownership society is both ideological and tactical. His political strategists believe that a
society of self-consciously individual owners can wean Americans from their political support for social
outlays. If people see their financial well-being as reflecting mainly their own nest eggs, they will think like
investors. Political support will evaporate for Social Security, redistributive taxation, public education, and
other collective enterprises that require us to think like citizens. If people “own their own health plans,” as
the president also proposed, there will be less need for inclusive social mechanisms such as Medicare.
Bush’s pollsters are convinced that as shareholders, people are more likely to vote Republican. His former
chief economist, Gregory Mankiw, recently wrote, “After workers develop an equity stake in corporate
America, they will start watching CNBC and the Nightly Business Report. Their view of how they relate to
the economy will fundamentally change. Bush understands this, and it is one reason he talks about an
‘ownership society.’”
But in reality, America’s long tradition as a society of owners has been substantially the result of activist
government -- making social investments, taking regulatory initiatives, and shielding individuals from economic
risks beyond their personal control. Today’s conservative program for an ownership society, by contrast,
transfers hazards back to individuals at a time when people are already bearing increased risks. Bush has
done us a favor by putting this idea in play. It invites us to devise a program for a true ownership society,
built on broadened social investment. Reclaiming a proud tradition, we could broaden America’s middle class by
once again expanding education and homeownership, resuming the march toward secure retirement income and
health care, and raising the real incomes on which a middle class depends.
* * *
In the early American republic, ownership was mainly agrarian. Government activism on behalf of broad
ownership began with Thomas Jefferson, who crafted land-tenure laws to favor freeholders rather than
absentee speculators. The United States, unlike Europe, could have a radically egalitarian land-distribution
policy without overthrowing a feudal class because the land, conveniently appropriated from the natives, was
“free.”
Nineteenth-century ownership initiatives included the Homestead acts and land-grant college legislation, both
under President Lincoln, and the abortive efforts of the Freedmen’s Bureau to give emancipated slaves their
“40 acres and a mule.” As an agrarian society gave way to an industrial one, government stepped forward
with a diverse variety of measures to broaden what today’s economists would call “human capital”:
agricultural extension, public kindergartens and high schools, “Americanization” programs for (mostly poor)
immigrants, and taxpayer subsidies of state colleges and universities. All these contributed to wealth
broadening; all were redistributive, because in their absence most of their beneficiaries would have gone
without.
The paradox is that every one of these investments used public outlays to foster what felt like self-
reliance. Far from reflecting a “nanny state,” they promoted a sense that people were making it on their
own. Yet without these early social investments, America would be far less of an ownership society today.
With the New Deal, government dramatically expanded interventions to broaden ownership and pool risks.
Homeownership is the most explicit badge of membership in the middle class. The U.S. government invented
the long-term, self-amortizing mortgage by agreeing to insure and purchase such mortgages; it created a
secondary mortgage-market, subsidized mortgages for new homeowners, and protected Depression-ravaged
farm owners from foreclosure. With the postwar GI Bill and low-interest Federal Housing Authority loans,
homeownership rates exploded.
After broadly democratic landholding and promotion of homeownership, the third phase of broadened
ownership involved retirement and pensions. Again, it was government that made possible the modern custom
of retirement for wage and salary earners, first with Social Security, then with tax-favored and
government-guaranteed private pension plans. Once more, this was all experienced as self-reliance, but it
reflected substantial social design and public outlay.
Regulation helped assure ordinary people that their assets would not be looted by corrupt or incompetent
financial institutions. Government was further implicated in the rising real wages that make it possible for
ordinary people to aspire to ownership. The mechanisms included minimum-wage laws, unemployment
compensation, the Wagner Act, and government’s macroeconomic commitment to keep the economy close to
full employment. Postwar college-aid grants and loans helped more Americans expand their human capital.
* * *
Since the 1980s, many of these government mechanisms, and the associated social compact, have been
reversed. Government has all but ceased subsidizing housing, except for the deductibility of home mortgages.
For most Americans buying their first home, rising real-estate prices are outstripping incomes. Pensions have
become less secure, as 401(k) and similar plans that leave the individual carrying financial risk have replaced
employer-provided and government-guaranteed pensions with defined benefits. The employment relationship
itself is far less secure, as is reliable employer-provided health insurance. As regulations have weakened,
the individual investor, home buyer, and pensioner need to be more on guard against financial predators.
Social transfers are under assault.
It is in this context that President Bush proposed to expand ownership by, oddly, shifting even more risks to
individuals and reducing social investments and regulations. As this magazine and others have documented,
Social Security privatization would leave people with lower assured pensions and greater risk of
impoverishment in old age. Under his plan to have people “own” their health insurance, Bush proposes to
combine tax-favored savings accounts with high-deductible individual insurance policies. These plans, once
known as “catastrophic” policies, would begin providing coverage only after, say, $3,000 or $4,000 in annual
out-of-pocket costs. Supposedly, people would become more astute medical shoppers as they draw on the
savings accounts to pay premiums and out-of-pocket expenses.
But this kind of system would be both less efficient and less equitable. Individual policies are much more
costly to administer than large group policies; more of every dollar spent goes to bureaucracy, less to health
care. Under a high-deductible plan, people with chronic illnesses and families with small children would quickly
exhaust their savings accounts and face far greater expenses than under conventional insurance, while the
healthy would be able to roll over their savings to the next year. In effect, this system would redistribute
money from the sick to the well. Less affluent Americans would also lack the financial means to use the tax-
favored savings accounts, and those who did use them would find that the tax benefits were worth less to
them than to the rich.
Health insurance is the last place to want “ownership.” Mainly, Bush’s approach would make people owners of
more risk. Health insurance, by definition, involves cross-subsidy. The premiums of the (temporarily) well
subsidize the sick. The young subsidize the old. And, to some extent, the rich subsidize the poor, who would
otherwise have to forgo medical care. The Bush approach undercuts all of this, favoring the rich, the young,
and the well. Far from expanding ownership, it would increase medical bankruptcies. The older term,
“catastrophic,” is an apt name for the whole scheme.
* * *
Bush’s proposed ownership society is an opportunity for liberals. First, the president offers a benchmark of
his own design against which we may measure proposals, such as health savings accounts and Social Security
privatization, that don’t broaden ownership but merely transfer risk.
Second, Bush’s emphasis on ownership ought to prompt us to remind Americans how government has actually
promoted ownership of farms, homes, businesses, and pensions that helped people achieve economic security
throughout American history. If we want a secure society of broader ownership, it will take the kind of
initiatives that have helped build the American middle class for more than two centuries.
The big, bold programs that achieved real progress -- from the Homestead Act to Social Security to the GI
Bill -- spent serious money. The right, far from proposing substantial public resources on behalf of
ownership, today wants to constrict social investment, transfer risk to individuals, and hold “asset
development” outlays to token levels. The goal of secure ownership also offers a chance to reclaim the
important role of regulation. The right has consented to regulation, whether the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act or
the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, only when episodes like the JP Morgan scandals of the 1920s and the Enron
affair put its back to the political wall.
What of Bush’s premise that a society of investors is a political community of rugged conservatives? As John
B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira have demonstrated in these pages, the professional class, with its 401(k)s and its
TIAA-Cref investments, is becoming both larger and more liberal. Most of America’s middle class appreciates
that secure retirement is built on both private savings and social insurance, as demonstrated by Bush’s
notable failure to move privatization. Investors also value the financial regulation that keeps them safe from
future Enrons. So let’s create more financial stakeholding, whether through add-on private accounts,
universal portable pensions, or “baby bonds.” Let’s challenge the right to promote ownership neither on the
cheap nor at the expense of social insurance. And let’s remember how government helped America become a
middle-class society.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect.
@P Government’s dwindling appetite for regulating capitalism is not an inevitable product of today’s global
economy. It’s a handy alibi.
By Robert B. Reich
Issue Date: 05.06.05
More permeable borders seem to make it more difficult for a nation to maintain a mixed economy, regulate
capital in the public interest, provide decent wages, and foster a political coalition to defend all of the
above. Indeed, there is an extensive conservative literature contending that the global market renders the
role of the state moot, and good riddance. Yet it remains entirely possible to maintain a domestic social
contract while developing a robust internationalism with rules that benefit everyone, not just the elite, and
to build a wealthy and competitive nation that boasts the most productive citizens on the planet.
Global commerce in goods and services does make it easier for a dominant elite in Washington to pursue its
preferred brand of laissez-faire and seek to remake America into a low-tax, low-regulation, low-wage
nation. All of it seems to be happening by chance -- but, of course, specific policy choices are driving it. …
Bigger and Better
T@P When it comes to providing broad-based social-insurance programs, it’s the government that’s rational
and the market that’s dumb.
By Jacob S. Hacker
Issue Date: 05.06.05
Remember those bumper stickers during the early-1990s fight over the Clinton health plan? “National Health
Care? The Compassion of the IRS! The Efficiency of the Post Office! All at Pentagon Prices!” In American
policy debates, it’s a fixed article of faith that the federal government is woefully bumbling and expensive in
comparison with the well-oiled efficiency of the private sector. Former Congressman Dick Armey even
elevated this skepticism into a pithy maxim: “The market is rational; government is dumb.”
But when it comes to providing broad-based insurance -- health care, retirement pensions, disability
coverage -- Armey’s maxim has it pretty much backward. The federal government isn’t less efficient than
the private sector. In fact, in these critical areas, it’s almost certainly much more efficient. …
Blocked Out
T@P A lifeline to cities, the Community Development Block Grant program faces elimination. It will probably
be saved -- but it also needs fixing.
By Alyssa Katz
Issue Date: 05.06.05
Here’s one way to sound the alarm about the impending death of a federal program that tens of millions
benefit from and almost no one has heard of: Accuse President Bush of copycatting al-Qaeda. At a February
meeting of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, National League of Cities, and National Association of Counties,
Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley invoked the September 11 attacks on “our metropolitan cores,” then went
on to say: “Years later, we are given a budget proposal by our commander in chief, the president of the
United States, and with a budget axe, he is attacking America’s cities. He is attacking our metropolitan
core.”
O’Malley’s incendiary words got the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which provides
nearly $5 billion yearly in aid to cities and counties, what was no doubt its first segment on Paula Zahn Now.
O’Malley waxed apocalyptic for a reason: The Bush administration’s budget proposes to eliminate the CDBG
and related programs run by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), creating in their
place a much smaller operation under the Department of Commerce. (For that matter, all grants to state
and local governments are slated to decline by $10.7 billion next year alone, according to the Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities.) The change would effectively kill infrastructure funding that cities have relied
on ever since Richard Nixon and Congress created the CDBG in 1974. …
T@P At the same time Republicans try to cut Social Security benefits, they're increasing them for the
wealthiest recipients.
By Robert S. McIntyre
Issue Date: 05.06.05
Late in the evening of St. Patrick’s Day, while much of America was out carousing, our hardworking U.S.
senators stayed in session. It was time for the Senate to take its first stab at addressing Social Security’s
long-term financial health since President Bush began his push to restructure the program. The result wasn’t
pretty.
Did our devoted lawmakers vote to give the program a new infusion of revenues to meet its needs? To reduce
future benefits to bring them in line with expected receipts? Or to finally take some steps to solve Social
Security’s most daunting problem, the government’s ballooning debt? No, no, and heavens no. Instead, our
fearless leaders voted to increase Social Security benefits, in a way carefully targeted mainly to benefit the
best-off retirees. …
T@P Before you write off the UN, consider this.
By The American Prospect Staff
Issue Date: 05.06.05
The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) shipped 5,612,257 student kits, 201,416 cartons of chalk,
and 5,106,885 school bags for primary and intermediate-level schoolchildren in Iraq from the start of the
Iraq War in 2003 through November 2004 … Through UNICEF’s “Immunization plus” program, the distribution
of high-dose vitamin A capsules has averted at least 1 million child deaths since 1998 … Since the UN–
sponsored Global Polio Eradication Initiative began in 1988, worldwide cases of polio have plummeted from
350,000 in 1988 to 1,263 in 2004 … UNICEF aims to eradicate polio from the globe by 2008 … The Office
of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has won two Nobel Peace Prizes in the past half-century
… Since 2002, the UNHCR has helped build 100,000 shelters in Afghanistan, providing homes for up to half
a million Afghans …
Pat Roberts was just kidding; enemies of "activist judges" most definitely are not.
By The American Prospect Staff
Issue Date: 05.06.05
The release on March 31 of a report by the presidentially appointed Commission on the Intelligence
Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction brought forth the non-news that
America’s intelligence community was mistaken in its assessment of Saddam Hussein’s programs. Yet, the
media missed perhaps the single most important sentence in the report, page 8’s observation that “we were
not authorized to investigate how policymakers used the intelligence assessments they received from the
Intelligence Community.” The commission, in other words, accomplished precisely what the president, who
handpicked its members and defined its scope, had wanted it to do: cast the blame for the debacle on
intelligence professionals while exonerating by omission the administration’s leading policy-makers. …
Spring is in the air, and the right has caught judge-bashing fever like never before. The Terri Schiavo
brouhaha featured death threats against the judges involved. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay swore that
they would “answer for their behavior.” John Cornyn speculated on the Senate floor that maybe there was a
reason for the recent spate of violence against judges. …
As the Bush administration tells it, America is shining freedom’s light into the darkest corners of Middle
Eastern autocracies. But if the conduct of public affairs here and there is beginning to converge, that’s also
because our government has become as indifferent to the rule of law as some of theirs. …
The following article
By Noam Chomsky
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The elections of November 2004 have received a great deal of discussion, with exultation in some quarters,
despair in others, and general lamentation about a “divided nation.” They are likely to have policy
consequences, particularly harmful to the public in the domestic arena, and to the world with regard to the
“transformation of the military,” which has led some prominent strategic analysts to warn of “ultimate doom”
and to hope that U.S. militarism and aggressiveness will be countered by a coalition of peace-loving states,
led by—China (John Steinbruner and Nancy Gallagher, Daedalus). We have come to a pretty pass when such
words are expressed in the most respectable and sober journals. It is also worth noting how deep is the
despair of the authors over the state of U.S. democracy. Whether or not the assessment is merited is for
activists to determine.
Though significant in their consequences, the elections tell us very little about the state of the country, or
the popular mood. There are, however, other sources from which we can learn a great deal that carries
important lessons. Public opinion in the U.S. is intensively monitored and, while caution and care in
interpretation are always necessary, these studies are valuable resources. We can also see why the results,
though public, are kept under wraps by the doctrinal institutions. That is true of major and highly
informative studies of public opinion released right before the election, notably by the Chicago Council on
Foreign Relations (CCFR) and the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland
(PIPA), to which I will return.
One conclusion is that the elections conferred no mandate for anything, in fact, barely took place, in any
serious sense of the term “election.” That is by no means a novel conclusion. Reagan’s victory in 1980
reflected “the decay of organized party structures, and the vast mobilization of God and cash in the
successful candidacy of a figure once marginal to the ‘vital center’ of American political life,” representing
“the continued disintegration of those political coalitions and economic structures that have given party
politics some stability and definition during the past generation” (Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, Hidden
Election, 1981). In the same valuable collection of essays, Walter Dean Burnham described the election as
further evidence of a “crucial comparative peculiarity of the American political system: the total absence of
a socialist or laborite mass party as an organized competitor in the electoral market,” accounting for much of
the “class-skewed abstention rates” and the minimal significance of issues. Thus of the 28 percent of the
electorate who voted for Reagan, 11 percent gave as their primary reason “he’s a real conservative.” In
Reagan’s “landslide victory” of 1984, with just under 30 percent of the electorate, the percentage dropped
to 4 percent and a majority of voters hoped that his legislative program would not be enacted.
What these prominent political scientists describe is part of the powerful backlash against the terrifying
“crisis of democracy” of the 1960s, which threatened to democratize the society, and, despite enormous
efforts to crush this threat to order and discipline, has had far-reaching effects on consciousness and social
practices. The post-1960s era has been marked by substantial growth of popular movements dedicated to
greater justice and freedom and unwillingness to tolerate the brutal aggression and violence that had
previously been granted free rein. The Vietnam War is a dramatic illustration, naturally suppressed because
of the lessons it teaches about the civilizing impact of popular mobilization. The war against South Vietnam
launched by JFK in 1962, after years of U.S.-backed state terror that had killed tens of thousands of
people, was brutal and barbaric from the outset: bombing, chemical warfare to destroy food crops so as to
starve out the civilian support for the indigenous resistance, programs to drive millions of people to virtual
concentration camps or urban slums to eliminate its popular base. By the time protests reached a substantial
scale, the highly respected and quite hawkish Vietnam specialist and military historian Bernard Fall wondered
whether “Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity” would escape “extinction” as “the countryside literally
dies under the blows of the largest military machine ever unleashed on an area of this size”—particularly
South Vietnam, always the main target of the U.S. assault. When protest did finally develop, many years
too late, it was mostly directed against the peripheral crimes: the extension of the war against the South to
the rest of Indochina—terrible crimes, but secondary ones.
State managers are well aware that they no longer have that freedom. Wars against “much weaker enemies”
—the only acceptable targets—must be won “decisively and rapidly,” Bush I’s intelligence services advised.
Delay might “undercut political support,” recognized to be thin, a great change since the Kennedy-Johnson
period when the attack on Indochina, while never popular, aroused little reaction for many years. Those
conclusions hold despite the hideous war crimes in Falluja, replicating the Russian destruction of Grozny ten
years earlier, including crimes displayed on the front pages for which the civilian leadership is subject to the
death penalty under the War Crimes Act passed by the Republican Congress in 1996—and also one of the
more disgraceful episodes in the annals of U.S. journalism.
The world is pretty awful today, but it is far better than yesterday, not only with regard to unwillingness to
tolerate aggression, but also in many other ways, which we now tend to take for granted. There are very
important lessons here, which should always be uppermost in our minds—for the same reason they are
suppressed in the elite culture.
Returning to the elections, in 2004 Bush received the votes of just over 30 percent of the electorate, Kerry
a bit less. Voting patterns resembled 2000, with virtually the same pattern of “red” and “blue” states
(whatever significance that may have). A small change in voter preference would have put Kerry in the White
House, also telling us very little about the country and public concerns.
As usual, the electoral campaigns were run by the PR industry, which in its regular vocation sells toothpaste,
life-style drugs, automobiles, and other commodities. Its guiding principle is deceit. Its task is to undermine
the “free markets” we are taught to revere: mythical entities in which informed consumers make rational
choices.In such scarcely imaginable systems, businesses would provide information about their products:
cheap, easy, simple. But it is hardly a secret that they do nothing of the sort. Rather, they seek to delude
consumers to choose their product over some virtually identical one. GM does not simply make public the
characteristics of next year’s models. Rather, it devotes huge sums to creating images to deceive consumers,
featuring sports stars, sexy models, cars climbing sheer cliffs to a heavenly future, and so on. The business
world does not spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year to provide information. The famed “entrepreneurial
initiative” and “free trade” are about as realistic as informed consumer choice. The last thing those who
dominate the society want is the fanciful market of doctrine and economic theory. All of this should be too
familiar to merit much discussion.
Sometimes the commitment to deceit is quite overt. The recent U.S.-Australia negotiations on a “free trade
agreement” were held up by Washington’s concern over Australia’s health care system, perhaps the most
efficient in the world. In particular, drug prices are a fraction of those in the U.S.: the same drugs,
produced by the same companies, earning substantial profits in Australia though nothing like those they are
granted in the U.S.—often on the pretext that they are needed for R&D, another exercise in deceit. Part of
the reason for the efficiency of the Australian system is that, like other countries, Australia relies on the
practices that the Pentagon employs when it buys paper clips: government purchasing power is used to
negotiate prices, illegal in the U.S. Another reason is that Australia has kept to “evidence-based”
procedures for marketing pharmaceuticals. U.S. negotiators denounced these as market interference:
pharmaceutical corporations are deprived of their legitimate rights if they are required to produce evidence
when they claim that their latest product is better than some cheaper alternative or run TV ads in which
some sports hero or model tells the audience to ask their doctor whether this drug is “right for you (it’s
right for me),” sometimes not even revealing what it is supposed to be for. The right of deceit must be
guaranteed to the immensely powerful and pathological immortal persons created by radical judicial activism
to run the society.
When assigned the task of selling candidates, the PR industry naturally resorts to the same fundamental
techniques, so as to ensure that politics remains “the shadow cast by big business over society,” as America’s
leading social philosopher, John Dewey, described the results of “industrial feudalism” long ago. Deceit is
employed to undermine democracy, just as it is the natural device to undermine markets. Voters appear to
be aware of it.
On the eve of the 2000 elections, about 75 percent of the electorate regarded it as a game played by rich
contributors, party managers, and the PR industry, which trains candidates to project images and produce
meaningless phrases that might win some votes. Very likely, that is why the population paid little attention
to the “stolen election” that greatly exercised educated sectors. And it is why they are likely to pay little
attention to campaigns about alleged fraud in 2004. If one is flipping a coin to pick the King, it is of no great
concern if the coin is biased.
In 2000, “issue awareness”—knowledge of the stands of the candidate-producing organizations on issues—
reached an all-time low. Currently available evidence suggests it may have been even lower in 2004. About
10 percent of voters said their choice would be based on the candidate’s “agendas/ideas/platforms/goals”: 6
percent for Bush voters, 13 percent for Kerry voters (Gallup). The rest would vote for what the industry
calls “qualities” or “values,” which are the political counterpart to toothpaste ads. The most careful studies
(PIPA) found that voters had little idea of the stand of the candidates on matters that concerned them.
Bush voters tended to believe that he shared their beliefs, even though the Republican Party rejected them,
often explicitly. Investigating the sources used in the studies, we find that the same was largely true of
Kerry voters, unless we give highly sympathetic interpretations to vague statements that most voters had
probably never heard.
Exit polls found that Bush won large majorities of those concerned with the threat of terror and “moral
values” and Kerry won majorities among those concerned with the economy, health care, and other such
issues. Those results tell us very little.
It is easy to demonstrate that for Bush planners, the threat of terror is a low priority. The invasion of
Iraq is only one of many illustrations. Even their own intelligence agencies agreed with the consensus among
other agencies, and independent specialists, that the invasion was likely to increase the threat of terror, as
it did; probably nuclear proliferation as well, as also predicted. Such threats are simply not high priorities as
compared with the opportunity to establish the first secure military bases in a dependent client state at the
heart of the world’s major energy reserves, a region understood since World War II to be the “most
strategically important area of the world,” “a stupendous source of strategic power, and one of the greatest
material prizes in world history.” Apart from what one historian of the industry calls “profits beyond the
dreams of avarice,” which must flow in the right direction, control over two-thirds of the world’s estimated
hydrocarbon reserves—uniquely cheap and easy to exploit—provides what Zbigniew Brzezinski recently called
“critical leverage” over European and Asian rivals, what George Kennan many years earlier had called “veto
power” over them. These have been crucial policy concerns throughout the post-World War II period, even
more so in today’s evolving tripolar world, with its threat that Europe and Asia might move towards greater
independence, and worse, might be united: China and the EU became each other’s major trading partners in
2004, joined by the world’s second largest economy (Japan), and those tendencies are likely to increase. A
firm hand on the spigot reduces these dangers.
Note that the critical issue is control, not access. U.S. policies towards the Middle East were the same
when it was a net exporter of oil, and remain the same today when U.S. intelligence projects that the U.S.
will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources. Policies would be likely to be about the same if the U.S.
were to switch to renewable energy. The need to control the “stupendous source of strategic power” and to
gain “profits beyond the dreams of avarice” would remain. Jockeying over Central Asia and pipeline routes
reflects similar concerns.
There are many other illustrations of the same lack of concern of planners about terror. Bush voters,
whether they knew it or not, were voting for a likely increase in the threat of terror, which could be
awesome: it was understood well before 9/11 that sooner or later the Jihadists organized by the CIA and
its associates in the 1980s are likely to gain access to WMDs, with horrendous consequences. Even these
frightening prospects are being consciously extended by the transformation of the military, which, apart from
increasing the threat of “ultimate doom” by accidental nuclear war, is compelling Russia to move nuclear
missiles over its huge and mostly unprotected territory to counter U.S. military threats—including the threat
of instant annihilation that is a core part of the “ownership of space” for offensive military purposes
announced by the Bush administration along with its National Security Strategy in late 2002, significantly
extending Clinton programs that were more than hazardous enough, and had already immobilized the UN
Disarmament Committee.
As for “moral values,” we learn what we need to know about them from the business press the day after the
election, reporting the “euphoria” in board rooms—not because CEOs oppose gay marriage. And from the
unconcealed efforts to transfer to future generations the costs of the dedicated service of Bush planners to
privilege and wealth: fiscal and environmental costs, among others, not to speak of the threat of “ultimate
doom.” That aside, it means little to say that people vote on the basis of “moral values.” The question is
what they mean by the phrase. The limited indications are of some interest. In some polls, “when the
voters were asked to choose the most urgent moral crisis facing the country, 33 percent cited ‘greed and
materialism,’ 31 percent selected ‘poverty and economic justice,’ 16 percent named abortion, and 12 percent
selected gay marriage” (Pax Christi). In others, “when surveyed voters were asked to list the moral issue
that most affected their vote, the Iraq war placed first at 42 percent, while 13 percent named abortion
and 9 percent named gay marriage” (Zogby). Whatever voters meant, it could hardly have been the operative
moral values of the Administration, celebrated by the business press.
I won’t go through the details here, but a careful look indicates that much the same appears to be true for
Kerry voters who thought they were calling for serious attention to the economy, health, and their other
concerns. As in the fake markets constructed by the PR industry, so also in the fake democracy they run,
the public is hardly more than an irrelevant onlooker, apart from the appeal of carefully constructed images
that have only the vaguest resemblance to reality.
Let’s turn to more serious evidence about public opinion: the studies I mentioned earlier that were released
shortly before the elections by some of the most respected and reliable institutions that regularly monitor
public opinion. Here are a few of the results (Chicago Council of Foreign Relations):
A large majority of the public believe that the U.S. should accept the jurisdiction of the International
Criminal Court and the World Court, sign the Kyoto protocols, allow the UN to take the lead in international
crises, and rely on diplomatic and economic measures more than military ones in the “war on terror.” Similar
majorities believe the U.S. should resort to force only if there is “strong evidence that the country is in
imminent danger of being attacked,” thus rejecting the bipartisan consensus on “pre-emptive war” and
adopting a rather conventional interpretation of the UN Charter. A majority even favor giving up the
Security Council veto, hence following the UN lead even if it is not the preference of U.S. state managers.
When official Administration moderate Colin Powell is quoted in the press as saying that Bush “has won a
mandate from the American people to continue pursuing his ‘aggressive’ foreign policy,” he is relying on the
conventional assumption that popular opinion is irrelevant to policy choices by those in charge.
It is instructive to look more closely into popular attitudes on the war in Iraq, in the light of the general
opposition to the “pre-emptive war” doctrines of the bipartisan consensus. On the eve of the 2004 elections,
“three quarters of Americans say that the U.S. should not have gone to war if Iraq did not have WMD or
was not providing support to al Qaeda, while nearly half still say the war was the right decision” (Stephen
Kull, reporting the PIPA study he directs). But this is not a contradiction, Kull points out. Despite the quasi-
official Kay and Duelfer reports undermining the claims, the decision to go to war “is sustained by persisting
beliefs among half of Americans that Iraq provided substantial support to al Qaeda, and had WMD, or at
least a major WMD program,” and thus see the invasion as defense against an imminent severe threat. Much
earlier PIPA studies had shown that a large majority believe that the UN, not the U.S., should take the
lead in matters of security, reconstruction, and political transition in Iraq. Last March, Spanish voters were
bitterly condemned for appeasing terror when they voted out of office the government that had gone to war
over the objections of about 90 percent of the population, taking its orders from Crawford Texas, and
winning plaudits for its leadership in the “New Europe” that is the hope of democracy. Few if any
commentators noted that Spanish voters last March were taking about the same position as the large
majority of Americans: voting for removing Spanish troops unless they were under UN direction. The major
differences between the two countries are that in Spain, public opinion was known, while here it takes an
individual research project to discover it; and in Spain the issue came to a vote, almost unimaginable in the
deteriorating formal democracy here.
These results indicate that activists have not done their job effectively.
Turning to other areas, overwhelming majorities of the public favor expansion of domestic programs: primarily
health care (80 percent), but also aid to education and Social Security. Similar results have long been found
in these studies (CCFR). Other mainstream polls report that 80 percent favor guaranteed health care even if
it would raise taxes—in reality, a national health care system would probably reduce expenses considerably,
avoiding the heavy costs of bureaucracy, supervision, paperwork, and so on, some of the factors that render
the U.S. privatized system the most inefficient in the industrial world. Public opinion has been similar for a
long time, with numbers varying depending on how questions are asked. The facts are sometimes discussed in
the press, with public preferences noted, but dismissed as “politically impossible.” That happened again on the
eve of the 2004 elections. A few days before (October 31), the New York Times reported that “there is so
little political support for government intervention in the health care market in the United States that
Senator John Kerry took pains in a recent presidential debate to say that his plan for expanding access to
health insurance would not create a new government program”—what the majority want, so it appears. But it
is “politically impossible” and has “[too] little political support,” meaning that the insurance companies, HMOs,
pharmaceutical industries, Wall Street, etc., are opposed.
It is notable that such views are held by people in virtual isolation. They rarely hear them and it is not
unlikely that respondents regard their own views as idiosyncratic. Their preferences do not enter into the
political campaigns and only marginally receive some reinforcement in articulate opinion in media and journals.
The same extends to other domains.
What would the results of the election have been if the parties, either of them, had been willing to
articulate people’s concerns on the issues they regard as vitally important? Or if these issues could enter
into public discussion within the mainstream? We can only speculate about that, but we do know that it does
not happen and that the facts are scarcely even reported. It does not seem difficult to imagine what the
reasons might be.
In brief, we learn very little of any significance from the elections, but we can learn a lot from the studies
of public attitudes that are kept in the shadows. Though it is natural for doctrinal systems to try to induce
pessimism, hopelessness, and despair, the real lessons are quite different. They are encouraging and hopeful.
They show that there are substantial opportunities for education and organizing, including the development of
potential electoral alternatives. As in the past, rights will not be granted by benevolent authorities, or won
by intermittent actions—a few large demonstrations after which one goes home, or pushing a lever in the
personalized quadrennial extravaganzas that are depicted as “democratic politics.” As always in the past, the
tasks require day-to-day engagement to create—in part re-create—the basis for a functioning democratic
culture in which the public plays some role in determining policies, not only in the political arena from which it
is largely excluded, but also in the crucial economic arena, from which it is excluded in principle.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Noam Chomsky is a linguist, social critic, and author of numerous articles and books, including Hegemony or
Survival (Owl/Metropolitan Books, 2003) and Pirates and Emperors, Old and New (South End Press, 2002).
Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?
By Michael I. Niman, AlterNet. Posted October 28, 2002.
Paul Wellstone Dies in Tragic Plane Crash
The death of the Minnesota senator, the conscience of the Senate, will have a major impact on American
politics.
Paul Wellstone was the only progressive in the U.S. Senate. Mother Jones magazine once described him as,
"The first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. senate." He was also the last. Since defeating incumbent
Republican Rudy Boschowitz 12 years ago in a grassroots upset, Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most
persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration.
In a senate that is one heartbeat away from Republican control, Wellstone was more than just another
Democrat. He was often the lone voice standing firm against the status-quo policies of both the Democrats
and the Republicans. As such, he earned the special ire of the Bush administration and the Republican Party,
who made Wellstone's defeat that party's number one priority this year.
Various White House figures made numerous recent campaign stops in Minnesota to stump for the ailing
campaign of Wellstone's Republican opponent, Norm Coleman. Despite being outspent and outgunned, however,
polls show that Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing
George Bush to wage war in Iraq. He was pulling ahead of Coleman and moving toward a victory that would
both be an embarrassment to the Bush administration and to Democratic Quislings such as Hillary Clinton who
voted to support "the president."
Then he died.
Wellstone now joins the ranks of other American politicians who died in small plane crashes. Another recent
victim was Missouri's former Democratic governor, Mel Carnahan, who lost his life in 2000, three weeks
before Election Day, during his Senatorial race against John Ashcroft. Carnahan went on to become the first
dead man to win a Senatorial race, humiliating and defeating the unpopular Ashcroft posthumously. Ashcroft,
despite his unpopularity, went on to be appointed Attorney General by George W. Bush. Investigators
determined that Carnahan's plane went down due to "poor visibility."
Carnahan was the second Missouri politician to die in a small plane crash. The first was Democratic
Representative Jerry Litton, whose plane crashed the night he won the Democratic nomination for senate in
1976. His Republican opponent ultimately captured the seat from his successor in November.
While an article in the New York Times on Saturday pointed out the danger politicians face due to their
heavy air travel schedules, the death of a senator or member of Congress is still relatively rare, with only
one other sitting U.S. Senator, liberal Republican John Heinz, dying in a plane crash since World War II.
Heinz, who entered office as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, later emerged as a strong
proponent of health care, social services, public transportation and the environment. He also urged
reconciliation with Cuba. He died when the landing gear on his small plane failed to function, and a helicopter
dispatched to survey the problem crashed into his plane.
One former senator, John Tower, also died in a small plane crash. Tower was best known as the chair of the
Tower Commission, which investigated the Reagan/Bush era Iran/Contra scandal.
Another member of a prominent government commission who died in a small plane crash was former
Democratic representative and House Majority Leader Hale Boggs. Boggs was best known as one of the seven
members of the Warren Commission, which investigated the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The
commission found that Lee Harvey Oswald was acting alone when he killed the president. Boggs, it turns out,
had "strong doubts" that Oswald acted alone, but went along with the commission findings. Later, in 1971
and 1972, he went public with his doubts. He was presumed dead after the small plane carrying him and
Democratic Representative Nicholas Begich disappeared in 1972.
Texas Democratic Representative Mickey Leland also died in a plane crash. In his case, the six-term
member of Congress and outspoken advocate of sanctions against the apartheid government of South Africa,
died while traveling in Ethiopia. Another American politician to die overseas in a plane crash was the Clinton
administration's Commerce Secretary, Ronald Brown, whose plane went down in the Balkans.
Anyone familiar with my work knows that I'm certainly not a conspiracy theorist. But to be honest, I know I
wasn't alone in my initial reaction at this week's horrible and tragic news: that being my surprise that
Wellstone had lived this long. Perhaps it's just my anger and frustration at losing one of the few reputable
politicians in Washington, but I also felt shame. Shame for not writing in my column, months ago, that I felt
that Paul Wellstone's life, more so than any other politician in Washington, was in danger. I felt that such
speculation was unprofessional and would ultimately undermine my credibility. In the end, my own self-
interest triumphed, and I never put my concerns into print. Neither did any other mainstream journalist,
though I know of many who shared my concern.
When I heard Wellstone's plane went down, I immediately thought of Panamanian General Omar Torrijos,
who in 1981 thumbed his nose at the Reagan/Bush administration and threatened to destroy the Panama
Canal in the event of a U.S. invasion. Torrijos died shortly thereafter when the instruments in his plane
failed to function upon takeoff. Panamanians speculated that the U.S. was involved in the death of the
popular dictator, who was replaced by a U.S. intelligence operative, Manuel Noreiga, who previously worked
with George Bush Senior.
There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however,
is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by
an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at
this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into
the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed
an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this.
Dr. Michael I. Niman teaches journalism and media studies at Buffalo State College
When I was in Europe last time th CIA assasinated the candidate that was just about to win the presidency
of I believe it was the Netherlands. He was a gay guy. With some research it wouldn't be hard to pin it on
the CIA. In Germany Schroder was first elected because he promised the policies of his Finance minister,
Oskar LaFontaine. After Schroders victory the CIA told Lofontaine they would try to kill him again if he
didn't step down and this time they would make sure he didn't recover like he did after they tried to kill
him the first time. I was in Germany in the late 80's when the CIA blew up the armored plated Mercedes
of the head of the German Federal reserve because they didn't like his monetary policy. For the same
reason they put a bullett in the head of the Swedish finance minister. Anyone interested in real democracy
in Europe can research these assasinations and Lofontaines history in Schroders government. Thats what
these sick fuckers from Texas call democracy.
Former Prime Minister of Saarland & Federal Minister of Finance a.D.
Oskar Lafontaine, born in 1943 and educated at the universities of Bonn and Saarbrücken, joined the SPD
(Social Democratic Party) in 1966. From 1970 to 1975 he was member of the SPD in Saarland. From 1974
to 1985 he became mayor of the town Saarbrücken and from 1977 to 1996 he was Chairman of the SPD in
Saarland. Since 1979 he has been a member of the Federal Board of the SPD.
In March 1985 he was first elected Prime Minister of Saarland and then re-elected in 1990 and 1994.
In June 1987 he was elected Deputy Chairman of the SPD and led the Commission "Fortschritt ‘90", which
developed the party programme for the elections in 1990. During this election Oskar Lafontaine stood as the
main candidate for his party.
On 25 April 1990 he was critically injured during an assassination attempt.
From 1991 to 1994 he was the Representative for cultural issues for the Bundesrepublik Germany within the
frame of the Treaty for German and French co-operation. From November 1992 until 31 October 1993 he
was President of the Federal Council (Upper House). From May 1995 until January 1996 Oskar Lafontaine
became Chairman of the Mediation Committee of the Federal Council (Upper House) and the ‘Bundestag’
(Lower House).
In November 1995 he became chairman for the SPD and was re-elected in December 1997.
In September 1998 he was elected as member of the German Bundestag.
After winning the elections, Gerhard Schröder, the German Chancellor, appointed him Minister of Finance on
28 October 1998. On the 18 March 1999 Oskar Lafontaine stood down from this position.
Why did GM pull a successful electric car off the market in California a few months ago. A few months ago
the following article was in the Financial Times. It describes how Volkswagon was working on a car that would
258 miles per gallon and they just decided to stop development of the car. They justified their decision
saying nobody wants to pay $25,800 for a car that get 258 miles per gallon.
VW cancels its 'one-litre car project
Volkswagen, Europe's biggest car maker, has cancelled one of its most high-profile projects, Bernd
Pischetsrieder, the group's chief executive, announced yesterday.
The car, which would have needed only one litre of fuel to travel 100 km, would cost too much to produce,
according to Mr Pischetsrieder.
The model, which would have cost at least €20,OOO
($25,800) to buy, would have been too expensive for most customers, according to the group. The
disappointing sales of the Audi A2 3L and Lupo, which need three
litres of fuel for 1oo km, have not justified the cost of developing the cars and the
group hopes to avoid a similar scenario with the one.litre car. In spite of the high petrol
"prices and environment tax, customers are reluctant to pay €15,000 for the Lupo or €19,OOO for the A2..
"Everyone thinks it is good that the three-litre engine cars are available but no one drives one," a
spokesperson for VW said.
Guido Reinking, Hamburg'
Passing the Buck
Comments (31)
SYNOPSIS:
The United States spends far more on health care than other advanced countries. Yet we don't appear to
receive more medical services. And we have lower life-expectancy and higher infant-mortality rates than
countries that spend less than half as much per person. How do we do it?
An important part of the answer is that much of our health care spending is devoted to passing the buck:
trying to get someone else to pay the bills.
According to the World Health Organization, in the United States administrative expenses eat up about 15
percent of the money paid in premiums to private health insurance companies, but only 4 percent of the
budgets of public insurance programs, which consist mainly of Medicare and Medicaid. The numbers for both
public and private insurance are similar in other countries - but because we rely much more heavily than
anyone else on private insurance, our total administrative costs are much higher.
According to the health organization, the higher costs of private insurers are "mainly due to the extensive
bureaucracy required to assess risk, rate premiums, design benefit packages and review, pay or refuse
claims." Public insurance plans have far less bureaucracy because they don't try to screen out high-risk
clients or charge them higher fees.
And the costs directly incurred by insurers are only half the story. Doctors "must hire office personnel just
to deal with the insurance companies," Dr. Atul Gawande, a practicing physician, wrote in The New Yorker.
"A well-run office can get the insurer's rejection rate down from 30 percent to, say, 15 percent. That's
how a doctor makes money. ... It's a war with insurance, every step of the way."
Isn't competition supposed to make the private sector more efficient than the public sector? Well, as the
World Health Organization put it in a discussion of Western Europe, private insurers generally don't compete
by delivering care at lower cost. Instead, they "compete on the basis of risk selection" - that is, by turning
away people who are likely to have high medical bills and by refusing or delaying any payment they can.
Yet the cost of providing medical care to those denied private insurance doesn't go away. If individuals are
poor, or if medical expenses impoverish them, they are covered by Medicaid. Otherwise, they pay out of
pocket or rely on the charity of public hospitals.
So we've created a vast and hugely expensive insurance bureaucracy that accomplishes nothing. The
resources spent by private insurers don't reduce overall costs; they simply shift those costs to other people
and institutions. It's perverse but true that this system, which insures only 85 percent of the population,
costs much more than we would pay for a system that covered everyone.
And the costs go beyond wasted money.
First, in the U.S. system, medical costs act as a tax on employment. For example, General Motors is losing
money on every car it makes because of the burden of health care costs. As a result, it may be forced to
lay off thousands of workers, or may even go out of business. Yet the insurance premiums saved by firing
workers are no saving at all to society as a whole: somebody still ends up paying the bills.
Second, Americans without insurance eventually receive medical care - but the operative word is
"eventually." According to Kaiser Family Foundation data, the uninsured are about three times as likely as
the insured to postpone seeking care, fail to get needed care, leave prescriptions unfilled or skip
recommended treatment. And many end up disabled - or die - because of these delays.
Think about how crazy all of this is. At a rough guess, between two million and three million Americans are
employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck for that
care to someone else. And the result of all their exertions is to make the nation poorer and sicker.
Why do we put up with such an expensive, counterproductive health care system? Vested interests play an
important role. But we also suffer from ideological blinders: decades of indoctrination in the virtues of
market competition and the evils of big government have left many Americans unable to comprehend the idea
that sometimes competition is the problem, not the solution.
In the next column in this series, I'll talk about how ideology leads to "reforms" that make things worse.
Originally published in The New York Times, 4.22.05
This article is by Paul Krugman
Last week Standard and Poor's, a bond rating agency, downgraded both Ford and General Motors bonds to
junk status. That is, it sees a significant risk that the companies won't be able to pay their debts.
Don't cry for the bondholders, but do cry for the workers.
Standard and Poor's downgraded GM and Ford sooner rather than later because it believes that the public is
losing interest in S.U.V.'s. But the companies were vulnerable because they still pay decent wages and offer
good benefits, in an age when taking care of employees has gone out of style. In particular, they are
weighed down by health care costs for current and retired workers, which run to about $1,500 per vehicle
at G.M.
So the downgrade was a reminder of how far we have come from the days when hard-working Americans
could count on a reasonable degree of economic security.
In 1968, when General Motors was a widely emulated icon of American business, many of its workers were
lifetime employees. On average, they earned about $29,000 a year in today's dollars, a solidly middle-class
income at the time. They also had generous health and retirement benefits.
Since then, America has grown much richer, but American workers have become far less secure.
Today, Wal-Mart is America's largest corporation. Like G.M. in its prime, it has become a widely emulated
business icon. But there the resemblance ends.
The average full-time Wal-Mart employee is paid only about $17,000 a year. The company's health care
plan covers fewer than half of its workers.
True, not everyone is badly paid. In 1968, the head of General Motors received about $4 million in today's
dollars - and that was considered extravagant. But last year Scott Lee Jr., Wal-Mart's chief executive,
was paid $17.5 million. That is, every two weeks Mr. Lee was paid about as much as his average employee
will earn in a lifetime.
Not that many of them will actually spend a lifetime at Wal-Mart: more than 40 percent of the company's
workers leave every year.
I'm not trying either to romanticize the General Motors of yore or to portray Wal-Mart as the root of all
evil. GM was , and Wal-Mart is, a product of its time. And there's no easy way to reverse the changes.
What should be clear, however, is that the public safety net F.D.R. and L.B.J. created is more important
than ever, now that workers in the world's richest nation can no longer count on the private sector to provide
them with economic security.
When they reach 65, most Wal-Mart employees will rely heavily on Social Security - if the privatizers
don't kill it. And many Wal-Mart employees already rely on Medicaid to pay for health care, especially for
their children.
Indeed, a growing number of working Americans have turned to Medicaid. As the Kaiser Family Foundation
points out, that's why children have for the most part have retained health coverage, despite a sharp
decline in employer-based health insurance since 2000.
Yet our current political leaders are trying to privatize Social Security and reduce benefits. And they are
slashing funds for Medicaid even as they give big tax cuts to people like Mr. Lee.
The attack on the safety net is motivated by ideology, not popular demand. The public isn't taken with the
vision of an "ownership society"; it seems to want more, not less, social insurance. According to a poll cited in
a recent Business Week article titled "Safety Net Nation," 67 percent of Americans think we should
guarantee health care to all citizens; just 27 percent disagree.
The question is whether the public's desire for a stronger safety net will finally be seconded by corporations
that haven't yet adopted the Wal-Mart model of minimal benefits and always low wages.
Last year Richard Wagoner Jr., G.M.'s chief executive, gave a speech about the costs of America's
"Kafkaesque" health care system that sounded a lot like my recent columns. And his company has made it
clear that it likes Canada's system: in 2002 the president of General Motors of Canada and the head of the
Canadian Auto Workers signed a joint letter declaring that "it is vitally important that the publicly funded
health care system be preserved and renewed."
But according to The Journal Register News Service, which covered Mr. Wagoner's speech, he "stressed
later to reporters that he was not proposing a national health care plan." Why not?
Originally published in The New York Times, 5.13.05
But Mr. Bush isn't calling for small sacrifices now. Instead, he's calling for zero sacrifice now, but big
benefit cuts decades from now - which is exactly what he says will happen if we do nothing. Let me repeat
that: to avert the danger of future cuts in benefits, Mr. Bush wants us to commit now to, um, future cuts in
benefits.
This accomplishes nothing, except, possibly, to ensure that benefit cuts take place even if they aren't
necessary.
Now, about the image of Mr. Bush as friend to the poor: keep your eye on the changing definitions of "middle
income" and "wealthy."
In last fall's debates, Mr. Bush asserted that "most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income
Americans." Since most of the cuts went to the top 10 percent of the population and more than a third went
to people making more than $200,000 a year, Mr. Bush's definition of middle income apparently reaches
pretty high.
But defenders of Mr. Bush's Social Security plan now portray benefit cuts for anyone making more than
$20,000 a year, cuts that will have their biggest percentage impact on the retirement income of people
making about $60,000 a year, as cuts for the wealthy.
These are people who denounced you as a class warrior if you wanted to tax Paris Hilton's inheritance. Now
they say that they're brave populists, because they want to cut the income of retired office managers.
Let's consider the Bush tax cuts and the Bush benefit cuts as a package. Who gains? Who loses?
Suppose you're a full-time Wal-Mart employee, earning $17,000 a year. You probably didn't get any tax
cut. But Mr. Bush says, generously, that he won't cut your Social Security benefits.
Suppose you're earning $60,000 a year. On average, Mr. Bush cut taxes for workers like you by about
$1,000 per year. But by 2045 the Bush Social Security plan would cut benefits for workers like you by
about $6,500 per year. Not a very good deal.
Suppose, finally, that you're making $1 million a year. You received a tax cut worth about $50,000 per
year. By 2045 the Bush plan would reduce benefits for people like you by about $9,400 per year. We have
a winner!
I'm not being unfair. In fact, I've weighted the scales heavily in Mr. Bush's favor, because the tax cuts
will cost much more than the benefit cuts would save. Repealing Mr. Bush's tax cuts would yield enough
revenue to call off his proposed benefit cuts, and still leave $8 trillion in change.
The point is that the privatizers consider four years of policies that relentlessly favored the wealthy a fait
accompli, not subject to reconsideration. Now that tax cuts have busted the budget, they want us to accept
large cuts in Social Security benefits as inevitable. But they demand that we praise Mr. Bush's sense of
social justice, because he proposes bigger benefit cuts for the middle class than for the poor.
Sorry, but no. Mr. Bush likes to play dress-up, but his Robin Hood costume just doesn't fit.
Originally published in The New York Times, 5.9.05
A Serious Drug Problem
Comments (8)
SYNOPSIS:
There was a brief flurry of outrage when Congress passed the 2003 Medicare bill. The news media reported
on the scandalous vote in the House of Representatives: Republican leaders violated parliamentary procedure,
twisted arms and perhaps engaged in bribery to persuade skeptical lawmakers to change their votes in a
session literally held in the dead of night.
Later, the media reported on another scandal: it turned out that the administration had deceived Congress
about the bill's likely cost.
But the real scandal is what's in the legislation. It's an object lesson in how special interests hold America's
health care system hostage.
The new Medicare law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised cost
savings. It creates an unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that the drug benefit be administered by
private insurers. The biggest giveaway is to Big Pharma: the law specifically prohibits Medicare from using
its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices.
Outside the United States, almost every government bargains over drug prices. And it works: the
Congressional Budget Office says that foreign drug prices are 35 to 55 percent below U.S. levels. Even
within the United States, Veterans Affairs is able to negotiate discounts of 50 percent or more, far larger
than those the Medicare actuary expects the elderly to receive under the new plan.
After the drug bill's passage, Jacob Hacker and Theodore Marmor of Yale University estimated that a
sensible bill could have delivered twice as much coverage for the same price.
Needless to say, apologists for the law insist that the prohibition on price negotiations had nothing to do with
catering to special interests - that it was a matter of principle, of preserving incentives to innovate. How
can we refute this defense?
One way is to challenge claims that the pharmaceutical industry needs high prices to innovate. In her book
"The Truth About the Drug Companies," Marcia Angell, the former editor in chief of The New England
Journal of Medicine, shows convincingly that drug companies spend far more on marketing than they do on
research - and that much of the marketing is designed to sell "me, too" drugs, which are no better than the
cheaper drugs they replace. It should be possible to pay less for medicine, yet encourage more real
innovation.
Another answer is to point to the haste with which key players in the drug bill's passage cashed in - making
the claims that they wrote a pharma-friendly Medicare bill out of genuine concern for the public's welfare
look ludicrous.
Let's look at just two examples.
Billy Tauzin, who shepherded the drug bill through when he was a member of Congress, now heads the
Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the all-powerful industry lobby group, for an
estimated $2 million a year. In his new job, he's making novel arguments against allowing Americans to buy
cheaper drugs from Canada: Al Qaeda, he suggests, might use fake Viagra tablets to get anthrax into this
country.
Meanwhile, Thomas Scully, the former Medicare administrator - who threatened to fire Medicare's chief
actuary if he gave Congress the real numbers on the drug bill's cost - was granted a special waiver from the
ethics rules. This allowed him to negotiate for a future health industry lobbying job at the very same time
he was pushing the drug bill.
If all this sounds like a story of a corrupt deal created by a corrupt system, it is. And it was a very
expensive deal indeed. According to the Medicare trustees, the fiscal gap over the next 75 years created by
the 2003 law - not the financing gap for Medicare as a whole, just the additional gap created by legislation
passed 18 months ago - will be $8.7 trillion.
That's about three times the amount President Bush proposes to save by cutting middle-class Social Security
benefits.
In fact, I have a suggestion for Mr. Bush. One way to prove that he's really sincere about addressing long-
run fiscal problems, that his calls for benefit cuts aren't just part of an ideological agenda, would be to put
Social Security aside for a while and fix his own Medicare program. Oh, never mind.
Nonetheless, someone will eventually have to take on the health care special interests. Who might do that?
I'll write about that in the next installment of this series.
Originally published in The New York Times, 5
A Gut Punch to the Middle
Comments (23)
SYNOPSIS:
By now, every journalist should know that you have to carefully check out any scheme coming from the White
House. You can't just accept the administration's version of what it's doing. Remember, these are the
people who named a big giveaway to logging interests "Healthy Forests."
Sure enough, a close look at President Bush's proposal for "progressive price indexing" of Social Security puts
the lie to claims that it's a plan to increase benefits for the poor and cut them for the wealthy. In fact,
it's a plan to slash middle-class benefits; the wealthy would barely feel a thing.
Under current law, low-wage workers receive Social Security benefits equal to 49 percent of their wages
before retirement. Under the Bush scheme, that wouldn't change. So benefits for the poor would be
maintained, not increased.
The administration and its apologists emphasize the fact that under the Bush plan, workers earning higher
wages would face cuts, and they talk as if that makes it a plan that takes from the rich and gives to the
poor. But the rich wouldn't feel any pain, because people with high incomes don't depend on Social Security
benefits.
Cut an average worker's benefits, and you're imposing real hardship. Cut or even eliminate Dick Cheney's
benefits, and only his accountants will notice.
I asked Jason Furman of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities to calculate the benefit cuts under the
Bush scheme as a percentage of pre-retirement income. That's a way to see who would really bear the
burden of the proposed cuts. It turns out that the middle class would face severe cuts, but the wealthy
would not.
The average worker - average pay now is $37,000 - retiring in 2075 would face a cut equal to 10 percent
of pre-retirement income. Workers earning 60 percent more than average, the equivalent of $58,000 today,
would see benefit cuts equal to almost 13 percent of their income before retirement.
But above that level, the cuts would become less and less significant. Workers earning three times the
average wage would face cuts equal to only 9 percent of their income before retirement. Someone earning
the equivalent of $1 million today would see benefit cuts equal to only 1 percent of pre-retirement income.
In short, this would be a gut punch to the middle class, but a fleabite for the truly wealthy.
Beyond that, it's a good bet that benefits for the poor would eventually be cut, too.
It's an adage that programs for the poor always turn into poor programs. That is, once a program is defined
as welfare, it becomes a target for budget cuts.
You can see this happening right now to Medicaid, the nation's most important means-tested program. Last
week Congress agreed on a budget that cuts funds for Medicaid (and food stamps), even while extending tax
cuts on dividends and capital gains. States are cutting back, denying health insurance to hundreds of
thousands of people with low incomes. Missouri is poised to eliminate Medicaid completely by 2008.
If the Bush scheme goes through, the same thing will eventually happen to Social Security. As Mr. Furman
points out, the Bush plan wouldn't just cut benefits. Workers would be encouraged to divert a large fraction
of their payroll taxes into private accounts - but this would in effect amount to borrowing against their
future benefits, which would be reduced accordingly.
As a result, Social Security as we know it would be phased out for the middle class.
"For millions of workers," Mr. Furman writes, "the amount of the monthly Social Security check would be at
or near zero."
So only the poor would receive Social Security checks - and regardless of what today's politicians say,
future politicians would be tempted to reduce the size of those checks.
The important thing to understand is that the attempt to turn Social Security into nothing but a program for
the poor isn't driven by concerns about the future budget burden of benefit payments. After all, if Mr. Bush
was worried about the budget, he would be reconsidering his tax cuts.
No, this is about ideology: Mr. Bush comes to bury Social Security, not to save it. His goal is to turn F.D.
R.'s most durable achievement into an unpopular welfare program, so some future president will be able to
attack it with tall tales about Social Security queens driving Cadillacs.
Originally published in The New York Times, 5.1.05
A Private Obsession
Comments (3)
SYNOPSIS:
American health care is unique among advanced countries in its heavy reliance on the private sector. It's also
uniquely inefficient. We spend far more per person on health care than any other country, yet many
Americans lack health insurance and don't receive essential care.
This week yet another report emphasized just how bad a job the American system does at providing basic
health care. A study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation estimates that 20 million working Americans
are uninsured; in Texas, which has the worst record, more than 30 percent of the adults under 65 have no
insurance.
And lack of insurance leads to inadequate medical attention. Over a 12-month period, 41 percent of the
uninsured were unable to see a doctor when needed because of cost; 56 percent had no personal doctor or
health care provider.
Our system is desperately in need of reform. Yet it will be very hard to get useful reform, for two reasons:
vested interests and ideology.
I'll have a lot more to say about vested interests and health care in future columns, but let me emphasize
one key point: a lot of big companies are essentially in the business of wasting health care resources.
The most striking inefficiency of our health system is our huge medical bureaucracy, which is mainly occupied
in trying to get someone else to pay the bills. A good guess is that two million to three million Americans are
employed by insurers and health care providers not to deliver health care, but to pass the buck to other
people.
Yet any effort to reduce this waste would hurt powerful, well-organized interests, which have already
demonstrated their power to block reform. Remember the "Harry and Louise" ads that doomed the Clinton
health plan? The actors may have seemed like regular folks, but the ads were paid for by the Health
Insurance Association of America, an industry lobbying group that liked the health care system just the way
it was.
But vested interests aren't the only obstacle to fixing our health care system. We also have a big problem
with ideology.
You see, America is ruled by conservatives, and they have a private obsession: they believe that more
privatization, not less, is always the answer. And their faith persists even when the evidence clearly points
to a private sector gone bad.
I could cite many examples of this obsession at work. But a particularly good illustration of ideology-induced
obliviousness is the 2004 Economic Report of the President, which devotes a whole chapter to health care
that can be read as a sort of conservative manifesto on the subject.
The main message of that report is that U.S. health care is doing just fine. Never mind the huge expense,
the low life expectancy, the high infant mortality; it's a market-based system, so it must be good.
The report even takes a Panglossian view of uninsured Americans - one that is completely at odds with the
grim statistics I cited above - suggesting that "many of them may remain uninsured as a matter of choice,"
perhaps because "they are young and healthy and do not see the need for insurance."
The president's economists had only one criticism of the system: insurance is too comprehensive, which
encourages people to consume too much health care. As they see it, insurance covers too large a percentage
of medical costs. The answer to this problem is the creation of, you guessed it, private accounts, which have
now superseded tax cuts as the answer to all problems.
Indeed, a new paper by Martin Feldstein of Harvard, which clearly reflects the administration's views,
suggests that Social Security privatization and health savings accounts - tax shelters designed to encourage
people to pay medical costs out of their own pockets - are only the beginning. "Investment-based personal
accounts," he says, are the way to go for unemployment insurance and Medicare, too.
O.K., let's not turn this into a Bush-bashing session. President Bush didn't cause the crisis in American
health care. His health care policies have made things only a little bit worse.
The point, instead, is that even though all the evidence suggests that we would be much better off under a
system of universal coverage, any such move will be fiercely opposed, on principle, by conservatives who want
us to move in the opposite direction.
And reform will also be opposed by powerful vested interests - my next subject in this series.
Originally published in The New York Times, 4.29.05
The Oblivious Right
Comments (12)
SYNOPSIS:
According to John Snow, the Treasury secretary, the global economy is in a "sweet spot." Conservative
pundits close to the administration talk, without irony, about a "Bush boom."
Yet two-thirds of Americans polled by Gallup say that the economy is "only fair" or "poor." And only 33
percent of those polled believe the economy is improving, while 59 percent think it's getting worse.
Is the administration's obliviousness to the public's economic anxiety just partisanship? I don't think so:
President Bush and other Republican leaders honestly think that we're living in the best of times. After all,
everyone they talk to says so.
Since November's election, the victors have managed to be on the wrong side of public opinion on one issue
after another: the economy, Social Security privatization, Terri Schiavo, Tom DeLay. By large margins,
Americans say that the country is headed in the wrong direction, and Mr. Bush is the least popular second-
term president on record.
What's going on? Actually, it's quite simple: Mr. Bush and his party talk only to their base - corporate
interests and the religious right - and are oblivious to everyone else's concerns.
The administration's upbeat view of the economy is a case in point. Corporate interests are doing very well.
As a recent report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points out, over the last three years
profits grew at an annual rate of 14.5 percent after inflation, the fastest growth since World War II.
The story is very different for the great majority of Americans, who live off their wages, not dividends or
capital gains, and aren't doing well at all. Over the past three years, wage and salary income grew less than
in any other postwar recovery - less than a tenth as fast as profits. But wage-earning Americans aren't
part of the base.
The same obliviousness explains Mr. Bush's decision to make Social Security privatization his main policy
priority. He doesn't talk to anyone outside the base, so he didn't realize what he was getting into.
In retrospect, it was a terrible political blunder: the privatization campaign has quickly degenerated from
juggernaut to joke. According to CBS, only 25 percent of the public have confidence in Mr. Bush's ability to
make the right decisions about Social Security; 70 percent are "uneasy."
The point is that people sense, correctly, that Mr. Bush doesn't understand their concerns. He was sold on
privatization by people who have made their careers in the self-referential, corporate-sponsored world of
conservative think tanks. And he himself has no personal experience with the risks that working families
face. He's probably never imagined what it would be like to be destitute in his old age, with no guaranteed
income.
The same syndrome has been visible on cultural issues. Republican leaders in Congress, who talk only to the
religious right, were shocked at the public backlash over their meddling in the Schiavo case. Did I mention
that Rick Santorum is 14 points behind his likely challenger?
It all makes you wonder how these people ever ended up running the country in the first place. But remember
that in 2000, Mr. Bush pretended to be a moderate, and that in the next two elections he used the Iraq
war as a wedge to divide and perplex the Democrats.
In that context, it's worth noting two more poll results: in one taken before the recent resurgence of
violence in Iraq, and the administration's announcement that it needs yet another $80 billion, 53 percent of
Americans said that the Iraq war wasn't worth it. And 50 percent say that "the administration deliberately
misled the public about whether Iraq has weapons of mass destruction."
Democracy Corps, the Democratic pollsters, say that there is a "crisis of confidence in the Republican
direction for the country." As they're careful to point out, this won't necessarily translate into a surge of
support for Democrats.
But Americans are feeling a sense of dread: they're worried about a weak job market, soaring health care
costs, rising oil prices and a war that seems to have no end. And they're starting to notice that nobody in
power is even trying to deal with these problems, because the people in charge are too busy catering to a
base that has other priorities.
Originally published in The New York Times, 4.25.05
Rogues Have No Right To Self-defense:
By Edward Herman
The view that U.S. targets have no right to defend themselves from a U.S. threat or actual attack goes
back a long way. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, when the United States was
regularly intervening in its backyard to discipline the unruly natives, those who objected and fought against
the Marines were always designated “bandits,” even when the resistance “was organized, using flags and
uniforms” (M. M. Knight, The Americans in Santo Domingo).
The Vietnamese, in the 1950s and 1960s, resisting a U.S.-imposed puppet ruler and then a direct U.S.
invasion, were always terrorists or aggressors in their own country in the U.S. official (and hence media)
view, and as Leslie Gelb explained in defending the classification of Vietnam as an “outlaw,” they “harmed
Americans” who had come to subdue them (NYT, April 15, 1993).
Gelb, then Foreign Editor of the New York Times (and former State Department and Pentagon official), had
internalized the imperial premise of a U.S. right to attack and dominate anywhere and for any reason, and
the corollary idea that resistance to such actions is criminal.
One of the grotesqueries in U.S. imperialist history has been the regular U.S. practice of threatening some
tiny backyard target, preventing its access to weapons from the United States or U.S. allies, and then
pointing to the target’s acquisition of arms from the Soviet bloc as proof of (1) their aggressive intentions
and (2) their links to the larger menace of Soviet aggression.
This was a notable feature of the U.S. direct and proxy attacks on Guatemala in the early 1950s, Cuba
from 1959 onward, and Nicaragua in the 1980s. In the case of Nicaragua, U.S. official claims of Soviet
MIG fighters on their way to Nicaragua in November 1984--eventually acknowledged to have been
straightforward Reagan administration disinformation--caused panic in the media and among leading
Democrats, just as a shipment of small arms from Czechoslovakia to Guatemala had done in 1954. These
countries had no right to try to defend themselves against ongoing U.S. efforts to overthrow their
governments by violence.
The premise of the right to attack at imperial discretion implies that international law does not apply to the
imperial center, but only to others, and of course the United States has taken this for granted for many
decades. For the New York Times, “Providence decreed” that we should take over Puerto Rico (1898); for
Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. adherence to the Monroe Doctrine “may force the United States, however
reluctantly, to the exercise of an international police power” (1904); and for William Howard Taft, the
entire hemisphere “will be ours...by virtue of our superiority of race” (1912). Modesty has never been a
characteristic of U.S. leaders.
The assumption of a right to use force anywhere and unilaterally was prominent in the 2003 invasion of Iraq,
but even before the Bush-2 era actions involving Iraq, U.S. officials never allowed international law to
interfere with policy.
For example, in the Reagan years the International Court finding that the United States had engaged in
“unlawful acts” and owed Nicaragua reparations was simply ignored, and the administration vetoed a Security
Council resolution calling upon all countries to abide by international law! During Bush-1’s tenure the United
States not only vetoed a Security Council condemnation of the U.S. invasion of Panama, it maneuvered the
UN into sanctioning a war against Iraq by fending off all negotiating efforts, and conducted that war in
violation of numerous international prohibitions (e.g., cluster bombs, fuel air explosives, depleted uranium,
burying large numbers of Iraqi soldiers in bulldozed sand, and deliberately destroying Iraq’s water supply
facilities).
Clinton carried on this great tradition, in the case of Iraq aggressively implementing the sanctions policy of
deliberate deprivation of medicines and means of repairing the water system destroyed in 1991, with
enormous civilian casualties, in clear violation of international law as regards the treatment of civilian
populations. The “no-fly zones” in Iraq were not authorized by any UN resolution and the destruction and
scores of civilian deaths resulting from U.S.-British air attacks on Iraq during the dozen years before the
2003 invasion were therefore criminal acts.
As with the Vietnamese daring to shoot at U.S. soldiers invading their country, so Iraqi missiles aimed at U.
S. and British aircraft prior to the March 18-19, 2003 invasion represent unjustified “attacks” that
“demonstrate Iraq’s contempt for UN resolutions” according to Donald Rumsfeld (BBC, “Iraq intensifies
‘attacks,’ says US,” Sept. 30, 2002). Iraq, like all other U.S. targets, has never had any right of self-
defense.
The United States also takes upon itself the right to name rogues, as it has long done terrorist organizations
and terror states. Naturally, as super-rogue, it does not name itself, despite its unsurpassed rogue
credentials (see Richard DuBoff’s updated listing of 27 recent U.S. rogue acts, which do not even include
attacks on other countries, in “Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Biggest Rogue of All,” ZNet
Commentary, Aug. 9, 2003; also the longer and more far-reaching accounts in William Blum, Rogue State and
Noam Chomsky, Rogue States).
It also excludes its allies and clients, just as it denies them terror-state status, no matter how excellent
their qualifications. It is easy to see why the super-rogue has decided that it will oppose, possibly by force,
any other country developing the capacity to challenge its military hegemony: this permits the super-rogue to
behave like a rogue itself while self-righteously naming (and attacking) targets (i.e., alleged “rogues”) of
choice.
Super-rogue behavior has been dramatically evident in the Iraq sanctions, invasion and occupation. Super-
rogue was able to impose punitive sanctions on Iraq that involved treating 23 million civilians as hostages to
the demand for regime change for twelve years, in the process killing over a million of those civilians.
This was done with the cooperation of Kofi Annan and the UN, and with no outcry or protest from the
“international community,” media or “cruise missile left.” Super-rogue was then able to invade and occupy
Iraq in blatant violation of the UN Charter, after having made fools of the inspectors and UN, and he did
this without the slightest penalty from the same “international community” that had punished Vietnam
severely for invading Cambodia and overthrowing Pol Pot, an invasion that took place only after repeated
attacks on Vietnam by Pol Pot’s forces. Iraq of course had not attacked the United States or Britain and
had no capability of doing so. In short, UN sanctions have nothing to do with principles; they only follow
demands and/or approval of the principal (super-rogue).
It is now generally acknowledged, even by some U.S. officials, that the attack on Iraq was based on serial
lies concerning Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the threat that they posed to U.S. and
British national security. It is also evident that the U.S. attack on Iraq once again involved the use of anti-
civilian weapons (cluster bombs, depleted uranium), deliberate attacks on many sites where civilians were
likely to be killed, and over 5,000 civilian deaths.
It is also evident that the U.S. government has violated the obligation of an occupying army to provide
security and assure basic services to the civilian population of the occupied territory; that it came in
prepared only to protect the oil ministry and oil resources; and that it has given highest priority to hunting
for Saddam Hussein rather than assuring even minimal services to the victimized population.
But despite the illegality-plus-lie basis of the conquest, and the gross mishandling and illegalities of the
occupation, and the obvious intent to rule Iraq directly or via proxies, the international community has not
called for punishing the killers of over 5,000 civilians (plus innumerable other crimes) and forcing the
aggressors-murderers out. Three thousand dead U.S. citizens on 9/11 was unbearable in the United States
and aroused the deepest sympathy and understanding on the part of the “international community,” for whom
it justified a vengeance assault on Afghanistan and declaration of a global “war on terror.”
But 5,000+ Iraqi civilians killed on the basis of lies is quite bearable, and the New Hitler will not even be
deprived of the fruits of his conquest, let alone be subjected to sanctions. He is merely urged to farm out
some of the management responsibilities to the UN and to move more rapidly to that democratic state that
he belatedly claimed to be his objective in regime change in Iraq. But there are no threats or penalties for
misbehavior, which is why super-rogue finds it so satisfying to be super-rogue and promises to use force to
assure preservation of his super-rogue status.
And super-rogue can continue to set the agenda on “threats” for the UN and international community. The
world’s people may, despite control of the global media by friends of super-rogue, believe that super-rogue
himself, with his invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, his continuing military buildup and drumbeat of threats to
use force unilaterally, his open-ended “war on terror” being carried out in cooperation with junior-partner
rogues like Sharon, constitutes far and away the world’s greatest threat to peace, security, and even
survival.
But super-rogue says that North Korea’s and Iran’s quest for nuclear weapons is a very very serious problem
that amounts to “crises,” and news reports tell of well-developed U.S. plans to attack these rogues and put
a stop to their nefarious behavior. The Western media and even the liberals swallow this, agreeing that
these are crises and major threats, with the debate over whether we can solve this problem by negotiations
(the liberals) or must go in and “take out” the threatening weapons and/or regimes.
One pathetic liberal gambit has been to criticize the Bush cabal’s focus on Iraq, which doesn’t have a bomb,
while neglecting the fearsome threat that North Korea in the meantime might be acquiring a nuclear weapon.
This inflates the threat of North Korea’s possible possession of a nuclear weapon, which it could not use
without committing national suicide. It ignores the fact that North Korea and Iran are compelled to seek
such weapons because the United States openly threatens to use such weapons against them.
It ignores the fact that Israel has been allowed—even helped—to acquire a nuclear weapons arsenal without
penalty, and is permitted by super-rogue and the international community to do so, while countries
threatened by Israel’s weaponry cannot do the same without constituting a “threat.” It ignores the fact that
the super-rogue is the only country that has used nuclear weapons and now threatens their further use even
more openly.
In short, the real threats today are not to be found in actions of North Korea or Iran, but rather in the U.
S. rejection of the Non-Proliferation Treaty promise to refrain from the use of nuclear weapons against non-
nuclear states; its threat to use these and its other weapons in “preemptive” (in reality, preventive) actions
against targets of choice; its self-exemption from international law; and its double standard support for
Israel’s freedom to acquire nuclear weapons while such efforts by Israel’s opponents are intolerable.
The response of the UN and international community to these real threats has been in the same pattern as
their treatment of the U.S. plan to attack Iraq. That is, instead of opposing the U.S. threats and plans of
aggression against its targets, the UN and international community accept the U.S. premises that its targets
pose the threat. And just as they rushed to accommodate the super-rogue with intensified inspections to
deal with that monstrous threat of Iraq’s WMD, they now rush to persuade North Korea and Iran to be
reasonable, accept international inspections, and give up any desire they might have to acquire nuclear arms.
Once again those threatened by the super-rogue are not granted the right to defend themselves, not only by
super-rogue but by the UN and “international community.” But this failure to contest super-rogue’s actions
and policies encourages him to continue on his deadly path, and it will hardly deter his prospective victims
from seeking to protect themselves.
Disposable Roosevelt:
Here's a little-known secret about the White House: every once in a while, when the mood strikes, in the
earliest morning hours, accompanied by a posse of Secret Service, President George W. Bush pays visits to
the FDR Memorial near the National Mall. Bush bows his head in silent homage to the past President and
then, remembering who he is, he tells his posse to turn their heads while he undoes his pants and pulls out
his cock.
The Secret Service agents, who have been taught to ignore the worst horrors imaginable in defense of their
charge, cringe at the agonized screams they hear with their backs turned to the President as Bush madly
jacks off, howling at the crippled visage in front of him, so loud that one might expect the giant Jefferson
and Lincoln to throw shoes at him. Then Bush orgasms, whimpering and giggling, giggling that staccato stroke
victim giggle of his as he wipes his dick on Roosevelt's face and says, "I've got a New Deal fer ya. Lick me
clean, you commie-enabling gimp." Then he zips up and tells his shaken phalanx of agents to take him home.
What a fantasy it is for Bush, forcing FDR to fellate him. It's like the dream of generations of Bushes,
having tolerated the Roosevelts for so, so long.
Like the statue, Roosevelt himself is a prop for the Bush administration and the right, ready to be taken out
and praised whenever useful, paraded about and degraded whenever expedient. A couple of months ago, Bush
was giving mad props to Roosevelt, saying crazed bullshit like, "I do want to applaud Franklin Roosevelt. I
thought he did a good thing with Social Security," which is not unlike saying to a hooker, "I want to praise
your parents. They did a good thing in giving birth to you" before you fuck her in the ass and steal her coke.
See, invoking Roosevelt is a way for Bush to say that he's acting reasonably, responsibly, for the good of
the entire nation. And this, of course, led to the parade of conservative motherfuckers using Roosevelt out
of context on Social Security and outright lying about him in order to justify the ways of Bush to the nation.
Bush kicked out the Roosevelt jams one more time last week, at the National Day o' Prayer service at the
White House. Once again, as a way of saying, "No, really, I'm not some psycho Jesus freak who sucks at
the teat of the fundamentalist cash cow," Bush mentioned Washington praying at Valley Forge and, of
course, "Franklin Roosevelt sent American troops off to liberate a continent with his D-Day prayer."
'Course, that prayer was for a special occasion, when the U.S. faced an enormous battle, not just a regular
event. (Although the Rude Pundit prefers the kick-in-the-face Wartime Prayer by Eleanor Roosevelt.)
This week, over in Europe, Bush took out a bag of FDR's bones, dumped them on the dais, and shit all over
them by blaming FDR and Winston Churchill for Soviet domination of Eastern and Central Europe. Said the
President as he grunted to pinch out a loaf right into the eye socket of FDR's skull, "Once again, when
powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable." And when, before
that Latvian audience, Bush called the Yalta treaty "one of the "greatest wrongs of history," one couldn't
help but think, is the President dissing the United States while he's in a foreign country? 'Cause, you know,
Yalta kinda helped end World War II. And Stalin kinda broke the agreement. And he was kinda already
takin' over Eastern Europe. And, really, and c'mon, does Bush's boo-boo face apology do anyone any good?
Oh, sure, sure, soon it'll be back to the Social Security campaign trail, and FDR's bones'll be all shined up,
ready to be put together like a puppet with a monocle and cigarette holder, as the right makes FDR dance in
ways that he never would have imagined medically or ethically possible in his time.
(And, as reader Dem Kat points out, if we're gonna start apologizin' fer shit past Presidents did, let's at
least be too legit to quit: "since Bush is in such a fuckall apologizin' mood perhaps we should expect these
further apologies in short order:
"1) to the Lebanese people for Ronald Reagan abandoning them to civil war and Syrian occupation after the
Beirut bombing.
"2) to the Afghani and American people for Ronald Reagan and George Bush I support and training of Osama
Bin Laden and the mujahedeen who eventually became Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
"3) to the Iraqi, Kuwaiti, Iranian and American people for Ronald Reagan and George Bush I decision to arm
Saddam Hussein in his war with Iran that eventually led to the gassing of the Kurds, the invasion of Kuwait
and Gulf Wars I & II.")
Appeals Court Sides With Cheney in Lawsuit
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The probability of a major Social Security overhaul is now approximately a snowball's chance in Houston.
According to polls, the public doesn't believe Social Security is in a crisis or that it needs major overhaul.
The real tragedy here is that the nation has some big domestic problems that need attention right away --
not a fake crisis like Social Security 40 years from now, but two real crises staring us right in the face.
The first involves the gas we're guzzling. Oil prices, already high, will almost certainly resume their upward
climb because of the soaring demand at America's gas pumps. And higher oil and gas prices could easily take
us back to the dread stagflation of the 1970s. So now's the perfect time for Washington to demand -- or
at least give tax incentives for -- cars with more fuel economy. But no one's talking about fuel economy.
Everyone's too busy talking about Social Security.
It's the same with health care. Costs are out of control and both Medicare and General Motors are going
broke before our very eyes. Now's the ideal time for the federal government to take action. As the nation's
biggest medical purchaser -- through Medicare, Medicaid, veterans' benefits, and federal employees' health
insurance -- it has the bargaining clout to drive down the costs of pharmaceuticals and private health
insurance. But the nation is too busy talking about Social Security.
The White House doesn't want a national discussion about how Washington could make our cars more efficient
or reduce health care costs. These would both require a more pro-active government, which would violate
conservative ideology. So the White House is talking about Social Security
But this shouldn't stop the rest of us. Instead of playing defense to the White House's offense, Democrats
ought to be offering detailed plans to improve fuel economy and control health care costs.
And instead of filling newspapers and airwaves with news about how the White House and Democrats are
positioning themselves on the non-crisis of Social Security, the media ought to inform Americans about the
dangers these two real and immediate crises pose to the nation.
The biggest danger to a democracy is not the public's failure to pay attention. It's the public's failure to
pay attention to the right things.
Robert B. Reich is co-founder of The American Prospect. A version of this column appeared on Marketplace.
GOP Actually Prohibits Better Wages
Nathan Newman points out one of the more hideously pro-corporate-at-all-social-costs bills that just passed
a state legislature.
According to the Macon Telegraph, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue signed a law barring "any city from seeking to
require their contractors to pay higher minimum wages to employees than the $5.15 per hour federal
standard."
Atlanta had been considering requiring a $10.15 "living wage" for government contractors, but that was
apparently unacceptable to Big Business - so they bought this wretched piece of legislation, meaning Georgia
taxpayers have to continue subsidizing companies that provide poverty-level wages. This, in a state that is
already plagued by companies that refuse to pay their workers well. A November 2004 New York Times
article cites a study in Georgia that found 10,000 children of Wal-Mart employees were in the state's low-
income healthcare program at a cost to taxpayers of $10 million a year.
But I guess that's how Georgia Republicans like it - low-wages for most people, as long as the big corporate
donors are happy
Where was the WSJ when Republicans were blocking Clinton nominees? On the side of obstruction
Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund claimed that he and the Journal editorial page criticized Republican
efforts to block former President Bill Clinton's judicial nominees -- more than 60 of whom Republicans denied
even votes in the Senate Judiciary Committee -- and that Fund himself wrote an editorial arguing that one
particular Clinton nominee, Richard A. Paez, deserved a vote. But a Media Matters for America search* of
Journal editorials revealed no instances of Fund or the editorial board condemning Republican efforts to block
Paez. In fact, the newspaper actually criticized then-Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Orrin Hatch (R-
UT) for allowing Paez's nomination to go to the full Senate. Several other Journal editorials also explicitly
defended the Republicans' right to deny Clinton nominees an up-or-down vote.
Appearing on MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews opposite Fund, former Democratic strategist Bob Shrum
asserted that, while Fund and the Journal have criticized Senate Democratic filibusters of a handful of Bush
judicial nominees, they never "editorialized against this same process under Bill Clinton." Fund responded by
stating: "We did. ... I personally wrote the editorial saying Paez deserved a vote. ... I know others [Journal
editorial board members] wrote others."
But in a March 17, 2000, editorial titled "Hatch v. Hatch," the Journal claimed Hatch "forgot" about the
Clinton administration's "many legal and ethical evasions" when he "whisked through two liberal judicial
nominees [Paez and Marsha L. Berzon]." The editorial declared that Hatch's role as a "Clinton enabler ...
helps explain [his] decision to approve Judge Richard Paez to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals." The
editorial claimed that Paez's condemnation of Californian anti-immigration Proposition 187 demonstrated his
belief that "the 59% of Californians who approved it were bigots. ... Mr. Hatch apparently doesn't mind."
Other Journal editorials defended the Republicans' right to deny Clinton nominees a vote on the floor in even
stronger terms:
A May 16, 2000, editorial titled "A GOP Judicial Debacle?" claimed that Hatch went "into the tank" by
failing to "us[e] his Senate power to block" Clinton nominees such as then-District of Columbia Circuit nominee
Allen Snyder. The editorial stated that "there are sound reasons for denying him a vote," including that
Reagan-appointee Laurence Silberman's retirement "combined with a Snyder confirmation, would mean a 5-5
[Republican/Democrat appointee] split that could haunt the first year of a Bush Presidency." Labeling the
Snyder nomination "an example of Beltway legal insiders looking out for their friends instead of for the
broader public interest," the editorial even asserted that blocking such nominees is the committee chairman's
raison d'être: "The Senate Judiciary chairman is paid to stand up to such pressure."
In a May 29, 1998, op-ed titled "Supreme Politics: Who'd Replace Justice Stevens?" current Wall Street
Journal editorial page editor Paul A. Gigot also criticized Hatch for allowing Clinton nominees a floor vote.
Gigot questioned Hatch's "brisk approval of Clinton lower-court nominees as a way to gain leverage and
credibility for the more significant Supreme Court pick," noting that "Mr. Clinton has fooled Republicans
before."
A November 4, 1997, editorial titled "Above the Law?", which defended the Republicans' right to block
Clinton Justice Department nominee Bill Lann Lee (who never received Senate confirmation, instead assuming
the position of acting assistant attorney general), suggested a series of "starting points for Chairman Hatch
and his colleagues before acceding to the Lee nomination," or any judicial nominations for that matter:
No nominations of any sort will be approved until this Administration starts enforcing the Supreme Court's
Beck decision [which allowed unionized workers to withhold union dues used for political activities]. No new
judges will be approved until the Clinton Administration nominates someone to run the criminal division at
Justice, now vacant for two years. Alternatively, no more judicial nominations until Janet Reno appoints an
independent counsel to investigate the Clinton fund-raising apparatus, as any normal reading of that statute
now so clearly requires.
A February 15, 1996, editorial titled "The Clinton Judges -- II" noted that the "Senate Judiciary
Committee may find itself 'too busy' to schedule hearings" before the November presidential election. The
editorial argued that Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-DE) had honed the "delay tactic" of blocking conservative
judicial nominees when he was committee chair, so Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) was "not about to support" the
nominations of James A. Beaty Jr. or J. Rich Leonard to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
From the May 9 edition of MSNBC's Hardball:
SHRUM: I wish, by the way, that John Fund and The Wall Street Journal had editorialized against this
same process under Bill Clinton.
FUND: We did. I can give you the dates, Bob. We did.
SHRUM: What John is saying would have more credibility.
FUND: We did.
SHRUM: Because the truth is -- who did you -- who? Who was being filibustered that you editorialized
against?
FUND: I personally wrote the editorial saying Judge Paez deserved a vote. I personally wrote that.
SHRUM: And what about all the other Clinton judges that were filibustered?
FUND: I gave you the one I wrote. I know others wrote others.
*Based on a search for "Paez" under "all dates" in The Wall Street Journal on the Factiva database and the
Journal's editorial page website, OpinionJournal.com.
US real wages fall at fastest rate in 14 years
By Christopher Swann in Washington
Published: May 10 2005 17:59 | Last updated: May 11 2005 15:20
Real wages in the US are falling at their fastest rate in 14 years, according to data surveyed by the
Financial Times.
Inflation rose 3.1 per cent in the year to March but salaries climbed just 2.4 per cent, according to the
Employment Cost Index. In the final three months of 2004, real wages fell by 0.9 per cent.
The last time salaries fell this steeply was at the start of 1991, when real wages declined by 1.1 per cent.
Stingy pay rises mean many Americans will have to work longer hours to keep up with the cost of living, and
they could ultimately undermine consumer spending and economic growth.
Many economists believe that in spite of the unexpectedly large rise in job creation of 274,000 in April, the
uneven revival in the labour market since the 2001 recession has made it hard for workers to negotiate real
improvements in living standards.
Even after last month's bumper gain in employment, there are 22,000 fewer private sector jobs than when
the recession began in March 2001, a 0.02 per cent fall. At the same point in the recovery from the
recession of the early 1990s, private sector employment was up 4.7 per cent.
Salaries stagnate as balance of power shifts to employers
A surfeit of workers and the threat of off-shoring are allowing companies to call the shots on wages.
Go there
“There is still little evidence that workers are gaining much traction in their negotiations,” said Paul
Ashworth, US analyst at Capital Economics, the consultancy. “If this does not pick up, it raises the prospect
of a sharper slowdown in consumer spending than we have been expecting.”
Economists are divided over the best source for measuring pay increases in the US, since the government
releases three main measures. A gauge of average hourly earnings is released with the employment report.
This rose by 0.3 per cent in both March and April and 0.1 per cent in February. Even with a slight rise in
the hours employees are working, from 33.7 to 33.9, this suggests wages are struggling to keep pace with
inflation. The gauge covers non-supervisory workers, about 80 per cent of the workforce.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis figures for personal income showed wages rising at close to 6 per cent in
2004 but slowing down since. This measure also showed wages rising by just 0.3 per cent in each of the past
2 months. This is a broader gauge and includes small businesses and professional partnerships, but it
measures total corporate wage bill rather than wages per person.
The Employment Cost Index, seen by some as the most reliable measure, excludes overtime and professional
partnerships.
Halliburton lands $72 million in bonuses
Army awards firm for logistics work; no decision on dining services
Updated: 4:27 p.m. ET May 10, 2005WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army said on Tuesday it had awarded
$72 million in bonuses to Halliburton Co. for logistics work in Iraq but had not decided whether to give the
Texas company bonuses for disputed dining services to troops.
advertisement
Army Field Support Command in Rock Island, Illinois, said in a statement it had given Halliburton unit Kellogg
Brown & Root ratings from "excellent" to "very good" for six task orders for work supporting U.S. troops in
Iraq.
The Army said its Award Fee Board in Iraq had met in March and had agreed to pay KBR bonuses for work
it did in support of U.S. forces there.
But it said dining facility costs questioned by auditors from the Defense Contract Audit Agency had not yet
been considered by the military's Award Fee Board.
The Army said it could not immediately provide more details on when the dining fee bonuses would be resolved.
Much of Halliburton's work for the U.S. military, ranging from building bases to delivering mail, is on a cost-
plus basis, which means the company can earn up to 2 percent extra depending on its performance.
Bonuses are awarded based on, among other factors, how efficient and responsible the company is to
requests from the Army and is an indicator of how the Army views KBR's performance in the field.
KBR's logistics deal with the U.S. military has been in the spotlight from the outset in Iraq, with allegations
by auditors that they overcharged for some work, including dining services.
In addition, investigators are looking into whether the Texas-based firm charged too much to supply fuel to
Iraqi civilians, a claim the firm says is not justified.
Halliburton, which was run by Vice President Dick Cheney until he joined the 2000 race for the White
House, has earned more than $7 billion under its 2001 logistics contract with the U.S. military.
Two Amigos And Their Gulag Archipelago
By Lou Dubose
May 12, 2005
Lou Dubose is the author, with Jan Reid, of The Hammer: Tom DeLay, God, Money and the Rise of the
Republican Congress by Public Affairs.
Jack Abramoff won’t make the May 12 Salute to Tom DeLay banquet at the Capitol Hilton.
That doesn’t seem fair.
For decades the two men—one an Orthodox Jewish lobbyist and Republican Party rainmaker, the other a
fundamentalist Christian Congressman and Republican Party rainmaker—were a team. Raising money.
Handicapping races. Supporting candidates. Lining up K Street support for Republican candidates and
legislation. Playing the world’s best golf courses. But mostly raising money—a political forte the two men
shared.
Oddly, it’s because of the money that Abramoff is not welcome at the DeLay tribute. Jack got a little
carried away. He is currently under investigation by a multi-agency task force, U.S. attorneys, and two
Washington, D.C., grand juries regarding $82 million he and former DeLay press aide Mike Scanlon billed (or
bilked from) six Indian tribes. Sen. John McCain is running a similar investigation out of Senate Indian
Affairs.
Abramoff, a top-tier Washington lobbyist, and Scanlon, who at the time was operating his own public
relations firm, billed their American Indian gaming clients at rates that stunned Washington’s lobbying
cultures. They pocketed much of the $82 million because it wasn’t billed by Abramoff’s lobbying firm but by
Scanlon’s small shop. But a big chunk of it went to Republican Party campaign committees. Scanlon, for
example, contributed $500,000 to the Republican Governors Association in 2002. Abramoff raised $100,000
for George W. Bush’s last two presidential campaigns (and served on Bush’s White House transition team.) He
also gave at least $30,000 to Tom Delay’s political action committee (and was a member of DeLay’s “kitchen
cabinet”).
DeLay is completely entangled in Abramoff’s Indian scheme and even took a $70,000 golf trip on the tribes’
tab. And accepted tens of thousands of Indian gaming contributions. But long before they discovered
American Indians, these guys were doing Micronesians on a remote Pacific archipelago. Captured from the
Japanese in World War II, the Northern Marianas was for a quarter of a century a United Nations trust
governed by the United States. In 1975 it became the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas
Islands (CNMI). Suddenly it was a sweatshop haven, exempt from U.S. import laws yet unregulated by U.S.
labor law. Apparel shops could pay $3.05 an hour, dodge the most basic workplace safety regs and still stick
“Made in the U.S.A.” tags on clothing sold to Tommy Hilfiger, Gap, Calvin Klein, Liz Claiborne, J.C. Penney
and other retail outlets.
Sweatshop owners and the islands’ governor feared intervention 10 years later: Retain my services as a
lobbyist and you get access to Tom DeLay.
He was working a seller’s market. There had been signs that Washington was not happy with labor conditions
on the islands. Reagan administration officials, never a group to worry too much about labor conditions, were
first to complain. Then, in 1992, a Bush I administration official told a congressional committee the garment
industry in the Commonwealth was built on a foundation of cheap alien labor, favorable tariff treatment, tax
breaks, rebates and other assistance underwritten by the federal government.
All true. All utterly understated.
The Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands was a for-profit American labor gulag. Women were
flown in from China, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Bangladesh, India and other underdeveloped countries. They
lived 10 or more to a room in workers’ compounds surrounded by fences topped by razor wire. Privacy was
sheets suspended between cots. Sanitation was poor. Women queued up at the single bathroom, faucet and
shower provided them.
They often worked 70-hour weeks and received no overtime pay. At times, some worked around the clock
for two or even three days to meet production quotas. They had little choice. Many workers spent much of
their first year paying off the $5,000 to $7,000 they had paid labor recruiters to book their jobs and
transportation.
In 1992, San Francisco Congressman George Miller began investigating working conditions on the islands. In
the same year, the U.S. Department of Labor fined five garment factories $9 million in back wages for
1,200 workers who had been locked in worksites and barracks and required to work 84-hour weeks with no
overtime. It was the largest fine the department ever levied. In 1995, the Philippines, not exactly a
country with a reputation for defending workers’ rights, began denying visas to Philippine citizens bound for
labor camps in the Commonwealth. By mid-1997, the Clinton administration was moving to impose federal
labor standards on the commonwealth. The president himself wrote to the governor, warning that “certain
labor practices in the islands are inconsistent with our country’s values.”
By then the government of commonwealth had retained Abramoff—at the time one of the hottest
lawyer/lobbyists on K Street. That connected the government to the good offices of then-Majority Whip
Tom DeLay.
DeLay delivered.
When Governor Froilan Tenorio visited Washington in 1997, DeLay stood on the floor of the U.S. House of
Representatives and told the story of the Marianas Miracle:
“Governor Tenorio did not come to Washington looking for taxpayer benefits, welfare or handouts. He came
to promote market reforms. During his administration, Governor Tenorio has actively pursued and courted
businesses around the globe to open shop on the CMI. Like President Reagan in the 1980s, Tenorio has kept
taxes low. Low tax rates have actually increased productivity, which in turn increased revenue for the
government of the CNMI…The economic changes that have taken place in the CNMI have been nothing short
of miraculous.”
He didn’t mention working conditions or the $9 million fine.
Abramoff also delivered. He paid for part of the trip for Tom and Christine DeLay, and their daughter Danni
Ferro, to spend Christmas 1997 and New Years' Eve at the Saipan Hyatt. They were accompanied by 14
staffers, including Scanlon, who would later help Abramoff elect his candidate for speaker of the house in
the Commonwealth. Airfare alone was $75,778. But it was chump change. Abramoff and his law firm billed
the Marianas $9 million. He even booked some work for a friend, right-wing Rabbi David Lapin, who pocketed
$1.2 million for an eight-day ethics course he taught in the Marianas. The high cost must have had
something to do with the difficulty of imposing ethical standards on such a wild place.
DeLay even took a tour of the garment factories. When a reporter asked him about sweatshop conditions
DeLay said the factories were air-conditioned. “I didn’t see anybody sweating.”
At a New Year’s Eve banquet at the Hyatt, DeLay toasted “one of my closest and dearest friends, Jack
Abramoff, your most able representative in Washington, D.C.” He then warned the factory owners and
elected officials about the Clinton administration.
“You are up against the forces of big labor and the radical left. Dick Armey and I made a promise to defend
the islands’ present system. Stand firm. Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from
our Creator. God bless you and the people of the Northern Marianas.”
God blessed them. Wages in the Marianas remained $3.05 an hour. Abramoff would return the compliment
DeLay paid him at the New Year’s eve party, later telling a group of cheering Young Republicans that, “Tom
DeLay is who we all want to be when we grow up.”
It’s too bad Jack can’t be on the podium to share that sentiment with the crowd gathered in Washington to
honor his old friend.
DeLay Ranking List –Top 25– –Full List– ( click heading to sort, name for detail )
Rank Full Name State District Party $ From DeLay (ARMPAC) $ to DeLay
(legal defense fund) Vote % DeLay Rankings
1 Tom Feeney FL 24 R $10,000 $5,000 97.42% 8.95
2 Bob Beauprez CO 7 R $20,000 $1,000 96.41% 8.93
3 Jim Ryun KS 2 R $31,777 $1,000 95.73% 8.91
4 Dave Weldon FL 15 R $13,569 $6,000 94.75% 8.90
5 Jim Gerlach PA 6 R $20,000 $2,000 90.16% 8.80
6 John Carter TX 31 R $20,000 $5,000 98.71% 7.97
7 Eric Cantor VA 7 R $15,000 $1,000 98.23% 7.96
8 Jo Bonner AL 1 R $10,000 $5,000 97.56% 7.95
8 Phil Gingrey GA 11 R $20,000 $5,000 97.37% 7.95
10 Todd Akin MO 2 R $15,000 $1,000 96.93% 7.94
10 Devin Gerald Nunes CA 21 R $10,000 $5,000 97.06% 7.94
10 Pete Sessions TX 32 R $21,644 $5,000 96.83% 7.94
13 Tom Cole OK 4 R $15,000 $5,000 96.63% 7.93
14 Mike Rogers AL 3 R $14,500 $5,000 95.98% 7.92
15 Henry Bonilla TX 23 R $12,942 $15,000 93.85% 7.88
16 Robert B Aderholt AL 4 R $19,571 $1,000 93.66% 7.87
17 Tom Tancredo CO 6 R $28,439 $1,000 92.36% 7.85
18 Jon Porter NV 3 R $25,000 $5,000 91.50% 7.83
19 Mark Green WI 8 R $29,414 $1,000 91.13% 7.82
20 Rob Simmons CT 2 R $29,500 $1,000 80.68% 7.61
21 Chris Chocola IN 2 R $30,000 $2,500 97.81% 7.46
21 John Culberson TX 7 R $5,000 $5,000 97.91% 7.46
23 Jeb Hensarling TX 5 R $20,000 $5,000 96.90% 7.44
24 Roy Blunt MO 7 R $1,019 $20,000 96.25% 7.43
25 Howard P McKeon CA 25 R $20 $5,000 95.35% 7.41
Produced by the Public Campaign Action Fund, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. We encourage other
organizations to disseminate this information widely. However, because the IRS has recently expanded audits
of 501(c)(3) organizations based on complaints filed by ideological opponents, 501(c)(3)s that wish to
redistribute this information should first consult with their attorney.
Not Rich? Not Poor? Watch Out
Bush's progressive indexing hurts the middle class more than anyone else.
By Robert Kuttner
Web Exclusive: 05.06.05
Print Friendly | Email Article
There is one useful thing about President Bush's ''progressive indexing" proposal for Social Security. It
finally makes explicit what we suspected -- that Bush intends benefit cuts for most American workers in
order to finance his privatization plan.
Privatization, let's recall, requires either new taxes or increased government borrowing or benefit cuts --
you can't spend the same money twice. Under the present system, payroll taxes pay the cost of Social
Security retirement checks. Bush would divert some of that tax money to optional private accounts.
Consequently, privatization would worsen Social Security's modest projected shortfall by trillions of dollars
unless benefits are cut.
''Progressive indexing" is a disguised benefit cut, but the disguise is pitifully transparent. Here's how it
works:
Under the present Social Security system, both workers and retirees are protected against inflation. During
the four decades of my working life, Americans' real incomes and consumer prices have gone steadily up. So
if I retire, say, in 2016, I will get an initial Social Security check based not on my income when I first
earned a paycheck in 1966 but on my lifetime contribution to the system adjusted for current prices. And
the inflation adjustments continue after I retire. (This cost-of-living guarantee is why Social Security beats
any private alternative.)
Bush wants to keep the postretirement adjustments but slash the inflation adjustments that occur during a
person's working life except for the poorest Americans. The result would be a steep reduction in benefits for
middle-class workers, since their anticipated retirement benefits are steadily eroded by inflation. People's
initial Social Security check would be progressively reduced relative to what current law promises.
According to the calculations of Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research,
the Bush plan would guarantee only the bottom 30 percent of wage earners the benefits they get under the
present system. Currently, that's people making less than $22,000 a year. Everyone else would get a
benefit cut, and the cuts would increase over time.
For example, someone with an income of $36,500 -- roughly the median -- would get a 13 percent benefit
cut by 2030, a 21 percent benefit cut by 2050, and a 40 percent cut by 2080, depending on when
retirement began.
An upper-middle-income earner with a current income of $90,000 would get steeper cuts: 24 percent by
2030, 41 percent by 2050, and 60 percent by 2080. And these cuts would apply whether or not you
diverted part of your payroll taxes to private accounts. These would be cuts in the guaranteed part of the
benefit.
Since affluent people are less reliant on Social Security, the proposed reductions as a share of total
retirement income would actually cut deepest for the middle-income earner -- a 14 percent cut in total
anticipated retirement income by 2050, according to Baker.
Another irony: The plan to cut benefits doesn't bring the Social Security system any closer to long-term
balance, which was Bush's prime rationale. Since the money saved by the benefit cuts would go to underwrite
the gap caused by the proposed private accounts, the traditional part of the system would actually be
further from long-term solvency than under present law. Greg Anrig of the Century Foundation calculates
that Bush's private accounts, even with the benefit cuts, would still require additional borrowing of $4.9
trillion during the first 20 years.
Why did Bush finally admit the need for benefit cuts? His privatization plan has not been getting good
reviews. His own political base includes people worried about fiscal irresponsibility. His strategists evidently
calculated that of the three possibilities -- higher taxes, greater borrowing, or benefits cuts -- the last
option would be the most palatable if it could be camouflaged as merely a technical change in indexing for
inflation and its impact postponed for decades.
Judging by the White House spin, there is one other coy reason. By retaining the present benefit structure
for the lowest-income wage-earners, George W. Bush can present himself as a friend of the poor.
In an inventive column titled ''Bush as Robin Hood," John Tierney, the newest conservative columnist to grace
the op-ed pages of The New York Times, wrote that ''Mr. Bush raised a supremely awkward question for
Democrats: Which party really cares about the poor?"
Of course, all that Bush's plan does for the poorest wage earners is to leave the present system intact. But
middle-income earners would really get whacked. One could turn the question around on Tierney and the
White House: Who really cares about the middle class?
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect. This column originally appeared in the Boston Globe.
Copyright © 2005 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Kuttner, "Not Rich? Not Poor?
Watch Out", The American Prospect Online, May 6, 2005. This article may not be resold, reprinted, or
redistributed for compensation of any kind without prior written permission from the author. Direct questions
about permissions to permissions@prospect.org.
Report shows 1996 Telecom Act Brought Less Diversity, More Concentration, Higher Consumer Prices, Less
News Coverage
Nearly a decade after Congress approved the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and with Congress once again
set to make major media and telecommunications policy, Common Cause today released a report showing how
the act failed to deliver on its promises of competition, increased diversity of viewpoints and lower prices for
consumers.
The report details how consumers and public interest groups were excluded from the process of writing the
1996 law while media industry lobbyists were deeply involved. Media companies have since increased their
influence in Washington. Eight major companies alone, their corporate parents and their three trade groups
have spent more than $400 million on lobbying and federal campaign contributions since 1997, raising fears
about the media policies Congress will adopt this year.
Common Cause president Chellie Pingree said: "Consumers and public interest groups must be given a real seat
at the table or history will repeat itself. We cannot have another decade of increased prices, declining
journalism, and growing media concentration."
The 1996 legislation was supposed to save consumers, over 10 years, $32 billion in lower local phone rates
and $78 billion in reduced cable bills. Industries supporting the new legislation predicted it would add 1.5
million jobs and boost the economy by $2 trillion.
Instead, the opposite has happened:
cable rates surged by about 50 percent,
local phone rates went up more than 20 percent.
By 2003, telecommunications companies shed half a million jobs.
By 2003, the market value of telecommunications companies fell by about $2 trillion,
large media companies are investing less in news and information, particularly on the local level.
"Corporate special interests were clearly out to protect themselves, not serve consumers or the public
interest when the 1996 Act was being negotiated. History cannot repeat itself. Not only are consumer
issues at stake, so is the quality and diversity of information we need to govern ourselves. The public's
priorities must be reflected as Congress makes major policy decisions this year," said Pingree
Common Cause on Thursday sent a letter to board members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
expressing concern about the governance of public broadcasting.
"We believe that the appointment process for members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting must be
changed, and that CPB's mission must be clarified and restored to its historic roots," Common Cause
President Chellie Pingree wrote.
High-Wage America
How we can reclaim a middle-class society
By Robert Kuttner
Issue Date: 1.1.04
Print Friendly | Email Article
This Prospect special report has demonstrated that America is needlessly generating a disproportionate
number of low-wage jobs, and that other paths are possible.
Low-wage America is a nation of hard-working people struggling to make ends meet -- and a nation of
politically disaffiliated and disempowered citizens. These two realities are related. As Christopher Jencks
suggests in his introduction, an America with a different constellation of political forces could be an America
with a different structure of wages and career opportunities -- as, indeed, our country has been in the not-
too-distant past. The story is therefore less about technological inevitabilities than politically determined
social arrangements.
This collection of articles should also lay to rest two related, powerful myths. The first is that it's natural
and desirable just to let many manufacturing and service jobs go to lower-wage countries, and that American
ingenuity will simply replace them with better jobs. In truth, the trading system, like the domestic economic
system, is based on a set of politically determined rules. The current trading system serves investors over
workers and undermines a more egalitarian social compact at home and overseas. But the present trade
regime, like its domestic counterpart, is not the only possible system.
The second myth is that the widening wage inequality and proliferation of low-wage jobs are primarily the
result of a skills deficit, which has been intensified by increased demand for "knowledge workers" in an era
of corporate restructuring. The old, stable firm with its paternalistic responsibility for workers has been
replaced by shifting and contingent loyalties. In the new economy, supposedly, what protects workers is their
"employability" -- the skills, and capacity to learn new skills, that they can bring to a succession of
employers.
This story rings true for some workers in some industries. However, this special report demonstrates that in
diverse fields, workers with exemplary skills are being displaced into lower-wage jobs; that many jobs
combine advanced technologies with low-skill work; and that advanced workers in America are increasingly in
head-to-head competition with one another, and with equally competent, cheaper foreign workers. Some of
the most highly skilled workers of all, such as doctors, are experiencing salary reductions and intensified
work demands because of revisions in social arrangements that have nothing whatever to do with skills or
learning capacity.
Better education and training per se will not ensure that bad jobs are replaced with good ones. Certainly
America needs better systems of basic education and lifelong learning, for civic reasons as well as economic
ones. Broadly speaking, a well-educated workforce is the source of an affluent society and an effective
democracy. But the allocation of that affluence is also a result of social arrangements that can be either
friendly or hostile to wage and salaried workers. So the distribution of earned income reflects not just
distribution of skills but of political power. Improving the human-capital side of the employment equation will
produce only frustrated, overeducated workers unless there is a rendezvous with good jobs. The idealized
progression of an America steadily shedding bad jobs and adding good ones requires supportive policies; it will
not just happen spontaneously.
If the story is not primarily one of skills deficits, what is it then? The low-wage job problem is mainly the
consequence of a new social contract strikingly different from that of the post-World War II boom. Without
romanticizing that era, which mostly excluded blacks and women from good jobs and careers, it's worth
recalling that the ground rules from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s included stronger regulation of
industries and of labor markets, broader acceptance of trade unions, and more insulation of the domestic
economy from speculative international capital flows and low-wage competition. Consequently, ordinary wage
and salaried workers had more bargaining power to command more of the total economic product. The
earnings distribution actually became slightly more equal between 1947 and 1973, a period also noted for
robust gross domestic product growth and relatively tight labor markets. So this more highly regulated and
socially just form of capitalism coexisted happily with an efficient economy.
The period that followed removed each of these props. Labor regulation was weakened. Industry began
aggressively resisting unions. As business regained political power in the 1970s, both parties also dismantled
economic regulation, with the net effect of reducing worker bargaining power. For example, a regulated
telephone or electric monopoly does not compete by reducing wages; a deregulated one does. The era that
began in the 1970s was also one of slower growth and accelerating import penetration, which also undermined
domestic wages. As the system stopped delivering for lower-wage workers, they increasingly stopped
participating in politics. By the time high rates of productivity growth returned in the late 1990s, they did
so in a radically transformed institutional and political context.
In the current era, firms are largely free of regulatory constraints, and managers can choose whatever path
they desire. The deregulated environment has intensified competitive pressures to cut costs, which often
turn out to be labor costs. The Russell Sage-Rockefeller study identified a low-wage, cost-cutting paradigm
in which firms minimize the employment of permanent workers, rely on temps and contract hires, shift work
to lower-wage locations, and live with barely competent workers and high rates of turnover as acceptable
costs of doing business. But the study identified an alternative competitive strategy in which employees are
viewed as assets, training for career progression is seen as a valuable investment, work processes are
regularly reorganized (with worker input) to increase productivity and innovation (again with worker
involvement) is continuous. Note that in both models, firms save costs by replacing human workers with
machines. But the former strategy yields more decently paying jobs.
Suppose we could raise political participation and put the low-wage job problem at the center of national
debate. What would be the most effective levers of national policy?
Unions. As several articles in this special section vividly show, unions can be forces not just for better wages
and working conditions but for skills training and career paths. The resulting wage premium, often, is more
than offset by the reduced turnover and increased worker productivity. The viability of unions, in turn, is
the product of worker and employer attitudes, of laws protecting the right to organize, and of the
competitive environment of the firm and the industry. A Las Vegas hotel can't relocate to Bangalore.
Increased labor costs of paying a living wage are passed along to tourists. Organize the whole town and the
unionized hotel suffers no competitive disadvantage. On the contrary, the union hotel's better trained, paid
and motivated staff attracts customers. Las Vegas is thus fertile soil for organizing. Even so, the success
there took extraordinary leadership, strategy and mobilization. Similar strategies have been pursued by the
Service Employees International Union, whose Justice for Janitors campaign seeks to organize the entire
local building-cleaning industry and then raise wages across the board.
What's true of hotels and janitors should be generally true of retailing, health care and education, all of
which stay close to customers, too. Even so, aspects of retailing (Internet sales), education (distance
learning) and even health care (remote reading of X-rays by radiologists in India, back-office record keeping
and billing in the Philippines) can be located almost anywhere. As we've seen, call-center organizing is tougher
than hotel organizing because the work itself can so easily be moved. However, even in a global, Internet
economy, a goodly percentage of the workforce necessarily stays near its customers. The biggest single boost
to labor organizing would be to enforce the freedom to join a union and bargain collectively that was
ostensibly guaranteed in the Wagner Act of 1935.
Economic Regulation. It is hard to imagine a full return to the regulation of the postwar boom, with
regulated, shared monopolies in telecommunications, airlines, hospitals, electric power, broadcasting and
several other core industries. Yet some of the deregulation introduced in the 1970s and '80s overreached
and has harmed both the larger economy and the distribution of income and good jobs. More stringent
financial regulation and a crackdown on options abuses could narrow the compensation spread between senior
executives and ordinary workers. Tax penalties could reduce the incentives of American firms to flee to tax
havens and to walk away from enterprises created with subsidies from local government. Tough pension
regulation would make retirement security part of the basic employment package. The federal Davis-Bacon
Act, requiring payment of "prevailing wages" in construction contracts, has long used federal procurement to
ensure decent earnings (and effective unions) in the skilled trades. The government could similarly use its
power as purchaser to raise wages and create career paths in child care and nursing homes. Right-to-know
legislation could enlist consumers on the side of workers. Socialization of health-insurance costs would save
corporations money and increase workers' basic purchasing power.
Labor Regulation. The federal minimum wage, at $5.15 an hour, is far below the purchasing power it once
had (greater than $7 in today's dollars). Regulations could reduce the incentive to shift to temps and
contract workers by requiring that contingent workers receive the same fringe benefits as permanent
employees. Unemployment insurance increases the bargaining power of all workers to hold out for better
wages. Like the minimum wage, unemployment insurance has been weakened -- fewer months of benefits, a
lower ratio of benefits to wages and fewer workers covered. All of these regulatory changes would help
induce employers to offer better jobs. But, as noted, the single most important regulatory reform would be
modernization of the Wagner Act to require recognition of a union when a majority of workers have signed
union cards, and to add serious punishments for employers who retaliate against pro-union workers (something
the law already prohibits but seldom punishes).
Tight Labor Markets. In the late 1990s, the brief period of full employment yielded dramatic gains for the
lowest-paid workers. In Europe, with its more highly regulated labor markets and more generous social
benefits, higher unemployment has less effect on the wages of most employed workers. But in the United
States, full employment is relatively more important as a source of higher wages.
Active Labor-Market Policies. The United States has no comprehensive strategy for systematically upgrading
worker skills and creating partnerships that reward training and technology. Rather, we have a profusion of
disconnected local experiments. The more that American workers are exposed to low-wage competition from
abroad, the more important it becomes to create a national competitive advantage based on skills and
technology. Workforce development, career ladders and technology partnerships add up to what the Swedes
have long called an "active labor-market policy." Sweden's relentless and systematic upgrading of the
technical virtuosity of its corporations and workers has allowed it to survive as a small, high-wage nation
with an open economy. An active labor market is not a silver bullet; rather, it is one tool among many that
also include wage regulation, full employment and unionization.
Global trade is the toughest issue, both conceptually and institutionally. The simpleminded case against free
trade is that it exports jobs. The glib and conventional rejoinder is that increased global commerce allows
capital, work and technology to flow to wherever they will be most efficiently deployed. When lower-wage
workers take jobs formerly held by Americans, developing nations get higher living standards, and Americans
get cheaper products and the opportunity to move to better jobs. So everyone wins, and critics are
protectionist fools.
But there is also a complex case against global commerce as currently structured. The issue is less the
protection of existing jobs than the protection of a hard-won social contract. Over the past century,
Americans and citizens of other advanced countries have struggled to overcome the anomalies and injustices
of a market economy. A laissez-faire system over-pollutes and under-invests in research, health, education,
training and other social goods that benefit economic development. Laissez-faire tolerates financial
manipulation and imbalances of demand that periodically result in depressions. A relatively closed system
permits both the politics and economics on which citizens can build a mixed economy -- a more efficient and
just form of regulated capitalism. We are voting citizens of the United States of America. There are no
citizens of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
The Economic Policy Institute recently reported that in the past eight recoveries, the labor share of total
income growth never fell below 55 percent of total income. In this recovery, labor's share is just 29
percent. The gap between executive compensation and worker compensation has never been wider, either.
These are the results of an altered social compact and shifts in political power that have both domestic and
global dynamics.
Footloose capital can flee domestic regulation by relocating to nations with lax labor laws, environmental
protections, tax collections and social investments. Industry is very alert to this reality and demands
extraterritorial enforcement of the laws that protect its interests (intellectual-property rights, repatriation
of profits), but it is delighted to shed the laws that protect worker and citizen rights. Globalization absent
social regulation, in short, allows industry to return to the political economy of the robber-baron era -- the
property rights without the labor and social rights.
Preventing global trade from punishing nations and firms with decent wages and social benefits requires
strategies for sustaining our own mixed economy and extending it worldwide -- as a condition of membership
in the trading system. That, and not simple protectionism, is the context in which demands arise for better
wages, working conditions and environmental standards in the Third World.
By the same token, there is no pure and simple definition of what constitutes free or fair trade. If a
government subsidizes domestic production, that is presumably "WTO illegal." But what if it subsidizes labor
costs by giving workers health benefits or an Earned Income Tax Credit? What if it subsidizes industry by
offering below-market loans or the fruits of government-subsidized basic research? What if regional
subsidies to depressed areas produce export winners? What if government subsidizes export industries by
failing to enforce its own labor laws, as Mexico and China palpably do? All governments do these things to
varying degrees. But America tends to cut nations like China a great deal of slack, partly because we need
their help geopolitically and partly because the current, business-dominated administration has no problems
with U.S.-based firms moving cheap production to China.
So the quest for pure free trade is an illusion. The rules are negotiable. We should be restructuring the
trading system so that it supports, rather than undermines, high-wage societies in each of its member
countries.
None of these policies, alone, will return America to the high-wage path. But taken together, they will
produce an economy more productive and far more equal than we now have.
Robert Kuttner
Copyright © 2004 by The American Prospect, Inc. Preferred Citation: Robert Kuttner,
Excerpt of article by Barbara Ehrenreich
College presidents, deans, provosts, chancellors-along with their deputies, assistants, and other members of
the ever-proliferating educational administrative workforce-insist that their labor problems are a sorry
distraction from their institutions' noble purpose of enlightening young minds. But administrators like to cloak
themselves in the moral authority of Western Civilization, such as it is, which means that labor issues are
hardly peripheral to the university's educational mission. On an increasing number of campuses, incoming
students are greeted at a formal fall convocation in which the top administrators-suited up in full medieval
mortarboard-and-gown attire-deliver platitudinous speeches about Character, Integrity, and Truth. The
message is that these weirdly costumed folks are not mere executives of a corporation but the guardians of
an ancient and sacred tradition. So when these same dignitaries turn out to be grossly underpaying their
employees and harassing the "troublemakers" among them, they do so with the apparent blessing of Aristotle,
Plato, and
Shakespeare.
If the university has so much to teach about social inequality, why shouldn't the students get credit for
learning it? The covert lessons from the administration should be formalized as course offerings. Here's the
curriculum.
Elementary Class Structure of the United States: The University as Microcosm. In this four-credit course,
we will examine the pay gradient from housekeeper (approximately $19,000/year) to president (more than
$270,000 for Miami University's James C. Garland and about $500,000 for Yale's Richard Levin.) In the
final exam, students will be asked to discuss the rationale for this pay gap in terms of the payees'
contributions to the university, ongoing housing and wardrobe expenses, and intrinsic human worth.
Presidential Architecture: A three-credit seminar course featuring field trips through university-provided
presidential dwellings, including "great rooms," wet bars, saunas, guest suites, and exercise rooms, with a
side trip, if time permits, to the trailer parks favored by the housekeeping and maintenance staff.
Race, Gender, and Occupational Preference: In this advanced sociology seminar, we will analyze the way
campus workers sort themselves into various occupations on the basis of race and gender, and we will explore
various theories attempting to explain this phenomenon-for example, the Innate Athleticism theory of why
African Americans so often prefer manual labor, and the Nimble Fingers theory of why females can usually
be found doing the clerical work.
Topics in University Financing: A four-credit business course tracing the development of the current two-
pronged approach to financing institutions of higher learning-tuition increases for the students plus pay
decreases for the staff. Alternative approaches to financing, featuring militant campaigns for adequate public
funding for higher education, will be thoroughly critiqued.
A cynic might say that the true purpose of college is to teach exactly such lessons. After all, college
graduates are a relative elite, comprising only 25 percent of the adult population, and they are expected to
fill the kind of administrative and managerial jobs that make it a positive advantage to be able to starve
workers, impose layoffs, and bust unions without losing a minute of sleep. Some students catch on with
lightning-like speed, such as Yale's precocious Scott Wexler, eighteen, who confided to The New York Times,
"I kind of like walking through the picket lines." This young man will make a fine assistant regional manager
at Wal-Mart-or possibly a college president.
Fortunately, not all students are buying the administrations' lesson plan. At Harvard in the spring of 2001,
students occupied an administration building for twenty-one days to persuade the administration to bargain
with campus janitors, many of whom were paid only $6.50 an hour. Last spring, Stanford students went on
their own hunger strike in support of campus blue collar workers. And it's not just the super-elite schools
that have been generating vigorous student-labor alliances. At mainstream public universities like those of
Maryland and Virginia, there are plenty of students who would agree with Miami University's Justin Katko,
when he writes that he got involved in the campus workers' struggle because "I could not allow such extreme
disparities as are found on college campuses . . . to exist without being ashamed of myself for apathy."
It's hard to concentrate in classrooms that were cleaned during the night by people who can barely make
rent. You tend to choke on your chicken fingers when the cafeteria is staffed by men and women who have to
work a second job in order to feed their own children.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive. She is the author of Nickel and Dimed: On (Not)
Getting By in America and Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War.
Published on Thursday, May 12, 2005 by the Baltimore Sun
A Double Whammy for Americans' Health
by Elizabeth Warren, David Himmelstein and Steffie Woolhandler
HEALTH INSURANCE is a bit like a hospital gown. From the front it appears to shield the essentials. Closer
inspection, however, reveals a lot uncovered behind - and only a tenuous thread prevents full exposure.
Most Americans think they're covered, except the 45 million who are uninsured ("going bare," in insurance
industry parlance). But few of us are really shielded from the financial ravages of illness.
Each year, 1 million people are bankrupted by illness or medical bills, according to the Harvard Consumer
Bankruptcy Project, the first in-depth study of medical bankruptcy.
Indeed, we found that about half of the families filing for bankruptcy do so in the aftermath of a serious
medical problem.
Most of those filing medical bankruptcies were solidly middle-class - they had gone to college, owned homes
and had good jobs. And more than three-quarters had health insurance when they first fell ill. But the
coverage often had gaping holes - co-payments, deductibles and exclusions, such as physical therapy. For
others, job-based coverage slipped away when a breadwinner got too sick to work.
The credit card industry, which successfully pushed Congress to make bankruptcy laws more punitive, has
portrayed bankruptcy as an easy way out for profligate spenders. Yet medical bankruptcy was anything but
easy. The debtors we interviewed arrived at the bankruptcy court emotionally and financially exhausted.
Twenty-two percent had gone without food; 30 percent had had a utility shut off; 50 percent had failed to
fill a doctor's prescription; and 61 percent went without needed medical care - all because they couldn't pay
their bills.
With the bankruptcy bill now law, American families are in for a one-two punch - less access to the
bankruptcy courts and more risk that their medical bills will crush them.
While the credit card industry seeks to close the bankruptcy courts to desperate families, employers and
politicians are pushing health policy reforms that will further shrink the financial protection for American
families.
From 1981 to 2001, medical bankruptcies increased 23-fold, driven by rising medical costs and declining
coverage. Now come health policy experts and employee benefit managers whose prescription for change is
"consumer-driven" health care, fancy language for higher co-payments, bigger deductibles and skimpier
coverage - the very things responsible for past increases in medical bankruptcy.
The new secretary of health and human services, Michael O. Leavitt, pioneered "nano-insurance" - coverage
so shrunken you need a microscope to see it. His Utah Medicaid program offered insurance that paid for
neither specialist visits nor hospital care, a plan he wants to encourage other states to emulate by offering
regulatory waivers.
To theorists of nano-coverage, patients are insatiable consumers of medical care who must be reined in by
saddling them with a bigger share of the costs. But most people - aside from true hypochondriacs - want
only the medical care they need.
In addition, patients have little choice when it comes to the expensive care that accounts for the vast
majority of costs. How many can comparison shop emergency rooms in the midst of a heart attack, or
knowledgeably appraise the cost-benefit calculations of chemotherapies when they have leukemia?
In the real world, holes in coverage don't save money, they merely shift costs away from employers and
government and let them fall on the backs of patients. Indeed, Americans already pay the highest co-
payments and deductibles in the world, yet our per capita health spending is twice the average of other
wealthy nations - by far the highest on Earth.
While most Americans are undercovered - or go entirely bare - the rest of the developed world enjoys full
protection because of national health insurance. Elsewhere, medical bankruptcies are rare, and the only
wardrobe malfunction most patients worry about involves their hospital gowns.
Elizabeth Warren is the Leo Gottlieb professor of law at Harvard Law School. David Himmelstein and
Steffie Woolhandler are medical doctors and associate professors of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
© Copyright 2005 Baltimore Sun
Imperialism 101
Chapter 1 of Against Empire by Michael Parenti
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Imperialism has been the most powerful force in world history over the last four or five centuries, carving up
whole continents while oppressing indigenous peoples and obliterating entire civilizations. Yet, it is seldom
accorded any serious attention by our academics, media commentators, and political leaders. When not
ignored outright, the subject of imperialism has been sanitized, so that empires become "commonwealths,"
and colonies become "territories" or "dominions" (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, "commonwealths" too).
Imperialist military interventions become matters of "national defense," "national security," and maintaining
"stability" in one or another region. In this book I want to look at imperialism for what it really is.
Across the Entire Globe
By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation
expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.
The earliest victims of Western European imperialism were other Europeans. Some 800 years ago, Ireland
became the first colony of what later became known as the British empire. A part of Ireland still remains
under British occupation. Other early Caucasian victims included the Eastern Europeans. The people
Charlemagne worked to death in his mines in the early part of the ninth century were Slavs. So frequent and
prolonged was the enslavement of Eastern Europeans that "Slav" became synonymous with servitude. Indeed,
the word "slave" derives from "Slav." Eastern Europe was an early source of capital accumulation, having
become wholly dependent upon Western manufactures by the seventeenth century.
A particularly pernicious example of intra-European imperialism was the Nazi aggression during World War
II, which gave the German business cartels and the Nazi state an opportunity to plunder the resources and
exploit the labor of occupied Europe, including the slave labor of concentration camps.
The preponderant thrust of the European, North American, and Japanese imperial powers has been directed
against Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the nineteenth century, they saw the Third World as not only a
source of raw materials and slaves but a market for manufactured goods. By the twentieth century, the
industrial nations were exporting not only goods but capital, in the form of machinery, technology,
investments, and loans. To say that we have entered the stage of capital export and investment is not to
imply that the plunder of natural resources has ceased. If anything, the despoliation has accelerated.
Of the various notions about imperialism circulating today in the United States, the dominant view is that it
does not exist. Imperialism is not recognized as a legitimate concept, certainly not in regard to the United
States. One may speak of "Soviet imperialism" or "nineteenth-century British imperialism" but not of U.S.
imperialism. A graduate student in political science at most universities in this country would not be granted
the opportunity to research U.S. imperialism, on the grounds that such an undertaking would not be scholarly.
While many people throughout the world charge the United States with being an imperialist power, in this
country persons who talk of U.S. imperialism are usually judged to be mouthing ideological blather.
The Dynamic of Capital Expansion
Imperialism is older than capitalism. The Persian, Macedonian, Roman, and Mongol empires all existed
centuries before the Rothschilds and Rockefellers. Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in
plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it
systematically accumulates capital through the organized exploitation of labor and the penetration of
overseas markets. Capitalist imperialism invests in other countries, transforming and dominating their
economies, cultures, and political life, integrating their financial and productive structures into an
international system of capital accumulation.
A central imperative of capitalism is expansion. Investors will not put their money into business ventures
unless they can extract more than they invest. Increased earnings come only with a growth in the
enterprise. The capitalist ceaselessly searches for ways of making more money in order to make still more
money. One must always invest to realize profits, gathering as much strength as possible in the face of
competing forces and unpredictable markets.
Given its expansionist nature, capitalism has little inclination to stay home. Almost 150 years ago, Marx and
Engels described a bourgeoisie that "chases over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere,
settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. . . . It creates a world after its own image." The
expansionists destroy whole societies. Self-sufficient peoples are forcibly transformed into disfranchised
wage workers. Indigenous communities and folk cultures are replaced by mass-market, mass-media, consumer
societies. Cooperative lands are supplanted by agribusiness factory farms, villages by desolate shanty towns,
autonomous regions by centralized autocracies.
Consider one of a thousand such instances. A few years ago the Los Angeles Times carried a special report
on the rainforests of Borneo in the South Pacific. By their own testimony, the people there lived contented
lives. They hunted, fished, and raised food in their jungle orchards and groves. But their entire way of life
was ruthlessly wiped out by a few giant companies that destroyed the rainforest in order to harvest the
hardwood for quick profits. Their lands were turned into ecological disaster areas and they themselves were
transformed into disfranchised shantytown dwellers, forced to work for subsistence wages--when fortunate
enough to find employment.
North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known
mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. But the pursuit of natural resources is not the only
reason for capitalist overseas expansion. There is the additional need to cut production costs and maximize
profits by investing in countries with cheaper labor markets. U.S. corporate foreign investment grew 84
percent from 1985 to 1990, the most dramatic increase being in cheap-labor countries like South Korea,
Taiwan, Spain, and Singapore.
Because of low wages, low taxes, nonexistent work benefits, weak labor unions, and nonexistent occupational
and environmental protections, U.S. corporate profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than
in developed countries. Citibank, one of the largest U.S. firms, earns about 75 percent of its profits from
overseas operations. While profit margins at home sometimes have had a sluggish growth, earnings abroad
have continued to rise dramatically, fostering the development of what has become known as the multinational
or transnational corporation. Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of
the capital assets of the global free market and are extending their grasp into the ex-communist countries
of Eastern Europe.
Transnationals have developed a global production line. General Motors has factories that produce cars,
trucks and a wide range of auto components in Canada, Brazil, Venezuela, Spain, Belgium, Yugoslavia, Nigeria,
Singapore, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and a dozen other countries. Such "multiple sourcing"
enables GM to ride out strikes in one country by stepping up production in another, playing workers of various
nations against each other in order to discourage wage and benefit demands and undermine labor union
strategies.
Not Necessary, Just Compelling
Some writers question whether imperialism is a necessary condition for capitalism, pointing out that most
Western capital is invested in Western nations, not in the Third World. If corporations lost all their Third
World investments, they argue, many of them could still survive on their European and North American
markets. In response, one should note that capitalism might be able to survive without imperialism--but it
shows no inclination to do so. It manifests no desire to discard its enormously profitable Third World
enterprises. Imperialism may not be a necessary condition for investor survival but it seems to be an
inherent tendency and a natural outgrowth of advanced capitalism. Imperial relations may not be the only
way to pursue profits, but they are the most lucrative way.
Whether imperialism is necessary for capitalism is really not the question. Many things that are not
absolutely necessary are still highly desirable, therefore strongly preferred and vigorously pursued. Overseas
investors find the Third World's cheap labor, vital natural resources, and various other highly profitable
conditions to be compellingly attractive. Superprofits may not be necessary for capitalism's survival but
survival is not all that capitalists are interested in. Superprofits are strongly preferred to more modest
earnings. That there may be no necessity between capitalism and imperialism does not mean there is no
compelling linkage.
The same is true of other social dynamics. For instance, wealth does not necessarily have to lead to
luxurious living. A higher portion of an owning class's riches could be used for investment rather personal
consumption. The very wealthy could survive on more modest sums but that is not how most of them prefer
to live. Throughout history, wealthy classes generally have shown a preference for getting the best of
everything. After all, the whole purpose of getting rich off other people's labor is to live well, avoiding all
forms of thankless toil and drudgery, enjoying superior opportunities for lavish life-styles, medical care,
education, travel, recreation, security, leisure, and opportunities for power and prestige. While none of
these things are really "necessary," they are fervently clung to by those who possess them--as witnessed
by the violent measures endorsed by advantaged classes whenever they feel the threat of an equalizing or
leveling democratic force.
Myths of Underdevelopment
The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World," to
distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely
defunct "Second World" of communist states. Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by
most Western observers as an original historic condition. We are asked to believe that it always existed,
that poor countries are poor because their lands have always been infertile or their people unproductive.
In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals
and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through all the trouble to steal and plunder
them. One does not go to poor places for self-enrichment. The Third World is rich. Only its people are
poor--and it is because of the pillage they have endured.
The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago and continues to
this day. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices, then flax, hemp, timber,
molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory,
ebony, and later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. Not to
be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave
labor.
Through the centuries of colonization, many self-serving imperialist theories have been spun. I was taught in
school that people in tropical lands are slothful and do not work as hard as we denizens of the temperate
zone. In fact, the inhabitants of warm climates have performed remarkably productive feats, building
magnificent civilizations well before Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. And today they often work long,
hard hours for meager sums. Yet the early stereotype of the "lazy native" is still with us. In every
capitalist society, the poor--both domestic and overseas--regularly are blamed for their own condition.
We hear that Third World peoples are culturally retarded in their attitudes, customs, and technical
abilities. It is a convenient notion embraced by those who want to depict Western investments as a rescue
operation designed to help backward peoples help themselves. This myth of "cultural backwardness" goes back
to ancient times, when conquerors used it to justify enslaving indigenous peoples. It was used by European
colonizers over the last five centuries for the same purpose.
What cultural supremacy could by claimed by the Europeans of yore? From the fifteenth to nineteenth
centuries Europe was "ahead" in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings, murders, and other
violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, plagues, and other bodily
afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); mistreatment of women and children; and
frequency of famines, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacres, and inquisitional torture. Those who
claim the West has been the most advanced civilization should keep such "achievements" in mind.
More seriously, we might note that Europe enjoyed a telling advantage in navigation and armaments. Muskets
and cannon, Gatling guns and gunboats, and today missiles, helicopter gunships, and fighter bombers have been
the deciding factors when West meets East and North meets South. Superior firepower, not superior
culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of supremacy that today are still
maintained by force, though not by force alone.
It was said that colonized peoples were biologically backward and less evolved than their colonizers. Their
"savagery" and "lower" level of cultural evolution were emblematic of their inferior genetic evolution. But
were they culturally inferior? In many parts of what is now considered the Third World, people developed
impressive skills in architecture, horticulture, crafts, hunting, fishing, midwifery, medicine, and other such
things. Their social customs were often far more gracious and humane and less autocratic and repressive than
anything found in Europe at that time. Of course we must not romanticize these indigenous societies, some of
which had a number of cruel and unusual practices of their own. But generally, their peoples enjoyed
healthier, happier lives, with more leisure time, than did most of Europe's inhabitants.
Other theories enjoy wide currency. We hear that Third World poverty is due to overpopulation, too many
people having too many children to feed. Actually, over the last several centuries, many Third World lands
have been less densely populated than certain parts of Europe. India has fewer people per acre--but more
poverty--than Holland, Wales, England, Japan, Italy, and a few other industrial countries. Furthermore, it
is the industrialized nations of the First World, not the poor ones of the Third, that devour some 80
percent of the world's resources and pose the greatest threat to the planet's ecology.
This is not to deny that overpopulation is a real problem for the planet's ecosphere. Limiting population
growth in all nations would help the global environment but it would not solve the problems of the poor--
because overpopulation in itself is not the cause of poverty but one of its effects. The poor tend to have
large families because children are a source of family labor and income and a support during old age.
Frances Moore Lappe and Rachel Schurman found that of seventy Third World countries, there were six--
China, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Chile, Burma, and Cuba--and the state of Kerala in India that had managed to
lower their birth rates by one third. They enjoyed neither dramatic industrial expansion nor high per capita
incomes nor extensive family planning programs. The factors they had in common were public education and
health care, a reduction of economic inequality, improvements in women's rights, food subsidies, and in some
cases land reform. In other words, fertility rates were lowered not by capitalist investments and economic
growth as such but by socio-economic betterment, even of a modest scale, accompanied by the emergence of
women's rights.
Artificially Converted to Poverty
What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries.
With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were actually set back in their
development sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810,
India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow
was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods and were
dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a
matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians
were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was
reduced to being a cow milked by British financiers.
By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million pounds. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by
almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities the Indians were obliged to send to
Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty
million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. The massive poverty we associate with India was not that
country's original historical condition. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development,
then it forcibly underdeveloped that country.
Similar bleeding processes occurred throughout the Third World. The enormous wealth extracted should
remind us that there originally were few really poor nations. Countries like Brazil, Indonesia, Chile, Bolivia,
Zaire, Mexico, Malaysia, and the Philippines were and sometimes still are rich in resources. Some lands have
been so thoroughly plundered as to be desolate in all respects. However, most of the Third World is not
"underdeveloped" but overexploited. Western colonization and investments have created a lower rather than a
higher living standard.
Referring to what the English colonizers did to the Irish, Frederick Engels wrote in 1856: "How often have
the Irish started out to achieve something, and every time they have been crushed politically and
industrially. By consistent oppression they have been artificially converted into an utterly impoverished
nation." So with most of the Third World. The Mayan Indians in Guatemala had a more nutritious and varied
diet and better conditions of health in the early 16th century before the Europeans arrived than they have
today. They had more craftspeople, architects, artisans, and horticulturists than today. What is called
underdevelopment is not an original historical condition but a product of imperialism's superexploitation.
Underdevelopment is itself a development.
Imperialism has created what I have termed "maldevelopment": modern office buildings and luxury hotels in
the capital city instead of housing for the poor, cosmetic surgery clinics for the affluent instead of hospitals
for workers, cash export crops for agribusiness instead of food for local markets, highways that go from the
mines and latifundios to the refineries and ports instead of roads in the back country for those who might
hope to see a doctor or a teacher.
Wealth is transferred from Third World peoples to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and
more recently Japan) by direct plunder, by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous
taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly
inflated prices. The colonized country is denied the freedom of trade and the opportunity to develop its own
natural resources, markets, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment gives way to wage
labor. From 1970 to 1980, the number of wage workers in the Third World grew from 72 million to 120
million, and the rate is accelerating.
Hundreds of millions of Third World peoples now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban
slums, suffering hunger, disease, and illiteracy, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by
agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef,
instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. A study of twenty of the poorest countries,
compiled from official statistics, found that the number of people living in what is called "absolute poverty"
or rockbottom destitution, the poorest of the poor, is rising 70,000 a day and should reach 1.5 billion by the
year 2000 (San Francisco Examiner, June 8, 1994).
Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, their mental and physical
health severely damaged by endless exploitation. A documentary film on the Discovery Channel (April 24,
1994) reported that in countries like Russia, Thailand, and the Philippines, large numbers of minors are sold
into prostitution to help their desperate families survive. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and
Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and
mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care.
In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. Tens of thousands labor in glass factories in
temperatures as high as 100 degrees. In one plant, four-year-olds toil from 5 o'clock in the morning until
the dead of night, inhaling fumes and contracting emphysema, tuberculosis, and other respiratory diseases.
In the Philippines and Malaysia corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment. The
pursuit of profit becomes a pursuit of evil.
Development Theory
When we say a country is "underdeveloped," we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way,
that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of
"underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street Journal, and parties of various political
persuasion to refer to Third World countries as "developing" nations, a term somewhat less insulting than
"underdeveloped" but equally misleading. I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" seems to be just
a euphemistic way of saying "underdeveloped but belatedly starting to do something about it." It still implies
that poverty was an original historic condition and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely
suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.
The dominant theory of the last half century, enunciated repeatedly by writers like Barbara Ward and W.
W. Rostow and afforded wide currency in the United States and other parts of the Western world,
maintains that it is up to the rich nations of the North to help uplift the "backward" nations of the South,
bringing them technology and teaching them proper work habits. This is an updated version of "the White
man's burden," a favorite imperialist fantasy.
According to the development scenario, with the introduction of Western investments, the backward economic
sectors of the poor nations will release their workers, who then will find more productive employment in the
modern sector at higher wages. As capital accumulates, business will reinvest its profits, thus creating still
more products, jobs, buying power, and markets. Eventually a more prosperous economy evolves.
This "development theory" or "modernization theory," as it is sometimes called, bears little relation to
reality. What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitive form of dependent capitalism.
Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of transnational corporate investment. The
problem is not poor lands or unproductive populations but foreign exploitation and class inequality. Investors go
into a country not to uplift it but to enrich themselves.
People in these countries do not need to be taught how to farm. They need the land and the implements to
farm. They do not need to be taught how to fish. They need the boats and the nets and access to shore
frontage, bays, and oceans. They need industrial plants to cease dumping toxic effusions into the waters.
They do not need to be convinced that they should use hygienic standards. They do not need a Peace Corps
Volunteer to tell them to boil their water, especially when they cannot afford fuel or have no access to
firewood. They need the conditions that will allow them to have clean drinking water and clean clothes and
homes. They do not need advice about balanced diets from North Americans. They usually know what foods
best serve their nutritional requirements. They need to be given back their land and labor so that they
might work for themselves and grow food for their own consumption.
The legacy of imperial domination is not only misery and strife, but an economic structure dominated by a
network of international corporations which themselves are beholden to parent companies based in North
America, Europe and Japan. If there is any harmonization or integration, it occurs among the global investor
classes, not among the indigenous economies of these countries. Third World economies remain fragmented
and unintegrated both between each other and within themselves, both in the flow of capital and goods and in
technology and organization. In sum, what we have is a world economy that has little to do with the economic
needs of the world's people.
Neoimperialism: Skimming the Cream
Sometimes imperial domination is explained as arising from an innate desire for domination and expansion, a
"territorial imperative." In fact, territorial imperialism is no longer the prevailing mode. Compared to the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the European powers carved up the world among themselves,
today there is almost no colonial dominion left. Colonel Blimp is dead and buried, replaced by men in business
suits. Rather than being directly colonized by the imperial power, the weaker countries have been granted
the trappings of sovereignty--while Western finance capital retains control of the lion's share of their
profitable resources. This relationship has gone under various names: "informal empire," "colonialism without
colonies," "neocolonialism," and "neoimperialism."
U.S. political and business leaders were among the earliest practitioners of this new kind of empire, most
notably in Cuba at the beginning of the twentieth century. Having forcibly wrested the island from Spain in
the war of 1898, they eventually gave Cuba its formal independence. The Cubans now had their own
government, constitution, flag, currency, and security force. But major foreign policy decisions remained in U.
S. hands as did the island's wealth, including its sugar, tobacco, and tourist industries, and major imports
and exports.
Historically U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring
more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without bothering to own and
administer the nations themselves. Under neoimperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes
everywhere--frequently assisted by the sword.
After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a strategy of neoimperialism. Left
financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third
World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more
expedient than outright colonial rule. They discovered that the removal of a conspicuously intrusive colonial
rule made it more difficult for nationalist elements within the previously colonized countries to mobilize anti-
imperialist sentiments.
Though the newly established government might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more
legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a colonial administration controlled by the imperial power.
Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country
while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on accumulating capital--which is all they really want
to do.
After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the
unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere.
Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one
or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.
The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the
global capitalist orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and aid. So
we witnessed the curious phenomenon of leaders of newly independent Third World nations denouncing
imperialism as the source of their countries' ills, while dissidents in these countries denounced these same
leaders as collaborators of imperialism.
In many instances a comprador class emerged or was installed as a first condition for independence. A
comprador class is one that cooperates in turning its own country into a client state for foreign interests. A
client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign
investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw
materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, few effective labor unions, no minimum wage or child
labor or occupational safety laws, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective
laws that do exist go largely unenforced.
In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United
States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in
a country with strong economic regulations. The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its
leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability
is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest
technologies of terror and repression. Still, neoimperialism carries risks. The achievement of de jure
independence eventually fosters expectations of de facto independence. The forms of self rule incite a desire
for the fruits of self rule. Sometimes a national leader emerges who is a patriot and reformer rather than a
comprador collaborator. Therefore, the changeover from colonialism to neocolonialism is not without risks for
the imperialists and represents a net gain for popular forces in the world.
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The Super Rich Are Out of Sight
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January 2000
The super rich, the less than 1 percent of the population who own the lion's share of the nation's wealth, go
uncounted in most income distribution reports. Even those who purport to study the question regularly overlook
the very wealthiest among us. For instance, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, relying on the latest
U.S. Census Bureau data, released a report in December 1997 showing that in the last two decades "incomes
of the richest fifth increased by 30 percent or nearly $27,000 after adjusting for inflation." The average
income of the top 20 percent was $117,500, or almost 13 times larger than the $9,250 average income of
the poorest 20 percent.
But where are the super rich? An average of $117,500 is an upper-middle income, not at all representative
of a rich cohort, let alone a super rich one. All such reports about income distribution are based on U.S.
Census Bureau surveys that regularly leave Big Money out of the picture. A few phone calls to the Census
Bureau in Washington D.C. revealed that for years the bureau never interviewed anyone who had an income
higher than $300,000. Or if interviewed, they were never recorded as above the "reportable upper limit" of
$300,000, the top figure allowed by the bureau's computer program. In 1994, the bureau lifted the upper
limit to $1 million. This still excludes the very richest who own the lion's share of the wealth, the hundreds
of billionaires and thousands of multimillionaires who make many times more than $1 million a year. The super
rich simply have been computerized out of the picture.
When asked why this procedure was used, an official said that the Census Bureau's computers could not
handle higher amounts. A most improbable excuse, since once the bureau decided to raise the upper limit
from $300,000 to $1 million it did so without any difficulty, and it could do so again. Another reason the
official gave was "confidentiality." Given place coordinates, someone with a very high income might be
identified. Furthermore, he said, high-income respondents usually understate their investment returns by
about 40 to 50 percent. Finally, the official argued that since the super rich are so few, they are not likely
to show up in a national sample.
But by designating the (decapitated) top 20 percent of the entire nation as the "richest" quintile, the Census
Bureau is including millions of people who make as little as $70,000. If you make over $100,000, you are in
the top 4 percent. Now $100,000 is a tidy sum indeed, but it's not super rich -- as in Mellon, Morgan, or
Murdock. The difference between Michael Eisner, Disney CEO who pocketed $565 million in 1996, and the
individuals who average $9,250 is not 13 to 1 -- the reported spread between highest and lowest quintiles
-- but over 61,000 to 1.
Speaking of CEOs, much attention has been given to the top corporate managers who rake in tens of millions
of dollars annually in salaries and perks. But little is said about the tens of billions that these same
corporations distribute to the top investor class each year, again that invisible fraction of 1 percent of the
population. Media publicity that focuses exclusively on a handful of greedy top executives conveniently avoids
any exposure of the super rich as a class. In fact, reining in the CEOs who cut into the corporate take would
well serve the big shareholder's interests.
* * *
Two studies that do their best to muddy our understanding of wealth, conducted respectively by the Rand
Corporation and the Brookings Institution and widely reported in the major media, found that individuals
typically become rich not from inheritance but by maintaining their health and working hard. Most of their
savings comes from their earnings and has nothing to do with inherited family wealth, the researchers would
have us believe. In typical social-science fashion, they prefigured their findings by limiting the scope of their
data. Both studies failed to note that achieving a high income is itself in large part due to inherited
advantages. Those coming from upper-strata households have a far better opportunity to maintain their
health and develop their performance, attend superior schools, and achieve the advanced professional
training, contacts, and influence needed to land the higher paying positions.
More importantly, both the Rand and Brookings studies fail to include the super rich, those who sit on
immense and largely inherited fortunes. Instead, the investigators concentrate on upper-middle-class
professionals and managers, most of whom earn in the $100,000 to $300,000 range -- which indicates that
the researchers have no idea how rich the very rich really are.
When pressed on this point, they explain that there is a shortage of data on the very rich. Being such a tiny
percentage, "they're an extremely difficult part of the population to survey," pleads Rand economist James
P. Smith, offering the same excuse given by the Census Bureau officials. That Smith finds the super rich
difficult to survey should not cause us to overlook the fact that their existence refutes his findings about
self-earned wealth. He seems to admit as much when he says, "This [study] shouldn't be taken as a
statement that the Rockefellers didn't give to their kids and the Kennedys didn't give to their kids." (New
York Times, July 7, 1995) Indeed, most of the really big money is inherited -- and by a portion of the
population that is so minuscule as to be judged statistically inaccessible.
* * *
The higher one goes up the income scale, the greater the rate of capital accumulation. Economist Paul
Krugman notes that not only have the top 20 percent grown more affluent compared with everyone below, the
top 5 percent have grown richer compared with the next 15 percent. The top one percent have become richer
compared with the next 4 percent. And the top 0.25 percent have grown richer than the next 0.75 percent.
That top 0.25 owns more wealth than the other 99 percent combined. It has been estimated that if
children's play blocks represented $1,000 each, over 98 percent of us would have incomes represented by
piles of blocks that went not more than a few yards off the ground, while the top one percent would stack
many times higher than the Eiffel Tower.
Marx's prediction about the growing gap between rich and poor still haunts the land -- and the entire planet.
The growing concentration of wealth creates still more poverty. As some few get ever richer, more people
fall deeper into destitution, finding it increasingly difficult to emerge from it. The same pattern holds
throughout much of the world. For years now, as the wealth of the few has been growing, the number of
poor has been increasing at a faster rate than the earth's population. A rising tide sinks many boats.
To grasp the true extent of wealth and income inequality in the United States, we should stop treating the
"top quintile" -- the upper-middle class -- as the "richest" cohort in the country. But to do that, we need
to look beyond the Census Bureau's cooked statistics. We need to catch sight of that tiny, stratospheric
apex that owns most of the world.
Michael Parenti is the author of Against Empire, Dirty Truths, America Besieged, and most recently, History
as Mystery, all published by City Lights Books.
The Cruise Missile Left (part 5):
By Edward Herman
Establishment politicians, media, and intellectuals use the word genocide with great abandon, but with a
hugely politicized selectivity. It is an invidious word, like terrorism, so that attaching it to an enemy and
target is helpful in demonizing, thereby setting up the target for bombing and invasion, and establishing a
case for pursuit of its leaders via assassination squads or tribunals.
Genocide was used often to describe the "killing fields" of Pol Pot, but not the killing fields of Vietnam where
the United States ravaged the country, killed many more people than did Pol Pot, and left a destroyed
country and chemical warfare heritage of hundreds of thousands of children with birth defects. The word
was never used in the U.S. mainstream to describe Indonesian operations in East Timor, where the invasion
of 1975 and murderous occupation killed off between a quarter and a third of the population, a larger
fraction than in Cambodia and not attributable, at least in part, to a prior war and its after-effects (as in
Cambodia).
"Genocide" was applied frequently to describe Serb actions in Bosnia and Kosovo in the 1990s, actions
supposedly the basis of "humanitarian intervention" and a major tribunal operation to bring Serbs to book.
The link here between Western target, invidious word usage, focus of attention of the "cruise missile left"
and mainstream news and commentary, and dedicated, long-lasting and expensive tribunal pursuit of the
chosen villains, is dramatic. The intellectual apologists for Western imperialism have pretended that the
Yugoslavia Tribunal is not fully politicized, but is rather pursuing justice, as they skirt by the facts that
nothing happened to Tudjman, Izetbegovic, or any other non-Serb high officials guilty of war crimes in the
Balkans.
(These would properly include Clinton, Blair and their top associates, who were guilty of aggression in addition
to bombing tactics that even Human Rights Watch, a notorious apologist for NATO policies in the Balkans,
condemned as violations of "international humanitarian law").
The apologists claimed that the global reach of justice was approaching institutionalization in the 1990s—that
human rights "has taken hold not just as a rhetorical but as an operating principle in all the major Western
capitals" (David Rieff)--pointing beyond the Yugoslavia Tribunal to the Spanish effort to bring Pinochet to
book, the Belgian case brought against Ariel Sharon, and the installation of the International Court of
Justice (ICJ).
They slighted the facts that nothing happened to Pinochet, that the case against Sharon was ended by a
change in Belgian law (under U.S. pressure), that no tribunal was organized to deal with triple genocidist
Suharto, and that the ICJ is repudiated by the United States despite groveling and compromising efforts to
accommodate U.S. demands for assured exemption from ICJ jurisdiction.
So it is a party line truth that only a U.S. target can commit "genocide" or even engage in "ethnic cleansing,"
while the United States can commit blatant aggression with only slightly delayed UN accommodation, and it
and its clients don't aggress, ethnically cleanse, or commit genocide. This applies pretty much across the
board..
The contrast between the treatment of Yugoslavia and Israel-Palestine is dramatic illustration of the double
standard. For one thing, Israeli ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the "promised land" has been going on
for half a century, and it is clear that the steady expropriations, demolitions, and killings of the Palestinians
is for the benefit of Jewish settlements, not for "security." So this is as pure an illustration of ethnic
cleansing as can be found on the face of the earth; Israeli historian Benny Morris, in his recent
acknowledgement of this "ethnic purification," complained only that it hadn't gone far enough.
By contrast, the Serb attacks on Kosovo Albanians before and during the 1999 bombing war were never to
provide room for Serb settlements, they were a feature of an ongoing civil war (stoked by outsiders), so
that this wasn't true ethnic cleansing at all. There was ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Croatia, but it was
carried out by all parties, struggling to establish land control in an externally encouraged civil war.
Nevertheless, the phrase ethnic cleansing was used lavishly to describe Serb actions in Kosovo, as well as
Bosnia, but it is rarely applied to Israeli behavior.
In the Genocide Convention of 1948, the word genocide was defined loosely, as any act "committed with the
intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such." Genocidal acts
included causing serious "mental harm" or inflicting "conditions of life" aimed at such destruction. Can anything
be clearer than that the Sharon government is trying to destroy the Palestinians as a national group by
creating intolerable "conditions of life"?
Under "Operation Defensive Shield" Israel carried out a "systematic process of demolition of Palestinian
public and private property, and mass expropriation of Palestinian land on behalf of settlers" (Appeal by 153
Israeli academics); "the Israeli army deliberately trashed the inside of every Palestinian institution that it
did not entirely destroy—schools, charities, health organizations, banks, radio and TV stations, even a puppet
theatre" (Gila Svirsky).
As Rania Awwad has said, "Sharon's solution is to depopulate as much as possible the Occupied Palestinian
Territories by making life for its citizens unbearable. And what could be more unbearable than watching your
children cry themselves to sleep from hunger, night after night?" The Israeli leadership is not trying to
exterminate all Palestinians, but they are prepared to kill them freely, take away their land, and make life
so harsh that they will die off or leave. That this is a genocidal process is sometimes suggested in the
Israeli media, but not in the Free Press.
The cruise missile left adheres closely to the party line on genocide, which is why its members thrive in the
New York Times and other establishment vehicles. This is true of Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and David
Rieff, but I will focus here on Samantha Power, whose large volume on genocide, "A Problem From Hell":
America and the Age of Genocide won a Pulitzer prize, and who is currently the expert of choice on the
subject in the mainstream media (and even in The Nation and on the Bill Moyers show).
Power never departs from the selectivity dictated by the establishment party line. That requires, first and
foremost, simply ignoring cases of direct U.S. or U.S.-sponsored (or otherwise approved) genocide. Thus the
Vietnam war, in which millions were directly killed by U.S. forces, does not show up in Power's index or text.
Guatemala, where there was a mass killing of as many as 100,000 Mayan Indians between 1978 and 1985,
in what Amnesty International called "A Government Program of Political Murder," but by a government
installed and supported by the United States, also does not show up in Power's index.
Cambodia is of course included, but only for the second phase of the genocide—the first phase, from 1969-
1975, in which the United States dropped some 500,000 tons of bombs on the Cambodian countryside and
killed vast numbers, she fails to mention. On the Khmer Rouge genocide, Power says they killed 2 million, a
figure widely cited after Jean Lacouture gave that number; his subsequent admission that this number was
invented had no effect on its use, and it suits Power's purpose.
A major U.S.-encouraged and supported genocide occurred in Indonesia in 1965-66 in which over 700,000
people were murdered. This genocide is not mentioned by Samantha Power and the names Indonesia and
Suharto do not appear in her index.
She also fails to mention West Papua, where Indonesia s 40 years of murderous occupation would constitute
genocide under her criteria, if carried out under different auspices.
Power does refer to East Timor, with extreme brevity, saying that "In 1975, when its ally, the oil-
producing, anti-Communist Indonesia, invaded East Timor, killing between 100,000 and 200,000 civilians, the
United States looked away" (146-7). That exhausts her treatment of the subject, although the killings in
East Timor involved a larger fraction of the population than in Cambodia, and the numbers killed were
probably larger than the grand total for Bosnia and Kosovo, to which she devotes a large fraction of her book
She also misrepresents the U.S. role—it did not "look away," it gave its approval, protected the aggression
from any effective UN response (in his autobiography, then U.S. Ambassador to the UN Daniel Patrick
Moynihan bragged about his effectiveness in protecting Indonesia from any UN action), and greatly increased
its arms aid to Indonesia, thereby facilitating the genocide.
Power engages in a similar suppression and failure to recognize the U.S. role in her treatment of genocide in
Iraq. She attends carefully and at length to Saddam Hussein's use of chemical warfare and killing of Kurds
at Halabja and elsewhere, and she does discuss the U.S. failure to oppose and take any action against
Saddam Hussein at this juncture.
But she does not mention the diplomatic rapproachement with Saddam in the midst of his war with Iran in
1983, the active U.S. logistical support of Saddam during that war, and the U.S. approval of sales and
transfers of chemical and biological weapons during the period in which he was using chemical weapons against
the Kurds. She also doesn't mention the active efforts by the United States and Britain to block UN actions
that might have obstructed Saddam's killings.
The killing of over a million Iraqis via the "sanctions of mass destruction," more than were killed by all the
weapons of mass destruction in history, according to John and Karl Mueller ("Sanctions of Mass Destruction,"
Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999), was arguably the greatest genocide of the modern era. It is unmentioned
by Samantha Power.
Again, the correlation between exclusion, U.S. responsibility, and the view that such killings were, in
Madeleine Albright's words, "worth it" from the standpoint of U.S. interests, is clear. There is a similar
political basis for Power's failure to include Israel's low-intensity genocide of the Palestinians and South
Africa's "destructive engagement" with the frontline states in the 1980s, the latter with a death toll
greatly exceeding all the deaths in the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Neither Israel nor South Africa, both
"constructively engaged" by the United States, show up in Power's index.
Samantha Power's conclusion is that the U.S. policy toward genocide has been very imperfect and needs
reorientation, less opportunism, and greater vigor. For Power, the United States is the solution, not the
problem. These conclusions and policy recommendations rest heavily on her spectacular bias in case selection:
She simply bypasses those that are ideologically inconvenient, where the United States has arguably
committed genocide (Vietnam, Cambodia 1969-75, Iraq 1991-2003), or has given genocidal processes
positive support (Indonesia, West Papua, East Timor, Guatemala, Israel, and South Africa).
Incorporating them into an analysis would lead to sharply different conclusions and policy agendas, such as
calling upon the United States to simply stop doing it, or urging stronger global opposition to U.S. aggression
and support of genocide, and proposing a much needed revolutionary change within the United States to
remove the roots of its imperialistic and genocidal thrust.
But the actual huge bias, nicely leavened by admissions of imperfections and need for improvement in U.S.
policy, readily explains why Samantha Power is loved by the New York Times and won a Pulitzer prize for her
masterpiece of evasion and apologetics for "our" genocides and call for a more aggressive pursuit of "theirs."
