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| 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 |
| How Bush stole the 2004 election |
| What you need to know about Social Security |
| Chapter on Trade by Robert Kuttner |
| First half of a chapter on healthcare written by Robert Kuttner |
| Conclusion of Robert Kuttner's Chapter on healthcare from the book "Everything for Sale" |
| Bush should be impeached for the war in Iraq. Read how he got us into it |
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links to read a rough draft of "The New Deal"
| opening scene, The New Deal |
| part1 |
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Minnesota who was assasinated before the
2002 election by the conservative white trash
that rules this country so they could take
control of the senate and ram their agenda
down the throats of the american people
Missouri who was assasinated right
before the 2000 election on behalf of
criminal conservatives who have taken
over our government in order to pass
legislation on behalf of criminals in the
energy, 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.
(who will transfer it back to him after he leaves
office) defrauded the government billions of
dollars via Tenet Healthcare. I meant to say HCA
Healthcare. See article below. There is the
possiblity he was ecouraged to steal billions,
intentionally allowed to keep a huge slush fund
and made senate leader in order to use this
slush fund to accomplish conservative objectives
with tax payer medicare money. It could have
something to do with a prescription bill for the
elderly without price controls. The
pharmacudicals have all the tax payer money in
the world to use as they wish.
| The press hasn't reported the fact that Tom Delay, at the last minute to the energy bill, allocated 1.5 billion to his home district. Is this the GOP's own private slush fund or what? It's obvious the ruling crackpots have their man in charge of the Liberal Democrats in Japan. Koizumi just disolved his party's rule of parliament when members of his party rejected privatization of the Post Office Bank. That was the choice the US masters forced on the ruling party. Do as we want or your political careers are over their US bosses told them. It's right out of Tom Delays play book that describes how Texas white trash should rule the country. That's why those Texans need to be eliminated. I imagine the Post Office Bank was set up after WW2 by US planners who were a hell of a lot smarter and ethical than our crack pot conservative trickle down lunatics. I applaud the Japanese politicians who did what was best for the people of Japan even though it cost them their political careers.The Japs aren't stupid. They all know the reason the US has put preasure on the US backed Jap puppet dictator is to privatize the bank in order to give their US masters greater control over Japanese savings. As if our conservative masters don't already have enough say in how the worlds capital is invested. Here in Chicago, if i recall correctly, when the masters wanted to get rid of the Sears Tower here in Chicago because they wanted to build a new Sears head quarters in the suburbs, they "told" the Japs to buy it. When they wanted a new ball park for the White sox, they used Jap savings to build it. They wanted to privatize social security to get there hands on even more play money. I suppose they wanted to privatize the Jap Post Bank to get there hands on the almost three trillion being invested for the benefit of the jap people. Who knows, maybe, like Deutche Bank, our conservative rulers already invest the capital of the post bank in a manner that suits their fancy, which is usually to buy a controlling interest in industries for the purpose of power and control by investing in industries capable of monopoly pricing and in this case simply want to privatize it for ideological reasons. I see how the Texan's invest their money. It's rarely invested for the benefit of the people but to maximize profits while impoverishing the people with monopoly prices like the energy and healthcare industry are doing now. I just wonder who advised the US backed puppet leader in Japan to disolve the govenment if he didn't get his way. Maybe such a ploy was designed to have the same effect as what that spoiled little cry baby jew Bajamin Netenyaho recently did. He quit the government when because it appears Israel will finally do what the majority of Jews want; get out of Gaza in order to work toward peace with the Palestinians. The following proves our conservative dictators only allow lunatics to work at the IMF: Letter to Editor Aug 9 "Prompt' passage and implementation of the 'much-maligned' European Union service directive, for example, would contain prices, boost real disposable incomes and growth and induce a 'more accommodative ECB stance than otherwise. That is the kind of shot in the arm that the euro area needs. Michael Deppler, Director, European Department, International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC 20431, US" Chapter 40, The Intelligent Women's Guide EMPIRES IN COLLISION by George B Shaw, 1928 IF the British Empire were the only State on earth, the process might go on peacefully (except for ordinary police coercion) until the whole earth was civilized under the British flag. This is the dream of British Imperialism. But it is not what the world is like. There are all the other States, large and small, with their Imperialist dreamers and their very practical traders pushing for foreign markets, and their navies and armies to back the traders and annex these markets. Sooner or later, as they push their boundaries into Africa and Asia, they come up against one another. A collision of that kind (called the Fashoda incident) very nearly involved us in a war with France. Fortunately France gave way, not being prepared to fight us just then; but France and Britain were left with the whole Sudan divided between them. France had before this pushed into and annexed Algeria and (virtually) Tunisia; and Spain was pushing into' Morocco. Italy, alarmed lest there should be nothing left for her, made a dash at Tripoli and annexed it. England was in Egypt as well as in India. Now imagine yourself for a moment a German trader, with more goods than you can sell in Germany, having either to shut up your factory and be ruined, or find a foreign market in Africa. Imagine yourself looking at the map of Africa. The entire Mediterranean coast, the pick of the basket, is English, Italian, French, and Spanish. The Hinterland, as you call it, is English and French. You cannot get in anywhere without going through the English Suez Canal or round the Cape to some remote place down south.. Do you now understand what the German Kaiser meant when he complained that Germany had not been left "a place in the sun"? That hideous war of 1914-18 was at bottom a fight between the capitalists of England, France, and Italy on the one side, and those of Germany on the other, for command of the African markets. On top, of course, it was about other things: about (Austria making the murder of the Archduke a pretext for subjugating Serbia; about Russia mobilizing against Austria to prevent this; about Germany being dragged into the AustroRussian quarrel by' her alliance with Austria; about France being dragged in on the other side by her alliance with Russia; about the German army having to make a desperate attempt to conquer the French army before the Russian troops could reach her; about England having to attack Germany because she was allied to France and Russia; and about the German army having taken the shortest cut through Belgium, not knowing that Belgium had a secret arrangement with England to have a British expedition sent to defend her if Germany invaded her. Of course the moment the first shot was fired all the Britons and Belgians and Germans and French and Austrians and Russians became enraged sheep, and imagined all sorts of romantic reasons for fighting, in addition to the solid reason that if Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan did not kill Hans and Fritz, Hans and Fritz would kill Tommy and the Poilu and Ivan. Before the killing had gone on very long, the Turks, the Bulgarians, the Japanese, the Americans, and other States that had no more to do with the first quarrel than you had, were in it and at it hammer and tongs. The whole world went mad, and never alluded to markets except when they ridiculed the Kaiser for his demand for a place in the sun. Yet there would have been no war without the alliances; and the alliances could not have fought if they had not set up great armaments, especially the new German navy, to protect their foreign markets and frontiers. The_ armaments, created to produce a sense of security, had produced a sense of terror in which no nation dared go unarmed unless it was too small to have any chance against the great Powers, and could depend on their jealousy of one another to stave off a conquest by anyone of them. Soon the nations that dared not go unarmed became more terrified still, and dared not go alone: they had to form alliances and go in twos and threes, like policemen in thieves' quarters, Germany and Austria in one group and England, France, and Russia in another, both trying to induce Italy and Turkey and America to join them. Their differences were not about their own countries: the German navy was not built to bombard Portsmouth nor the British navy to bombard Bremerhaven. But when the German navy interfered in the north of Africa, which was just what it was built for, and the French and British navies frightened it off from that market in the sun, the capitalist diplomatists of these nations saw that the first thing to concentrate on was not the markets but the sinking of the German navy by the combined French "and British navies (or vice versa) on any available pretext. And as you cannot have fleets fighting on the sea without armies fighting on the land to help them, the armies grew like the fleets; The race of Armaments became as familiar as the Derby; all the natural and. kindly sentiments of white civilized nations towards one another were changed into blustering terror, the parent of hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; and after all, when the explosive mixture blew up at last, and blew millions of us with it, it was not about the African markets, but about a comparatively trumpery quarrel between Austria and Serbia which the other Powers could have, settled with the greatest ease, without the shedding of one drop of blood, if they had been on decent human terms with one another instead of on competitive capitalistic terms. And please do not fail to note that whereas in the early days of Capitalism our capitalists did not compel us to fight for their markets with our own hands, but hired 'German serfs and British voluntary professional soldiers for the job, their wars have now become so colossal that every woman's husband, father, son, brother, or sweetheart, if young and strong enough to carry a rifle, must go to the trenches as helplessly as cattle go to the slaughterhouse, abandoning wife and children, home and business, and renouncing normal morality and humanity, pretending all the time that such conduct is splendid and heroic and that his name will live for ever, though he may have the greatest horror of war, and be perfectly aware that the - enemy's soldiers, against whom he is defending his hearth, are in exactly the same predicament as himself, and would never dream of injuring him or his if the pressure of the drive for markets were removed from both. I have purposely brought you to the question of war because\ your conscience must be sorely troubled about it. You have seen' the men of Europe rise up and slaughter one another in the most horrible manner in millions. Your son, perhaps, has received a military cross for venturing into the air in a flying machine and dropping a bomb on a sleeping village, blowing several children into fragments, and mutilating or killing their parents. From militarist, nationalist, or selfishly patriotic point of view such deeds may appear glorious exploits; but from the point of view of any universally valid morality: say from the point of view of a God who is the father of Englishmen and Germans, Frenchmen and Turks alike, they must seem outbursts of the most infernal wickedness. As such they have caused many of us to despair of human nature. A bitter cynicism has succeeded to transports of pugnacious hatred of which all but the incorrigibly thoughtless, and a few incurables who have been mentally disabled for life by the war fever, are now heartily ashamed. I can hardly believe that you have escaped your share of this crushing disillusion. If you are human as well as intelligent you must feel about your species very much as the King of Brobdingnag did when he took Gulliver in his hand as a child takes a tin soldier, and heard his boastful patriotic discourse about the glories of military history. Perhaps I can console you a little. If you will look at the business in the light of what we have just been studying I think you will see that the fault lay not so much in our characters as in the capitalist system which we had allowed to dominate our lives until it became a sort of blind monster which neither we nor the capitalists could control. It is absurd to pretend that the young men of Europe ever wanted to hunt each other into holes in the ground and throw' bombs into the holes to disembowel one another, or to have to hide in those holes themselves, eaten with lice and sickened by the decay of the unburied, in unutterable discomfort, boredom, and occasionally acute terror, or that any woman ever wanted to put on her best Sunday clothes and be gratified at the honor done to her son for killing some other woman's babies. The capitalists and their papers try to persuade themselves and us that we are like that and always will be, in spite of all the Christmas cards and Leagues of Nations. It is not a bit true. The staggering fact about all these horrors was that we found ourselves compelled to do them in spite of the fact that they were so unintended by us, and so repugnant and dreadful to us that, when at last the war suddenly stopped, our heroic pretences dropped from us like blown-off hats, and we danced in the streets for weeks, mad with joy, until the police had to stop us to restore, the necessary traffic. We still celebrate. by two minutes' national silence, not the day on which the glorious war broke out, but the day on which the horrible thing came to an end. Not the victory, which we have thrown away by abusing it as helplessly as we fought for it, but the Armistice, the Cessation, the stoppage of the Red Cross vans from the terminuses of the Channel railways with their heartbreaking loads of mutilated men, was what we danced for so wildly and pitifully. If ever there was anything made clear in the world it was that we were no more directly guilty of the war than we were guilty of the earthquake of Tokio: We and the French and the Germans and the Turks and the rest found ourselves conscripted for an appalling slaughtering match, ruinous to ourselves, ruinous to civilization and so dreaded by the capitalists themselves that it was only by an extraordinary legal Suspention of all financial, obligations. (called the Mora-' torium) that the city was induced to face it. The attempt to fight out the war with volunteers fai1ed: 'there were not enough. The rest went because they were forced to go, and fought because they were forced to fight. The women let them go partly because they could not help themselves, partly because they were just as pugnacious as the men, partly because they read the papers (which were, not allowed to tell them the truth), and partly because most of them were so poor that they grasped at the allowances which left most of them better off with their husbands in the trenches than they had ever been with their husbands at home. How had they got into this position? Simply by the original sin of allowing their countries to be moved and governed and fed and clothed by the pursuit of profit for capitalists instead of by. the pursuit of righteous prosperity for "all people that on earth do dwell".; The first ship that went to Africa to sell things to the natives at more than cost price because there was no sale for them at home began not only this war, but the other and worse wars that will follow it if we persist in depending on Capitalism for our livelihood and our morals. All these monstrous evils begin in a small and apparently harmless way. It is not too much to say that when a nation, having five shillings to divide-up, gives four to Fanny and one to Sarah instead of giving half a crown to each and seeing that she earns it, it sows .the seed of all the evils that now make thoughtful and farseeing men speak of our capitalistic civilization as a disease instead of a blessing. 41 THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE. Do not, however, disparage foreign trade. There is nothing wrong with foreign trade as such.- We could have no gold without foreign trade; and gold has all sorts of uses and all sorts of beauties. I will not add that we could have no tea, because I happen to think that we should be better without this insidious Chinese stimulant. It is safer and probably healthier for a nation to live on the food and drink it can itself produce, as the Esquimaux manage to do under much harder conditions. But there are many necessaries - of a high civilization that nations' cannot find within their own boundaries,. and must buy from one another. We must trade and travel and come to know one another all over the habitable globe. We have to make international institutions as well as national ones, beginning with Trading Treaties and Postal Conventions and Copyright Conventions, and going on to the Leagues of Nations. The necessities of travelling and trade, and the common interest of all nations in the works and discoveries of art, literature, and science, have forced them to make international agreements and treaties with one another which are making an end of "keeping ourselves to ourselves", and throwing half bricks at foreigners and strangers. Honest foreign trade would never have got us into trouble. Neither is the combination of little States in great Federations and Commonwealths undesirable: on the contrary, the fewer frontiers the better. The establishment of law and order in uncivilized places should not have made us hated there: it should have made us popular; and it often did-at first. The annexation of other countries under our flag, when it was really needed, should have been a welcome privilege and a strengthening partnership for the inhabitants of the annexed regions. Indeed we have always pretended that this was actually the case, and that we were in foreign countries for the good of the inhabitants and not for our own sake. Unfortunately we never could make these pretensions good in the long run. However noble the aspirations of our Imperialist idealists might be, our capitalist traders were there to make as much profit out of the inhabitants as they could, and for no other purpose. They had abandoned their own country because there was no more profit to be made there, or not so much; and it is not to be expected that they would become idealistically disinterested the moment they landed on foreign shores. They stigmatized the Stay-at-homes, the anti- Expansionists, the Little-Englanders, as friends of every country but their own; but they themselves were the enemies of every country, including their own, where there was a sweatable laborer to make dividends for them. They pretended that the civilization of the annexed country was "the white man's burden", and posed as weary Titans reluctantly shouldering the public work of other nations as a duty imposed on them by Providence; but when the natives, having been duly civilized, declared that they were now quite ready to govern themselves, the capitalists held on to their markets as an eagle holds on to its prey, and, throwing off their apostolic mask, defended their annexations with fire and sword. They said they would fight to the last drop of their blood for "the integrity of the Empire"; and they did in fact pay many thousands of hungry men to fight to that extremity. In spite of them half of North America broke loose, after a war which left a volcano of hatred that is still smouldering and winning Chicago elections after a century of American independence. Roman Catholic Ireland, South Africa, and Egypt have extorted self-government from us. India is doing the same. But they do not thank us for it, knowing how loth our Capitalism was to let them go. On the other hand look at Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. We did not dare coerce them after our failure in North America. We provide a costly fleet gratuitously to protect their shores from invasion. We give them preferences in trade whilst allowing them to set up heavy protective duties against us. We allow them to be represented at international congresses as if they were independent nations. We even allow them access to the King independently of the London Cabinet. The result is that they hang on to us with tyrannical devotion, waving the Union Jack as enthusiastically as the Americans wave the Stars and Stripes. And this is not because they are of our own race. The Americans were that; yet they broke away; so were the Irish and their leaders. The French Canadians, who are of the same race with us only in the sense that we all belong to the human race, cling to us just as hard. They all follow us to war so boldly that we begin to have misgivings as to whether someday they may not make us follow them to war. The last land to strike for independence of the British Empire may be Protestant England herself, with Ulster and Scotland for allies, and the Irish Free State heading her Imperialist opponents. But Capitalism can be depended on to spoil all these reconciliations and loyalties. True, we no longer exploit colonies capitalistically: we allow them to do it for themselves, and to call the process seIf-government whilst we persisted in governing them they blame us for all the evils Capitalism brought upon them; and they finally refused to endure our government. When we left them to govern themselves they became less and less hostile to us. But the change always- impoverishes them, and leaves them in comparative disorder. The capitalistic evils for which they blamed us still oppress them. Their self-government is more tyrannical than our alien government ever dared to be. Their new relation to the Imperial State becomes more dangerously strained than the old relation, precisely as the relation of England to Germany was more dangerously strained in l913 than the relation of England to Ireland. The most liberal allowance of self- government "cannot reconcile people as long as their capitalists are competing for markets. Nationalism may make Frenchmen and Englishmen,. Englishmen and Irishmen, savage enemies when it is infringed.! Frenchmen and Irishmen laid their own countries waste to get rid of English rule. But Capitalism makes all men enemies all the time without distinction of race, color, or creed. When all the nations have freed themselves Capitalism will make them fight more furiously than ever, if we are fools enough to let it. Have you ever seen the curiosity called a Prince Rupert's Drop? It is a bead of glass in such a state of internal strain that if you break off the tiniest corner the whole bead flies violently to bits. Europe was like that in 1914. A handful of people in Serbia committed a murder, and the next moment half Europe was murdering the other half. This frightful condition of internal strain and instability was not set up by human nature: it was, I repeat, intensely repugnant to human nature, being a condition of chronic terror that at last became unbearable, like that of a woman who commits suicide because she can no longer endure the dread of death. It was set up by Capitalism. Capitalism, you will say, is at bottom nothing but covetousness; and covetousness is human nature. That is true; but covetousness is not the whole of human nature; it is only a part, and...one that vanishes when it is satisfied, like hunger after a meal, up to which point it is wholesome and necessary. Under Capitalism it becomes a dread of poverty and slavery, which are neither wholesome nor necessary. and, as we have just seen, capital is carried by its own nature beyond the control of both human covetousness and human conscience, marching on blindly and automatically, until we find on the one hand the masses of mankind condemned to poverty relieved only by horrible paroxysms of bloodshed, and on the other a handful of hypertrophied capitalists gasping under the load of their growing millions, and giving it away in heaps in a desperate attempt, partly to get rid of it without being locked up as madmen for throwing it into the sea, and partly to undo, by founding Rockefeller institutes and Carnegie libraries, and hospitals and universities and schools and churches, the effects of the welter of ignorance and poverty produced by the system under which it has accumulated on their hands. To call these unfortunate billionaires monsters of covetousness in the face of their wild disgorgings (to say nothing of their very ordinary portraits) is silly. They are rather to be compared to the sorcerer's apprentice who called up a demon to fetch a drink for him, and, not knowing the spell for stopping him when he had brought enough, was drowned in an ocean of wine. Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy by Ravi Batra Thom Hartmann's "Independent Thinker" Book of the Month Review What do you do when you want to screw only the working people of your nation with the largest tax increase in history and hand those trillions of dollars to your wealthy campaign contributors, yet not have anybody realize you've done it? If you're Ronald Reagan, you call in Alan Greenspan. Through the "golden years of the American middle class" - the 1940s through 1982 - the top income tax rate for the hyper- rich had been between 90 and 70 percent. Ronald Reagan wanted to cut that rate dramatically, to help out his political patrons. He did this with a massive tax cut in the summer of 1981. The only problem was that when Reagan took his meat axe to our tax code, he produced mind-boggling budget deficits. Voodoo economics didn't work out as planned, and even after borrowing so much money that this year we'll pay over $100 billion just in interest on the money Reagan borrowed to make the economy look good in the 1980s, Reagan couldn't come up with the revenues he needed to run the government. Coincidentally, the actuaries at the Social Security Administration were beginning to get worried about the Baby Boomer generation, who would begin retiring in big numbers in fifty years or so. They were a "rabbit going through the python" bulge that would require a few trillion more dollars than Social Security could easily collect during the same 20 year or so period of their retirement. We needed, the actuaries said, to tax more heavily those very persons who would eventually retire, so instead of using current workers' money to pay for the Boomer's Social Security payments in 2020, the Boomers themselves would have pre-paid for their own retirement. Reagan got Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Alan Greenspan together to form a commission on Social Security reform, along with a few other politicians and economists, and they recommend a near-doubling of the Social Security tax on the then- working Boomers. That tax created - for the first time in history - a giant savings account that Social Security could use to pay for the Boomers' retirement. This was a huge change. Prior to this, Social Security had always paid for today's retirees with income from today's workers (it still is today). The Boomers were the first generation that would pay Social Security taxes both to fund current retirees and save up enough money to pay for their own retirement. And, after the Boomers were all retired and the savings account - called the "Social Security Trust Fund" - was all spent, the rabbit would have finished its journey through the python and Social Security could go back to a "pay as you go" taxing system. Thus, within the period of a few short years, Reagan dramatically dropped the income tax on America's most wealthy by more than half, and roughly doubled the Social Security tax on people earning $30,000 or less. It was, simultaneously, the largest income tax cut in America's history (almost entirely for the very wealthy), and the most massive tax increase in the history of the nation (which entirely hit working-class people). But Reagan still had a problem. His tax cuts for the wealthy - even when moderated by subsequent tax increases - weren't generating enough money to invest properly in America's infrastructure, schools, police and fire departments, and military. The country was facing bankruptcy. No problem, suggested Greenspan. Just borrow the Boomer's savings account - the money in the Social Security Trust Fund - and, because you're borrowing "government money" to fund "government expenditures," you don't have to list it as part of the deficit. Much of the deficit will magically seem to disappear, and nobody will know what you did for another 50 years when the Boomers begin to retire 2015. Reagan jumped at the opportunity. As did George H. W. Bush. As did Bill Clinton (although Al Gore argued strongly that Social Security funds should not be raided, but, instead, put in a "lock box"). And so did George W. Bush. The result is that all that money - trillions of dollars - that has been taxed out of working Boomers (the ceiling has risen from the tax being on your first $30,000 of income to the first $90,000 today) has been borrowed and spent. What are left behind are a special form of IOUs - an unique form of Treasury debt instruments similar (but not identical) to those the government issues to borrow money from China today to fund George W. Bush's most recent tax cuts for billionaires (George Junior is still also "borrowing" from the Social Security Trust Fund). Former Bush Junior Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill recounts how Dick Cheney famously said, "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Cheney was either ignorant or being disingenuous - it would be more accurate to say, "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter if you rip off the Social Security Trust Fund to pay for them, and don't report that borrowing from the Boomers as part of the deficit." As the Associated Press reported on April 6, 2005: "PARKERSBURG, West Virginia. (AP) -- President Bush on Tuesday used a four-drawer filing cabinet stuffed with paper representing government IOUs the president said symbolized the Social Security trust fund's bleak outlook for meeting Americans' future retirement needs. ... "'A lot of people in America think there is a trust -- that we take your money in payroll taxes and then we hold it for you and then when you retire, we give it back to you,' Bush said in a speech at the University of West Virginia at Parkersburg. "'But that's not the way it works,' Bush said. 'There is no trust "fund" -- just IOUs that I saw firsthand,' Bush said... "[Susan] Chapman [of the Office of Public Debt] opened the second drawer and pulled out a white notebook filled with pseudo Treasury securities -- pieces of paper that offer physical evidence of $1.7 trillion in treasury bonds that make up the trust fund." Later, Senator Rick Santorum made an odd admission for a Republican: ""You can't pay benefits with IOUs," he said on the Senate floor. "You have to pay it with cash." And where will that cash - now nearly two trillion dollars - come from over the next decades as Boomers begin to retire? Technically (and legally) it's simple - the Social Security Trust Fund will give back its IOUs to the Treasury Department and in exchange for them get cash to pay the Boomers' retirement checks. Practically, though, it'll be a crisis of biblical proportions. In order for the Treasury to come up with that kind of cash will require either massive tax increases or increased massive borrowing - at a time when we're already borrowing so heavily that China is propping up our economy with weekly loans. Thus, Bush talks about a "crisis" in Social Security with some accuracy. But he doesn't dare tell us what the real "crisis" is, or how Reagan and Greenspan set it up, because when it becomes widely known that the real crisis is that Reagan set the course to steal Boomers' Social Security savings, it will destroy the reputation of both supply-side economics and the Republican Party for generations to come. That Republicans and "conservative" Democrats have been able to perpetrate this fraud on America for the past 25 years tracks back to the initial and ongoing efforts of one man, Alan Greenspan, says Ravi Batra in his new book "Greenspan's Fraud: How Two Decades of His Polices Have Undermined the Global Economy." And the Social Security fraud just outlined is only the beginning. Batra shows - in extraordinary (and easily understood) detail - how Greenspan has steadily worked for over two decades to sell out America's sovereignty and economic interests to those of the multinational corporations he so loves, and to sell out the working people of America (and their Social Security Trust Fund) to the super-rich who Greenspan has always represented. Greenspan manipulated the stock market so his buddies could get rich, then warned them just in time to get out before it blew up. He's kept together tax cuts and pay increases for the CEO class by pumping cheap money into the economy so the Middle Class will go ever deeper into debt, setting up a housing bubble that could crash in a way that would make 1929 look like a mild bump in the economic road. And he's helped engineer and support international "free" trade policies that have disemboweled America's manufacturing and information technology sectors, with the happy result for Republicans that the once-politically-active and heavily unionized middle class is being replaced by a politically impotent mass of the working poor, too busy to worry about politics or challenge corporate news. Most people, coming across this massive indictment of Greenspan, would probably react with skepticism. Why wasn't any of this in the paper? Why haven't I heard Democrats and liberals attacking Greenspan from the floors of Congress and in the progressive media? As Batra points out, the truest testament to the power Alan Greenspan holds is that he's been able to do so much of this behind the scenes. He gently encourages and nudges, argues and lectures, leaks and pontificates. He suggests, rather than orders. And, of course, he holds the levers of the nation's money supply in his hands - making him a more fearsome threat to a sitting president or political party than J. Edgar Hoover ever was. threat to a sitting president or political party than J. Edgar Hoover ever was. threat to a sitting president or political party than J. Edgar Hoover ever was. And, Batra documents, Greenspan has not been at all reluctant to use his considerable power to the benefit of those in office. One example: During the Reagan and Bush presidencies, he was in favor of tax cuts. During Clinton's he was against them. During Bush Junior's he was again in favor of them. Ravi Batra's book "Greenspan's Fraud" is not only required reading for all Americans because it so clearly lays out the crimes this man - and the Republican Party - have committed against the United States of America, but also because it's such a brilliant primer in macroeconomics overall. If you never were able to figure out, for example, what interest rates had to do with unemployment, or how the rich get richer in America while the poor get poorer, or why when the minimum wage is increased the economy gets better, Batra explains it all with elegance, wit, and comfortable clarity. "Greenspan's Fraud" is one of the most important books you can read this year. Get two copies, because you're sure to have at least one friend you'll want to read this book, but your own copy will be so marked up and beloved that you'll not want to let go of it. Lobbyinginfo.org According to the report: • Forty-three percent of the 198 members who have left Congress since 1998 and were eligible to lobby have become registered lobbyists. • Fifty percent of eligible departing members of the U.S. Senate have become lobbyists (18 of 36) while 42 percent of eligible departing members of the U.S. House of Representatives have become lobbyists (68 of 162). • Almost 52 percent of the Republican members of Congress who left Capitol Hill since 1998 registered to lobby (58 of 112) compared to 33 percent of the departing Democrats (28 of 86). This could reflect the fact that after George W. Bush became president, Washington became a hostile place for lobbyists whose contacts were Democratic. As part of the “K Street Project” pushed by Republicans, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas), lobbying firms that hired former Democratic members of Congress were to be denied access and business by the Republican majority. • Of the 2000 departing class, the ratio was even more lopsided when Republicans won the White House and retained control of Congress. More than 62 percent of Republicans (23 of 37) who left that year became lobbyists, compared to only 15 percent of Democrats (2 of 13). Livingston exemplifies how a member-turned-lobbyist interacts with his former colleagues. In six years, Livingston built his business into the 12th largest non-law lobbying firm in Washington and took in almost $40 million from 1999 through 2004, records show. Among his clients are Turkey, Morocco and the Cayman Islands, which collectively paid his firm $11 million from 2000 to 2004, with $9 million of that coming from Turkey. Livingston delivered; he helped ensure that a $1 billion supplemental appropriation for Turkey remained intact through the legislative process, despite that country’s refusal to allow U.S. troops to use its soil as a staging area for the Iraq invasion. He also helped kill an amendment that would have formally recognized the Armenian genocide that occurred between 1915 and 1923. Turkey has always opposed this recognition. Livingston, his wife Bonnie and his two political action committees (PACs) also contributed $503,449 to various candidates or their PACs from 2000 through 2004. Some of that money went to people Livingston later lobbied. “The revolving door is spinning faster than ever,” said Frank Clemente, director of Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division. “When nearly half the lawmakers in Congress use their position to move into a job that pays so handsomely, it’s time to change the system.” In light of the findings, Public Citizen recommends the following reforms: • Extend the former members’ cooling-off period (the time during which they are not allowed to lobby) to two years and include the supervision of lobbyists as a prohibited activity. • Require members of Congress to disclose their employment negotiations while they are in office if they pose a conflict of interest, similar to the requirement for the executive branch. • Repeal the privileges that give former members of Congress special access to former colleagues (access to the House and Senate floor and to members-only gymnasiums and restaurants) if they register to lobby. • Prohibit registered lobbyists from making, soliciting or arranging campaign contributions to elected officials in the branches of government they lobby (Congress, the executive branch or both). ### Public Citizen is a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.citizen.org. Did the GOP steal another Ohio Election? by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman August 5, 2005 The Republican Party has -- barely -- snatched another election in Ohio. And once again there are telltale symptoms of the kind of vote theft that put George W. Bush in the White House in 2000 and then kept him there in 2004. This time an outspoken Iraqi War vet named Paul Hackett led the charge for a Cincinnati-area Congressional seat, earning 48% of the vote. The spot was open because Bush appointed his pal Rep. Rob Portman to be a trade representative. Hackett is a rarity among today's Democrats---a blunt, hard-driving truth talker who blasted Bush's attack on Iraq. Hackett labeled W. "a chicken hawk." He's the first Iraqi war vet to run for Congress. He made no bones about the incompetence and cynicism that define the GOP strategy there. In particular Hackett attacked Bush's attacks on veterans benefits while claiming patriotic support of the war. In return, GOP candidate Jean Schmidt lied about Hackett's war record. Unlike John Kerry, Hackett fought back immediately. The Ohio GOP is now being thoroughly roasted by a Coingate scandal in which Republican high roller Tom Noe seems to have walked off with at least $4 million in state funds, and possibly $16.5 million in theft and unauthorized administrative charges from a $50 million rare coin investment fund. Noe is a Bush Pioneer/Ranger level donor, and a supporter of Ohio Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell, the point man in Bush's theft of Ohio's 20 electoral votes and thus the presidency last November. As his friends and supporters flee him, Noe's role as long-time chair of the Lucas County (Toledo) Board of Elections has come under intense scrutiny. Noe turned the seat over to his wife, Bernadette, in time for a 2004 election rife with disenfranchisement and fraud. Long lines, computer breakdowns, intimidation, harassment and hacked vote counts were the defining characteristics of the election the Noe's administered in the Toledo area last November. In one instance, an entire precinct was shut down because the voting machines were locked in the office of a school principal, who called in sick. Someone also placed the wrong type of ballot scan markers in heavily Democratic Toledo precincts, causing a high rate of uncounted, machine-rejected votes without the voters knowing it. Overall, experts estimate more than 7,000 votes were stolen outright from John Kerry under the Noe's supervision in Lucas County 2004. Whether similar theft defeated Paul Hackett remains to be seen. Hackett ran extremely well in a district thoroughly gerrymandered as a permanent Republican safe seat. Democrats are now crowing about how well Hackett did in "serving notice" that the GOP may be in trouble. But the bottom line is that the Republicans still won the election. As of 1 am this past Tuesday night/Wednesday morning, Hackett was within 3600 votes---about four percent---of Schmidt. But election officials announced a mysterious "computer glitch" that delayed reports from Clermont County, which accounted for roughly a quarter of all the ballots cast in the district. When things finally settled out, Clermont gave Schmidt 58%, and a 5,000 vote margin there. And thus the election. Earlier in the evening---around 9pm---Hackett and Schmidt had been in a virtual dead heat, according to sources in the Cincinnati area (see among them http://billmon.org/archives/002073.html ). A full 88% of the district's precincts had then reported, including more than half those in Clermont. As in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004, it looked like a cliffhanger. Schmidt's lead was less than 900 votes. Clermont's "technical malfunction" with optical scan readers was blamed on the humidity. Election officials said the southern Ohio summer had soaked into the ballots, making it hard to pass them through opti-scan machines. Once the problem was "solved," Schmidt picked up more than enough votes to guarantee victory. The percentages by which she won in the post-glitch vote count were far higher than those by which she had been winning prior to the glitch. Vote counts were also higher than expected in the strongest Schmidt precincts. Clermont and neighboring Butler and Warren Counties gave George W. Bush a margin in 2004 that exceeded his entire statewide margin over John Kerry. Warren County became infamous on election night, when its supervisors suddenly declared a "Homeland Emergency" and dismissed all media and Democrats from the vote count. Bush then emerged with a huge, unexpected and unmonitored majority. Clermont, Butler and Warren Counties' totals were also suspect because a Democratic candidate for Ohio Supreme Court implausibly out-polled John Kerry. As would be expected, Bush vastly out ran the Republican candidate for Supreme Court Chief Justice in those three counties. But Democrat C. Ellen Connelly, a pro-choice, pro-gay-marriage African-American from Cleveland somehow got a higher vote count than Kerry in these conservative, predominantly white southern Ohio counties. Richard Hayes Philips and other experts who have assessed that vote say it is beyond implausible, indicating a high likelihood of fraud. But along with Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, Paul Hackett has become another Democratic candidate whose campaign went suddenly and mysteriously down to defeat late in the evening of a close election. Amidst the obligatory computer glitches, the GOP candidate was declared the winner before the vote count could be investigated. computer glitches, the GOP candidate was declared the winner before the vote count could be investigated. computer glitches, the GOP candidate was declared the winner before the vote count could be investigated. Did Clermont County do for Schmidt in 2005 what it did for Bush in 2004? Did that "glitch" in the evening vote count give GOP dirty tricksters time to once again hack the machines they needed to win? Who in the Bush/Rove Justice Department or major media will even ask the question? -- Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman are co-editors of DID GEORGE W. BUSH STEAL AMERICA'S 2004 ELECTION?, published by www.freepress.org, along with THE FITRAKIS FILES. HARVEY WASSERMAN'S HISTORY OF THE US is available through www.harveywasserman.com, along with A GLIMPSE OF THE BIG LIGHT: LOSING PARENTS, FINDING SPIRIT. For more on Clermont County, see http://billmon.org/archives/002073.html. GB Shaw, reprinted from my 5/20 page WHAT WE SHOULD BUY FIRST To test the effects of our unequal division of the nation's. income on our national institutions and on the life and prosperity of the whole people we must view the industry of the country, and see how it is affected by inequality of income. We must view one by one the institution of marriage, the working of the courts of justice, the honesty of our Houses of Parliament, the spiritual independence of the Church, the usefulness of our schools, and the quality of our newspapers, and consider how each of them is dependent on the way in which money is distributed. Beginning with industry, we are at once plunged into what we call political economy, to distinguish it from the domestic economy with which we are all only too- familiar. Men find political economy a dry and difficult subject: they shirk it as they shirk housekeeping; yet it means nothing more abstruse_than the art of managing a country as a housekeeper manages a house. If the men shirk it the women must tackle it. The nation has a certain income to manage on just as a housekeeper has; and the problem is how to spend that income to the greatest general advantage. Now the first thing a housekeeper has to settle is what things are wanted most, and what things can be done without at a pinch. This means that the housekeeper must settle the order in which things are desirable. For example, if, when there is not enough food in the house, she goes out and spends all her money on a bottle of scent and an imitation pearl necklace, she will be called a vain and silly woman and a bad mother. But a stateswoman would call her simply a bad economist: one who does not know what should come first when money has to be spent. No woman is fit to have charge of a household who has not sense and seIf control enough to see that food and clothing and housing and firing come first, and that bottles of scent and pearl necklaces, imitation or real, come a long way afterwards. Even in the jeweller's shop a wrist watch comes before a necklace as being more useful. I am not saying that pretty things are not useful: they are very useful and quite right in their proper order; but they do not come first. A Bible may be a very proper present to give to a child; but to give a starving child a Bible instead of a piece of bread and a cup of milk would be the act of a lunatic. A woman's mind is more wonderful than her flesh; but if her flesh is not fed her mind will perish, whereas if you feed her flesh her mind will take care of itself and of her flesh as well. Food comes first. Think of the whole country as a big household, and the whole nation as a big family, which is what they really are. What do we see? Half-fed, badly clothed, abominably housed children all over the place; and the money that should go to feed and clothe and house them properly being spent in millions on bottles of scent, pearl necklaces, pet dogs, racing motor cars, January strawberries that taste like corks, and all sorts of extravagances. One sister of the national family has a single pair of leaking boots that keep her sniffing all through the winter, and no handkerchief to wipe her nose with. Another has forty pairs of high-heeled shoes and dozens of handkerchiefs. A little brother is trying to grow up .on a penn'orth of food a day, and is breaking his mother's heart and' wearing out her patience by asking continually for more, whilst a big brother, spending five or six pounds on his dinner at a fashionable hotel, followed by supper at a night club, is in the doctor's hands because he is eating and drinking too much. Now this is shockingly bad political economy. When thought less people are asked to explain it they say "Oh, the woman with the forty shoes and the man drinking at the night club got their money from their father who made a fortune by speculating in rubber; and the girl with the broken boots, and the troublesome boy whose mother has just clouted his head, are only riffraff from the slums". That is true; but it does not alter the fact that the nation that spends money on champagne before it has provided enough milk for its babies, or gives dainty meals to Sealyham terriers and Alsatian wolf-hounds and Pekingese dogs whilst the infant mortality rate shews that its children are dying by thousands from insufficient nourishment, is a badly managed, silly, vain, stupid, ignorant nation, and will go to the bad in the long run no matter how hard it tries to conceal its real condition from itself by counting the pearl necklaces and Pekingese dogs as wealth, and thinking itself three times as rich as before when all the pet dogs have litters of six puppies a couple. The only way in which a nation can make itself wealthy and prosperous is by good housekeeping: that is, by providing for its wants in the order of their importance, and allowing no money to be wasted on whims and luxuries until necessities have been thoroughly served. But it is no use blaming the owners of the dogs. All these mischievous absurdities exist, not because any sane person ever wanted them to exist, but because they must occur whenever some families are very much richer than others. The rich man, who, as husband and father, drags the woman with him, begins as everyone else begins, by buying food, clothing, and a roof to shelter them. The poor man does the same. But when the poor man has spent all he can afford on these necessaries, he is still short of them: his food is insufficient; his clothes are old and dirty; his lodging is a single room or part of one, and unwholesome even at that. But when the rich man has fed himself, and dressed himself, and housed himself as sumptuously as possible, he has still plenty of money left to indulge his tastes and fancies and make a show in the world. Whilst the poor man says_"I want more bread, more clothes, and a better house for my family; but I cannot pay for them", the rich man says "I want a fleet of motor cars, a yacht, diamonds and pearls for my wife and daughters, and a shooting box in Scotland. Money is no object: I can pay and overpay them ten times over". Naturally men of business set to work at once to have the cars and the yacht made, the diamonds dug out in Africa, the pearls fished for, and the shooting lodge built, paying no attention to the poor man with his crying needs and empty pockets. To put the same thing in another way, the poor man needs to have labor employed in making the things he is short of : that is, in baking, weaving, tailoring, and plain building; but he cannot pay the master bakers and weavers enough to enable them to pay the wages of such labor. The rich man meanwhile is offering money enough to provide good wages for all the work required to please him. All the people who take his money may be working hard; but their work is pampering people who have too much instead of feeding people who have too little; therefore it is misapplied and wasted, keeping the country poor and even making it poorer for the sake of keeping a few people rich. It is no excuse for such a state of things that the rich give employment. There is no merit in giving employment: a murderer gives employment to the hangman; and a motorist who runs over a child gives employment to an ambulance porter, a doctor, an undertaker, a clergyman, a mourning-dressmaker, a hearse driver, a gravedigger: in short, to so many worthy people that when he ends by killing himself it seems ungrateful not to erect a statue to him as a public benefactor. The money with which the rich give the wrong sort of employment would give the right sort of employment if it were equally distributed; for then there would be no money offered for motor cars and diamonds until everyone was fed, clothed, and lodged, nor any wages offered to men and women to leave useful employments and become servants to idlers. There would be less ostentation, less idleness, less wastefulness, less uselessness; but there would be more food, more clothing, better houses, more security, more health, more virtue: in a word, more real prosperity. Published on Saturday, August 6, 2005 by the lndependent/UK We Must Act Now to Prevent Another Hiroshima - or Worse The explosions in London are a reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate by Noam Chomsky This month's anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki prompts only the most somber reflection and most fervent hope that the horror may never be repeated. In the subsequent 60 years, those bombings have haunted the world's imagination but not so much as to curb the development and spread of infinitely more lethal weapons of mass destruction. A related concern, discussed in technical literature well before 11 September 2001, is that nuclear weapons may sooner or later fall into the hands of terrorist groups. The recent explosions and casualties in London are yet another reminder of how the cycle of attack and response could escalate, unpredictably, even to a point horrifically worse than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. The world's reigning power accords itself the right to wage war at will, under a doctrine of "anticipatory self-defense" that covers any contingency it chooses. The means of destruction are to be unlimited. US military expenditures approximate those of the rest of the world combined, while arms sales by 38 North American companies (one in Canada) account for more than 60 per cent of the world total (which has risen 25 per cent since 2002). There have been efforts to strengthen the thin thread on which survival hangs. The most important is the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which came into force in 1970. The regular five-year review conference of the NPT took place at the United Nations in May. The NPT has been facing collapse, primarily because of the failure of the nuclear states to live up to their obligation under Article VI to pursue "good faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons. The United States has led the way in refusal to abide by the Article VI obligations. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, emphasizes that "reluctance by one party to fulfill its obligations breeds reluctance in others". President Jimmy Carter blasted the United States as "the major culprit in this erosion of the NPT. While claiming to be protecting the world from proliferation threats in Iraq, Libya, Iran and North Korea, American leaders not only have abandoned existing treaty restraints but also have asserted plans to test and develop new weapons, including Anti-Ballistic missiles, the earth-penetrating 'bunker buster' and perhaps some new 'small' bombs. They also have abandoned past pledges and now threaten first use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states". The thread has almost snapped in the years since Hiroshima, repeatedly. The best known case was the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, "the most dangerous moment in human history", as Arthur Schlesinger, historian and former adviser to President John F Kennedy, observed in October 2002 at a retrospective conference in Havana. The world "came within a hair's breadth of nuclear disaster", recalls Robert McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, who also attended the retrospective. In the May-June issue of the magazine Foreign Policy, he accompanies this reminder with a renewed warning of "apocalypse soon". McNamara regards "current US nuclear weapons policy as immoral, illegal, militarily unnecessary and dreadfully dangerous", creating "unacceptable risks to other nations and to our own", both the risk of "accidental or inadvertent nuclear launch", which is "unacceptably high", and of nuclear attack by terrorists. McNamara endorses the judgment of William Perry, President Bill Clinton's defense secretary, that "there is a greater than 50 per cent probability of a nuclear strike on US targets within a decade". Similar judgments are commonly expressed by prominent strategic analysts. In his book Nuclear Terrorism, the Harvard international relations specialist Graham Allison reports the "consensus in the national security community" (of which he has been a part) that a "dirty bomb" attack is "inevitable", and an attack with a nuclear weapon highly likely, if fissionable materials - the essential ingredient - are not retrieved and secured. Allison reviews the partial success of efforts to do so since the early 1990s, under the initiatives of Senator Sam Nunn and Senator Richard Lugar, and the setback to these programs from the first days of the Bush administration, paralyzed by what Senator Joseph Biden called "ideological idiocy". The Washington leadership has put aside non-proliferation programs and devoted its energies and resources to driving the country to war by extraordinary deceit, then trying to manage the catastrophe it created in Iraq. The threat and use of violence is stimulating nuclear proliferation along with jihadi terrorism. A high-level review of the "war on terror" two years after the invasion "focused on how to deal with the rise of a new generation of terrorists, schooled in Iraq over the past couple of years", Susan B Glasser reported in The Washington Post. "Top government officials are increasingly turning their attention to anticipate what one called 'the bleed out' of hundreds or thousands of Iraq-trained jihadists back to their home countries throughout the Middle East and Western Europe. 'It's a new piece of a new equation,' a former senior Bush administration official said. 'If you don't know who they are in Iraq, how are you going to locate them in Istanbul or London?'" Peter Bergen, a US terrorism specialist, says in The Boston Globe that "the President is right that Iraq is a main front in the war on terrorism, but this is a front we created". Shortly after the London bombing, Chatham House, Britain's premier foreign affairs institution, released a study drawing the obvious conclusion - denied with outrage by the Government - that "the UK is at particular risk because it is the closest ally of the United States, has deployed armed forces in the military campaigns to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and in Iraq ... [and is] a pillion passenger" of American policy, sitting behind the driver of the motorcycle. The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity. While speculation is pointless, reaction to the threat of another Hiroshima is definitely not. On the contrary, it is urgent, particularly in the United States, because of Washington's primary role in accelerating the race to destruction by extending its historically unique military dominance, and in the UK, which goes along with it as its closest ally. The author is a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author, most recently, of Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance © Copyright 2005 Independent News & Media Published on Saturday, August 6, 2005 by CommonDreams.org E=mc2: Congress and the Energy Bill by Christopher Brauchli E=mc2 --Albert Einstein So marvelous are the benefits that it almost makes a human being giddy. Congress passed an energy bill before its members hurried home to their well-earned rest. (By September 3, when they return, they will have vacationed for 90 days and worked for 153 days. And when a piece of legislation becomes law that provides each of us as many benefits as the Energy Bill does, all those days of vacation can be forgiven.) Although the energy bill does lots of wonderful things for human beings, corporations were not overlooked. The difference between how humans are treated and how corporations are treated is that corporations get bigger and longer lasting benefits than do individuals. The final cost of the bill will be between $12.3 billion and $15 billion. Eight hundred million will go to those of us who are homeowners and another $874 million to those who buy alternate fuel vehicles over the next decade. It is impossible to describe all the benefits corporations get in a space as short as this. Here are a few: A 30% business tax credit for the purchase of fuel cell power plants and a 10% credit for the purchase of stationary microturbine power plants; a 15 year write off for natural gas distribution lines (down from the former 20); ability to expense 50% of the cost of refinery equipment through 2012; significant financial aid for companies building nuclear power plants; (Taxpayers will, therefore, not only help pay for the new plants but pay again when they get their electric bills from those plants. ) The list of benefits for large corporations goes on and on and the reader would grow weary in a column such as this were I to continue the description. The important thing is that many of the benefits are not limited in size or duration. And that is what distinguishes them from the benefits conferred upon those of us not lucky enough to be corporations. The best news for non-corporations is that we get things called “life time credits.” The worst thing is they are tiny and assume we’ll all be dead before 2008. The most significant benefit for the human being who is also a homeowner is a 30% tax credit for installing qualifying residential solar water heating, photovoltaic equipment and fuel cell property. Not believing in frivolity congress did not make the credit available for systems used to heat swimming pools and hot tubs. The maximum credit is $2000, which will probably not buy the best system on the market. The property must be placed in service after 2005 and before 2008. Otherwise the credit is lost. Other benefits for homeowners are less generous. A taxpayer who makes qualifying energy saving improvements to an existing home may claim a lifetime credit of up to $500 for those improvements. Only $200 of that credit, however, may be applied to the cost of replacing windows. That means that Congress is willing to help pay for most of the cost of replacing all the windows in a house that only has one window. Since it’s a lifetime credit, after replacing the window, the taxpayer still has a $300 lifetime credit that can be applied to other useful energy savings programs around the house such as the installation of an advanced main air-circulating fan. That would generate a credit of $50. Qualified natural gas, propane, or oil furnaces or hot water boilers are entitled to a $150 credit. The size of the benefits bestowed on human beings is not the only feature that distinguishes what human beings get from what corporations get. Whereas many of the benefits bestowed upon large corporations have no identifiable ending period, most of human beings’ lifetime credits must be used after 2005 and before 2008. Assuming congress does not intend for us to all die before 2008, the use of the word “lifetime” joins other words in the Washington vernacular that make no sense. Because of the time constraints imposed by the law, a taxpayer who plans on replacing a window at other taxpayers’ expense should wait until January 1 of next year to accomplish that and should make sure the window is placed in service by New Year’s Eve, 2007. There is one area in which congress has deigned to give generous benefits to individuals. It has continued benefits bestowed on those buying alternate fuel vehicles including hybrids, electric cars and cars using alternative fuels. Those all last beyond 2007 but have varying cut off dates and amounts. After reading this, some may wonder why most of the goodies flow to corporations. Here’s the answer. Corporations contribute more money to members of Congress than do individuals. It is only fair that they get greater rewards from the objects of their bounty. Life is fair. They do. Christopher Brauchli can be reached at Brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu ### Published on Friday, August 5, 2005 by the Capital Times (Madison, WI) Another Radio Station Falls to Fox News by Dave Zweifel Earlier this year public radio's Garrison Keillor wrote a great piece for the Nation in which he lamented the passing of radio programming as we once knew it. He talked about the heyday of great radio stations like WCCO in Minneapolis, WOR in New York, KMOX in St. Louis and WGN in Chicago and how they were filled with down-home programming on everything from fishing and home repair to baseball games and live coverage of the local news. But, more importantly, the stations were about their hometowns. In smaller communities, Keillor recalled, you would hear the local livestock reports, the announcements of service club meetings and a listener calling to thank everybody for helping her find her lost dog Pookie. Every station had its own personality or two who could speak to the listeners like they were longtime close friends. Thus it was right here in Madison not all that long ago. There were strong local personalities on the air throughout the day and into the night, not just during the morning drive time, and they were certainly not foaming at the mouth with hate-filled political diatribe. Jim Mader, Clark Kellogg, George "Papa Hambone" Vukelich, "P.K." Powers and dozens of others were such familiar voices, with whom listeners identified and actually considered friends. But, as Keillor pointed out, the deregulation of radio was terribly tough on what he called "good neighbor" radio. Texas-based Clear Channel and others began gobbling up all those little money-making stations and homogenized their content to make even more money. So Rush is on everywhere. On many of the FM stations, the same music fills the air. An iconoclast like Hambone no longer exists. This all came to mind earlier this week when WIBA/AM, one of those Clear Channel properties, announced it was switching its longtime affiliation with CBS radio news to Fox News. The station manager, Jeff Tyler, chalked it all up to "some issues with CBS' credibility," as if Dan Rather had something to do with CBS radio. The real reason, of course, is that Fox News - Tyler should check its credibility - is cheaper. And that's all that matters. So now all of Clear Channel's stations in Madison, except WXXM, which will continue with CNN News, will be broadcasting Fox News. Keillor, incidentally, had an answer in that Nation article for why huge numbers of right-wingers appear on those chain-owned radio stations while liberals are hard to find. "It's simple," he said. "Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time." Dave Zweifel has been editor of The Capital Times since 1983. A native of New Glarus, Wis. and a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, his life-long goal was to be the editor of this newspaper. © 2005 Capital Times Inquiry Into Lobbyist Sputters After Demotion The unusual financial deal between Jack Abramoff and officials in Guam drew scrutiny. By Walter F. Roche Jr., Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON — A U.S. grand jury in Guam opened an investigation of controversial lobbyist Jack Abramoff more than two years ago, but President Bush removed the supervising federal prosecutor and the inquiry ended soon after. The previously undisclosed Guam inquiry is separate from a federal grand jury in Washington that is investigating allegations that Abramoff bilked Indian tribes out of millions of dollars. ADVERTISEMENT In Guam, an American territory in the Pacific, investigators were looking into Abramoff's secret arrangement with Superior Court officials to lobby against a court revision bill then pending in the U.S. Congress. The legislation, since approved, gave the Guam Supreme Court authority over the Superior Court. In 2002, Abramoff was retained by the Superior Court in what was an unusual arrangement for a public agency. The Times reported in May that Abramoff was paid with a series of $9,000 checks funneled through a Laguna Beach lawyer to disguise the lobbyist's role working for the Guam court. No separate contract was authorized for Abramoff's work. Guam court officials have not explained the contractual arrangement. At the time, Abramoff was a well-known lobbyist in the Pacific islands because of his work for the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas garment manufacturers, accused of employing workers in sweatshop conditions. Abramoff spokesman Andrew Blum said the lobbyist "has no recollection of his being investigated in Guam in 2002. If he had been aware of an investigation, he would have cooperated fully." Blum declined to respond to detailed questions. The transactions were the target of a grand jury subpoena issued Nov. 18, 2002, according to a copy obtained by The Times. The subpoena demanded that Anthony Sanchez, administrative director of the Guam Superior Court, release records involving the lobbying contract, including bills and payments. A day later, the chief prosecutor, U.S. Atty. Frederick A. Black, who had launched the investigation, was demoted. A White House news release announced that Bush was replacing Black. The timing caught some by surprise. Despite his officially temporary status, Black had held the acting U.S. attorney assignment for more than a decade. The acting U.S. attorney was a controversial official in Guam. At the time he was removed, Black was directing a long-term investigation into allegations of public corruption in the administration of then-Gov. Carl Gutierrez. The inquiry produced numerous indictments, including some of the governor's political associates and top aides. Black also arranged for a security review in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that was seen as a potential threat to loose immigration rules favored by local business leaders. In fact, the study ordered by Black eventually cited substantial security risks in Guam and the Northern Marianas. Abramoff, who then represented the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, alerted his clients in a memo about the expected report and warned: "It will require some major action from the Hill and a press attack to get this back in the bottle." The lobbyist also wrote that he and his aides expected to meet in the near future with Justice Department officials, according to Abramoff billing documents released this year by the Marianas government. A Justice Department spokesman previously dismissed Abramoff's references to meetings with high level department officials as "a lot of bluster to impress a client." Abramoff also sought expanded lobbying business with the Pacific island governments. A lawyer for Gutierrez discussed hiring Abramoff to represent Guam's territorial government in 2002 before the grand jury inquiry began. The discussions were held at Abramoff-owned Signature's Restaurant here, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. They provided details on condition of anonymity. The federal grand jury in Guam took no further action after the initial subpoena was issued in the Abramoff case, according to sources familiar with the inquiry who spoke on condition of anonymity. Three weeks after the subpoena was issued, about 100 pages of documents related to the court-revision lobbying effort were turned over to FBI agents investigating the case, records show. This year, Public Auditor Doris Flores Brooks initiated a separate investigation of Abramoff's secret lobbying work for the Guam courts. The auditor's office is reviewing Abramoff's payments totaling $324,000 in 36 separate checks for $9,000 paid through lawyer Howard Hills of Laguna Beach. Hills said he was a middleman. The new Guam inquiry remains open. Black, 56, had served as acting U.S. attorney for Guam and the Northern Mariana islands since 1991. The career prosecutor, who had held a senior position as first assistant before accepting the acting U.S. attorney job, was demoted to a staff post. Black's demotion came after an intensive lobbying effort by supporters of Gov. Gutierrez, who had been publicly critical of Black and his investigative efforts. Black declined to comment for this article. Black's successor, Leonardo Rapadas, was confirmed in May 2003 without any debate. Rapadas had been recommended by the Guam Republican Party for the job. Fred Radewagen, a lobbyist who had been under contract to the Gutierrez administration, said he carried that recommendation to top Bush aide Karl Rove in early 2003. After taking office, Rapadas recused himself from the ongoing public corruption case involving Gutierrez. The new U.S. attorney was a cousin of "one of the main targets," according to a confidential memo to Justice Department officials. Rapadas declined to comment and referred questions about his recusal to Justice Department officials, who did not respond to requests for comment. Erin Healy, a Bush spokeswoman, would not comment on the recusal but defended Rapadas' appointment, saying that he was "well known and well respected" and had served for more than a decade as an assistant attorney general in the Guam government. Abramoff is now the subject of Senate and federal grand jury inquiries related to his dealings with Indian tribes. He also has drawn controversy for his role in arranging foreign trips for congressional leaders, including House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas). The More Patriotic and Truthful You are, the Greater the Slime and Slander that Bush Allows Karl Rove to Heap Upon You. No Patriotic American Should Shake the Hand of Bush, a Man Who Has No Decency and No Shame, However Piously He is Packaged by the White House "Branding" Machine. The List of Soldiers and Loyal Americans Vilified with Bush's Approval adds Cindy Sheehan as Another Victim of a Vicious Administration that Betrays the Integrity, Honesty and Moral Values of America. Bush Continues to Allow Traitors to Betray Our Nation Because No One Will Stand Up to Him, Except a Mother Whose Son Was Killed in Sadr City, Iraq. Shameful is Not a Strong Enough Word for His Actions, Slanderous White House Attacks, and Phony Piety as He Unleashes the Long Knives on a Growing List of Soldiers and Patriots. He Tacitly Condones the Outing of a CIA Operative and Then Allows the Traitorous Leaker to Continue to Drag Others Through the Gutter. This is the Rule of the Mob, Not the Rule of Law. itorial: Energy bill good only for Texas contingent August 6, 2005 All the hoopla aside, the energy bill that President Bush will sign Monday in Albuquerque is another sucker punch to American consumers and taxpayers. It will do little to strengthen the nation's long-term security or energy independence, future economic vitality or sputtering commitment to a clean environment. Though the bill never included the one major step that would make the most difference - mandating improvements in vehicle fuel mileage - the Senate version looked fairly good coming down the stretch. That was until the congressional conference committee trashed most of the progressive elements that New Mexico Sens. Pete Domenici, an Albuquerque Republican and chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and Jeff Bingaman, a Silver City Democrat and the committee's ranking member, had put into the bill, in a laudable bipartisan compromise. Domenici in particular deserves enormous credit for finally seeing the energy light this year and involving Bingaman directly in the bill process upfront. Together they favored a substantial national effort to pursue and promote alternative energy sources, such as wind and solar, as well as energy conservation. Combined with a return to nuclear power, these paths offer the most credible potential for U.S. energy independence and long-term weaning of the American economy from the oil well. But in the end, Texas greed trumped New Mexico foresight. The senators caved and allowed the House and the White House to rule. The bill reflects the fossil-fuel interests of Bush, a Texan, and other Texans, including Vice President Dick Cheney - who primed the pump with his secret energy policy meetings four years ago - and House Majority Leader Rep. Tom DeLay, whose hometown energy companies stand to benefit enormously from the bill. They also include Republican Rep. Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, who was instrumental in sustaining elements that subsidize drilling for hard-to-reach oil, write-offs for refineries and more-aggressive offshore and public-land oil or gas drilling. All of which prompted Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Edward Markey to tell the Boston Globe that under this bill, "No one is lonesome in the Lone Star State when it comes to energy policy." Sure, New Mexico energy interests also will benefit in the short term. But at what cost to the American people? Let's be brutally honest: Compared with the rest of the world, Americans are energy hogs. Unfortunately, once again it was demonstrated that American politicians can't seem to bite the energy diversification, conservation and renewable bullet - never mind record prices for gasoline, skyrocketing oil company profits or another devastating war in the Middle East. Eventually, that bullet is going to wound us all. Early estimates of the complex and convoluted bill by watchdog groups - such as the U.S. Public Interest Research Group or Friends of the Earth - suggest that more than $20 billion in public subsidies or tax incentives will go to conventional energy sources, while renewable and alternative sources will get just $5.3 billion. Even the comparatively conservative National Center of Policy Analysis' energy-team scholars found "special interests" drove the legislation. One member said that rather than being signed Monday in an unusual ceremony at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, Bush should have vetoed it. Center senior fellow Rob Bradley concluded that the bill "represents a transfer of wealth from taxpayers to energy producers." Is Bush coming to New Mexico to reward the perseverance of the state's two senators - or to draw the fire from his parochial energy interests back home in Texas? Together our two senators made energy policy inroads, and their constituents and all Americans owe them some thanks. But there the plaudits must end, for Domenici and Bingaman allowed their willingness to compromise give in to a largely ineffective energy policy. Despite what you will hear Monday, America's energy future still is anything but bright. New GOP Money Laundering Scheme Before Congress left Washington for the summer, Republicans quietly inserted a provision into the Transportation Appropriations bill that would repeal the cap on the amount of money a "Leadership PAC" can donate to a political party. The bill is set to come up for a vote in the fall and could be a political disaster for Democrats. By repealing the caps, Senators and Representatives will be able to raise substantial sums of money for their leadership PACs from the same donors who have already maxed out to their campaign committees. As a result, they will be able to launder these contributions backs to their campaigns through the RNC, NRSC or NRCC. # posted by The Buzz @ 12:18 AM Comments: Any reaction from the Dems yet? # posted by Anonymous : 7:15 AM Outside the beltway an actions like this would land normal people in jail. BUT, thr Gay ole Republicans are not normal. What the hell is this country coming to?? It sounds like the inmates from the prisons and Bedlam are running the country from within starting with the White House. BLOG | Posted 08/08/2005 @ 1:20pm Why AIPAC Indictment Is Bad News for Rove SEE ALL POSTS EMAIL THIS POST PERMALINK COMMENTS (72) I'm on vacation, but I couldn't resist posting the below on my davidcorn.com site, where I routinely obsess over the Karl Rove scandal. Last week, the Justice Department issued a new indictment of Lawrence Franklin, the Pentagon official accused of passing secrets to officials of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying outfit. The indictment is bad news for the Bush White House and Karl Rove. That's not only because the Franklin case is embarrassing for the administration, the Pentagon, and their neocon allies. (Franklin worked with Douglas Feith, who until recently was a senior Pentagon official close to the neocons.) The Franklin indictment is a sign that Rove and any other White House aide involved in the Plame/CIA leak might be vulnerable to prosecution under the Espionage Act. Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald--who is not involved in the Franklin prosecution--has not had to state publicly what sort of case he is trying to build in the Plame/CIA leak matter. The most obvious one would be based on the charge that the leaker violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. But that law was narrowly drawn, and to win a conviction Fitzgerald would have to prove that Rove or any other leaker knew that Valerie Wilson was working under cover at the CIA. There are, however, other laws under which Fitzgerald might charge the CIA/Plame leakers. The Franklin indictment points the way. (And criminal law aside, by sharing classified information with at least two reporters--Valerie Wilson's employment at the CIA was classified--Rove committed an offense that violated various rules and would get most government workers seriously punished or dismissed.) The Franklin indictments notes: On or about December 8, 1999, FRANKLIN signed a Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement, a Standard Form 312 (SF-312). In that document FRANKLIN acknowledged that he was aware that the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by him could cause irreparable injury to the United States or could be used to advantage by a foreign nation and that he would never divulge classified information to an unauthorized person. He further acknowledged that he would never divulge classified information unless he had officially verified that the recipient was authorized by the United States to receive it. Additionally, he agreed that if he was uncertain about the classification status of information, he was required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before he could disclose it. Yet, the indictment alleges, Franklin passed classified information to Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two senior AIPAC officials. And the indictment claims Rosen and Weissman shared this information with Israel. Consequently, the indictment charges Franklin, Rosen and Weissman with "conspiracy to communicate National Defense Information under sections 793 (d) and 793(e) of Title 18, United States Code. And Franklin was charged with three counts of "communication of National Defense Information"--not conspiracy--under section 793(d). He was also charged with one count of "conspiracy to communicate classified information" to a foreign government. Let's look at sections 793(d) and (e). The first generally applies to government officials, the second to nongovernment officials. Both sections make it a crime to transmit national defense information--and the identity of an undercover CIA officer would probably count as national defense information--to a person unauthorized to receive it (such as a reporter). These sections define violators as (d) Whoever, lawfully having possession of, access to, control over, or being entrusted with any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it on demand to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it. (e) Whoever having unauthorized possession of, access to, or control over any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, or note relating to the national defense, or information relating to the national defense which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted, or attempts to communicate, deliver, transmit or cause to be communicated, delivered, or transmitted the same to any person not entitled to receive it, or willfully retains the same and fails to deliver it to the officer or employee of the United States entitled to receive it. [Emphasis added.] Rove, like Franklin, had to sign SF-312. As Rep. Henry Waxman noted in a short report he released on the Rove leak, this nondisclosure agreement states, "I will never divulge classified information to anyone" unauthorized to receive such information. Rove broke that vow. And Executive Order 12958--which Bush updated on March 25, 2003-- says that "officers and employees of the United States Government...shall be subject to appropriate sanctions if they knowingly, willfully, or negligently...disclose to unauthorized persons information properly classified." The sanctions include "reprimand, suspension without pay, removal, termination of classification authority, loss or denial of access to classified information, or other sanctions." So Rove ought to be slapped with one of those punishments. But worse for Rove--from a legal perspective--is section 793. Rove did communicate classified information which could be used "to the injury of the United States" to a person "not entitled to receive it." The information was the identity of an undercover intelligence official working on anti-WMD operations. Such information could be used to thwart or undermine past or present CIA operations and assets connected to Valerie Wilson. The persons "not entitled" to received this info were Robert Novak and Matt Cooper (and perhaps there were more). I am--as I've said before--no lawyer. But given the letter of the law in section 793, it seems to me there is a case to be made that Rove essentially did what Franklin did. There may be a difference in intent or awareness. Perhaps Rove did not know he was passing on classified information that could be used to the detriment of the United States (though he should have realized that had he given the matter a moment or two of thought), and it seems that Franklin had to know he was sharing classified material with outsiders. But section 793 does not say a violator must be aware he or she is passing on information that could cause harm to the United States if exposed. It only sets as a criterion that the violator "willfully" communicates this information. I assume that means a purely accidental slip of the lip would not be a crime. But Rove--who told at least two reporters about Valerie Wilson's CIA position--cannot argue he was not "willfully" communicating this information to others. So might Fitzgerald have a case under section 793? Journalists don't like these sorts of prosecutions, for it brings us close to an official secrets act (like the one that exists in Britain). If prosecutors chased after government leakers--say those who leaked intelligence showing that the White House's case for war in Iraq was weak--the public would suffer. And the Justice Department's indictment of Rosen and Weissman--nongovernment officials--for passing along classified information is also worrisome for reporters who pass along classified information by publishing and airing stories that contain secret information. But Fitzgerald has certainly demonstrated he's not too concerned about pursuing legal cases and setting legal precedents that are bad for journalism. And that's why Rove ought to be sweating the Franklin indictment. |
