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Pictures of me in Europe

The music presented features Bryne
Terfel singing the Flying Dutchman's
aria Die Frist ist Um

Click here for articles by No a m Chomsky

Learn how the media is an instrument of conservative propagand a

Click here to access an archive of articles written by Robert
Kuttner

click here for an archive of articles by Michael Parenti

Articles by Paul Krugman

Here is a good article on the pharmaceutical industry

Click here to see how Conservatives use the media to control media
reporting

Articles by Edward Herman

Moveon.org website link

link to mediamatters.org

Articles from Z Magazine

Articles by Common Cause

How the energy companies robbed the
people of California

Link to the website for the Nation Magazine

for information on media control of the public min d

Moving ideas.org

Articles by James Galbraith

Articles by Robert Reich

Progressive Media Online Magazines and Portals

Common Dreams Online Portal

Pop and Politics Online Magazine

Women's eNews Online Magazine

Alternet Online Magazine

Tom Paine On Line Magazine

Institute for Global Communications

For information on how Bush stole the last election

Everything you need to know about Wall Streets desire to steal social
security about security about security about about security about security abou
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ecurity about security about about security about security about about about se
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Robert Kuttner on Trade

Conclusion of Chapter Kuttner on Healthcare

Link to the website Daily Kos

Chapters From the Book "Worse Than Watergate" by
John Dean, Richard Nixon's White House LawyerJohn
Dean, Richard Nixon's White House Lawyer

Chapter2 from the book worse than Watergate

Chapter 3 from the book Worse Than Watergate

ChapterFour, Worse Than Watergate

Part of Chapter five from John Dean's book worse than Watergate.

Chapter 6

Mel Carnahan, democratic senator from
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, healthcare and Tobacco
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.

Paul Wellstone, Democratic Senator from
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

In a previous letter I said the Bill Frist's family
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.

p5, june 20, Financial Times, "Mr Trichet harked back to his previous governorship of the Bank of France during the
1990's, when he backed "competitve disinflation" boosting a country's economic advantage through lower production
costs and lower inflation rather than monetary devaluation." Obviously Mr Trichet is another conservative crackpot who
learned nothing from the great depression and for that reason needs to be immediately exterminated. Its lunatics like him
that cause depressions when their ideology prevents wages from rising with productivity, subsequently reducing demand in
the economy, reducing purchasing power in a race to the bottom to impoverish labor until the economy collapses and pulls
down all interconnected economic systems. He wants the 1930's all over again.

Japan “Creating a sub-class of poorly paid”

David Pilling in Tokyo for the Financial Times

Huge 'changes in Japan's labor market are creating a dangerous divide between well-paid, well-trained workers_in
permanent employment and a sub-class of poorly paid. workers with low skills and fragile job security, the organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development has warned.
The" report, which makes calls to tackle deflation and assert fiscal control highlighted the downside of greater labour
market flexibility.
. "Employment flexibility is being achieved through an increased percentage of non- regular workers" whose numbers had
sky-rocketed from 19 per cent to 29 per cent of the total workforce in a decade it said. 'Ternporary staff earned about 40
percent as much as regular workers. "The increasing dualism, is creating a group, concentrated among young people with
short term employment experience and low human capital.', The OECD's concern chimes with growing concern within the
Japanese government that the postwar it employment model is dying but has not been replaced by a tenable
alternative.
One government official said the suicide rate had not fallen since Japan's' economic recovery began three years ago, a
phenomenon he attributed to greater despair caused by the collapse of the old labour market system.
               The Bank of Japan recently issued a report on labor market changes which it_ said were partly responsible for
persistent deflation, which is now into its seventh Year.
Wages have continued to fall in spite of three years of economic recovery, interrupting a transmission mechanism by which
greater economic activity normally feeds through into higher prices.

This weekend the government produced a draft of a report, Japans vision for the 21st century, in which one of the main
recommendations was to change pension and other laws to make it easier for workers to move between jobs.

It also recommended making it easier for woman to work full time and for people to work until 75.
One of the OECD’s main concerns, according to Randall Jones, the OECD’s chief economist for Japan and South Korea,
was that labor flexibility was being introduced in only one part of the market, creating an unbridgeable divide between
workers in non-regular and regular employment."

With regards to Bank America's purchase of Bank of China, The chinese are about to get robbed. Bank of America stole
money out of my account and many others I know that had an account there.

With regards to Dick Durban comparing interogation proceedures at Gitmo to the Nazi interogation proceedures he should
be aware that the Nazi found they could get ten times more information from their prisoners by treating them with kindness
and respect, befriending them until they gained their confidence. It was the Nazi's that invented the proceedures used by
our police departments.

Recently Dick Cheney got upset at Howard Dean for saying to someone the Republican Party is basically a party of white
Christians. Now if Dick (trained to be a paranoid control freak by Dick (Nixon)) is going to use the conservative controlled
lapdog media to attack every person who says the truth about anything, poor dick (because he acts like tricky Dick) is
going to have another heart attack. The fact that Dick can't find anything productive to do with his time explains why this is
the worst administration in the history of the country.

I watched a little of This Week with George Stephonopolis, (a program sponsored and controlled by the oil companies) but
had to shut it off after listening to George Will speak. George said the Germans, the Italians and the French would trade
positions with Americans in a heart beat. Someone should have responded 'George, how can you say something so
stupid. You obviously are talking propaganda again." And Stephonopolis should tell George Will that he doesn't want
people on his show who simply speak propaganda. Will's usual technique is to site a piece of historical information that
might be true and twist it around to imply something false for his propaganda purposes. He's made a fortune selling books
of such propaganda. Stephanopolis, smart enough to recognize this, not wishing to offend conservative viewers, doesn't
come out and point out Wills lies which occur almost everytime Will makes a point. Robert Reich knew better and even he
didn't point out the lies in order to be agreeable for the media. And you wonder why young people have no interest in
politics. I heard Michael Eisner on Charlie Rose yesterday. What leads me to believe he was forced from Disney because
he was the only person left in control of a media sourse in America that didn't support conservative efforts to make the
global media into an instrument of indoctrination for the conservative crackpots.

Fidelity Investments is giving tons of money to a hedge fund called something like Lazard or Lizard. It would be interesting
to know exactly where it is coming from and where it is going. I didn't know mutual funds fund hedge funds. Fidelity was
also spending billions in Germany with George Soros buying up things. I'm not sure how many investors in Fidelity Mutual
Funds know exactly where there money is going. I have the feeling that these things give one a bit of insight as to the real
reason the criminals want to privatize social security. To divert peoples retirement savings into play money for the ruling
parasites to either steal (like Citibank just paid two billion in penalties regarding Enron-they calculate they steal more than
they get penalized-same story with the billions in excess of panalties Billl Frists family received when defrauding the
taxpayers out of billions through HCA) or to put into hedge funds and purchase things for political objectives; such as
converting Energy or healthcare into sectors where they can reep monopoly profits.

I believe the Bush administration should go down as the most corrupt in history. It turns out that taxpayers are actually
subsidizing the Tobacco industry. I'm not sure how many ten of billions Bush gave them not to produce last year but he just
reduced what they owe as a result of the settlement to 10 billion. So he actually gave them more in subsidies than he
penalized them for the Tobacco settlement. I'm not sure of the numbers right now but I will report on it when I get them.

Japan is doing something the US should do. They are changing their commercial code regarding quasi foreign companies.
Those companies do most of their business in the country but are registered off shore and run their business through a
branch. The change would force these companies to reincorporate in Japan.

Greenspan is an idiot. If he wanted to pay own the deficit while controlling inflation he would advocate raising taxes on the
wealthy and controlling health and energy costs.

CAFTA is crap. Get rid of it. Latin America has had like zero growth since we forced free trade on them. Treasury
Secretary Snow wants a trans-Atlantic free trade zone with Europe that will do the same thing to Europe.

Since April 2003 UK companies have seen their energy bills increase by 60% driving many UK companies out of business
in order to enrich Cheneys friends in the energy industry. Thats why Gordon Brown is pushing for further deregulation. It
almost makes you thing the UK and US are run by the same criminals. The UK's huge housing bubble and massive
consumer debt could cause their economy to come crashing down. Then they tell the other EU contries they need to be
like them. I've always thought what prevented up the US economy from come crashing down was the stability of the
socialist economies that bankrolled the US deficit, before Japan and now China picks up the tab for the deficit spending
required to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. The billion people impoverished in SE Asia during the 90s shows how fast things
can unravel when the conservative crackpots start making economic policy.

The criminals put a guy like Ackermann (a military man, a CIA backed lunatic) in charge of Deutche Bank. This crackpot
wanted to sell Deutche Bank to that criminal institution called Citi Bank that just paid 2 billions in fines related to Bush's
piggy bank Enron. There was an interesting article in the comment section page 11 june 13 Financial Times regarding the
problem with excess thrift. Everything conservatives do to redistribute wealth upward (rob the poor and give to the rich)
contributes to this from the new bankrupcy laws to cuts in social welfare. But their mentally ill so they can't help themselves.

The mobsters want the EU to build a bridge across the Massina Strait so they can drive off the Island of Sicily or get home
faster with the loot. Now, I don't know if that is worth the expense or not but I would like more flowers and grass in Vegas.
There is no reason Vegas can't be as pleasant as Palm Springs. With regards to Italy I believe they should raise taxes on
the wealthy and increase spending on the poor. It's good economics and the right thing to do. With regards to the question
of returning to the Lira or staying with the Euro there is a simple statistic that may help resolve the question. Compare the
sum of economic growth for the Euro Zone countries since the launch of the Euro to the sum of economic growth for a
similar peroid of time prior to the launch of the Euro for those same countries(before expansion). I realize their are other
factors that have attributed to slow EU growth since the introduction of the Euro (namely trickle down policies related to
Agenda 2010) but as conservatives believe those policies should have increased the economic performance of the Euro
zone they should then conclude that a decline in performance is related to the introduction of the Euro. In a previous letter
I quoted a passage from a chapter of a book by Robert Kuttner explaining how it is easier to manage the economic
performance of smaller economic units for the best interests of the people in the smaller economic area.(see quote below)
From this I dediced that it would maximize the economic performance of the whole EU if smaller economic entities had their
own monetary policy. Now I only had one econ course at the community college so this may beyond my expertise but
based on my interpretation of Kuttners statement EU economic performance would be maximized if say a country like Italy
had three currencies and cooresponding monetary polices and central bank. Lets say northern Italy had lire with a picture
of Verdi, the south had lire with a pic of Michael Angelo and maybe Sicily had currency with a pic of Al Capone. George
Soros would love speculating on such currencies. It would be alot of fun.

The following from the end of my 2/17/05 quote of Robert Kuttners book, The Economic Illusion, reprinted with out
permission but many compliments to his brilliance. "Organized Labor and Corporatism
Corporatism has many faces. In the 1930s, Fascist Italy offered a model of totalitarian corporatism. Roosevelt's brief
experiment with tripartite industry committees through the NRA (National Recovery Administration) attempted to introduce
democratic corporatist institutions to the United States. japan now offers a more or less corporatist model but with weak
labor representation. In the democratic corporatism typical of Northern Euroe unions play a decisive role. Democratlc
corporatism operates not as substitute for parlamemary democracy but as a complement to it. By almost any standard
the nations of Northern Europe are among the world's most democratic. Voting participation is high; the press is free; the
political culture is vigorous and by American standards uncorrupted; democratic participation has been expanded to
economic institutions to a greater extent than in other political democracies; civil liberties are unparalleled. The
centralized nature of interest-group representation does not seem to take a toll on political liberty. Although a high
degree of centralism facilitates bargaining, the nations of Northern Europe are fairly skilled at leaving the details of
bargains to local affiliates; their unions are highly democratic internally. So the undemocratic aspects of centralized
bargaining are substantially leavened by accountability and participation.
In general, this social model seems to work best in countries that are relatively small, with parliamentary and unitary
systems of government. A small, unitary nation is more likely to engage in successful social bargaining for a variety of
reasons; most obviously, a small nation is more manageable; decision makers tend to know each other.
p.145
And in a unitary and parliamentary system of government, bargains can be negotiated and carried out with a minimum of
extraneous politicking. More subtly, a small nation is liable to be more vulnerable to the international economic system
and doesn't have the luxury of domestic fractiousness. The vulnerability of Switzerland, though a nation that is highly
federated both ethnically and constitutionally, helps explain why that nation has many of the characteristics of corporatist
social bargaining. But the correlation between small size and corporatist characteristics is far from perfect. History and
politics also playa key role. Norway and Sweden have maintained successful social bargaining. But in Denmark, with just
5 million inhabitants, a compact geography, a uniform culture, and a unitary government,
corporatist bargaining has broken down almost totally. West Germany, with 62 million people and a federalist constitution,
is fairly successful at corporatist-style bargaining. So is japan, with a population of 119 million."
In recent years, a number of academic studies have quantified the relative success of different economies in the years
before and after 1973. All have concluded that the "labor-corporatist" or "neocorporatist" nations have been among the
most successful at reconciling high rates of employment, productivity growth, and social equality with low rates of
inflation. This is all the more surprising from the laissez-faire view, since these are the very nations with big public sectors
and strong unions. The success of democratic corporatist economies provides a key illustration of equality and efficiency
working in tandem and of the importance of social institutions in bringing that result about. It refutes the presumption that
the_ gains of "organized labor" must be losses for the larger society. These positive sum gains reflect the value of strong
and responsible unions as brokering and representational institutions, which look beyond the short term self-interest of
their members. In a society where organized and responsible labor unions are powerful, "efficiency" comes to be defined
as something social and collective as well as individual and economic.

.Japan's political structUre differs from Northern European corporatism in many respects - Japan's unions are weaker; its
private welfare state (which ties benefits to employment) is far more important. But the Japanese experience does
suggest that corporatist social bargaining can function in a fairly large country."

A Serious Drug Problem

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 803 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 27 , Column 6

ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says 2003 Medicare bill is object lesson in how special interests hold America's
health care system hostage; says law subsidizes private health plans, which have repeatedly failed to deliver promised
cost savings, and creates unnecessary layer of middlemen by requiring that drug benefit be administered by private
insurers; says it specifically prohibits Medicare from using its purchasing power to negotiate lower drug prices; notes that
Rep Billy Tauzin, who shepherded drug bill through Congress, now heads all-powerful drug-industry lobbying group, and
Thomas Scully, former Medicare administrator, negotiated for future health industry lobbying job at same time he was
pushing drug bill; calls Medicare bill corrupt deal created by corrupt system (M)

One Nation, Uninsured


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 13, 2005
Harry Truman tried to create a national health insurance system. Public opinion was initially on his side: Jill Quadagno's
book "One Nation, Uninsured" tells us that in 1945, 75 percent of Americans favored national health insurance. If Truman
had succeeded, universal coverage for everyone, not just the elderly, would today be an accepted part of the social
contract.

Skip to next paragraph

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

More Columns by Paul Krugman But Truman failed. Special interests, especially the American Medical Association and
Southern politicians who feared that national insurance would lead to racially integrated hospitals, triumphed.

Sixty years later, the patchwork system that evolved in the absence of national health insurance is unraveling. The cost of
health care is exploding, the number of uninsured is growing, and corporations that still provide employee coverage are
groaning under the strain.

So the time will soon be ripe for another try at universal coverage. Public opinion is already favorable: a 2003 Pew poll
found that 72 percent of Americans favored government-guaranteed health insurance for all.

But special interests will, once again, stand in the way. And the big debate among would-be reformers is how to deal with
those interests, especially the insurance companies. These companies played a secondary role in Truman's failure but
have since become a seemingly invincible lobby.

Let's ignore those who believe that private medical accounts - basically tax shelters for the healthy and wealthy - can solve
our health care problems through the magic of the marketplace. The intellectually serious debate is between those who
believe that the government should simply provide basic health insurance for everyone and those proposing a more
complex, indirect approach that preserves a central role for private health insurance companies.

A system in which the government provides universal health insurance is often referred to as "single payer," but I like Ted
Kennedy's slogan "Medicare for all." It reminds voters that America already has a highly successful, popular single-payer
program, albeit only for the elderly. It shows that we're talking about government insurance, not government-provided
health care. And it makes it clear that like Medicare (but unlike Canada's system), a U.S. national health insurance system
would allow individuals with the means and inclination to buy their own medical care.

The great advantage of universal, government-provided health insurance is lower costs. Canada's government-run
insurance system has much less bureaucracy and much lower administrative costs than our largely private system.
Medicare has much lower administrative costs than private insurance. The reason is that single-payer systems don't
devote large resources to screening out high-risk clients or charging them higher fees. The savings from a single-payer
system would probably exceed $200 billion a year, far more than the cost of covering all of those now uninsured.

Nonetheless, most reform proposals out there - even proposals from liberal groups like the Century Foundation and the
Center for American Progress - reject a simple single-payer approach. Instead, they call for some combination of
mandates and subsidies to help everyone buy insurance from private insurers.

Some people, not all of them right-wingers, fear that a single-payer system would hurt innovation. But the main reason
these proposals give private insurers a big role is the belief that the insurers must be appeased.

That belief is rooted in recent history. Bill Clinton's health care plan failed in large part because of a dishonest but
devastating lobbying and advertising campaign financed by the health insurance industry - remember Harry and Louise?
And the lesson many people took from that defeat is that any future health care proposal must buy off the insurance lobby.

But I think that's the wrong lesson. The Clinton plan actually preserved a big role for private insurers; the industry attacked
it all the same. And the plan's complexity, which was largely a result of attempts to placate interest groups, made it hard to
sell to the public. So I would argue that good economics is also good politics: reformers will do best with a straightforward
single-payer plan, which offers maximum savings and, unlike the Clinton plan, can easily be explained.

We need to do this one right. If reform fails again, we'll be on the way to a radically unequal society, in which all but the
most affluent Americans face the constant risk of financial ruin and even premature death because they can't pay their
medical bills.

Losing Our Country


By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 10, 2005
Baby boomers like me grew up in a relatively equal society. In the 1960's America was a place in which very few people
were extremely wealthy, many blue-collar workers earned wages that placed them comfortably in the middle class, and
working families could expect steadily rising living standards and a reasonable degree of economic security.

But as The Times's series on class in America reminds us, that was another country. The middle-class society I grew up in
no longer exists.

Working families have seen little if any progress over the past 30 years. Adjusted for inflation, the income of the median
family doubled between 1947 and 1973. But it rose only 22 percent from 1973 to 2003, and much of that gain was the
result of wives' entering the paid labor force or working longer hours, not rising wages.

Meanwhile, economic security is a thing of the past: year-to-year fluctuations in the incomes of working families are far
larger than they were a generation ago. All it takes is a bit of bad luck in employment or health to plunge a family that
seems solidly middle-class into poverty.

But the wealthy have done very well indeed. Since 1973 the average income of the top 1 percent of Americans has
doubled, and the income of the top 0.1 percent has tripled.

Why is this happening? I'll have more to say on that another day, but for now let me just point out that middle-class
America didn't emerge by accident. It was created by what has been called the Great Compression of incomes that took
place during World War II, and sustained for a generation by social norms that favored equality, strong labor unions and
progressive taxation. Since the 1970's, all of those sustaining forces have lost their power.

Since 1980 in particular, U.S. government policies have consistently favored the wealthy at the expense of working families
- and under the current administration, that favoritism has become extreme and relentless. From tax cuts that favor the rich
to bankruptcy "reform" that punishes the unlucky, almost every domestic policy seems intended to accelerate our march
back to the robber baron era.

It's not a pretty picture - which is why right-wing partisans try so hard to discredit anyone who tries to explain to the public
what's going on.

These partisans rely in part on obfuscation: shaping, slicing and selectively presenting data in an attempt to mislead. For
example, it's a plain fact that the Bush tax cuts heavily favor the rich, especially those who derive most of their income from
inherited wealth. Yet this year's Economic Report of the President, in a bravura demonstration of how to lie with statistics,
claimed that the cuts "increased the overall progressivity of the federal tax system."

The partisans also rely in part on scare tactics, insisting that any attempt to limit inequality would undermine economic
incentives and reduce all of us to shared misery. That claim ignores the fact of U.S. economic success after World War II. It
also ignores the lesson we should have learned from recent corporate scandals: sometimes the prospect of great wealth
for those who succeed provides an incentive not for high performance, but for fraud.

Above all, the partisans engage in name-calling. To suggest that sustaining programs like Social Security, which protects
working Americans from economic risk, should have priority over tax cuts for the rich is to practice "class warfare." To show
concern over the growing inequality is to engage in the "politics of envy."

But the real reasons to worry about the explosion of inequality since the 1970's have nothing to do with envy. The fact is
that working families aren't sharing in the economy's growth, and face growing economic insecurity. And there's good
reason to believe that a society in which most people can reasonably be considered middle class is a better society - and
more likely to be a functioning democracy - than one in which there are great extremes of wealth and poverty.

Reversing the rise in inequality and economic insecurity won't be easy: the middle-class society we have lost emerged only
after the country was shaken by depression and war. But we can make a start by calling attention to the politicians who
systematically make things worse in catering to their contributors. Never mind that straw man, the politics of envy. Let's try
to do something about the politics of greed.

America Wants Security

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 798 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 19 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says that at state level, where elections are fought on bread-and-butter issues,
voters are sending message that they want stronger, not weaker, social safety net; says that is because over past 25
years, lives of working Americans have become ever less secure; says any major strengthening of safety net will have to
come at federal level; says Rep Tom DeLay recently cited his party's latest achievements, all of them either irrelevant or
actively hostile to economic security of working Americans; says Democrats who voted for those measures have
undermined their party's ability to claim that it stands for something different (M)

Staying What Course?

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 740 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 21 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says it is time to revisit history of Iraq war; says leaked Downing Street memo
proves that Bush adminstration cooked up case for war it wanted; says Iraq was perceived as soft spot; says irony is that
Iraq has demonstrated limits of American power, and emboldened potential enemies; says those who got US into Iraq have
done just what they falsely accused Bill Clinton of doing: they have stripped America of its capacity to respond to real
threats; says US must tell Iraqi government that America's stay is time-limited, and that it has to find way to take care of
itself (M)

Always Low Wages. Always

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 801 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 23 , Column 6

ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says workers in world's richest nation can no longer count on private sector to
provide them with economic security; contrasts earnings and benefits of autoworkers in 1968 with those of Wal-Mart
employees today; says question is whether public's desire for stronger safety net will finally be seconded by corporations
that have not yet adopted Wal-Mart model of minimal benefits and always low wages (M)

The Final Insult

By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 751 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 19 , Column 1

ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column says idea that Pres Bush's Social Security plan would somehow protect future
Social Security benefits is misconception; says Bush is calling for zero sacrifice now, but big benefit cuts decades from now
unless his plan is adopted; says privatizers want Americans to accept large cuts in Social Security benefits as inevitable,
and they demand that Bush be praised for proposing bigger benefit cuts for middle class than for poor; says Bush is no
Robin Hood

Losing The American Revolution
Bill Moyers
June 06, 2005

Bill Moyers was press secretary to President Lyndon Johnson, correspondent for CBS News and host of numerous PBS
Television series, most recently, NOW With Bill Moyers. This is the prepared text of the speech Moyers delivered to the
Take Back America Conference in Washington, D.C., on June 3, 2005. To view a video recording of the speech, click here
.

It's good to be with you again. Your passion for democracy is inspiring and your enthusiasm contagious. I can't imagine a
more exuberant gathering today except possibly at the K Street branch of the Masters of the Universe where they are
celebrating their coup at the Securities and Exchange Commission

I wish that I could have attended all your sessions, listened to all the speakers, and heard all the points of view that have
been raised here. But thanks to C-Span I was able to catch enough of your proceedings to realize you covered so many
subjects and touched on so many ideas that you've left me little to say. That's okay, because as Bob Borosage reminded
us back in January, what matters most isn't what is said in Washington but what you do on the ground across the country
to build an independent infrastructure, generate ideas, drive local campaigns, persuade the skeptic, organize your
neighbors, and carry on the movement at the grass roots for social and economic justice.

Before you go home, however, Bob has asked me to talk about what's at stake in what you are doing. Given all that has
already been said, I will take my cue from the late humorist Robert Benchley who arrived for his final exam in international
law at Harvard to find that the test consisted of this one instruction: "Discuss the arbitration of the international fisheries
problem in respect to hatcheries protocol and dragnet and procedure as it affects (a) the point of view of the United States
and (b) the point of view of Great Britain." Benchley was desperate but he was also honest, and he wrote: "I know nothing
about the point of view of Great Britain in the arbitration of the international fisheries problem, and nothing about the point
of view of the United States. I shall therefore discuss the question from the point of view of the fish."

That's what I have done in much of my work in journalism. Thirty-five years ago almost to the day I set out on a three-
month trip of over 10,000 miles to write a book called Listening to America. I completed the book but I've never finished the
trip; never was able to come off the road; never could stop listening. My worldview has been a work in progress, molded
largely by the stories I've heard from the people I've met. I want to tell you this morning about some of those people. They
tell us what's at stake.

I begin with two families in Milwaukee. The breadwinners in both households lost their jobs in that great wave of downsizing
in 1991 as corporations began moving jobs out of the city and out of the country. In a series of documentaries over the
next decade my colleagues and I chronicled their efforts to cope with the wrenching changes in their lives and find a place
for themselves in the new global economy. I grew up with people like them. They're the kind my mother called "the salt of
the earth" (takes one to know one!). They love their children, care about their neighborhoods, go to church every Sunday,
and work hard all week. But like millions of Americans, these two families in Milwaukee were playing by the rules and still
losing. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous
America had reached Grand Canyon proportions.

I want to show you a very brief excerpt from that first documentary. It aired on PBS in January 1992 with the title Minimum
Wages: The New Economy. You'll see the father of one family as he looks for work after losing his machinist's job at the
big manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton. You'll meet his wife in their kitchen as they make a desperate call to the bank that is
threatening to foreclose on their home after failing to meet their mortgage payments. During our filming the fathers in both
families became seriously ill. One was hospitalized for two months, leaving the family $30,000 in debt. You'll hear the
second family talk about what it's like when both parents lose their jobs, depriving them of health insurance and putting
their children's education up for grabs. Take a look.

[VIDEO]

Seeing those people again I thought of the interviews that the Campaign for America's Future conducted around the
country on the eve of your conference. A woman in Columbus, Ohio, told one interviewer something that I've heard in
different ways in my own reporting over the past few years. She said: "Everyday life pulls families apart." It takes a moment
for the implications of that to hit home. Think about it: Our country, the richest and most powerful nation in the history of
the race—a place where "everyday life pulls families apart."

What turns these personal traumas into a political travesty is that the people we're talking about are deeply patriotic. They
love America. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, they are
watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade, when our final film in the series
aired, they were paying little attention to politics; they simply didn't think their concerns would ever be addressed by our
governing elites. They are not cynical—their religious faith leaves them little capacity for cynicism—but they know the
system is rigged against them. As it is.

You know the story: For years now a relatively small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme
concentration of wealth and income as large economic and financial institutions obtained unprecedented levels of power
over daily life. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent was 30-fold. Four
decades later it is more than 75 fold. (See Joshua Holland, AlterNet, posted 4/25/05 )

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if everyone were benefiting proportionally. But that's not the
case. Statistics tell the story. Yes, I know—statistics can cause the eyes to glaze over, but as one of my mentors once
reminded me, "It is the mark of a truly educated man [or woman] to be deeply moved by statistics."

Let's see if these statistics move you.

While we've witnessed several periods of immense growth in recent decades, the average real income of the bottom 90
percent of American taxpayers - that's a heap of people - fell by 7 percent between 1973 and 2000. (ibid )

During 2004 and the first couple of months this year, wages failed to keep pace with inflation for the first time since the
1990 recession. They were up somewhat in April, but it still means that "working Americans effectively took an across-the-
board pay cut at a time when the economy grew by a healthy four percent and corporate profits hit record highs as
companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay raises down." (ibid )

Believe it or not, the United States now ranks the highest among the highly developed countries in each of the seven
measures of inequality tracked by the index. While we enjoy the second highest per capita GDP in the world (excluding tiny
Luxembourg), we rank dead last among the 20 most developed countries in fighting poverty and we're off the chart in
terms of the number of Americans living on half the median income or less. (ibid )

And the outlook is for more of the same. On the eve of George W. Bush's second inauguration The Economist - not
exactly a Marxist rag - produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American can get to
the top. With income inequality not seen since the first Gilded Age (and this is The Economist editors speaking, not me) -
with "an education system increasingly stratified with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great
universities "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities" - with corporate employees
finding it "harder…to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchy by dint of hard work and self-improvement" -
"with the yawning gap between incomes at the top and bottom" - the editors of The Economist - all friends of business and
advocates of capitalism and free markets—concluded that "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-
based society."

Let me run that by you again: "The United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society."

Or worse. The Wall Street Journal is no Marxist sheet, either, although its editorial page can be just as rigid and dogmatic
as old Stalinists. The Journal's reporters, however, are among the best in the country. They're devoted to getting as close
as possible to the verifiable truth and describing what they find with the varnish off. Two weeks ago a front-page leader in
the Journal concluded that "As the gap between rich and poor has widened since 1970, the odds that a child born in
poverty will climb to wealth - or that a rich child will fall into middle class - remain stuck... Despite the widespread belief that
the U.S. remains a more mobile society than Europe, economists and sociologists say that in recent decades the typical
child starting out in poverty in continental Europe (or in Canada) has had a better chance at prosperity." (Wall Street
Journal , page one, 5/13/05)

That knocks the American Dream flat on its back. But it should put fire in our bellies. Because what's at stake is what it
means to be an American.

A few weeks ago my colleague Charlie Rose put a question to the new president of CNN, Jonathan Klein. He asked: Could
there ever be a successful progressive version of Fox News Channel? Klein didn't think so. He said Fox appeals to "mostly
angry white men" while liberals—"you know, they don't get too worked up about anything."

Well, here's something to get worked up about:

Under a headline stretching six columns across the page, the New York Times reported last year that tuition in the city's
elite private schools, kindergarten as well as high school, would hit $26,000 for the coming school year. On the same
page, under a two-column headline, the Times reported on a school in nearby Mount Vernon, just across the city line, with
a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: Nine out of ten children qualify for free
lunches; one out of ten lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February a sixth-grader who
wanted to write a report on the poet Langston Hughes could not find a single book about Hughes in the library - not one.
There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or
other path breakers like them in the modern era. Except for a couple of Newbery Award books bought by the librarian with
her own money, the books are largely from the 1950s and 1960s, when all the students were white. A child's primer on
work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. There's a 1967 book about telephones with the
instruction: "When you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons." The newest
encyclopedia dates from 1991, with two volumes missing. And there is no card catalogue in this library. Something worth
getting mad about.

How about this:

Caroline Payne's face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don't fit. Her appearance has
caused her to be continuously turned down for jobs. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler's recent book,
The Working Poor: Invisible in America . She was born poor; although she once owned her own home and earned a two-
year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will
to move up, but lacking the resources to deal with such unexpected and overlapping problems as a mentally handicapped
daughter, a broken marriage, and a sudden layoff that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots, and move on. "In the
house of the poor…" Shipler writes, "the walls are thin and fragile, and troubles seep into one another." If you believe the
Declaration of Independence means what it says - that all of us are endowed by the Creator with a love of life, a longing for
liberty, and a passion for happiness - and everyone includes Caroline Payne - this is something to get worked up about.

Or this - courtesy of the columnist, Mark Shields. It seems workers in the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands
were being forced to labor under sweatshop conditions producing garments for Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein, Gap and Liz
Claiborne. The garments were then shipped tariff-free and quota-free to the American market where they were entitled to
display the coveted "Made in the USA" label. When Republican Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska heard that these
people were being paid barely half the U.S. minimum hourly wage and were forced to live behind barbed wire in squalid
shacks without plumbing while working 12 hours a day, often seven days a week, with none of the legal protections U.S.
workers are guaranteed, he became enraged. He got the Senate to pass a bill - unanimously - that would extend the
protection of our laws to the U.S. territory of the Northern Marianas. But then the notorious lobbyist Jack Abramoff moved
into action with an SOS to his good friend, Tom DeLay. The records show they met at least two dozen times. DeLay
traveled to the Marianas with his family and staff - on a "scholarship" provided by Abramoff's clients where they played golf
and went snorkeling not far from the sweatshops (some scholarship!). Was Tom DeLay offended by what he saw? To the
contrary. He told the Washington Post that the sweatshops were "a perfect petri dish of capitalism." ABC News recorded
him praising Abramoff's clients by saying: "You are a shining light for what is happening to the Republican Party, and you
represent everything that is good about what we are trying to do in America and leading the world in the free-market
system." And Tom Delay - the rightwing radicals' revisionist incarnation of Saint Francis of Assisi—killed the Senate bill.
(Mark Shields, CNN.com, 5/28/05)

If that doesn't get your dander up, maybe this will: The minimum wage hasn't been raised since 1997. After the
Republicans recently defeated an effort to increase it, Rick Wilson wrote for CommonDreams.org about a single mother of
two children working somewhere in his home state of West Virginia at $5.15 an hour, 40 hours a week, or $5,378 below the
federal poverty level of $16,090 for a family that size. Put another way, "her earnings only reach two-thirds of the poverty
level." Meanwhile, the base salary of the Members of Congress who voted down the wage increase is $162,100. That
single mom would have to work about 31,476 hours to earn what those members of Congress get in a year. And
remember—the minimum wage she earns is actually worth less than it was 40 years ago. (Rick Wilson, CommonDreams.
org, 5/25/05)

It wasn't supposed to be this way. America was not meant to be a country where the winner takes all. Through a system of
checks and balances we were going to maintain a decent equilibrium in how democracy works so that it didn't just work for
the powerful and privileged (If you don't believe me, I'll send you my copy of The Federalist Papers ). The economist
Jeffrey Madrick put it well: Because equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy, Americans
made primary schooling free to all. Because everyone deserves a second chance, debtors - especially the relative poor -
were protected by state laws against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most if not all
(white) comers, rather than held for elites. Government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land and even
supported squatters' rights. The old hope for equal access to opportunity became a reality for millions. Including yours
truly.

Ruby and Henry Moyers were knocked down and almost out when the system imploded into the Great Depression. They
worked hard all their lives but never had much money - my father's last paycheck before he retired was $96 and change,
after taxes. We couldn't afford books at home but the public library gave me a card when I was eight years old. I went to
good public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. And in my freshman year I hitchhiked to college on public
highways stopping to rest in public parks. Like millions of us, I was an heir to what used to be called the commonwealth -
the notion of America as a shared project. It's part of our DNA, remember: "We, the People...in order to create a more
perfect union."

You're never more mindful of this than at the Lincoln Memorial. Like you, I've been there many times over the years. Back
in 1954, when I was a summer employee in the Senate, I took the same hike every Sunday. Starting at the Capitol I headed
for the Washington Monument, briskly climbed its 898 steps, came down almost as briskly (I was only 20, remember),
veered over to the Jefferson Memorial and then doubled back to the mall and down past the reflecting pool to where
Lincoln gazes perpetually over this city - a city that because of him is the capital of the United States of America and not
just the Northern States of America.

Standing there last night, I sensed that temple of democracy where Lincoln broods to be as deeply steeped in melancholy
as it was during the McCarthy reign of terror, the grief of Vietnam, or the crimes of Watergate. You stand there silently
contemplating the words that gave voice to Lincoln's fierce determination to save the Union - his resolve that "government
of, by, and for the people shall not perish from the earth" - and then you turn and look out, as he does, on a city where
those words are daily mocked. This is no longer Lincoln's city. And those people from all walks of life making their way up
the steps to pay their respects to this martyr for the Union - it's not their city, either. This is an occupied city, a company
town, a wholly owned subsidiary of the powerful and privileged whose have hired an influence racket to run it. The records
are so poorly kept it's impossible to know how many lobbyists there really are in this town, but the Center for Public
Integrity found that their ranks include 240 former members of Congress and heads of federal agencies and over 2000
senior officials who passed through the revolving door of government at warp speed. Lobbyists now spend $3 billion a
year buying influence and access for their clients and, according to the New York Times , over the last six years spent
more than twice the amount spent by candidates for federal office. Once again this is a divided city. Not between North and
South as in Lincoln's time, but between those who pay to play - those who can buy the government they want—and those
who can't even afford even a seat in the bleachers.

So it is that huge financial institutions like MBNA - the credit card giant that is the biggest contributor to the President's two
campaigns for the White House - prevail in getting Congress and George W. Bush to curtail personal bankruptcies, making
it harder for those families in Milwaukee to get a fresh start and a second chance.

So it is that Wal-Mart, with the third largest corporate political action committee in the country, and pharmaceutical giants
with more lobbyists in town than there are Members of Congress, join with gun manufacturers and asbestos makers and
the White House to restrict the right of aggrieved citizens to take corporations to court for malfeasance.

So it is that as ExxonMobil accumulates more than $1 billion a month from escalating oil prices—more than $1 billion a
month even after allocating for dividends, share repurchases, and capital spending - the oil and gas industry wrings huge
tax breaks from a public already squeezed hard by high prices at the gas pumps.

And so it is that on the Sunday before President Bush's second inaugural, Nick Confessore, writing in the New York Times
Magazine, describes how the president's first round of tax cuts has brought the United States tax code closer to a system
under which income from savings and investments would not be taxed at all and revenues for public services would be
raised exclusively from taxes on working men and women. One of the most fervent right-wing class warriors in Washington
is quoted as predicting: "No capital gains tax, no dividends tax. No estate tax, no tax on interest." It will be one of President
Bush's enduring legacies to have replaced estate taxes on the wealthy with a sweat tax on their grave diggers.

Let me read you something:

When political interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it's
ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't
contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill.
You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar
situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them.
You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off your tax returns some of the money
spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules,
while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast the fortunate few who contribute to the right
politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the
government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do
so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain
laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its
approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

Once again I'm not quoting Marx or Lenin or even The Nation, the American Prospect, the Washington Monthly, In These
Times, The Progressive, or Mother Jones.

I'm quoting from...Time . From the heart of the Time-Warner empire comes the judgment that America now has
"government for the few at the expense of the many."

You read this, and then you read the report by the American Political Science Association which finds that "increasing
inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in
this country and even reversed." You also read - in that same report - that a quarter of all whites in this country have no
financial assets. Then you read on and learn that the median white household has 62% more income and twelve times as
much wealth as the median black household and that 6l% of African-Americans in this country and half of all Latinos have
no financial assets at all.

Then you open Jared Diamond's new book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail to find the Pulitzer Prize-
winning scholar's description of an America where rich elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private
security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to
private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social
Security, and public schools." Any society where the elite insulate themselves from the consequences of their action,
Diamond warns, contains a built-in blueprint for failure.

You read all this and realize you have been seeing it with your own eyes as a reporter in the field. You're seeing the
mugging of the American Dream right before your eyes.

Go with me for a moment to a small town in Pennsylvania. Two years ago, for my weekly PBS series Now with Bill Moyers,
one of our teams spent time there listening to regular people talk about what's happening in their lives. I want to share with
you an excerpt so that you can eavesdrop on the hidden conversation of America that the ruling powers in Washington
wants to stay hidden, as I'll explain in a moment. First look at this:

[VIDEO]

Let me tell you something about these people ("the point of view of the fish," remember?)

They don't ask to get rich.

They want a job that pays a living wage.

They want social security to be there in their old age, for their own sake and so their kids won't be burdened with their care.

They want a simple, comprehensive health care system.

They want their livelihoods and the fate of their communities to be taken into account as the elites in government and
corporations measure profits, economic growth and the GDP.

And they would like to see the political system cleaned up, so the playing field is more level and their voices not wholly
drowned out by the deep-pocket predators from the Business Roundtable.

These are not radical views. These are not even "liberal" views. They are just plain American values. Any reporter who
spends any time in the field can see that. You just have to get out of the Washington and New York studios, throw away
the talking points sent you by the Republican National Committee, stop yakking and start listening, leave the winners to
their champagne and buy the losers a beer, and you'll discover that the actual experience of regular people is the missing
link in a nation wired for everything but the truth.

And let me tell you: These plain American values - the truth from an America that is barely holding on - scare the hell out
of the powers that be.

Case in point: When that broadcast aired in November of '03, Kenneth Tomlinson was watching. As most of you know by
now, Mr. Tomlinson is chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ally of Karl Rove, and the rightwing
monopoly's point man to keep tabs on public broadcasting. You've heard no doubt that he and I have been, shall we say,
somewhat at odds of late. I didn't know exactly what started the trouble until just a few days ago, when the Washington
Post carried a story reporting that when Mr. Tomlinson watched that documentary from Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, it was too
much for him. Reaching into the well-worn book of mindless rightwing clichés, he called it "liberal advocacy journalism" and
decided right then and there "to bring some 'balance' to the public TV and radio airwaves."

So what did he do? Well, apparently the saintly Tom DeLay was too busy snorkeling with lobbyists to take on his own show
informing the folks in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, that they are the "Petri dish of capitalism." But Mr. Tomlinson found kindred
spirits at the right-wing editorial board of the Wall Street Journal where the "animal spirits of business" are routinely
celebrated with nary a negative note about the casualties of their voracious appetites. Now you can get on public television
every week, in The Wall Street Editorial Report, an alternative view of reality to life as it is lived in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania
and communities like it all across this country.

Here's the point: The last thing ideologues want is reporting about the facts on the ground. Facts on the ground subvert
the party line. That's why if you live where rightwing talk radio and media monopolies dominate the public discourse, you
are told a hundred different ways every day why unregulated markets work better than democracy. It's a lie, but it works,
because you are never told the other side of the story. But here, on PBS one Friday evening, was the other side of the
story. Here were ordinary people who are in pain for reasons not of their own making. And it was more than a rightwing
apparatchik could take. Because too much of the truth might set those people free. Might take them to the voting booths -
or even to the streets - to declare: We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore!"

This is a good place to pause and call on that old journalistic warhorse, Hal Crowther, who was at Time and Newsweek and
the Buffalo News before going his own way with an independent column. Just this week he writes that "The first thing every
reporter was taught, back when reporters were taught things, is that the best way to find the truth is to follow the money…If
the media still hunted with live ammunition, Enron, Halliburton and the energy industry's pornographic profits since 9/11
would be enough to force this oil-soaked, sheik-beholden government to resign. In disgrace-remember disgrace?" And he
goes on: "Worse still than handouts to the wealthy is the reprehensible new legislation that blocks working Americans from
climbing the hill where the money flows - laws like boulders rolled downhill to crush the scrambling underclass, the millions
of Americans unable to pay their bills. Think about what it means to limit personal bankruptcies, inhibit class action suits
against toxic employers, protect chemical polluters (usually oil companies) from liability lawsuits and cap settlements in
personal injury cases. It means trying to eliminate what little protection ordinary citizens retain against corporate leviathans
that cheat, exploit, injure and poison them, trap them in hopeless jobs, renege on their healthcare and default on their
pensions. It means striping leverage from the people who have no leverage to spare."

Hal Crowther is one of those journalists who goes hunting with live ammunition. But if Kenneth Tomlinson and Karl Rove
have their way, public broadcasting journalists will be firing blanks.

What's important in this story is not only that journalism still matters - that reporting from the ground up can strike a nerve
in the heart of the imperium. What's important is that you see what as citizens you are up against. These guys play for
keeps. They mean to control the story. And if they can they will silence or discredit anyone who dissents from the official
view of reality.

A profound transformation is occurring in America and those responsible for it don't want you to connect the dots. We are
experiencing what has been described as a "fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory
canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from
the excesses of private power." From public land to water and other natural resources, from media with their broadcast
and digital spectrums to scientific discoveries and medical breakthroughs, a broad range of America's public resources is
being shifted to the control of elites and the benefit of the privileged. It all seems so clear now that we wonder how we
could have ignored the warning signs at the time. Back in the early 1970s President Nixon's Attorney General, John
Mitchell, predicted that "this country is going to go so far to the right that you won't recognize it." A wealthy right-winger of
the time, William Simon, President Nixon's Secretary of the Treasury, wrote a polemic declaring that "funds generated by
business…must rush by the multimillions" to conservative causes. Said Business Week, bluntly: "Some people will
obviously have to do with less…It will be a bitter pill for many Americans to swallow the idea of doing with less so that big
business can have more."

We've seen the strategy play out for years now: to cut workforces and wages, scour the globe in search of cheap labor,
trash the social contract and the safety net meant to protect people from hardships beyond their control, make it hard for
ordinary citizens to gain redress for the malfeasance and malpractice of corporations, and diminish the ability of
government to check and balance "the animal spirits" of economic warfare where the winner takes all. Streams of money
flowed into think tanks to shape the agenda, media to promote it, and a political machine to achieve it. What has happened
to working Americans is not the result of Adam Smith's benign and invisible hand but the direct consequence of corporate
money, ideological propaganda, a partisan political religion, and a string of political decisions favoring the interests of
wealthy elites who bought the political system right out from under us.

It's an old story in America. We shouldn't be surprised by it any more. Hold up a mirror to this moment and you will see
reflected back to you the first Gilded Age in the last part of the 19th century. Then, as now, the great captains of industry
and finance could say, with Frederick Townsend Martin, "We are rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we
intend to keep it."

They were deadly serious. Go for the evidence to such magisterial studies of American history as Growth of the American
Republic (Morison, Commager, and Leuchtenberg), and you'll read how they did it: They gained control of newspapers
and magazines. They subsidized candidates. They bought legislation and even judicial decisions. To justify their greed
and power they drew on history, law, economics, and religion to concoct a philosophy that would come to be known as
Social Darwinism - "backed up by the quasi religious principle that the acquisition of wealth was a mark of divine favor."
One of their favorite apologists, Professor William Graham Sumner of Yale, said: "If we do not like the survival of the fittest,
we have only one possible alternative, and that is the survival of the unfittest. The former is the law of civilization; the latter
is the law of anti-civilization.

I'm not making this up. It's right there in the record. The historians tell us that a boundless continent lay open and ready for
their exploitation and "all the bounties of nature were allowed to fall into the hands of strong men and powerful
corporations." Clever lawyers came up with new devices for the legal aggrandizement of private fortunes (shades of
today's Federalist Society!) No labor laws or workingmen's compensation nets interfered with their profits (shades of
DeLay's "Petri dish of capitalism!") No public opinion penetrated the walls of their conceit (shades of "The Great
Republican Noise Machine.")

They're back, my friends. They're back in full force and their goal is to take America back - to their private Garden of Eden
in that first Gilded Age when "the strong take what they wanted and the weak suffer what they must." Look no further than
today's news: William Donaldson, who made a decent stab at enforcing post-Enron reform on Wall Street, is out as
Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission; according to USA Today, the President's big donors - the captains
of finance - cashed in their IOUs and came away from the White House with his head on a platter. In his place: A right-wing
congressman who takes a dim view of shareholder suits and favors eliminating the estate tax, the dividend tax, the - well,
there's no tax on wealth he doesn't want to eliminate. Once again the chicken coop is sold to the fox.

Back in the first Gilded Age it was the progressives who took them on, throwing themselves at the juggernaut to try and
keep it from rolling over the last vestiges of democracy. They lost the first rounds and only because they kept fighting for
many long years did in time America begin to balance the power of concentrated wealth with the claims and needs of
ordinary people. Nowadays it's you who stand between that regenerated juggernaut and those families in Milwaukee, those
folks in Tamaqua, and the millions like them around the country. You must be like the Irishman coming upon a street brawl
who yells in a loud voice: "Is this a private fight, or can anyone get in it?" Not waiting, he wades in.

Wade in! Go home and tell the truth to your neighbors and fight the corruption of the system. But it's not enough just to
say how bad the others are. You owe your opponents the compliment of a good argument. Come up with fresh ideas to
make capitalism work for all. Ask entrepreneurs to join you - they know how to make things happen. Show us a new vision
of globalization with a conscience. Stand up for working people and people in the middle and people who can't stand on
their own. Be not cowed, intimidated, or frightened - you may be on the losing side of the moment, as the early
progressives were, but you're on the winning side of history. And have some fun when you fight - Americans are more
likely to join the party that enjoys a party. Come to think of it, go out and argue that working people should have more time
off from the endless hours of tedious work that devours the soul and the long commutes that devastate families and
communities.

Above all, know what you believe and why. So I have some homework for you. Here's your summer reading: Thomas Paine
and the Promise of America, by Harvey Kaye, soon at your bookstores (along, I might add, with a revised and updated
paperback version of Moyers on America.) Thomas Paine was the foremost journalist of the American Revolution who
called forth the better angels of our nature, imbued us with our democratic impulse, and articulated our American Identity
with its exceptional purpose and promise. It was Paine who argued that America would afford "an asylum for mankind,"
provide a model to the world, and support the global advance of republican democracy. In these pages is tonic for flagging
spirits facing great odds - because it was Thomas Paine who insisted that "it is too soon to write the history of the
Revolution." And writing the history of the Revolution is now up to you. That's what truly is at stake.

Good luck!

(The transcript of the speech as delivered can be found at http://www.ourfuture.
org/projects/national_conference/2005/index.cfw.)

What Politics Can Learn From The NFL June 16, 2005
Patriots Against USA PATRIOT June 16, 2005
His Was Not To Wonder Why June 15, 2005
Why Business Needs Government June 15, 2005
The Folly Of Space Weapons June 15, 2005
ARCHIVES

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The Battle for PBS
BY BILL MOYERS
The story I'd like to share with you go to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism
are deeply entwined Public media is now under attack, as am I, by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation
for Public Broadcasting (CPB).
CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political
influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is
too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous not to respond to.
I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me although I retired over six months
ago. They've been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don't come back
from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some 2,000 years ago-after the Pharisees,
Sadducees and Caesar's surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won't be expecting that kind of
miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the
anchor chair.
Who are they? They are the people obsessed with control, the government to threaten and intimidate. They are the
people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a
war to make sure Ahmad Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq's oil. They are people who turn faith-based initiatives into a
slush fund and encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not too see the long arm of privilege and power
picking their pockets. They are the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate_ dissent and consolidate their
orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.
And if that's editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it is OK to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence.
I'm in hot water because my colleagues and I at "NOW" didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those
rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they
have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the
news.
I decided long ago that this wasn't healthy for democracy. I came to see that
"news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity:' Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing
people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.
When PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast, they wanted us to make it different from anything else on
the air-commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to
people who might not otherwise be heard.
But we also had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate
reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn't like. I told our producers and correspondents that in our
field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the
aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no
definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state
meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even
unproven, threats. I reminded our team of how the correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who
asked him to define real news. "Real news;' Reeves responded, "is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms:'
For these reasons and in that spirit we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting-except
occasionally"60 Minutes"-was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department's power of surveillance. We
reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn't work. We reported on how campaign
contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well connected while our troops
were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was
shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, back-room deals in
Washington were costing ordinary workers and taxpayers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens
that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.
And always-because what people know depends on who owns the press-we kept coming back to the media business itself,
to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio
cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies
were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.
The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only Public Affairs
broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down. Then strange things began to happen. Friends in
Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off "unless
Moyers is dealt with:' Apparently there was apoplexy in the right wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night
by putting an American flag in my lapel and said: I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven't thought it necessary
to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic
duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me,
whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart's affections in return. It no more
occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother's picture on my lapel to prove her son's love.
Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April I5.

So what's this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag's been hijacked and turned into a logo- the trademark
of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is
the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag?
How come? No administration's patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error.
When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Maos little red book on every official's
desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while
writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as unAmerican. They are people
whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They're in the same league as those
swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on
war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think
tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long
as they don't have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the
cash.)
I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us.
The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it's not unAmerican to think that war-except
in selfdefense-is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your
government can mean standing up for your country.
That did it. That-and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Halliburton, chicanery on K -Street, and the heavy, if
divinely guided, hand of Tom DeLay.
When Senator Trent Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting "has not seemed willing to deal with Bill
Moyers:' a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halpern, who had been appointed by
President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of
penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.
But the New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board
people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that "on the recommendation of
administration officials" Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a
senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to
Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB's
new ombudsman's office. And only a few weeks ago
did we learn that Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last
year to hire a contractor who would watch my show
and report on political bias.
In a May 10 op-ed in The Washington Times, CPB
Chairman Tomlinson tells of
a phone call from an old friend complaining about my
bias. He wrote: "The friend explained that the
foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to
his local television station for digital conversion.
But he declared there would be no more contributions
until something was done about the network's bias:
Apparently that's Kenneth Tomlinson's method of
governance. Money talks and buys the influence it
wants.
I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.
This letter came to me last year from a woman in New
York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among
other things,
after the worst sneak attack in our history, there's not
been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror
resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as
humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only
our family's world, but the whole world seems to have
gotten even worse than that tragic day:' She wanted
me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on
duty. "He was home with me having coffee. But my
Charlie took off like a lightning bolt to be with his men
from the Special Operations Command. 'Bring my
gear to the plaza: he told his aide immediately after
the first plane struck the North Tower. ... He took
action based on the responsibility he felt for his job
and his men and for those towers that he loved: In the
FDNY, she continued, chain-of command rules extend
to every captain of every fire house in the city. "If
anything happens in the firehouse-at any time-even if
the captain isn't on duty or on vacation-that captain is
responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7: So
she asked: "Why is this administration responsible
for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is
not leadership Watch everyone pass the blame again
in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi
prisons: She told me she was a faithful fan of NOW.
She wrote: "We need more program like yours to
wake America up. . .. Such programs must continue
amidst the sea of false images and name-calling that
divide America now. Such programs give us hope
that search will continue to get this
imperfect human condition on to a higher plane.
Without public broadcasting, all we would call news
would be merely carefully controlled propaganda:
Enclosed with the letter was a check me out to
"Channel 13-NOW" for $500.
I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind
me of what journalism is about
Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors. I'll
take the widows mite any day.
This essay is adapted from a speech Bill Moyer gave
on May 15 at the National Conference on Media
Reform in St. Louis. The full text, which also recounts
President Richard Nixon',; attempts to muzzle public
broadcasting, can be read at WWI freepress.
/let/news/8120.

1992
Staircase to Nowhere
By Paul Krugman

BACK WHEN I WROTE "THE RICH, the Right, and the Facts" for The American Prospect in September 1992, I
was trying to get two ideas across: The middle-class society of the postwar era was unraveling, and the right
was lying about it.
It was a very straightforward exercise. My favorite figure was the graph showing how the postwar "picket
fence" chart of widely shared growth had turned into a "staircase" of rising income inequality. And all I
needed was a bit of elementary statistical analysis to demonstrate the falsity of the various obfuscations the
right was offering.
How did it all turn out? Those of us who warned about inequality and right-wing dishonesty circa 1992 have
been completely vindicated on the facts: Both the unraveling and the lies have gone even further than we
imagined. But we've lost all the political battles.
At the time that I wrote 'that piece Bill Clinton was using incme distribution pretty effectively as a campaign
theme. There was also quite a bit of genuine populist outrage over corrupt businesspeople and their political
friends. So it seemed reasonable to expect a political realignment something like the one that happened in
Britain under Tony Blair (pre-poodle)" a public demand for a reinvigoration of the welfare state, financed by a
return to progressive taxation.
In fact, during the recent UK. campaign, the Financial Times printed graphs identical to those I used in the
Prospect article, showing exactly the reverse trend: Thatcher's staircase gave way to Blair's picket fence.
But it didn't happen here. The Clinton health-care plan crashed and burned, the DeLay Republicans took over
Congress, and under George W. Bush ... well, you all know about that.
The result was that everything I wrote about in 1992 is far more extreme today.
Compared with 1970, America in the early '90s looked radically unequal; from today's vantage point, it looks
positively egalitarian. In 1992, it seemed shocking that the ratio of the paychecks of the top 100 CEOs to the
earnings of the average worker had gone from about 40, the postwar norm, to 200. By 2000 that ratio was up
to 1,000; it slumped to 500 when the stock bubble burst, but it's headed up again.
At this point, income inequality is right back where it was in the 1920s. Just about all that's left of the New Deal
legacy is Social Security-and they're trying to get rid of that, too.
Meanwhile, I thought officials in the first Bush administration were dishonest about economics; these days,
they look like Boy Scouts. In 1992, it seemed shocking that the administration was trying to pretend that the
obvious increase in inequality wasn't happening. But these days we have a White House pretending that a tax
cut-whose main components are ending the inheritance tax, cutting the top marginal rate, and reducing taxes
on dividends-is somehow aimed at helping ordinary working people.
At this point, the important question is political: What will it take to wake people up? TAP
/Paul Krugman is an economist and a columnist for The New York Times.

The Normalization of Torture, Death Squads and Contempt for the
Rule of Law

By Edward Herman

The U.S. political establishment keeps reaching new levels of hypocrisy, deception (including self-deception),
and open immorality as the empire expands in the pursuit of "freedom," militarism and war become more
institutionalized, and rightwing political power is consolidated. The appointment of Alberto Gonzales as
Attorney-General is the most dramatic illustration of these developments, as he epitomizes the
institutionalization of a regime of torture on the U.S.'s own Devil's Island (Guantanamo), at Abu Ghraib,
Bagram, Kabul (the "pit") and elsewhere in the empire, along with the official contempt for law. (Human Rights
First lists some 44 disclosed and 13 suspected detention centers in the gulag: see, Ending Secret Detentions,
Deborah Pearlstein et al., Human Rights First, June, 2004:

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/detainees/rpt_disclose_intro.htm [Media Material]

http://www.humanrightsfirst.org/us_law/PDF/EndingSecretDetentions_web.pdf [Complete Report]).

Gonzalez' appointment was an announcement that the United States under Bush is now openly and proudly an
outlaw regime in which torture is acceptable and a feature of state policy, and was to be used further (as it
has been), despite its illegality in a host of international agreements (and U.S. law) and the widespread view
that it is deeply immoral. As Amnesty International noted in its 1974 Report on Torture, "One of the shared
values of the humanist tradition was the abolition of torture. This principle found its way into the post-war
declarations on human rights and laws of war without any dissent of debate" (p. 30). In elevating Gonzales,
the Bush administration has officially rejected that humanist tradition and associated human rights and laws
of war principles, not without dissent but with little or no debate.

It should be emphasized that U.S. involvement in torture is far from new. In the frontispiece to The
Washington Connection and Third World Fascism, published back in 1979, Noam Chomsky and I showed that
26 of the 35 countries that used torture on an administrative basis in the mid-to-late 1970s were clients of the
United States, and there was solid evidence that torture technology and training flowed out from the "sun" to
all its "planets." But this was not overt and openly defended in important segments of the media (as it is with
Limbaugh, O'Reilly et al. today), and it was done largely by proxies working over their indigenous dissidents
and labor organizers. With the usual cooperation of the mainstream media, the U.S. public was spared
knowledge of these activities.

Today the United States is heavily into torture directly as well as via "renditions" and proxy operations (e.g.,
the U.S.-employed Iraqis are now torturing with great zeal: see Human Rights Watch,, The New Iraq? Torture
and Ill-treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody). And Gonzales, the principal legal apologist for this torture
outburst, is rewarded with appointment as the highest law enforcement official in the United States. Could
there be a more brazen statement of a country's leadership's contempt for basic morality and the rule of law?

Of course, another brazen statement was the invasion of Iraq itself, a clear case of aggression in violation of
the most fundamental principle of the UN Charter and declared at Nuremberg to be the "supreme crime."
Even though this was based on Big Lies in the Goebbels style, the establishment media and moralists have
never considered this supreme criminality a point worth mentioning, let alone the basis of moral
condemnation.

Aggression by Saddam against Kuwait in 1990 and alleged efforts to create a "Greater Serbia" by Milosevic -
which I consider unadulterated baloney [see Diana Johnstone, Fools Crusade, pp. 32-40] - caused great
indignation and harsh sanctions and military responses by the Great Powers, but a really major aggression
based on lies by the Godfather, although it received a plaintive wee protest about "illegality" from Kofi Annan,
was swallowed and the aggressor's further pacification and takeover of Iraqi affairs was even sanctioned by
Kofi Annan and the Security Council (UN Security Council Resolution 1546 [2004], adopted unanimously, gives
the "multinational force in Iraq" the authority to "take all necessary measures to contribute to the
maintenance [sic] of security and stability in Iraq," and it "welcomes" the "security partnership between the
sovereign Government of Iraq [i.e., the U.S.-appointed Allawi government] and the multinational force…").

The Bush government's contempt for basic morality and the rule of law is also displayed in the appointment of
John Negroponte to be chief of the new intelligence bureaucracy. Negroponte was part of the war
management apparatus during the Vietnam War, and helped organize the killing of millions and destruction of
that country in that failed attempt to save it for a minority government under our control.

He played a sinister role in the war against Nicaragua as Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985,
maintaining warm relations with and bribing a military-dominated government that allowed the contras to work
from Honduran bases in their terrorist activities, tolerating and almost certainly giving sub rosa support to
the murder of hundreds of dissidents at the El Aguacate air base and by the CIA-trained death squad Battalion
3-16. Negroponte's predecessor Jack Binns claimed that 30 Salvadoran nuns who fled El Salvador to
Honduras in 1981 were savagely tortured by the Honduran police and later thrown out of helicopters to their
death.

Negroponte has denied knowledge of any of these serious human rights violations, but the leading Honduras
newspapers "carried at least 318 stories about military abuses in 1982 alone," and he contradicted himself by
boasting that he "personally intervened …to secure the release of politically sensitive detainees." "Instances
of disappearances, harassment and abductions of political dissidents all escalated under Negroponte, yet the
annual Human Rights Reports prepared by the ambassadorial staff …were masterpieces of cunning redaction
or invention, consistently downplaying human rights abuses and denying that any evidence existed of
systematic violations by manipulating language and statistics."

There is a "huge amount of material implicating him in playing a sedulously deceitful role after being posted
to Honduras." (Council on Hemispheric Affairs, "Negroponte: Nominee for Baghdad Embassy, a Rogue for all
Seasons," April 27, 2004: http://www.coha.org/NEW_PRESS_RELEASES/New_Press_Releases_2004/04.
20_Negroponte.htm.)

So Negroponte is an established liar, lying to congress as well as to the public, willing to violate national and
international law, including the 1983 Boland amendment barring military aid to groups working to overthrow
the Sandinista government, and he is a proven efficient manager of death squads (see ibid.; also Sam Smith,
Undernews, Feb. 17, 2005: http://www.prorev.com/indexa.htm; Marjorie Cohn, "Negroponte, Director of
Intelligence Manipulation," Feb. 21, 2005: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/022105B.shtml)

This background of course made Negroponte a logical Bush appointment as ambassador to Iraq, bringing
knowledge of ruthless pacification policy from Vietnam and death squad-support experience from his
Honduras years. His return to the United States as head of intelligence gives that job to a man who is totally
ruthless in serving his masters, willing to use force and deception in all their forms, and an expert in lying in
all of its forms.

The Council on Hemispheric Affairs calls him "an-ends-justifies-the-means operator" and describes him as
"the anti-Christ of democracy, repeatedly dragging its noble cause through the offal." His appointment
signifies an advance over the puny tricks of a J. Edgar Hoover, with a potential for blowing back to this
country some of the uglier forms of dissident control that Negroponte has been involved with in Vietnam,
Honduras and Iraq.

There was some sharp media criticism of the Gonzalez appointment; virtually none of the appointment of
Negroponte (see FAIR's Media Advisory: "Media Omissions on Negroponte's Record ," Feb. 22, 2005: http:
//www.fair.org/index.php?page=2452 ). The New York Times set a hard-to-beat standard for apologetics for
criminality and human rights violations in reporting on the Negroponte appointment.

Under a general heading on his appointment which refers to him only as "Longtime Diplomat," David Sanger's
article "An Old Hand In New Terrain" only reaches Negroponte's human rights record in the 16th of 20
paragraphs, where Sanger tells us that Negroponte was "immersed in" U.S. aid to Honduras, with not one
word about human rights violations or what precisely Negroponte did there. Then, "He has spent the ensuing
two decades vigorously defending himself against allegations that he played down human rights violations in
Honduras when their exposure could have undermined the Reagan administration's Latin American agenda."

So, not a word of what those human rights violations charges were, no suggestion that he might have had an
active role in those violations rather than merely playing them down, not a trace of investigative effort
seeking evidence about the truth or falsity of those charges, and an implicit defense of anything he might
have done as based on loyal support of Reagan's program (unspecified as to ends or methods). Saddam
Hussein needs somebody like David Sanger to write up a news account of charges of his human rights
violations, exposure of which might have undermined the reputation of the Iraqi state.

Despite some reservations on the Bush regime's policies and actions in its aggression/occupation and
torture - and as just noted there are few if any on the appointment of death squad supervisor Negroponte--
the Democrats, mainstream media, and much of the intellectual class still identify with this outlaw regime, and
automatically side with it in its struggle to pacify Iraq, accommodate Sharon and the Israeli occupation, and
move on to a war with Iran. Completely destroy a city (Fallujah), openly bombing one hospital and occupying
another to prevent "propaganda"? N

o problem - no suggestion of illegality, immorality, or qualification of who are the good guys. Ditto for the use
of cluster bombs, napalm and depleted uranium in Iraq (following their use in Afghanistan and Yugoslavia).
Ditto for Abu Ghraib and its numerous affiliates and the regular use of "extraordinary renditions" - more
"errors" and regrettable even if unremedied exceptions to alleged normally decent behavior. Support the
apartheid wall and continued illegal occupation and ethnic cleansing on the West Bank and East Jerusalem?
Continues a great tradition. Support the claim that Iran poses a real threat and is not entitled to seek
defensive capability in the face of explicit and real U.S. and Israeli threats, including the nuclear? What good
propaganda system members ever fail to jump on the bandwagon of any threat that their leadership proclaims
no matter how implausible or unsupported by credible evidence? Remember the WMDs!

A Tax Plan for Progressives
A simpler and fairer tax code-on the American middle class-can h

BY JOHN S. IRONS and John Podesta

FOR FOUR YEARS PRESIDENT BUSH HAS TOUTED his tax cuts as
an economic cure-all, but middle income workers have instead
watched helplessly as the tiny tax cut they received has gone to
pay for higher property taxes, tuition increases, and exploding
medical costs. While the conservatives' tax initiatives have
wreaked havoc on people barely living on their paychecks, wealthy
taxpayers have enjoyed ever-higher incomes taxed at stunningly
lower rates. Furthermore, Bush's tax cuts have wrecked public
services and undermined prospects for long term economic
growth.
Progressives share a responsibility to not only oppose the
conservative tax program but to offer a sensible alternative: reform
to make our tax system fair, simple, and fiscally responsible. We
nee_ to see to it that middle-class Americans get the relief they
need, and that our nation has the wherewithal to make the
investments it must.
Since coming to Washington, President Bush has launched a
series of initiatives to shift America's tax burden onto the
shoulders of the middle class. The most notable were the
Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of2001 and
the Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003.
The 2001 tax change phased in significant reductions in federal
income-tax rates, phased out the estate tax, and provided modest
tax breaks for families with children and for married couples.
While most people .remember a tax-refund check in the range of
$300 to $600, the law also mandated a reduction in the tax rates in
the top four brackets of at least 3 percentage points, and the
creation of a new l0-percent bracket. In addition, there were other
provisions that benefited upper-income
taxpayers and those with significant annual retirement savings.
The president's 2003 tax change accelerated the phase-ins of the
2001 law while slashing the taxation of dividends and capital
gains. Prior to the 2003 tax change, dividends were taxed
according to the same rate schedule as ordinary income. The 2003
law taxed dividends at 5 percent and 15 percent to match the tax
rates on capital gains, which were lowered from 10 percent and 20
percent. The oddly named Job Creation and Worker Assistance
Act of 2002 reduced taxes for new business investments. And the
American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 replaced export trade
subsidies with myriad tax credits for businesses. Of the $140
billion in corporate tax giveaways under that legislation, importers
of Chinese ceiling fans received about $44 million worth of lower
import duties.
One result of these tax-code changes is that middle-income
workers today can easily find themselves paying a tax rate on their
wages double the I5-percent rate that millionaires pay on their
investment income. The immense tax burden placed on wage
earners mocks a core American value: our belief in fairness.
Forcing middle-class workers to bear a greater share of the cost of
government weakens their support for needed investments and
stirs resentment toward those who depend on public services the
most. In this respect, the tax policy enacted by the president and
his supporters has less to do with conservative economics than
conservative politics-promoting antigovernment sentiment within
the middle class and votes for politicians who echo it.

TRAGICALLY, THE ARGUMENT AGAINST THE BUSH TAX
agenda was never heard. Instead of offering a progressive counter-
narrative, Democrats too often allowed the right to set the terms of
the debate. As a result, even those rare victories, such as the
middle-class tax relief Democrats gained in the 2001 tax bill, were
dwarfed by the system's growing regressivity.
While disappointing, the Democrats' dilemma is hardly surprising.
Since the emergence of California anti-tax crusader Howard Jarvis
and the state tax revolts of the mid-I970s, conservatives have
transformed what should be a movement for tax fairness into a
jihad against government spending. The right understands the
language that taps into the public's anger and is not afraid to use
it. Fearful of being branded "tax and spend liberals," many
Democrats have too often chosen to run for cover, raising their
heads only to plead for the status 'quo.
Is that the way it has to be? Hardly. Progressives can not only
fight for fair taxes;' we can even win. Opinion research tells us that
most Americans regard President Bush's elbow-on-the scale
approach to tax rates as fundamentally unfair. What many are
beginning to recognize is that it is also unsustainable. One
Democracy Corps poll in April of this year found respondents, by a
margin of 74 percent to 17 percent, saying that the country is
headed in the wrong direction on the federal budget deficit. Other
polls have consistently found strong support for repealing some
or all of Bush's tax changes if it means reducing the deficit or
financing health care, education, and other priorities.
Last year, federal revenue, as a share of the economy, fell to its
lowest level in nearly 50 years-just 16.3 percent of the gross
domestic product. As a result of the right's efforts to "starve the
beast" and lower taxes for America's wealthiest taxpayers, even a
booming economy would leave the federal government trapped in
a massive fiscal hole.
Yet what sticks in the craw of many Americans is not only that the
conservative tax agenda favors the wealthy and fails to respond to
budget deficits; it also is that, under President Bush, the tax code
has become more complicated than ever. Since 2001, 10,000 pages
have been added to the tax code and related regulations. One
result of this tinkering and tweaking is that millions of American
families will soon be ensnared in the additional complexity of the
dreaded alternative minimum tax (AMT). Because the AMT is not
indexed for inflation, and because the 2001-03 tax changes
lowered tax shares of upper income taxpayers without
permanently adjusting it, the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center
estimates that by 2010, as many as one-third of taxpayers will be
affected by the AMT at a cost of more than $100 billion.
Americans don't want to blow up our tax system and start over.
Instead, we want to restore the values of progressive taxation that
have historically guided US. tax policy. The federal income tax the
cornerstone of the tax code-needs to be restructured, simplified,
and broadened. This means eliminating loopholes for
corporations and wealthy individuals, simplifying the rate
structure, and reversing the trend of unfairly lower tax rates on the
capital income of the wealthiest Americans.

THE MODERN ECONOMY IS INCREASINGLY DRIVEN BY jobs in
which advanced skills play an important role, and in which
"human capital" is as important as physical capital, if not more so.
A tax system that rewards wealth and accumulated capital at the
expense of work and skill flies in the face of this fundamental
economic change.
The Center for American Progress has put forward a new proposal
to make the tax code fair, simple, and supportive of new economic
opportunity. We would tax all forms of income according to the
same rate schedule. This change would end preferential treatment
for income from capital (wealth) over income
from work by setting capital gains and dividend taxes equal to the
tax rates on ordinary income.
We also would provide relief for the most regressive part of the
system, the payroll'\ax. The Social Security payroll tax is currently
12.4 percent and split evenly between workers and their
employers. The center's plan would reduce the tax rates on work
by eliminating the employee side of the Social Security payroll tax.
This would mean an immediate 6.2-percentage-point reduction in
the tax rates on the first $90,000 of income from salaries and
wages. At the same time, we would make the employer side of the
payroll tax less regressive by requiring employers to pay taxes on
payroll incomes above $90,000.
We would revamp the income-tax rate structure by reducing it to
three tax brackets with tax rates set at 15 percent, 25 percent, and
39.6 percent-which we would also set as the tax rate on capital
gains and dividends. The brackets would be set at taxable income
levels of $0, $25,000, and $120,000, with a $10,000 standard
deduction for married couples.
The net cost of the payroll-tax change would be about $3 trillion
over 10 years (the $3.7 trillion in lost payroll-tax revenue would be
partially offset by an additional $700 billion raised by eliminating
the cap). However, the reformed tax system would raise federal
revenue overall by about $500 billion when compared with
President Bush's policy. Because most taxpayers pay more in
payroll taxes than in income taxes, the tax savings for middle-
income households would be significant.
This simple restructuring of the tax code would also include an
elimination of the AMT, rescuing 30 million taxpayers from the
snare of complicated and expensive tax filings over the next
several years. We would also reduce the income level needed to
qualify for the full child tax credit, enabling more low-wage
workers to receive it. By raising additional revenue, this simpler,
fairer tax plan would also reduce the deficit and create a stronger
foundation for economic growth.
Unlike the trifecta of right-wing tax-policy reforms-a flat tax, a
value-added tax (VAT), or a national sales tax-our plan would
maintain the current deductibility of charitable giving, home
mortgage interest, state-tax deductibility, and other deductions in
their current form. We believe that there is room enough to raise
revenue without eliminating valuable deductions that serve
important social interests.
Finally, the center's plan would replace the upside-down
retirement savings deduction with a refundable credit. Currently,
those in a higher tax bracket receive a greater tax benefit from
retirement savings. For example, someone in the 15-percent
bracket receives a 15-cent reduction in their tax share for each $1
saved in a tax-preferred retirement account, while those with
higher incomes in the 35-percent bracket receive a 35-cent
reduction. Under our plan, everyone would receive a 25-percent
refundable credit for retirement savings.
The center's plan would also retain current limits on contributions
to these tax-preferred retirement accounts. For instance, a $1,000
contribution to an IRA would give taxpayers a $250 credit on their
taxes-and the credit would be refundable to guarantee that low-
income Americans would receive the same savings incentives as
upper-income families. More than 60 million Americans would thus
have a new or increased incentive to save.
Retirement savings would also be enhanced by exempting a
portion of long held assets from capital-gains taxes for those
earning less than $1 million a year. In addition, the plan would
raise and dedicate enough money to the Social Security Trust
Fund from general revenues to fill half of the gap between
dedicated revenue and payments in the Social Security system.
A portion of the added revenue raised by our system could be
used for further retirement savings incentives, which would offer
additional matching funds for low-income savers while phasing
out matching funds for those with annual incomes
greater than $100,000. We would also include a modest automatic
contribution for low-income families, who are often unable to
contribute due to a lack of disposable income. These accounts
would be managed in a cost-effective manner limiting personal
risk. This enhanced savings and retirement wealth would provide
an important supplement to Social Security.
Simplifying the system by eliminating loopholes at the corporate
and individual levels would save billions of dollars and offer an
added degree of horizontal equity. In addition, the plan would
retain a reformed estate tax, an important backstop to a fair and
efficient tax code. Our proposed $2.5 million exemption that small
family farms and businesses are not burdened by the tax, while
preserving the estate tax on the very wealthy.
These changes are genuine reforms that would restore
progressivity to the tax code, while at the same time raising
additional revenue. With the center's plan, more than 70 percent of
Americans earning less than $200,000 a year would see an average
tax cut of about $600. Those making more than $200,000 a year-the
primary beneficiaries of the Bush tax changes would see an
increase in their tax share. Overall, the plan would raise nearly
$500 billion over 10 years when compared with Bush's tax
proposals.
What's more, the center's tax plan would promote growth by
reducing the deficit and boosting national savings, by rewarding
work and promoting "human capital" formation through lower
taxes on wages, and by expanding incentives to save for" more
than 60 million tax filers.
Under the center's plan, the CEOs of large corporations and other
very wealthy Americans would have a tougher time dodging their
tax responsibilities. And in a return to America's progressive
values, this tax plan would make it clear that wealth and
investment are no longer preferred to the hard work of the
American middle class.

As THE SOCIAL SECURITY DEBATE MOVES TO THE BACK burner,
we will likely see a renewed drive by conservatives to replace the
income tax with a flat tax, a VAT, a consumption tax, or even a
national sales tax. While the details of each plan differ, their main
thrust is clear: more of the same failed economic_policy that -
rewards capital and the wealthy at the expense of work and the
middle class.
Does the center's plan offer progressives the means to fight back
and win? We think so, and we are not alone. Nobel laureate Robert
Solow contrasted our proposal with other plans and endorsed it
as not only fair but plausible. "When anybody tells you that they
have a tax scheme which will allow you to file your income-tax
return on a postcard, I often wonder where that postcard is going
to be postmarked-someplace like Neverland, Solow said. 'We're
talking here about things that could, in fact, actually be done;'
Ultimately, whether these things are done is less a question of
economic science than political science. After all, it is of little
consequence if progressives master the former but repeatedly fail
in the latter. In 1995, Bryan Gould, a former Labour member of the
British Parliament, recalled his own party's shortcomings in
addressing tax policy, saying, "We found ourselves bogged down
on an issue [taxation] which, notwithstanding Tory ineptitude, our
opponents were bound to capitalize on in the end."'
Today the stakes are far too high to allow our opponents to
capitalize on tax policy any longer. For Democrats, the time to
speak out for progressive tax reform is now. If they fail to,
Americans will be paying the price for President Bush's ineptitude
for generations to come. TAP

John S. Irons is the Center for American Progress' director of tax
and budget policy. John Podesta was President Bill Clinton's chief
of staff from 1998 to 2001 and is currently the center's president
and CEO.

Appointees in all the wrong places
AUSTIN, Texas - Sometimes you look at the people President
Bush appoints to
High public office and the only possible response is, "What was
he thinking? "Zalmay Khalilzad for US ambassador to Iraq? Why
not just send Richard Perle? Khalilzad is a second-rank neocon
with all the same credentials as the rest of those bozos- pre
emptive war, world,hegemony,         Project for a New
AmericanCentury... the whole stinking lot of-it. Plus, he's_been a
big booster for Iran's ayatollahs, the Afghani mujahedeen and the
Taliban, not to mention an oil company consultant. Isn't that just
jim-dandy?. What this tells us is that the Bush administration has
learned exactly nothing from the past three yeaArs of insurgency
in Iraq. The 1,700-dead, $1 billon-a-week mistake will continue to
be run in exactly the same way we have already proved doesn't
work. We'll keep trying to put out a growing insurgency with too
small an army as the country drifts ever-closer to civil war. It's like
Ben Franklin's definition. of insanity-doing the samething over
and over, expecting different results. As one-who has long-argued
that George W. Bush is not stupid, I must admit that not learning
from your mistakes is a prime signal of stupidity. But of course, in
order to learn from your mistakes, you have to recognize you made
them.
_The president assured us just last week that he is "heartened" by
what is happening in
Iraq and, "I am pleased with the progress." The vice president says
there is "major progress" and the insurgency is in its "last throes."
These folks are in such deep denial.
Chris Cox, now there's an appointment of near-genius level. Hey,
is this the man you
would put in charge of the Securities and Exchange Commission
to protect investors from greedy capitalist crooks? Cox, a
Republican from Orange County, Calif., helped produce the Enron
Corp. mess and subsequent scandals in the fIrst place. Just the
guy for the job! Cox led the fight in 1995 to pass the Private
Securities and Litigation Reform Act, which provided extensive
legal protection to corporate executives, accountants and lawyers
who make misleading statements. The law paved the way for
corporate executives to lie without fear of being sued -it's the "Ken
Lay Protection Act." In 2002, Cox said he "rejected the notion that
Enron's meltdown should cause Congress to rethink
deregulation." The guy's home state was ripped off for $10 billion
by Enron. Here's another one who can't learn from his mistakes.
Of course, the fact that he's gotten more than $640,000 in
campaign money from the very people he will now be regulating
has nothing to do with his views. Cox, according to the New, York
Times, is a devotee of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of
unregulated capitalism. On announcing the Cox appointment,
Bush said, "As a champion of the free-enterprise system in
Congress, Chris Cox knows that a free economy is built on trust."
Trust? How about, trust but verify?
And a new development in the most ludicrous nomination yet,
John Bolton, Mr. Diplomacy, for ambassador to the United
Nations. It turns out that in addition to trying to get American
intelligence analysts who disagreed with him fired, Bolton axed an
international civil servant for having the temerity to do his job.
In 2001, Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prohibition
of Chemical Weapons, says, Bolton "telephoned me to try to
interfere, in a menacing" tone, in decisions that are the exclusive
responsibility of the ' director-general." Bolton was opposed to
Bustani's effort to get Iraq and other Arab countries involved in
the OPCW. Bustani aide Bob Rigg of New Zealand said: "Why did
they not want OPCW involved in Iraq? They felt they couldn't rely
on OPCW to come up with the findings the U.S. wanted." Bolton
then arranged to have " Bustani fired in a way a UN "" tribunal has
since said was unlawful. I'll bet they just can't' wait to see Bolton's
moustache up at the United Nations. How could we possibly make
more friends there? As I'm sure Chris Cox can tell us, in business,
"goodwill" is considered an asset.

Creators Syndicate:
Molly Ivins is a syndicated columnist based in Austin, Texas. E-
mail: info@Creator s.com

A State-Run News Service
By Jerry Star
PUBLIC BROADCASTING IS THE LATEST FRONT in the Republican majority's assault on the "liberal" media.
After years of trying to destroy public broadcasting from without, right-wing Republicans are now trying to do
so from within, by planting aggressive conservatives on the board and staff. These people have no qualms
about destroying the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's (CPB) function as a "heat shield" from
governmental influence. Rather, they seem bent on turning public broadcasting into a heat source-a
censorship center.
This may be the most effective tactic yet in the longstanding struggle to kill public broadcasting. CPB, while
only providing 15 percent of the total funding of public broadcasting, has a powerful leveraging function. It
provides important operating money for its 350 member TV stations, and crucial producing funds for PES. NPR
depends on the money its member stations give it for programming, and those stations get a significant
portion of their basic operating funds from CPB.
At the center of this current controversy are veteran broadcast journalist Bill Moyers and CPB board chair
Kenneth Tomlinson, who ran Voice of America during the Reagan administration. (See "The Battle Over PBS"
by Bill Moyers on page 40.)
Angered by criticism of the Republican Party on Bill Moyers' "NOW,' Tomlinson promoted the development of
two conservative opinion shows. One was hosted by Tucker Carlson and the other featured the staff of the
Wall Street Journal editorial page. Tomlinson has claimed that all he wants is to "balance" Moyers. But
prominent journalists Carl Stern and Marvin Kalb have told colleagues on PBS's Editorial Standards Review
Committee that CPB's advocacy for "ideological balance" has compromised PBS's editorial integrity.
Earlier this year, Kathleen Cox was abruptly dropped as CPB president and temporarily replaced by Ken
Ferree, a top adviser to former FCC chair Michael Powell and a supporter of greater media consolidation.
Tomlinson now is touting Patricia Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee, for the
permanent position.
Without consulting PBS, CPB broke new ground by appointing a committee of two, one of them Tomlinson's
former executive editor at Readers Digest, to review all PBS news and public affairs programs for
"objectivity" and "balance:' In an internal memo,
PES general counsel described this as "government encroachment on ... content, potentially in violation of
the First Amendment:'
CPB's own studies, conducted by professional pollsters in 2002 and 2003 (before Tomlinson took over), found
that PES was rated more trusted, fair and balanced than any other broadcaster. Unsatisfied, Tomlinson paid
$10,000 to a personal associate to analyze Moyers' program (which frequently interviews conservatives),
placing guests in categories like "anti-Bush:' "anti-business:' and "anti-Tom DeLay:' The results of that
analysis are not known because, as Television Week TV critic Tom Shales wrote, Tomlinson "had the report
locked away in a drawer, stamped it 'confidential: and now pretends it doesn't exist:'
In its current contract with PES, the CPB pledged to provide $22.5 million a year (about 20 percent of its
funding) for two years on the condition that PES adopt editorial guidelines and standards, provide copies of
those guidelines to the board, and not invest "CPB funds in programs of a controversial nature" that fail to
meet conlgressionally mandated standards for balance and objectivity. While this agreement was a
compromise from CPB's previous demand that PES submit its programming for approval, it is nonetheless a
victory for Tomlinson and his fellow Republican board members.
A progressive response is rapidly emerging. On May 10-15, some 2,500 people gathered in St. Louis for the
National Conference for Media Reform. (See "Free Speech in Action page 10) On behalf of Citizens for
Independent Public Broadcasting (cipbonline.org), I presented our proposal to restructure public
broadcasting as an independently funded public trust.        .
Ernest Wilson, one of the CPB's two Democratic board members, advised attendees: "The change needed
cannot come from inside the Beltway. It's got to come from the people in this room and in your communities:'
Already, more than 70,000 Americans have signed the Free Press petition calling on Tomlinson to resign and
demanding that "the public be put back into PES:' At present, Free Press and Common Cause are
spearheading a movement to challenge this assault on PBS and NPR. Among the initiatives will be town
meetings held across the nation. Advocates are seeking public broadcasting that includes alternative voices
rather than justifies their exclusion; that reflects on power, not simply reflects power.

1992
As I Predicted, Only" BY ROBERT B. REICH

In December 1992, according to Bob Woodward:S The Agenda, President-elect Bill Clinton was about to
announce Laura Tyson:S appointment as chair of t
the Council of Economic Advisors, when Tyson mentioned she and Robert Reich had debated in The American Prospect
whether the nationality of a firm was important. Suddenly recalling the debate, Clinton said, "You know what? You were
right, and [Reich] was wrong." So we decided to ask them now: Bob Reich, were you wrong? Laura Tyson, were you right?

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, IN AN ARTicle in the Harvard Business Review and a subsequent debate with Laura Tyson in
these pages [see "Who Do c We Think They Are?" and "They Are Not r Us: Why American Ownership Still Matters" Winter
1991], I contended that large American corporations were losing their national identity by employing people and attracting
capital globally. Because we couldn't count on American companies to invest in the productivity of American citizens, we
had to rely increasingly on public investment.
Tyson thought the trend wouldn't occur nearly as quickly as I claimed. Besides, she argued, we needed American-based
companies to keep America's lead in technology and national defense.
With all due respect to my colleagues in the Clinton administration, I think my prediction, if anything, was understated.
Toyota is now the second-largest car manufacturer in the United States. Chinese a factories account for a large and
growing percentage of the manufacturing for American companies, whose back-office work and software design are
increasingly done in India. The Commerce Department says 48 percent of US imports are from US companies operations
abroad.
None of this is a serious problem for professional, college-educated Americans-yet. But a majority of the American
workforce is stuck in the local service economy as retail and restaurant workers, hotel and hospital assistants, janitors, cab
drivers, child- or elder-care workers, and other low-wage laborers with scant health benefits. The public investment to
make ordinary Americans more productive never materialized. Public investment is a lower percentage of the national
economy today than it was in
Fourteen years ago I failed to understand the political logic of my argument. Big American-based corporations, becoming
less dependent on the productivity of Americans, would use their muscle to reduce taxes, thereby preventing the needed
public investment. I didn't anticipate that conservative Republicans would run up massive budget deficits under the two
Bushes in order to make it virtually impossible for the federal government to do much except wage war. And I never
imagined that Democrats could be so timid as to let them get away with it.
During the four years I was Bill Clinton's secretary of labor, from 1993 to 1997, the administration was unable to increase
public investment. It had to cut the budget deficit it inherited so that Alan Greenspan and his colleagues at the Federal
Reserve, plus bond traders on Wall Street, would feel confident enough to reduce interest rates. But even when the
economy soared in the late 1990s and deficits turned into large surpluses- that is, even when we could afford it-Clinton
and the Democrats were reluctant to push an investment agenda. Instead, they admonished Congress to "save Social
Security first;' a stopgap strategy that left the surpluses an the table. That gave George W. Bush the trillions of dollars he
needed to cut taxes on the rich before plunging the federal budget back into deficit.
The rest is history. And unless we reverse course and make the needed investments, American workers-even the college-
educated-will be history, too. TAP

Injuries for All

Human rights report details the gruesome cost of the Bush Administration's' hostility to workplace safety

JAMIE DANIEL

READERS OF THE MARCH 5 NEW York Times were greeted by the grotesque headline, "His Hands Reattached, a Worker
is Over w'ed:' The piece included a photo of the rovering machinist, 49-year-old Arsenio ltias, a Dominican immigrant and
father six. While operating a vacuum press that produces plastic components for window plays, both his hands had been
caught and neatly severed at the wrist. Only the quick thinking of his co-workers, who used _ir belts to stop the flow of
blood from his 11S and ran to buy ice to keep his hands V'e until medics could arrive, allowed ltias to survive long enough
to have his ads surgically reattached. Doctors do not Ject him to regain normal mobility.
This account of traumatic injury at the ,rkplace is a fairly ordinary situation_ only thing exceptional about it is that ltias'
hands were saved. Had this not _n the case, or if he had lost the use of ; hands over timft-1:c( repetitive stress, we ,uld
know nptfung about him. Disabling ,rkplace injuries are now so common the United States that the thousands of ,rkers who
lose their fingers, hands, hear_, sight, mobility-and often their lives_ry year remain invisible to most of us. : don't see the
human cost of unsafe lchines, dangerous production quotas, ldequate safety equipment and exposure toxic chemicals
unless a case like that of ltias catches a reporter's attention.
What's worse, these conditions are un:essary. This is one of the conclusions an important study released by Human
_hts Watch. "Blood, Sweat, and Fear: )rkers' Rights in u.S. Meat and Poultry mts" documents the outrageous inciace of
needless disability and death sufed mostly by immigrant workers in this industry, as well as the extent to which industry and
Bush administration antipathy to the right to organize has eroded enforcement of basic health and safety standards that
unions fought to establish throughout the 20th century. The report is available at www.hrw.org/reports/200s/usaolOS/.
"Blood, Sweat, and Fear" documents in excruciating detail the rates of traumatic
and longer term injury. Workers in the industry now face a one in five chance of severe disability or death on the job-jobs
that often lack benefits and decent pay. Just as crucially, the report traces the industry's concerted and largeJy successful
efforts over the last two decades to disable the once-muscular unions that had previously protected meatpacking and
poultry workers from such ferocious injury rates.
:ndeed, while "injury rates had been in ine with other manufacturing sectors with :rade union representation... since the )
reakdown of national bargainil}.f}. agreenents, [meat packing] has become the nost dangerous factory job in America:'
_eferring to industry giant Tyson Foods as he "Wal-Mart" of the industry, the report :races a de-skilling of meat and poultry
Jroduction that has "reduced every stage n the process to repetitive cutting:' forcing Nurkers to repeat the same motion
30,000 imes a day, often with no time to sharpen lull knives or clear dangerous detritus 'rom the work area.
As is the case in other industries, meatJacking and poultry workers have suffered he impact of the Bush administration's :
ollusion with industry giants like Tyson,
a fact that has permitted "government agencies themselves [to] give production priority over worker safety:'
One of the first actions taken by the Bush administration was the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health
Administration (OSHA) Ergonomics Standard adopted by the. Clinton administration. This was just the first step in what
became a pattern for the administration, which has actively turned its back on worker health and safety in order to placate
its corporate allies. For example, as the AFL-CIO pointed out last February, the White House has proposed freezing the
budget for OSHA standard enforcement programs, even though OSHA is already so inadequately funded that its staff will
only be able to inspect any particular plant an average of once a century.
For FY 2006, the Bush budget proposes to eliminate all funding for union-run worker health and safety training programs.
In addition, the Bush administration has shut down the development of new workplace rules on exposure to cancer-causing
substances, reactive chemicals and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis. It has refused to issue a rule requiring
employers to pay for the sort of personal"protective equipment that could prevent thousands of injuries to the mostly
immigrant, mostly low-wage workforce in industries like meat processing.
In another obvious favor to corporations, the administration repealed the OSHA rule requiring musculoskeletal disorders to
be reported on workplace injury rate logs, and made enforcement of existing ergonomic standards "voluntary" rather than
mandatory.
The degree of administration contempt for worker safety was perhaps most evident when, in January 2002, President Bush
appointed as acting solicitor oflabor one Eugene Scalia, the son of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and a member of
the arch-conservative Federalist Society. The solicitor of labor is the federal attorney responsible for implementing and
enforcing workplace safety, wage and hour, pension security, and other critically important protections. But Scalia was
apparently nominated by Bush precisely because of what AFL-CIO President John Sweeney has termed his "extreme and
relentless opposition to ergonomics protections and other worker protection initiatives:'
Scalia's opposition was evident in a paper published by the Cato Institute in June of 2000, in which he belittled carpal
tunnel syndrome and other RSI injuries as "subjective" and dismissed ergonomics as a "questionable science:' Only after a
concerted effort by labor unions and Senate Democrats was Scalia forced from the Department of Labor in 2003. His
resignation was lamented by, among others, the National Right to Work Foundation and Bush's secretary of labor, Elaine
Chao.
Given that we're all going to suffer another four years of this administration's
relentless anti-worker agenda, we would do well to recognize that the injuries faced by those who process our hamburgers
and chicken are ever closer to becoming "injuries to all." II!

JAMIE DANIEL is the director oj organizing and development at UP1 Local 4100, 1FT! AFT and a co-chair oj the Chicago
Center jor Working Class Studies.

George Packer and the Liberal Struggle to Support Imperialism

By Edward Herman

In his edited volume The Fight Is For Democracy (Perennial: 2003),
George Packer and his liberal colleagues argued that Bush went
too far with his international policies that were “a prescription for
empire” (Michael Tomasky). But Packer and company did not
renounce empire; instead they urged the Democrats to put the
“fight for democracy” abroad as the core of their foreign policy,
which would involve steady interventionism abroad, but with an
allegedly noble end, and hopefully would prevent the rightwing
from effectively labeling the Democrats as peaceniks and
incapable of defending our “national security.” In This Fight Is For
Democracy, Packer and Tomasky argued that the Democrats were
a proper vehicle for the democracy crusade, although history, the
structural imperatives that it reflects, and the constant systemic
pressure on the Democrats to display their devotion to our
“national security” by forceful actions, make it quite clear that the
Democrats’ fight for democracy abroad will continue to be
wonderfully selective, ignoring “our kind of guy” like Suharto and
helping overthrow a social democrat like Joao Goulart in Brazil
(Democrats Clinton and Johnson, respectively, operating in accord
with corporate priorities, with Johnson actually proclaiming the
overthrow of democracy and installation of a military dictatorship
a triumph of freedom). The Packer-Tomasky defense of the
Democrats was based on a laughable misreading of history (as I
discussed earlier in “Liberals in Search of a Foreign Policy,” Z
Magazine: http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Dec2003/herman1203.htm.)
Another key feature of the Packer-Tomasky support of
interventionism was its complete lack of any serious political-
economic analysis. Could U.S. foreign policy be explained by the
demands of the growing transnational corporate sector and the
military-industrial complex that grew up side-by-side with TNC
outreach and possibly adds its own interventionary interests to
the package? Could these power interests feed in to the electoral
process and media and through these routes dominate the
behavior of the political parties and elected officials in defining the
“national interest”? These elemental questions don’t arise for
Packer and company, leaving the Republican and Democratic
parties and leaders disembodied and free to choose their paths,
which is utter nonsense, but useful in systems of liberal
apologetics that are not prepared to oppose a consensus
supportive of imperialism. An amusing feature of Packer’s
Introduction to The Fight Is For Democracy is that he
acknowledges that the growth in corporate power and inequality
has caused “money and its influence [to] claim a greater share of
political power,” with the result that “democracy has atrophied” in
this country. But he does not allow this to interfere with the notion
that the Democrats are a potential vehicle for spreading democracy
abroad; he does not admit that an atrophied democracy more than
ever influenced by corporate power might not be a great vehicle
for spreading democracy, although its principals might be happy
to see it used as a cover. Nor does he suggest that maybe the
liberals ought to be working full-time to get a working democracy
here before pushing for spreading it elsewhere. This can only be
explained by his taking of imperialism as a given and something
that must be supported, along with his limited objective of helping
the Democrats regain control of office and the imperialist process.
George Packer has updated his thoughts on Republicans versus
Democrats as vehicles for spreading democracy (“Invasion Vs
Persuasion,” The New Yorker, December 20/27, 2004: http:
//newyorker.com/talk/content/?041220ta_talk_packer), but he has
no doubts that spreading democracy is what this country is up to:
“The hard question isn’t whether America should try to enlarge the
democratic order but how”. This is straightforward imperialist
ideology, which explains the outward thrust of the United States
not as the projection of power by a country with global economic
interests, but done in a spirit of benevolence. However, certain
problems arise: one is the historical record extending over many
years of support of political gangsters, many of whom ousted
democratic governments—a key set is the eleven cases of
displacement of democratic governments by dictatorships in Latin
America in the Kennedy-Johnson years, but there are many others.
Furthermore, this support continues today, with Uzbekistan’s
Karimov and Pakistan’s Musharraf notable illustrations. There is
also documentation from the official record of a primary concern
over open door and investment climate policies and minimal
concern over “democracy” (see Chomsky’s On Power and
Ideology [South End: 1987], chap. 1, and my “The United States
Versus Human Rights in the Third World,” Harvard Human Rights
Journal, Spring 1991). And there is solid data showing an inverse
relationship between U.S. economic and military aid and human
rights, including maintenance of a democratic political structure
(see Herman, The Real Terror Network [South End: 1982], chap. 3).
The long U.S. aid and training of Latin American (and other)
military in the School of the Americas was explicitly designed to
provide a counterweight to populism, and these trainees led the
transformation of Latin America into a virtual system of National
Security States from 1954 through the 1980s, regularly displacing
democratic governments, with U.S. support. There is also the
problem that the Bush administration’s leaders put up a series of
policy statements between 1992 and 2002 that called for a more
aggressive projection of power, with minimal reference to
democratization and maximum attention to the desire for an
enhanced power presence in the Middle East and elsewhere, and
alleged “national security” concerns. All of the above
considerations are consistent with the hypothesis that now, as in
the past, the United States will support democracy when this will
serve the higher objectives, which include the willingness to
provide a favorable climate of investment, to accept neoliberalism
as basic policy and ideology, and to become a de facto
dependency of the United States and West. George Packer does
not discuss this hypothesis, which would suggest that spreading
democracy is not a real objective but can be the instrument of a
well-managed imperialism, serving as a cover for more mundane
ends. One of the most remarkable features of Packer’s new look is
that he has transformed George Bush into a conscious agent for
the spread of democracy.Packer had already offered apologetics
for the invasion-occupation, arguing that since it had happened it
was important for it to be successful. “You can object to no bid
contracts, you can object to cronyism and waste as I do, without
undermining the basic understanding that we are committed to
this and we have an enormous obligation to the Iraqis” (quoted by
Michelle Goldberg, “Dazed and Confused About Iraq,” Salon, Oct.
27, 2003).

Notice the “we,” with Packer identifying with the Bush
administration and making that “our” and “his” commitment, in
the “Good German” and ”willing executioner” tradition. A non-
imperialist might argue that when an aggression built on lies takes
place, the first order of business is exit, the second is punishment
for the “supreme crime,” plus ongoing serious lesser crimes that
Packer can’t acknowledge. For him we can’t forfeit our alleged
obligations even in face of Abu Ghraib, ruthless pacification, and
the fact that the ugly U.S. presence has produced a massive
insurgency and that the Iraqis seem anxious to get rid of us. The
idea that our “obligation” to the Iraqis might be quick exit,
prosecutions for U.S. war crimes, and massive reparations is
outside Packer’s orbit of thought. There is also the problem that
the Bush team clearly had other objectives than democratization
and planned from the beginning to neo-liberalize Iraq without the
consent of the people, and establish a client state that would
sanction U.S. bases and privileged access to Iraqi oil. Packer now
asserts that “No one should doubt that he and his surviving senior
advisers believes in what they call the ‘forward strategy of
freedom,’ even if they’ve had to talk themselves into it…By now…it
is clear that, however, clumsy and selective the execution, Bush
wants democratization to be his legacy.” Packer tells us that no
one should “misjudge his sincerity,” and that arguing that it is a
cover for an “American power grab…is not a good position for the
opposition to be in, either morally or politically. The best role for
critics in the president’s second term will be not to scoff at the
idea of spreading freedom but to take it seriously—to hold him to
his own talk.” Packer of course gives not the slightest evidence for
this claim of a new devotion to democratization beyond the Bush
words, and he does not claim to have invented a sinceriometer—
this is a liberal trimmer’s pure but exceedingly crude and silly
rationalization of the ongoing imperial operation. Now that Bush
has four more years, as Packer is spiritually unable to move into
the anti-imperialist (and anti-aggression and pro-international law)
camp, he must make “our mission” benevolent, and our job
making Bush stick to his objectives, although why we have to
bother holding him to his own talk if he is really and sincerely now
seeking democracy is unclear. Packer’s claim that arguing that the
Bushies are engaged in a “power grab” is “morally” as well as
politically unacceptable implies that even if it is true that the
Bushies are so engaged we cannot press that claim. Presumably in
this case it is moral to lie and pretend that the Bush mission is
benevolent even if internal documents and his actual performance
tell us otherwise. We should remain silent and press Our Leader to
pursue a forward strategy of freedom because morality is always
on our side, by patriotic assumption. A further difficulty with
Packer’s notion of a new Bush aiming for a democracy legacy is
that Bush has been busy undermining democracy and the rule of
law in the United States. Perhaps he has become so devoted to
and preoccupied with bringing democracy abroad that his own
country slipped out of his consciousness and some of his
underlings not yet geared in to the new Bush legacy aim have
been doing this damage. Or perhaps Packer found this
deviationism too inconvenient for integration into his “analysis” of
the new and sincere devotion to democracy elsewhere! In his
recent New Yorker piece Packer puts great emphasis on the
difference between good , multilateral interventionism in favor of
democracy, as exemplified by the recent “pro-democracy”
campaign in the Ukraine, and the bungling unilateral effort by
Bush and company in Iraq. For Packer the interventions in the
Ukraine (and in Yugoslavia and Georgia) helped produce “peaceful
democratic revolutions,” and in the Ukraine “the meddlers have
done nothing worse than help guarantee a people’s right to
choose a government freely.” This is a gross error of fact: massive
intervention with resources, training programs, organizational
efforts, and propaganda, combined with subtle and unsubtle
pressures from the outside on the regime targeted for change, will
distort an electoral process (as happened earlier in Nicaragua in
the process of ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990). Packer ignores
the fact that “pro-democracy” in the three cases he mentions was
also “pro-neoliberalism,” so that these campaigns are somehow
managing to achieve the economic policy ends sought by U.S.
interventionism that brought military dictators into power in Latin
America. With the help of the IMF, World Bank, WTO, and trade,
financial and military base agreements, this can now be done via
“democratic revolutions,” whose only problem is that they yield
very constrained democracies that lack much independence.
Packer, who mentions the atrophying of democracy in the United
States (in his book) has not a word to say about the possible limits
to democracy in these new “democracies” helped into being by
foreign atrophied democracies. Packer also ignores the
geopolitical aspect of these supposed “pro-democracy”
movements, which in the Ukraine will have the affect of pulling a
close and important neighbor of Russia out of Russia’s sphere of
influence into that of the United States and NATO. (The strategy of
removing Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit as a means of weakening
Russia was a major theme of Brezezinski’s 1997 book The Grand
Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.)
In fact, Packer sneers at The Nation for making the obvious point
that the United States “refuses to abandon its Cold War policy of
encircling Russia and seeking to pull every former Soviet Republic
into its orbit.”

Packer comments that the magazine is “taking the Russian side of
the Cold War.” So, it is a continuation of the Cold War, and Packer
implicitly supports “his side,” but doesn’t even think this is worth
mentioning as a feature of the “pro-democracy” policy. Only a
journal lacking adequate patriotic ardor and bias would bring this
up! This is crude apologetics, and in this apologetic for the real
rescuscitation of Cold War aggressiveness covered over by “pro-
democracy” interventionism, Packer displays another violation of
morality—namely, he writes apologetics for actions that, if carried
out by a hostile power against the United States, such as Russia
pumping resources into Mexico to assist people there to resist U.
S. penetration, he would find highly objectionable. He has the
built-in double standard that is characteristic of nationalists and
imperialists everywhere. We are special and rules applicable to
others are not applicable to us. (This is one reason Packer has not
been outraged by the U.S. violation of the UN Charter in each of its
recent wars.) With Packer adjusting well to Bush era imperialism—
Bush has bungled, but is now intent on democratizing [abroad!],
though needing an occasional push--and with Democratic
Senators like Joe Biden and Charles Schumer expressing warmth
toward the nomination of anti-rule-of-law and torture apologist
Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General, anti-imperialists and
democrats (with a small d) have a tough job ahead.

Longevity Crisis? Kill Grandma
by Barbara Ehrenreich
June 12, 2005

Los Angeles Times Printer Friendly Version
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A specter is stalking the Western world, and it looks a lot like
Grandma. As President Bush has repeatedly put it, the problem
with Social Security is that "baby boomers will be living longer."
Not "too" long, he's careful to say, but long enough to create a
fiscal catastrophe. And it's not just Social Security. Medicare, as
well as any company rash enough to have offered pensions, may
eventually sink under the weight of its obligations to the elderly. A
welfare state designed in the era of bacon, eggs and Lucky Strikes
cannot expect to survive in an age of "active seniors" who wash
down their Viagra with soy milk and think a six-pack is something
you get at the gym.

So far, the policymakers' response has been to gut the welfare
state before the greedy geezers can plunder it. For example, the
Bush administration has achieved deep cuts in Medicaid, which
supports many of the middle class in their post-golden nursing
home years, and it continues to fight for the evisceration of Social
Security.

But can such namby-pamby solutions really get to the root of the
problem? Isn't it clear that there are just too many old people
around, luxuriating in their assisted-living communities and
expecting the government to support their statin and beta-blocker
habits? Does no one have the courage to confront the longevity
crisis head-on?

There are exceptions - a few Americans brave enough to try. Some
credit should go to Burger King for its new "Enormous Omelet
Sandwich," and to Hardee's for its "Monster Burger" (two one-
third-pound patties.) Nor can we neglect the manufacturers of the
various cardiovascularly compromising painkillers, such as
Celebrex and Vioxx. In addition, Wyeth, the pharmaceutical
company whose aggressively marketed hormone replacement
therapy pill turned out to cause breast cancer and heart disease,
deserves some retrospective recognition.

The longevity-fighting Purple Heart, though, goes to the Center for Consumer Freedom, funded by the
tobacco and restaurant industries, which bravely battles restrictions on indoor smoking, repressive limits on
blood-alcohol levels for drivers and the relentless liberal bad-mouthing of salt, fat, sugar and meat. And what
has the CCF gotten for its efforts? A challenge to its tax-exempt status from Citizens for Responsibility and
Ethics in Washington.

Face it, nothing is really going to change until the federal government tackles the problem itself. It might start
drafting 60-year-olds, for example, for a few months of service in the Iraqi desert. And what about
transforming the Drug Enforcement Administration into the Diet Enforcement Administration, with the power
to search drivers for stray bits of broccoli and tofu?

Of course, it could be argued that Bush's attack on the welfare state will solve the longevity crisis without
recourse to controversial measures. Toss Gramps out of the nursing home, take away his Social Security
check and see how long he survives. Still, it's fair to ask: Is Bush really doing enough, or is he being held
back by his oft-stated commitment to the "culture of life"?

Here is the contradiction in the tiny, dark heart of American conservatism: Its values are solidly "pro-life," but
its economic policies lean toward death. While upholding the right of each stem cell to blossom into a human,
conservatives have curtailed the lives of all multicellular citizens - by weakening environmental regulations,
for instance, and cutting social programs.

Right-wing ambivalence on life-and-death issues exploded into a schizophrenic breakdown in the case of
Terri Schiavo. With one hand, the Republicans held her feeding tube firmly in place, while the other hand
reached for the ax to cut off the flow of Medicaid dollars that were keeping that poor shell of woman alive.

It would take courage for a president to promote a consistently pro-death outlook. Some Christian spokesmen
will fret that we are on the slippery slope to euthanasia, although they have never complained about torture
or war. Nevertheless, it might be tactful to frame the new stance as a way of encouraging turnover - as at Wal-
Mart, where 40% of employees leave every year - rather than death.

Get born, get into the crucial 18-to-35-year-old consumer demographic, and have the good sense to get out
before you've overstayed your welcome. And it would take genuine heroism to confront baby boomers with
the question usually addressed to 18-year-old grunts: Are you willing to die for your country? Like maybe right
now? Because that's what they want from us, folks, unless we can come up with a better idea.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the author, most recently, of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting

The Great Crash, Part 2 by Robert Kuttner
The lessons of the stock-market crash and corporate scandals of 1999-2002 are only now beginning to sink in.
The larger story is the second collapse of laissez-faire as a plausible ideology and an efficient way of
organizing the economy. But unlike its first failure in the 1930s, laissez-faire has not yet collapsed as a
politics. Evidently that will take a little longer. A spate of recent books provides ample fuel for the political
reversal that still awaits the necessary political leadership.
The basic story has three strands. At its core is the overturning, in the 1980s and 1990s, of many of the
safeguards that kept the capitalist system honest and efficient. At the heart of these regulatory protections
were the policing of capital markets and financial institutions by the Securities and Exchange Commission and
the several agencies that regulate banks. Both political parties, as the books under review demonstrate,
colluded in the demise of effective regulation.

This regulatory reversal was part free-market ideology, part opportunism. In conservative theory, all these
regulations only constrained financial "innovation" and prevented capital from flowing freely to its most
efficient use. That was the ideology. In practice, the dismantling of regulations allowed a small number of
insiders to get very rich, often at the expense of ordinary investors. In the absence of regulation, the
flourishing of opportunism was efficient for the insiders who profited but highly inefficient for the larger
economy, as a great many investments ultimately went bust, wasting trillions of dollars in capital. As events
proved, the opportunism was beyond the competence of market forces to keep in check. So much for the
theory.

If the demise of effective financial regulation is one strand of the story, the second is the overturning of
regulation of other industries, notably banking, energy, telecommunications and airlines. As the Enron
scandal epitomized, these two forms of deregulation fed on each other. Deregulated energy markets allowed
corrupt energy traders to manipulate prices, plundering both consumers and Enron's own shareholders and
pensioners. Meanwhile, the collapse of effective policing by the SEC invited the phony accounting that
allowed Enron to build a pyramid scheme that did substantially wider damage before the company finally
collapsed. At the same time, weakened banking regulation enabled colluding commercial and investment
banks to help inflate the Enron bubble and to profit from it while it lasted.

The third part of the story is the stock-market collapse. It wasn't just the aftermath of random euphoria; high-
flying Enron and its abrupt downfall serve as metaphor for the larger crash, which involved hundreds of other
Enrons, with accountants and bankers as enablers. The great stock bubble of the 1990s had multiple causes,
including dot-com mania. But surely the paramount cause was deregulation -- of the banks and brokers that
profited from touting bum investments; of the industries such as electric power and telecommunications,
which speculated with both shareholder and ratepayer money; and of the accountants that colluded in the
phony books. Had effective regulation not been sabotaged, the bubble would have been neither so
excessive nor so damaging the morning after.

This is one connection that has yet to be fully teased out.

If you have time to read only one book on this set of events, spend it with Arthur Levitt's Take on the Street.
Levitt, who was named chairman of the SEC by President Clinton, served almost the entire eight years of
Clinton's two terms. Clinton got more than he bargained for. Levitt was a tough and honest regulator,
increasingly skeptical of self-regulation and appalled by what he found. The book is one part consumer's
guide on how to avoid investment pitfalls, one part memoir. The latter reveals a series of efforts by Levitt to
outlaw the abuses that eventually led to the market collapse, to Enron and to the other Enrons.

Levitt is no Monday morning quarterback. He saw the excesses as they were unfolding, while the stock
market was still flying high, and he tried mightily to keep regulation one step ahead of abuses. He was stymied
at nearly every turn by a Congress eager to please the accounting, banking, stock brokerage and technology
industries. He spent much of his first year at the SEC defending the efforts of the quasi-governmental
Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to force corporations to count stock options as expenses.
Failure to do so allowed them to artificially inflate stated profits, which in turn pumped up stocks, which in
turn gave value to the stock options.

After the collapse, options were revealed as one of the signal abuses. Faced with overwhelming pressure
from both parties and knowing that he didn't have the votes in Congress, Levitt backed down. "I regard this
as the single biggest mistake during my years of service," he writes.

Levitt's book recounts one such episode after another, and reprints several joint letters he got from
representatives and senators bluntly warning of dire consequences if he failed to relent. The SEC's
appropriations were threatened. As late as September 2000, after the conflicts of interest in the accounting
industry had become widely known, scores of legislators were still warning Levitt not to proceed with
regulations requiring accounting firms to refrain from collecting lucrative consulting fees from the same
corporations whose books they audited.

For a reader who is not an expert in securities regulation, the most remarkable revelation of Levitt's book is
the degree to which Wall Street regulates (or fails to regulate) itself. On paper, the SEC has immense power
to limit conflicts of interest, move against corrupt underwriters, brokers and traders, and establish ground
rules for accounting. This is the famous "transparency" on which honest money markets and efficient
investment depend, a transparency that we regularly commend to developing countries. But in practice,
nearly all of the SEC's powers are delegated to industry bodies, or to quasi-independent but industry-
dominated ones such as the FASB.

Did you know, for instance, that most enforcement actions against corrupt stockbrokers are taken not by the
SEC but by the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD)? Did you know that the American Institute of
Certified Public Accountants, the lobby for the accounting industry, has long dominated the process of
defining acceptable practice, with its standards essentially rubber-stamped by the SEC? As Levitt saw the
abuses mount in the 1990s, this was the club he was up against, a club with powerful friends in both parties.
As his book demonstrates, in case after case the SEC chairman does not issue regulations but delicately
negotiates agreements with the industries he ostensibly regulates, as if they were sovereign powers.

Long before revelations poured into the press -- thanks largely to the investigative work of New York
Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who detailed how ostensibly independent "stock analysts" were really pumping
up stock recommendations so that their investment-banker bosses could win underwriting business -- Levitt
was giving speeches warning about such conflicts of interest. He was finally able to issue a very mild
regulation mandating disclosure, but only in the year 2000, after the damage had been done and the bull
market had begun to unravel.

Nobody has written the full Spitzer story yet, but it's clear that the New York attorney general has essentially
functioned as the SEC in exile. The heavy investigative work on conflicts of interest between retail stock
brokerage and stock underwriting has been done by Spitzer's office thanks to the 1921 Martin Act, an obscure
New York law that empowers the attorney general to bring civil or criminal charges for fraudulent sale of
securities in his state, which includes Wall Street. The New Yorker's John Cassidy, who wrote a useful book,
on the Internet bubble, Dot.con, has provided a first installment of the Spitzer story in a riveting April 7 New
Yorker profile. Free from congressional pressures, Spitzer issued extensive subpoenas and exposed the
pervasive and systemic conflicts of interest among the stock analysts whose salaries, sometimes in excess of
$10 million a year, were based on currying favor with companies and not dispassionately "analyzing" them for
the benefit of retail customers.

Spitzer settled many of the cases for relatively modest fines and consent agreements to change longstanding
practices. But his comparative aggressiveness, Cassidy recounts, roused the SEC and the NASD to launch
their own investigations. Eventually, every major New York bank and brokerage agreed to a settlement
worked out jointly with Spitzer, the SEC and the NASD. It included $1.4 billion in fines and prohibited some of
the more egregious conflicts of interest, requiring greater independence for stock analysts and prohibiting
investment banks from rewarding favored clients by giving them quick profits in hot IPOs.

But these reforms stop short of those that Spitzer originally sought, and the SEC, under tight Republican
control, remains a paper tiger. Most of the post-Enron reforms will be neutered by weak enforcement, and the
system is already reverting to its habits of toothless self-regulation. Charmingly, as these investigations
began to unfold in 1999, Congress was in the final throes of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, the single most
important piece of New Deal legislation that kept bankers from underwriting stocks and underwriters from
engaging in commercial banking. Conflicts of interest are in Wall Street's DNA.

Several books have appeared on the emblematic Enron meltdown. The most comprehensive and entertaining
is Robert Bryce's Pipe Dreams, which chronicles how Kenneth Lay built Enron from a small pipeline operation
into what was nominally America's eighth-largest company, using off-the-books partnerships that enriched
insiders. Enron made these deals with the collusion of every major investment bank in New York, including
Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase and literally dozens of others. Enron also sought to recoup its
massive borrowings not by creating efficient energy-trading markets in the new climate of deregulation but by
amassing so much market power that it could manipulate them. (Though Bryce's book has genuine merits, he
appears to have written it in haste; among other blemishes, he spells Arthur Levitt's name wrong.)

As Peter C. Fusaro and Ross M. Miller write in their What Went Wrong at Enron, the basic flaw in Enron's
business plan as a legitimate trading company was that huge profits were not to be had honestly on energy
trading margins: "[T]he bulk of the legitimate profits from creating a new [trading] market would come in the
first year or two of its existence. As producers and consumers would figure out how the market worked, they
would strike increasingly better deals, squeezing out Enron's profits in the process." So Enron had to make
its exorbitant returns either by fraud or by using its position to gouge consumers. As we now know, it did
both. Before it crashed, Fusaro and Miller note, Enron had unveiled an online affiliate that proposed to
conduct trading transactions in no fewer than 1,800 different commodities.

Fusaro and Miller's book is useful for its explanation of the dynamics of energy trading. But like Bryce, they
fail to explore fully a key aspect of the Enron story: the rigging of California's electricity markets and the wider
lesson about the wisdom of deregulation. The Enron debacle could not have occurred without the failure to
supervise accountants and investment bankers. But it also could not have occurred without the utopian
attempt to deregulate electric power.

Besides Enron itself, the other casualty of the collapse was the company's accountant, the once-
irreproachable Arthur Andersen. In Final Accounting, Barbara Toffler has written a book that is partly a tell-all
memoir and partly a history of Andersen. Toffler had what seems, in retrospect, a hilarious job description:
She was head of Andersen's Ethics and Responsible Business Practices Consulting Services. Much of the
frothy memoir deals with the author's frustrations with the Andersen subculture and her mounting unease as
the company's consulting and accounting businesses merged, undermining the integrity of the firm. There is
a lovely chapter that describes in detail the intense competition among executives to generate fees (known
delicately as the "fee fuck") and the clash of norms between auditors, who were trained to measure, and
consultants, who aimed to fleece clients for whatever the market would bear. Toffler left Andersen in 1999.
There's not much in this short book about the relationship between Andersen and Enron, which was fully
covered in the business press thanks largely to public documents that emerged in the course of litigation.
But the book offers one more glimpse of the pervasive culture of self-dealing that became American
capitalism in the 1990s.

Conflicts of interest are at the very heart of all these stories. Auditors, after all, were supposed to be serving
shareholders and the public. Instead, they did what was necessary to get consulting business from the
companies they audited and to inflate their own salaries and bonuses. Stock analysts were supposedly there
to help retail investors. But they were really cultivating the very corporations whose stocks they were
touting. Investment bankers were ostensibly the instruments of an efficient capital market. They turned out to
be more interested in self-enrichment. It is sometimes said that norms ultimately matter more than laws. In
fact, as these books document all too well, the norms of professionalism and probity in accounting,
commercial banking and investment banking were very much the creatures of regulation and law
enforcement. Take away the laws and regulators and opportunism soon crowds out integrity. As every other
insider is getting rich playing ordinary investors for suckers, the last professional holding out for honor is
Lucky Pierre.

One other important book provides a counterpoint to this story. In The Company of Owners, Joseph Blasi,
Douglas Kruse and Aaron Bernstein turn the recent history of stock options on its head. In the 1990s, stock
options were used as bonuses for top executives. They were supposed to "align the incentives" of the boss
and the ordinary shareholders. But because options only had value if and when the stock reached a certain
price, they created a perverse incentive for bosses to inflate the value of the stock artificially and cash in
fast, leaving the long-term fate of the company to others.

Blasi, a sociologist and tireless crusader for employee stakeholding, Kruse, an economist colleague of Blasi's
at Rutgers University, and Bernstein, a senior writer at BusinessWeek, contend that options, differently
configured, could and should be an instrument of wealth spreading, broadened employee stock ownership
and more efficient capitalism. The problem, of course, is the current set of ground rules, which favor insiders
and harm ordinary workers and shareholders. The authors conclude, accurately in my view, that "most
corporations in America would enjoy more motivated workers and larger profits if they embraced partnership
capitalism centered around employee stock options." More broadly diffused ownership has always been a
possibility. As Blasi et al. point out, it has been tried in fits and starts at different times in the history of
American capitalism, but the system always has a tendency to default to insider enrichment.

Blasi and company are well worth reading, but they don't quite convince me why options, rather than direct
stock-ownership plans, are a superior approach, or why employees should bear a double risk (as workers and
then as shareholders) if the company fails for reasons beyond their control. Wouldn't workers be better off
with some company stock and a broad, diversified portfolio as well? In assessing why the stakeholder brand
of capitalism has failed to take root, the authors also tread lightly on the politics. Rather than proposing a
comprehensive policy of broader employee stock ownership, they hope to persuade sensible corporations to
embrace options-for-all out of enlightened self-interest. This may place too much faith in corporate
executives, who have much to gain personally by looking to the short term and adopting a personal
enrichment strategy of winner-take-all.

We regulate capitalism and use democratic politics to produce the votes to enact the necessary legislation.
Otherwise, insider enrichment, corporate corruption and calamity for the rest of the economy become the
norm. None of these books entirely connects the dots between the stock-market meltdown, the regulatory
reversals and the concentration of political power on Wall Street (Levitt's comes closest). But the connection
is there for the reader to make. The story of how democracy will reassert the necessary governance of
capitalism remains to be written. Indeed, it remains to be accomplished.

Robert Kuttner

A Galbraith Revival
James K. Galbraith
June 07, 2005

James K. Galbraith is Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in government/business relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson
School of Public Affairs, the University of Texas at Austin, and senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute.
These remarks were delivered to the Take Back America Conference at the Washington Hilton Hotel on June
1, 2005, on behalf of John Kenneth Galbraith upon receipt of a Lifetime Achievement Award.

First, my father's response:

"I am delighted, as who would not be, by the invitation of April 6 from the Campaign for America's Future. Of
course I accept with all appropriate pride and pleasure, but health is a major barrier. I am banned by the full
force of the medical profession from both travel and events such as this. Thus my proposal: Have the award
made on my behalf to James K. Galbraith [and here, I repeat, these are my father's words] a distinguished
economist, well steeped in my views..."

You may have seen my father's brief appearance on the News Hour last week, at the end of a segment
devoted to Richard Parker's magnificent book. He was asked whether there would be a revival of his ideas
and values. He said he was not so optimistic as to think it would come in his lifetime. That might seem
discouraging, until you think a bit, and realize it was a typically Galbraithian remark. When you're 96, after all,
the phrase "not in my lifetime" doesn't preclude very much.

It's therefore not too early to give a blueprint for a Galbraith revival.

Mine rests simply on three themes.

Democracy. The civil rights struggle of our time must be to regain, for all Americans, the right to vote, the
practical capacity to exercise that right, and the right to a full, accurate and verified count. I was in Columbus,
Ohio, on election day. I saw the voting machine shortages and the two and three hour lines they produced. I
spoke with voters who came to vote and could not stay. That's the simple reality, in part, of how the court-
picked government of 2000 was returned to power in 2004. I ask you not to let it happen again—not in Florida,
not in Ohio, and not anywhere else.

Peace. The world is dangerous but war is no solution. Sixty years ago my father showed what bombing cannot
do. Iraq now shows what an occupation army cannot achieve. Undaunted, some seek a wider war and a
deeper disaster. We say, No. Let's work instead to end the war we are in. And if we need new strategists,
unafraid to weigh the costs of war, let's get them. My father contributed one line to John F. Kennedy's
inaugural address: "Let us never negotiate from fear, but let us never fear to negotiate."

It's not the most soaring line in that speech, but it's perhaps the one we need most today. Above all, let us
rise to the warning just issued by Robert McNamara, that our nuclear policy is "illegal, immoral, militarily
unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous." Life itself is at stake on this point, and about no other does my
father care more deeply. It is truly time to stop the bomb.

Truth. Yesterday, we were reminded dramatically that three decades ago Watergate taught us the potential for
malice in high office and cleansing power of revelation. When did Bush decide to invade Iraq and why? Who
ordered and who approved the disgrace of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? Why and how did the trail of Osama
bin Laden grow cold? We are passing through a sorry moment of history. These and many other questions
demand answers, and they will continue to do so, long after this administration leaves town.

Finally, inevitably, a word on economics. Full employment prosperity is not a birthright, it must be earned. It
doesn't come by magic, by cutting deficits or through prayer to the Great God Greenspan. Full employment
prosperity must be created in the solution of our own national problems. Let's therefore rebuild our cities,
conserve our energy resources, save education, extend health care, restore the environment and preserve
Social Security. When we have taken back America, we will surely have to rebuild it, finally ending the long
age of "public squalor" of which my father wrote in The Affluent Society 50 years ago.

I'll close on a personal note. My father has been in the hospital for several weeks, trying to regain some
strength after a touch of pneumonia. I have word today that he is walking, and the doctors have given him a
date of June 10 to return home. On his behalf, I thank you very deeply for the honor of this lifetime
achievement award, and I will write him tonight of your affection.

But, get to work. Working together, we might take back America in his lifetime after all. And I have to say,
much as he dislikes being proven wrong, I don't think he'd mind at all.

In Praise of Prosperity

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted April 25, 2005.

In order to win the economic battle over America's future, progressives need to first challenge the very terms
of the national debate: It's about quality of life. Story Tools

Every day, progressives dive headlong into debates over the U.S. economy only to end up angry, defensive,
and confused. The problem: few of us realize that the very definition of the terms used in these heated
discussions -- for example, "growth" or "competitiveness" -- is loaded against us.

The language of economic competitiveness is not ideologically neutral, but instead designed to promote
policies that serve the interests of big corporations and their investors. If progressives want to reframe the
debate over America's future, they will have to reframe its very terms. A first step: start talking about
prosperity.

When making arguments in support of their favored policies -- be it massive tax cuts or rolling back
environmental safeguards -- conservatives focus almost exclusively on economic growth. What most
Americans don't understand is that economic growth does not necessarily make us more prosperous as a
society.

Consider the research of economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez: while we've witnessed several
periods of immense growth in recent decades, the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American
taxpayers -- in other words, most of us -- actually fell by 7 percent between 1973 and 2000.

As Americans, we are raised to believe from an early age that growth is an over-arching imperative of a
capitalist economy. You don't have to be an economist to get it -- when graphs point upward, the economy's
good. So we are expected to dedicate ourselves to that goal, even if it requires ceding our own personal well-
being. Just think about the rhetoric surrounding living wage laws: sacrifice your very basic needs for the
good of the corporations, i.e. America. We're all Corporate Citizens, and we have to advance the national
project of achieving growth at all costs.

But for progressives, this narrative muddies the waters and obscures questions that are important to all
Americans. Growth-related statistics, for example, tell us nothing about inequality. If the wages of 99,990
workers were to decline by a half percent while the fortunes of ten members of the Walton family increased
by 20 or 30 billion dollars, the average growth for that population of 100,000 would be quite impressive
indeed. But that's little solace for anyone who is not a Walton.

The self-serving politics of growth has grown ever more dominant since the emergence of the new
conservative movement under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, creating a lopsided system that
increasingly serves the greed of the few at the expense of the well-being of the many. According to Ed Wolff,
author of Top Heavy, the share of national wealth controlled by the top 1 percent of households increased
from 20.5 percent in 1979 to 38.5 percent in 1998, while the bottom 40 percent of American households
experienced a drop in their share of national net worth, from 0.9 percent in 1983 to only 0.2 percent in 1998.

This alarming trend is only going to get worse in George Bush's "Ownership Society." According to the Los
Angeles Times, during 2004 and the first couple of months of 2005, wages didn't keep pace with inflation for
the first time since the 1990 recession. In other words, working Americans effectively took an across-the-
board pay cut -- and, more importantly, at a time when the economy grew by a healthy four percent, and
"corporate profits hit record highs as companies got more productivity out of workers while keeping pay
raises down."

According to ILO statistics (from 2001), Americans are the most productive workers in the world -- a fact that is
often touted by the 'boot-straps' folk on the right as proof of our system's superiority. But we're not the most
productive workers per hour; we merely work more hours than any other industrialized country, and our
hours increase almost every year. It's the kind of productivity that is built primarily on the backs of the middle
class and the poor. Squeezing every last drop of productivity out of working people to maximize growth is the
essence of the Wal-Mart model. It's good for the economy, but not for the people who live within it.

The Prosperous Nation

In order to challenge this growth-obsessed narrative, progressives have to do more than point to facts and
figures, however damning they might be. They must reframe the debate in terms of prosperity. Prosperity is
less concerned about the GDP or per capita income, but the quality of life afforded by a given economy.
Within such a discourse, economic growth is still important, not as an end in itself but as a means to achieve
true prosperity.

Discussing the economy in terms of a prosperous society opens up the debate to a more inclusive and
accurate picture of what Americans want. If our goal were to be the most prosperous nation, we'd be forced to
grapple with the fact that the United States ranks the highest among the highly developed countries in each
of the seven measures of inequality the index tracks. While we enjoy the second highest GDP in the world
(excluding tiny Luxembourg), we rank dead last among the 20 most developed countries in fighting poverty
and we're off the chart in terms of the number of Americans living on half of the median income or less.

Among industrialized nations, the United States is at the bottom in functional literacy, even as only about a
quarter of Americans graduate from college. Despite spending twice as much per capita on healthcare as
most developed countries, only Ireland and Denmark have lower life expectancies. We're number one in the
percentage of population without access to healthcare. One of eight Americans don't survive to reach age 60,
which leaves us at the bottom of the pile in terms of life expectancy in the developed world.

We're overworked, underpaid, and with little or no financial security. No wonder that the National Institutes of
Mental Health found that in any given year, 10 percent of Americans suffer from depression and over 13
percent from some type of anxiety disorder.

We may be rich as hell as a nation, but a great many of us are struggling just to keep it together. A truly
prosperous country, on the other hand, ensures the greatest benefits to the greatest number of people.

Prosperity is Competitive

Here's the kicker: a prosperous society is also an economically competitive society. Contrary to what the Bush
administration may claim, giving Americans a decent shot at the good life is not incompatible with building a
strong economy. The world leader in per capita GDP is Norway, a nation that offers its citizens long vacations,
generous paternity leave programs, strict environmental regulations and well-developed social safety net.

According to rankings put out by the World Economic Forum -- an industry group of big multinationals -- the
most competitive economy in the world is a social democracy: Finland. So are seven of the 10 most
competitive economies in the Forum's Global Competitiveness Index. And seven of the 10 most 'economically
free' countries in the Economic Freedom Index -- which is published annually by the uber-conservative
Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal -- are social democracies. The Fraser Foundation -- a
Canadian version of Heritage -- publishes a similar index and, lo and behold, seven of its 10 most competitive
economies are also social democracies.

The next time some right-winger claims social benefits reward laziness and inertia, remember to point to
Bernard Wasow's research. The economist with the Century Foundation found that between 1970 and 2000,
per capita GDP increased by 64 percent in the United States and 60 percent in France: "In America, [however,]
this came about because productivity per worker rose by 38 percent and hours worked per worker rose by 26
percent. In France, it came about because productivity rose by 83 percent while hours worked fell by 23
percent."

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