Stop Him Before He Gets More Experience

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times
February 11, 2007

AS the official Barack Obama rollout reaches its planned climax on “60 Minutes” tonight, we’ll learn if he has the star power to upstage Anna Nicole Smith. But at least one rap against him can promptly be laid to rest: his lack of experience. If time in the United States Senate is what counts for presidential seasoning, maybe his two years’ worth is already too much. Better he get out now, before there’s another embarrassing nonvote on a nonbinding measure about what will soon be a four-year-old war.

History is going to look back and laugh at last week’s farce, with the Virginia Republican John Warner voting to kill a debate on his own anti-surge resolution and the West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd seizing the occasion for an hourlong soliloquy on coal mining. As the Senate pleasured itself with parliamentary one-upmanship, the rate of American casualties in Iraq reached a new high. The day after the resolution debacle, I spoke with Senator Obama about the war and about his candidacy. Since we talked by phone, I can’t swear he was clean, but he was definitely articulate.

He doesn’t yet sound as completely scripted as his opponents — though some talking-point-itis is creeping in — and he isn’t remotely defensive as he shrugs off the race contretemps du jour prompted by his White House run. Not that he’s all sweetness and light. “If the criterion is how long you’ve been in Washington, then we should just go ahead and assign Joe Biden or Chris Dodd the nomination,” he said. “What people are looking for is judgment.”

What Mr. Obama did not have to say is that he had the judgment about Iraq that his rivals lacked. As an Illinois state senator with no access to intelligence reports, he recognized in October 2002 that administration claims of Saddam’s “imminent and direct threat to the United States” were hype and foresaw that an American occupation of Iraq would be of “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Nor can he be pilloried as soft on terrorism by the Cheney-Lieberman axis of neo-McCarthyism. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said in the same Chicago speech. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

Now that Mr. Obama has passed through Men’s Vogue, among other stations of a best-selling author’s cross of hype, he wants to move past the dumb phase of Obamamania. He has begun to realize “how difficult it is to break through the interest in me on the beach or that my wife’s made me stop sneaking cigarettes.” He doesn’t expect to be elected the leader of the free world because he “can tell a good joke on Jay Leno.” It is “an open question and a legitimate question,” he says, whether he can channel his early boomlet into an electoral victory.No one can answer that question at this absurdly early stage of an absurdly long presidential race.

But Mr. Obama is well aware of the serious criticisms he engenders, including the charge that he is conciliatory to a fault. He argues that he is “not interested in just splitting the difference” when he habitually seeks a consensus on tough issues. “There are some times where we need to be less bipartisan,” he says. “I’m not interested in cheap bipartisanship. We should have been less bipartisan in asking tough questions about entering into this Iraq war.”

He has introduced his own end-the-war plan that goes beyond a split-the-difference condemnation of the current escalation. His bill sets a beginning (May) and an end (March 31, 2008) for the phased withdrawal of combat troops, along with certain caveats to allow American military flexibility as “a big, difficult, messy situation” plays out during the endgame. Unlike the more timid Senate war critics, including Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama has no qualms about embracing a plan with what he unabashedly labels “a timeline.” But he has no messianic pretensions and is enough of a realist to own up to the fact that his proposal has no present chance of becoming law.

Nor do any of the other end-the-war plans offered by Congressional Democrats — some overlapping his, some calling for a faster exit than his. If a nonbinding resolution expressing mild criticism of President Bush’s policy can’t even come to a vote in the Senate, legislation demanding actual action is a nonstarter. All the Democrats’ parrying about troop caps, timelines, benchmarks, the cutting off of war funding, whatever, is academic except as an index to the postures being struck by the various presidential hopefuls as they compete for their party’s base. There simply aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to force the hand of a president who, in Mr. Obama’s words, “is hellbent on doing what he’s been doing for the last four years.”Unless, of course, Republicans join in.

The real point of every Iraq proposal, Mr. Obama observes, is to crank up the political heat until “enough pressure builds within the Republican Party that they essentially revolt.” He argues that last week’s refusal to act on a nonbinding resolution revealed just how quickly that pressure is building. If the resolution didn’t matter, he asks, “why were they going through so many hoops to avoid the vote?”

He seconds Chuck Hagel’s celebrated explosion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when “he pointed at folks” and demanded that all 100 senators be held accountable for their votes on what Senator Hagel called “the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam.” That’s why Mr. Obama is right when he says that the individual 2008 contests for the Senate and the House are at least as important as the presidential race when it comes to winding down the war: “Ultimately what’s going to make the biggest difference is the American people, particularly in swing districts and in Republican districts, sending a message to their representatives: This is intolerable to us.”

That message was already sent by many American voters on Election Day in 2006. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois congressman who, with his Senate counterpart, Chuck Schumer, oversaw that Democratic takeover, smells the blood of more Republicans in “marginal districts” in 2008. His party is now in the hunt for fresh candidates, including veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. Such is the sense of impending doom among House Republicans that their leader, John Boehner, told CNN on Jan. 23 that he could render a verdict on whether the latest Bush Iraq strategy is “working” in a mere “60 to 90 days.”

In the Senate, even the rumor of a tough opponent is proving enough to make some incumbents flip overnight from rubber-stamp support of the White House’s war policy to criticism of the surge. Norm Coleman of Minnesota started running away from his own record the moment he saw the whites of Al Franken’s eyes.

Another endangered Republican up for re-election in 2008, John Sununu of New Hampshire, literally sprinted away from the press, The Washington Post reported, rather than field questions about his vote on the nonbinding resolution last week.My own guess is that the Republican revolt will be hastened more by the harsh reality in Iraq than any pressure applied by Democratic maneuvers in Congress. Events are just moving too fast.

While senators played their partisan games on Capitol Hill, they did so against the backdrop of chopper after chopper going down on the evening news. The juxtaposition made Washington’s aura of unreality look obscene. Senator Warner looked like such a fool voting against his own principles (“No matter how strongly I feel about my resolution,” he said, “I shall vote with my leader”) that by week’s end he abruptly released a letter asserting that he and six Republican colleagues did want a debate on an anti-surge resolution after all.

(Of the seven signatories, five are up for re-election in 2008, Mr. Warner among them.) What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. The latest National Intelligence Estimate said as much when it posited that “even if violence is diminished,” Iraq’s “absence of unifying leaders” makes political reconciliation doubtful. Not enough capable Iraqi troops are showing up and, as Gen. Peter Pace told the Senate last week, not enough armored vehicles are available to protect the new American deployments.

The State Department can’t recruit enough civilian officials to manage the latest push to turn on Baghdad’s electricity and is engaged in its own sectarian hostilities with the Pentagon. Revealingly enough, the surge’s cheerleaders are already searching for post-Rumsfeld scapegoats. William Kristol attacked the new defense secretary, Robert Gates, for “letting the Joint Chiefs slow-walk the brigades in.”

Washington’s conventional wisdom has it that the worse things go in the war, the more voters will want to stick with the tried and true: Clinton, McCain, Giuliani. But as Mr. Obama reminds us, “Nobody had better Washington résumés than Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld.” In the wake of the catastrophe they and their enablers in both parties have made, the inexperienced should have a crack at inheriting the earth, especially if they’re clean.

Death by Dollars

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
The New York Times
February 11, 2007

So is your Fidelity account underwriting genocide in Sudan? Is your pension fund helping finance the janjaweed militias that throw babies into bonfires in Darfur and Chad?

The answer to both questions is complicated but may be yes, and that’s one reason a divestment campaign is gaining strength around America and abroad. Six states (including California) have already begun divesting from companies active in Sudan, and legislation is pending in 23 more states, including New York.

More than 30 universities, beginning with Harvard in 2005, have sold certain Sudan-related investments. Five cities have divested, and New York is considering doing so. A bill before Congress would bar certain companies active in Sudan from receiving federal contracts.

Let’s start by acknowledging that divestment and economic sanctions generally fail. The closest thing to a success was the way they helped topple white rule in South Africa in the 1980s, but even there one result was greater hardship for ordinary blacks.

Elsewhere, divestment and economic sanctions have mostly been counterproductive. Our Cuban embargo has hurt Cubans but cemented Fidel Castro in power; our sanctions against Myanmar have inflicted tremendous pain on Burmese without dislodging the brutal government.

So I’m against economic sanctions in almost every case. But Sudan is an exception, a rare instance where narrowly focused divestment makes practical as well as moral sense.

Partly that’s because Sudan’s economy depends on foreign oil companies, giving the outside world leverage. And 70 percent of Sudan’s oil revenue goes to weaponry, like bayonets used to gouge out people’s eyes.

The oil companies in Sudan aren’t American; the biggest players are Chinese companies. Pressure on them is also one way to get the attention of the Chinese government, which is Sudan’s main protector in the U.N. Security Council.

So in this case pressure on a small number of foreign companies could help get Sudan’s attention, and that of its protectors in China, without hurting ordinary people. And Sudan has shown that it can be nudged and embarrassed into behaving better: the best example is the way that pressure (including economic sanctions) led Sudan’s leaders to end their brutal war in southern Sudan in 2005.

Fortunately, the Darfur divestment campaign has been remarkably restrained in choosing targets. Organizers are not seeking divestment from all of the more than 400 foreign companies that operate in Sudan, but only from a few dozen that are complicit in genocide without helping ordinary Sudanese. (See the guidelines at www.SudanDivestment.org, developed largely by a recent U.C.L.A. graduate, Adam Sterling.)

“People are surprised to find out that Royal Dutch Shell is not a targeted company by us, even though they are an oil firm and operate in Sudan,” notes Mark Hanis, who runs the Genocide Intervention Network (which has a divestment hot line, 1-800-GENOCIDE). That’s because Shell sells gas in Sudan at a retail level, rather than enriching the army through production, Mr. Hanis said, and less than 5 percent of those sales are believed to be to the government.

More than other money managers, Fidelity has resisted the pressure and clung firmly to Sudan-related investments. So Darfur campaigners are urging investors to avoid Fidelity mutual funds: more information is at www.FidelityOutofSudan.com.

The biggest U.S. investor in Class H shares of PetroChina, a Chinese oil concern whose parent company is active in Sudan, is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. I have huge respect for Mr. Buffett, and he may be thinking: My obligation is to make money for shareholders, not to use their investments in a dubious attempt to save the world. But surely if Berkshire Hathaway and Fidelity mutual funds saw lucrative opportunities in selling bayonets to the janjaweed, they would balk at that. We do have limits; the question is where we draw them.

In this case, the cost of divestment to fund managers or investors is negligible, and there is a real prospect that the strategy will add enough attention, embarrassment and pressure that Sudan will stop slaughtering Darfuris — just as it has stopped massacring people in southern Sudan.

It’s not a sure thing. But remember that in Darfur and Chad, aid workers — some of them Americans — are being killed, raped and beaten as they try to alleviate the slaughter. So shouldn’t we make the minimal sacrifice of divestment, rather than blithely continue to invest in ways that provide grenades and guns to kill aid workers and Darfuris alike?

Who’s Afraid of the New Economy?

By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
February 11, 2007

Once, there was a bridge to the 21st century. But no major Democrat today speaks as confidently about globalization and technological change as Bill Clinton and Al Gore did a decade ago. No major Democrat today speaks as optimistically about free trade as Gordon Brown does in Britain.

In the Democratic Party today, neopopulists and economic nationalists are on the rise. The free-traders are on the defensive. The Democratic view of the global economy has grown unremittingly grim. When John Edwards talks about the economy, you think he’s running for the Democratic nomination of 1932.

Which is why the report to be released tomorrow by the Democratic activist group Third Way is so remarkable. Here is a group of Democratic economists and strategists who are taking on the rising neopopulists.

The first thing their report, “The New Rules Economy,” does is challenge the neopopulist depiction of economic reality. Neopopulists are good at describing the suffering in towns like Mansfield, Ohio, and Flint, Mich. But they act as if they’ve never been to Charlotte or Phoenix, where office parks are shooting up.

The authors of this report, Anne Kim, Adam Solomon, Jim Kessler and Stephen Rose, try to blend all the diverse pieces of American reality, and to expose what they call “the myths of neopopulism.”

The first myth, they write, is the myth of the failing middle class. It’s true there are more households headed by young and old people, who tend to have lower incomes. But if you take households headed by people in their prime working years, 25 to 59, you find those people are not failing. Their median income is $61,000. If they are married, their median income is $72,000. Those are decent incomes in most parts of the country.

Moreover, their living standards are not stagnant. Between 1979 and 2005, the percentage of prime-age households making over $100,000 in current dollars rose by 12.7 percentage points. As Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, said last week, incomes at all levels are rising; it’s just that incomes at the upper end are rising much faster.

The Third Way authors also dispute recent warnings of wildly increasing income volatility. The main reason incomes have grown more volatile over the past decades is motherhood, they write. As women play a more significant role in the economy, their movements in and out of the labor force to care for children increase volatility.

The report goes on to challenge the direst warnings about rising credit card debt (household assets have risen faster than debts), rising corporate profits (they are cyclical and pretty much normal for this stage in a recovery) and American decline.

The Third Way authors are not saying everything is hunky-dory — far from it — but they are saying Democrats tend to lose when they are relentlessly grim and when the reality they describe is detached from the reality most Americans experience.

Moreover, they are restating the truth neopopulists are loath to admit: that no nation on earth is better positioned to take advantage of an ever-more-open economy, and today’s challenge is not to retard openness but enable more people to take part in it.

The second half of the report describes how government can help people adjust to the new economic rules. Frankly, I wish the authors had been a bit more creative here, asking, for example, why so many people don’t heed the huge incentives to finish high school and college. There are deeper mental and cultural processes in play than can be dealt with by the usual mix of tax credits.

Still, the significance of the report is that at least some Democrats have the guts to take on the neopopulists, who are masters of vilification.

In fact, their political method is based on vilification over explanation. They vilify unpatriotic executives, but the vast majority of job losses are caused by technological change, not outsourcing. They vilify overpaid C.E.O.’s, even though their pay packages have nothing to do with the stagnant wages of the unskilled. They vilify foreign governments for not living up to the rules of “fair trade,” even though developing countries could enforce every labor and environmental regulation under the sun and their workers would still be cheaper for low-skill tasks.

The neopopulist caucus in the Democratic Party is like the anti-immigrant caucus in the Republican Party. Both speak for loud and angry minorities who have been hurt by globalization. But the party that mistakes their experience for the central reality will doom itself for years to come.

COMMENT: Granted, Brooks is a PNAC-friendly Weekly Standard-associated putz but we have to post his stuff anyway so it may be intelligently criticized &/or learned from, by negative example. We should always try to know what our enemies are thinking.

====

Stop Him Before He Gets More Experience [The Short Course]

By FRANK RICH
The New York Times
February 11, 2007

If time in the United States Senate is what counts for presidential seasoning, maybe his two years’ worth is already too much. Better he get out now, before there’s another embarrassing nonvote on a nonbinding measure about what will soon be a four-year-old war.

History is going to look back and laugh at last week’s farce, with the Virginia Republican John Warner voting to kill a debate on his own anti-surge resolution and the West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd seizing the occasion for an hourlong soliloquy on coal mining. As the Senate pleasured itself with parliamentary one-upmanship, the rate of American casualties in Iraq reached a new high.

The day after the resolution debacle, I spoke with Senator Obama about the war and about his candidacy. Since we talked by phone, I can’t swear he was clean, but he was definitely articulate. He doesn’t yet sound as completely scripted as his opponents — though some talking-point-itis is creeping in — and he isn’t remotely defensive as he shrugs off the race contretemps du jour prompted by his White House run. Not that he’s all sweetness and light. “If the criterion is how long you’ve been in Washington, then we should just go ahead and assign Joe Biden or Chris Dodd the nomination,” he said. “What people are looking for is judgment.”

What Mr. Obama did not have to say is that he had the judgment about Iraq that his rivals lacked. As an Illinois state senator with no access to intelligence reports, he recognized in October 2002 that administration claims of Saddam’s “imminent and direct threat to the United States” were hype and foresaw that an American occupation of Iraq would be of “undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” Nor can he be pilloried as soft on terrorism by the Cheney-Lieberman axis of neo-McCarthyism. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said in the same Chicago speech. “What I am opposed to is a dumb war.”

Now that Mr. Obama has passed through Men’s Vogue, among other stations of a best-selling author’s cross of hype, he wants to move past the dumb phase of Obamamania. He has begun to realize “how difficult it is to break through the interest in me on the beach or that my wife’s made me stop sneaking cigarettes.” He doesn’t expect to be elected the leader of the free world because he “can tell a good joke on Jay Leno.” It is “an open question and a legitimate question,” he says, whether he can channel his early boomlet into an electoral victory.

No one can answer that question at this absurdly early stage of an absurdly long presidential race. But Mr. Obama is well aware of the serious criticisms he engenders, including the charge that he is conciliatory to a fault. He argues that he is “not interested in just splitting the difference” when he habitually seeks a consensus on tough issues. “There are some times where we need to be less bipartisan,” he says. “I’m not interested in cheap bipartisanship. We should have been less bipartisan in asking tough questions about entering into this Iraq war.”

He has introduced his own end-the-war plan that goes beyond a split-the-difference condemnation of the current escalation. His bill sets a beginning (May) and an end (March 31, 2008) for the phased withdrawal of combat troops, along with certain caveats to allow American military flexibility as “a big, difficult, messy situation” plays out during the endgame. Unlike the more timid Senate war critics, including Hillary Clinton, Mr. Obama has no qualms about embracing a plan with what he unabashedly labels “a timeline.”

[...]

The real point of every Iraq proposal, Mr. Obama observes, is to crank up the political heat until “enough pressure builds within the Republican Party that they essentially revolt.” He argues that last week’s refusal to act on a nonbinding resolution revealed just how quickly that pressure is building. If the resolution didn’t matter, he asks, “why were they going through so many hoops to avoid the vote?” He seconds Chuck Hagel’s celebrated explosion before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when “he pointed at folks” and demanded that all 100 senators be held accountable for their votes on what Senator Hagel called “the most divisive issue in this country since Vietnam.”

That’s why Mr. Obama is right when he says that the individual 2008 contests for the Senate and the House are at least as important as the presidential race when it comes to winding down the war: “Ultimately what’s going to make the biggest difference is the American people, particularly in swing districts and in Republican districts, sending a message to their representatives: This is intolerable to us.”

[...]

My own guess is that the Republican revolt will be hastened more by the harsh reality in Iraq than any pressure applied by Democratic maneuvers in Congress. Events are just moving too fast. While senators played their partisan games on Capitol Hill, they did so against the backdrop of chopper after chopper going down on the evening news. The juxtaposition made Washington’s aura of unreality look obscene. Senator Warner looked like such a fool voting against his own principles (“No matter how strongly I feel about my resolution,” he said, “I shall vote with my leader”) that by week’s end he abruptly released a letter asserting that he and six Republican colleagues did want a debate on an anti-surge resolution after all. (Of the seven signatories, five are up for re-election in 2008, Mr. Warner among them.)

What anyone in Congress with half a brain knows is that the surge was sabotaged before it began. The latest National Intelligence Estimate said as much when it posited that “even if violence is diminished,” Iraq’s “absence of unifying leaders” makes political reconciliation doubtful. Not enough capable Iraqi troops are showing up and, as Gen. Peter Pace told the Senate last week, not enough armored vehicles are available to protect the new American deployments. The State Department can’t recruit enough civilian officials to manage the latest push to turn on Baghdad’s electricity and is engaged in its own sectarian hostilities with the Pentagon.

----

* Note: Full text version of this column will be posted when available.

Heels Over Hemingway

By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
February 10, 2007

I was cruising through Borders, looking for a copy of “Nostromo.”

Suddenly I was swimming in pink. I turned frantically from display table to display table, but I couldn’t find a novel without a pink cover. I was accosted by a sisterhood of cartoon women, sexy string beans in minis and stilettos, fashionably dashing about book covers with the requisite urban props — lattes, books, purses, shopping bags, guns and, most critically, a diamond ring.

Was it a Valentine’s Day special?

No, I realized with growing alarm, chick lit was no longer a niche. It had staged a coup of the literature shelves. Hot babes had shimmied into the grizzled old boys’ club, the land of Conrad, Faulkner and Maugham. The store was possessed with the devil spawn of “The Devil Wears Prada.” The blood-red high heel ending in a devil’s pitchfork on the cover of the Lauren Weisberger best seller might as well be driving a stake through the heart of the classics.

I even found Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” with chick-lit pretty-in-pink lettering.

“Penis lit versus Venus lit,” said my friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who was with me. “An unacceptable choice.”

“Looking for Mr. Goodbunny” by Kathleen O’Reilly sits atop George Orwell’s “1984.” “Mine Are Spectacular!” by Janice Kaplan and Lynn Schnurnberger hovers over “Ulysses.” Sophie Kinsella’s “Shopaholic” series cuddles up to Rudyard Kipling.

Even Will Shakespeare is buffeted by rampaging 30-year-old heroines, each one frantically trying to get their guy or figure out if he’s the right guy, or if he meant what he said, or if he should be with them instead of their BFF or cousin, or if he’ll come back, or if she’ll end up stuck home alone eating Häagen-Dazs and watching “CSI” and “Sex and the City” reruns.

Trying to keep up with soap-opera modernity, “Romeo and Juliet” has been reissued with a perky pink cover.

There are subsections of chick lit: black chick lit (“Diva Diaries”), Bollywood chick lit (“Salaam, Paris”), Jewish chick lit (“The J.A.P. Chronicles” and “The Matzo Ball Heiress”) and assistant lit, which has its own subsection of Hollywood-assistant lit (“The Second Assistant”), mystery lit (“Sex, Murder and a Double Latte”), shopping lit (“Retail Therapy”), the self-loathing genre (“This Is Not Chick Lit”) and Brit chick lit (“Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging”).

The narrator of that last, Georgia, begins with a note to her readers: “Hello, American-type chums! (Perhaps you say ‘Howdy’ in America — I don’t know — but then I’m not really sure where Tibet is either, or my lipstick.) ... I hope you like my diary and don’t hold it against me that my great-great-great-grandparents colonized you. (Not just the two of them. ...).”

Giving the books an even more interchangeable feeling is the bachelorette party of log-rolling blurbs by chick-lit authors. Jennifer “Good in Bed” Weiner blurbs Sarah Mlynowski’s “Me vs. Me” and Karen McCullah Lutz’s “The Bachelorette Party.” Lauren Weisberger blurbs Emily “Something Borrowed” Giffin.

I took home three dozen of the working women romances. They can lull you into a hypnotic state with their simple life lessons — one heroine emulated Doris Day, another Audrey Hepburn, one was the spitting image of Carolyn Bessette, another Charlize Theron — but they’re a long way from Becky Sharp and Elizabeth Bennet. They’re all chick and no lit.

Please do not confuse these books with the love-and-marriage of Jane Austen. These are more like multicultural Harlequin romances. They’re Cinderella bodice rippers — Manolo trippers — girls with long legs, long shiny hair and sparkling eyes stumbling through life, eating potato skins loaded with bacon bits and melted swiss, drinking cocktails, looking for the right man and dispensing nuggets of hard-won wisdom, like, “Any guy who can watch you hurl Cheez Doodles is a keeper,” and, “You can’t puke in wicker. It leaks.”

In the 19th century in America, people often linked the reading of novels with women. Women were creatures of sensibility, and men were creatures of action. But now, Leon suggested, American fiction seems to be undergoing a certain re-feminization.

“These books do not seem particularly demanding in the manner of real novels,” Leon said. “And when we’re at war and the country is under threat, they seem a little insular. America’s reading women could do a lot worse than to put down ‘Will Francine Get Her Guy?’ and pick up ‘The Red Badge of Courage.’ ”

The novel was once said to be a mirror of its times. In my local bookstore, it’s more like a makeup mirror.

Maureen Dowd, New York Times, Books and Literature, Women, news, commentary, op ed

!!!...HAPPY BIRTHDAY, BRENDAN BEHAN...!!!

February 9, 1923 - March 20, 1964

The bells of hell
Go ting-a-ling-a-ling
For you but not for me.
Oh death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling
Or grave thy victory?

US refuses to sign UN ban on renditions and secret detention

By Kate Randall
WSWS
9 February 2007

Fifty-seven countries signed a UN treaty on Tuesday that bans governments from carrying out forced disappearances and holding individuals in secret detention. Washington, as well as a number of European governments, including Britain, Germany, Spain and Italy, refused to sign.

At the treaty signing in Paris, French Foreign Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy commented, “Our American friends were naturally invited to this ceremony; unfortunately, they weren’t able to join us.”

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack commented simply that the treaty “did not meet our expectations.” It is clear from the provisions of the treaty, however, precisely why this is the case.

The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance calls for nations to adopt an “absolute ban” on secret detentions and provides for the tracing of the whereabouts of the “disappeared.” It also obliges each state party to ensure that victims of renditions and secret detention have the right to reparations.

It requires each nation signing on to submit for prosecution by competent authorities any person suspected of carrying out forced disappearances anywhere in the world. The convention also establishes a committee charged with monitoring the implementation of the treaty and to take action in individual cases.

Agents of the Central Intelligence Agency who have been actively involved in renditions around the world—and top US officials who have commissioned them—would be in direct violation of the treaty. Their actions have been authorized and defended by George W. Bush and other members of his administration. Last September, the US president openly acknowledged the existence of a network of secret prisons run by the CIA, and insisted that they continue to operate.

The US practice of sweeping up alleged suspects in the name of the “war on terror” has been condoned as well by US Congress, which adopted in late September the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which rubber-stamped the incarceration of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and other US-run detention camps around the world—large numbers of them secret. Prisoners released from Guantanamo and other US-run prison camps have described conditions of torture at the facilities.

French officials who led the effort to institute the ban counted more than 51,000 people who have been disappeared by their governments in over 90 countries since 1980. The vast majority of these individuals—41,000—have never been accounted for and their whereabouts and fate remain a mystery.

Families of the disappeared and human rights organizations have lobbied the UN for years for an international treaty banning such abductions. Washington is determined that the role played by US intelligence agents in such disappearances remains secret and that those responsible be immune from prosecution by either US or international courts.

A number of the European governments that refused to sign the treaty have been implicated as collaborators in the CIA’s illegal kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects. Following media accounts of European collusion in these practices—including reports of the existence of detention facilities in eastern Europe—the Council of Europe commissioned a report to investigate the allegations.

The Council’s report described a “global spider web” of detention facilities run by US government agencies—many of them “shrouded in secrecy.” It determined that allegations made against the US and 14 European governments were “substantially true.” The former Stalinist-ruled countries—Poland, Romania, and the former Yugoslav republics of Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—have played a critical role in collaborating with the CIA.

The report prepared by Dick Marty, a rapporteur for the council, compiled flight logs of planes run by CIA-front organizations and matched them with reports of known abductions. It also provided detailed accounts of 17 people who say they were abducted, rendered and subsequently tortured in US-run prison camps.

These victims reported being shackled, blindfolded and searched by groups of masked CIA agents, who abducted them. The detainees’ clothes were cut from their bodies and they were subject to a full-body cavity search. Some were beaten, and there were cases of a “foreign object being forcibly inserted into the man’s anus.”

Afterwards the victim was shackled, his ears muffed and a bag placed over his head, and he was flown off to an unknown location. “In some cases the man is drugged and experiences little or nothing of the actual rendition flight,” the report noted.

The report described the case of Binyam Mohamed al Habashi, an Ethiopian citizen with residence status in the UK. Al Habashi was seized in Pakistan and subjected to torture while held in Morocco, according to letters and first-hand accounts by his family and legal counsel. He was subsequently transferred to Guantánamo.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed the Council of Europe report, claiming it contained “nothing new,” and at the same time defended the practice of rendition as perfectly legal. Britain has refused to sign the new treating banning the practice.

Two ongoing criminal cases concerning the activities of CIA agents in Europe—and the collaboration of European governments—have focused renewed attention on the illegal practice of rendition.

On January 31, the public prosecutor’s office in Munich issued arrest warrants against 13 suspected CIA agents accused of the kidnapping, rendition and torture of German citizen Khaled el-Masri. El-Masri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent, was arrested in December 2003 in Macedonia as a terrorist suspect and abducted by the US intelligence agents to Afghanistan, where he was interrogated and tortured for a period of four months. After it became clear he had been arrested in error, el-Masri was flown to the Balkans and abandoned in a forest near the Albanian border.

A parliamentary commission of inquiry is also investigating el-Masri’s case, attempting to determined the extent to which German authorities were informed of—or were actually involved in—the abduction and detention of el-Masri.

Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democratic Union) has attempted to distance the German government from the case. Germany has also refused to sign the new treaty banning secret detention.

In Italy—another European country declining to sign the ban—the public prosecutor’s office has issued warrants against another 26 CIA agents involved in the 2003 abduction of Muslim cleric Abu Omar.

Abu Omar was kidnapped in broad daylight in Milan and transported by minibus to the US Air Force base at Aviano. He was then transported by plane to the US Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany and eventually flown to Cairo, where he was thrown in prison and tortured. To this day he remains in the notorious Thora prison in Cairo and has been denied any trial.

The former director of the Italian military secret service (SISMI) faces indictment on suspicion of aiding the CIA rendition. One of the main obstacles to the trial proceeding against the CIA agents is the role of Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, who has stated that important information relating to the cooperation between the CIA and SISMI constitutes a state secret.

See Also:

Munich, Germany: Arrest warrants issued against 13 CIA agents [2 February 2007]

Italian court considers trial against CIA agents in rendition case [29 January 2007]

Bush admits secret prisons, demands Congress sanction drumhead tribunals [8 September 2006]

Council of Europe says 14 governments complicit in CIA renditions [9 June 2006]

Edwards Gets It Right

By PAUL KRUGMAN
The New York Times
February 9, 2007

What a difference two years makes! At this point in 2005, the only question seemed to be how much of America’s social insurance system — the triumvirate of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — the Bush administration would manage to dismantle. Now almost all prominent Democrats and quite a few Republicans pay at least lip service to calls for a major expansion of social insurance, in the form of universal health care.

But fine words, by themselves, mean nothing. Remember “compassionate conservatism?” I won’t trust presidential candidates on health care unless they provide enough specifics to show both that they understand the issues, and that they’re willing to face up to hard choices when necessary.

And former Senator John Edwards has just set a fine example.

At first glance, the Edwards health care plan looks similar to several other proposals out there, including one recently unveiled by Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. But a closer look reveals extra features in the Edwards plan that take it a lot closer to what the country really needs.

Like Mr. Schwarzenegger, Mr. Edwards sets out to cover the uninsured with a combination of regulation and financial aid. Right now, many people are uninsured because, as the Edwards press release puts it, insurance companies “game the system to cover only healthy people.” So the Edwards plan, like Schwarzenegger’s, imposes “community rating” on insurers, basically requiring them to sell insurance to everyone at the same price.

Many other people are uninsured because they simply can’t afford the cost. So the Edwards plan, again like other proposals, offers financial aid to help lower-income families buy insurance. To pay for this aid, he proposes rolling back tax cuts for households with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Finally, some people try to save money by going without coverage, so if they get sick they end up in emergency rooms at public expense. Like other plans, the Edwards plan would “require all American residents to get insurance,” and would require that all employers either provide insurance to their workers or pay a percentage of their payrolls into a government fund used to buy insurance.

But Mr. Edwards goes two steps further.

People who don’t get insurance from their employers wouldn’t have to deal individually with insurance companies: they’d purchase insurance through “Health Markets”: government-run bodies negotiating with insurance companies on the public’s behalf. People would, in effect, be buying insurance from the government, with only the business of paying medical bills — not the function of granting insurance in the first place — outsourced to private insurers.

Why is this such a good idea? As the Edwards press release points out, marketing and underwriting — the process of screening out high-risk clients — are responsible for two-thirds of insurance companies’ overhead. With insurers selling to government-run Health Markets, not directly to individuals, most of these expenses should go away, making insurance considerably cheaper.

Better still, “Health Markets,” the press release says, “will offer a choice between private insurers and a public insurance plan modeled after Medicare.” This would offer a crucial degree of competition. The public insurance plan would almost certainly be cheaper than anything the private sector offers right now — after all, Medicare has very low overhead. Private insurers would either have to match the public plan’s low premiums, or lose the competition.

And Mr. Edwards is O.K. with that. “Over time,” the press release says, “the system may evolve toward a single-payer approach if individuals and businesses prefer the public plan.”

So this is a smart, serious proposal. It addresses both the problem of the uninsured and the waste and inefficiency of our fragmented insurance system. And every candidate should be pressed to come up with something comparable.

Yes, that includes Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. So far, all we have from Mr. Obama is inspiring rhetoric about universal care — that’s great, but how do we get there? And how do we know whether Mrs. Clinton, who says that she’s “not ready to be specific,” and that she wants to “build the consensus first,” will really be willing to take on this issue again?

To be fair, these are still early days. But America’s crumbling health care system is our most important domestic issue, and I think we have a right to know what those who would be president propose to do about it.

Not Their Parents’ Russia

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The New York Times
February 9, 2007

MOSCOW

Russia today is a country that takes three hands to describe.

On the one hand, it is impossible any more to call Vladimir Putin’s government “democratic,” given the way it has neutered the Russian Parliament, intimidated or taken over much of the Russian press, subordinated the judiciary and coercively extended its control over the country’s key energy companies.

On the other hand, it is obvious talking to Russians how much the humiliating and dispiriting turmoil that accompanied Boris Yeltsin’s first stab at democracy — after the collapse of Communism — left many people here starved for a strong leader, a stable economy and stores with Western consumer goods. Mr. Putin is popular for a reason.

And on the third hand, while today’s Russia may be a crazy quilt of capitalist czars, mobsters, nationalists and aspiring democrats, it is not the totalitarian Soviet Union. It has more than a touch of the authoritarianism of postwar Gaullist France and a large spoonful of the corruption and messiness of postwar Italy — when those countries emerged from World War II as less than perfect democracies.

But 60 years later, after huge growth in their per capita incomes, France and Italy now help to anchor Western Europe. For all of their shortcomings, their postwar governments provided the context for the true democratic agent of change to come of age — something that takes 9 months and 21 years to produce — a generation raised on basically free markets and free politics. I still think Russia will follow a similar path — in time.

“In historical terms, the transition will be very fast,” Boris Makarenko, deputy chief of Russia’s Center for Political Technologies, said to me. “But I am 47. I am in a hurry. I am very optimistic [though] for my daughter, who is 15. … I can see the normal middle class rising here. It’s all about shape and pace. When will we get there, I don’t know — we will get there, but probably not fast enough for me to see.”

The Yeltsin democratic experiment is over, to be sure, added Rose Gottemoeller, director of the Carnegie Endowment’s Moscow office, “because it was delegitimized by the 1998 ruble crash and because it was a time of supreme corruption and dominance by oligarchs — but the Russian democratic experiment is not over because Russia is such a changed place.”

Ms. Gottemoeller, an American, told me she recently visited Ulyanovsk, Lenin’s birthplace, in the heart of Russia’s aging industrial rust belt, and went out to dinner with three Russian couples, all new entrepreneurs.

“After they plied me with drinks,” she recalled, “they said: ‘O.K., we have a question. We want to know how you define middle class’ — and did I think they were middle class? And that just flummoxed me. … They wanted to know what middle class was in America. It meant a lot to them to think they were linked up to a broader community of middle class. … [They] are not out in the streets with a banner, but their aspirations are huge and in the right direction.”

People who identify themselves as middle class often end up fighting for legal and civil rights to protect their gains, without even knowing they are fighting for them. That said, the pace of democratization here will most likely depend on three things.

One is whether this emerging middle class gets so preoccupied with material gains — thanks to the trickle-down of high oil and gas prices — that “it just disconnects from politics,” Ms. Gottemoeller noted. (Russia today has more cellphones than people!) Another is the genie of Russian nationalism, which can always pop up and derail democratization. Just down the street from my hotel, the Movement Against Illegal Immigration held a march denouncing Jews and immigrants.

Third is the price of oil and gas. Anyone who observes Russia can see that the price of oil and the pace of freedom here operate with an inverse correlation. As oil prices go down the pace of freedom goes up, because Russia has to open itself more to the world and empower its people to get ahead. As oil prices go up the pace of freedom goes down, because the government can get by drilling oil wells, rather than unleashing its people.

“When oil prices became higher, the reforms became slower,” said Vladimir Ryzhkov, a liberal Russian Duma member from Altay. “Russia became a more closed country with a more state-oriented economy. Last year we saw record oil prices and not one reform. [That is the] reason Freedom House last year proclaimed Russia a ‘non-free country. ’ … The question for you Americans is: When will prices go down? It is the only hope for us Russian democrats.”

FRANKIE LAINE (1913- 2007) ANTI-RACIST SOCIAL ACTIVIST -- R.I.P.

Along with opening the door for many R&B performers, Laine played a significant role in the civil rights movements of the 1950s and '60s. When Nat King Cole's television show was unable to get a sponsor, Laine crossed the color line, becoming the first white artist to appear as a guest (foregoing his usual salary of $10,000.00 as Cole's show only paid scale). Many other top white singers followed suit, including Tony Bennett and Rosemary Clooney, but Cole's show still couldn't get enough sponsors to continue.

In the following decade, Frankie Laine joined several African American artists who gave a free concert for Martin Luther King's supporters during their Selma to Montgomery marches on Washington DC.

Laine was also active in many charities as well, including Meals on Wheels and The Salvation Army. Among his charitable works were a series of local benefit concerts and his having organized a nationwide drive to provide "Shoes for the Homeless." He donated a large portion of his time and talent to many San Diego charities and homeless shelters, as well as the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul Village. He was also an emeritus member of the board of directors for the Mercy Hospital Foundation.

Frankie Laine, who had a strong appreciation of African-American music, went so far as to include recording at least two songs that have being black as their subject matter, "Shine" and Fats Waller's "Black and Blue".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankie_Laine#Social_Activism

----

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' ...

Keep movin', movin', movin',
Though they're disapprovin',
Keep them doggies movin' Rawhide!
Don't try to understand 'em,
Just rope and throw and grab 'em,
Soon we'll be living high and wide.
Boy my heart's calculatin'
My true love will be waitin',
Be waiting at the end of my ride.

Move 'em on, head 'em up,
Head 'em up, move 'em out,
Move 'em on, head 'em out Rawhide!
Heeyah!
Set 'em out, ride 'em in
Ride 'em in, let 'em out,
Cut 'em out, ride 'em in Rawhide.

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' ...

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Though the streams are swollen
Keep them doggies rollin'
Rawhide!
Rain and wind and weather
Hell-bent for leather
Wishin' my gal was by my side.
All the things I'm missin',
Good vittles, love, and kissin',
Are waiting at the end of my ride

Move 'em on, head 'em up
Head 'em up, move 'em on
Move 'em on, head 'em up
Rawhide
Heeyah!
Count 'em out, ride 'em in,
Ride 'em in, count 'em out,
Count 'em out, ride 'em in
Rawhide!

Rollin', rollin', rollin'
Rollin', rollin', rollin' ...

Keep movin', movin', movin'
Though they're disapprovin'
Keep them doggies movin'
Rawhide!
Don't try to understand 'em
Just rope, throw, and brand 'em
Soon we'll be living high and wide.
My hearts calculatin'
My true love will be waitin',
Be waitin' at the end of my ride.

Rawhide!
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Rawhide!
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Heeyah! [bullwhip crack]
Rawhide!

====

‘They Beat Gary So Bad’

By BOB HERBERT
The New York Times
February 8, 2007

ST. ROSE, La.

Juanita Tyler lives in a neat one-story house that sits behind a glistening magnolia tree that dominates the small front lawn.

She is 74 now and unfailingly gracious, but she admits to being tired from a lifetime of hard work and trouble. I went to see her to talk about her son, Gary.

The Tylers are black. In 1974, when Gary was 16, he was accused of murdering a 13-year-old white boy outside the high school that they attended in nearby Destrehan. The boy was shot to death in the midst of turmoil over school integration, which the local whites were resisting violently.

The case against young Tyler — who was on a bus with other black students that was attacked by about 200 whites — was built on bogus evidence and coerced testimony. But that was enough to get him convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His life was spared when the Louisiana death penalty was ruled unconstitutional, but he is serving out a life sentence with no chance of parole in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Ms. Tyler’s sharpest memory of the day Gary was arrested was of sitting in a room at a sheriff’s station, listening to deputies in the next room savagely beating her son.

“They beat Gary so bad,” she said. “My poor child. I couldn’t do nothing. They wouldn’t let me in there. I saw who went in there. They were like older men. They didn’t care that I was there. They didn’t care who was there. They beat Gary something awful, and I could hear him hollering and moaning. All I could say was, ‘Oh Jesus, have mercy.’

“One of the deputies had a strap and they whipped him with that. It was terrible. Finally, when they let me go in there, Gary was just trembling. He was frightened to death. He was trembling and rocking back and forth. They had kicked him all in his privates. He said, ‘Mama, they kicked me. One kicked me in the front and one kicked in the back.’ He said that over and over.

“I couldn’t believe what they had done to my baby.”

The deputies had tried to get Gary to confess, but he wouldn’t. Ms. Tyler (like so many people who have looked closely at this case) was scornful of the evidence the authorities came up with.

“It was ridiculous,” she said. “Where was he gonna get that big ol’ police gun they said he used? It was a great big ol’ gun. And he had on those tight-fitting clothes and nobody saw it?”

The gun that investigators produced as the murder weapon was indeed a large, heavy weapon — a government-issued Colt .45 that had been stolen from a firing range used by the sheriff’s department. Deputies who saw Gary before the shooting and those who searched him (and the rest of the black students on the bus) immediately afterward did not see any gun.

“I don’t know where the police got that gun from,” said Ms. Tyler. “But they didn’t get it from my son, that’s for sure.”

Ms. Tyler worked for many years as a domestic while raising 11 children. Her husband, Uylos, a maintenance worker who often held three jobs at a time, died in 1989. “He had a bad heart,” Ms. Tyler said.

She shifted in her chair in the living room of the small house, and was quiet for several minutes. Then she asked, “Do you know what it’s like to lose a child?”

I shook my head.

“I always felt sorry for that woman whose son was killed,” she said. “That was a terrible time. I remember it clear, like it was yesterday. But what happened was wrong. The white people, they didn’t want no black children in that school. So there was a lot of tension. And my son has paid a terrible price for that.

“They didn’t have no kind of proof against him, but they beat him bad anyway, and then they sentenced him to the electric chair.”

Ms. Tyler visits Gary at Angola regularly, the last time a few weeks ago. “He’s doing well,” she said. “And I’m glad that he’s able to cope. He tries to help the young ones out when they come in there. He always tells me, ‘My dear, you have to stay strong so I can stay strong.’ So then I just try to hold my head up and keep on going.”

She looked for a moment as if she was going to cry, but she didn’t.

“It’s just sad,” she said. “I wonder if he’ll ever be able to come out. I wonder will I live long enough to see him out.”

Bob Herbert, New York Times, Racism, Descrimination, Criminal Sentences, Justice System, Trials and Verdicts, Gary Tyler, Louisiana, news, commentary, op ed

Private Virtue, Public Vice

By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
February 8, 2007

Deep in the bowels of Washington, hidden from public scrutiny and prying cameras, there is an illicit underworld where people are subtle, reasonable and interesting. I have occasionally been admitted to this place, the land of RIP (Reasonable in Private).

I have been in the Senate dining room and heard senators, in whispers and with furtive glances, acknowledge the weaknesses in their own arguments and admit the justice of some of the other side’s points. I have seen politicians fess up to their own evasions and acknowledge the trade-offs inevitable in tough decisions.

I have always felt honored when politicians admit me into the realm of RIP, because if it ever got out that these pols were sensible and independent, it would ruin their careers. If it ever got out that they could think for themselves or often had subversive and honest thoughts, they would be branded traitors to their party and uncertain champions for their cause.

For politicians are not permitted to ply their trade in the land of RIP. In our democracy, all public business must be done in the land of SIPB (Self-Important Pathetic Blowhards).

In our democracy, everybody has to line up in party formation for each week’s mighty clash, no matter how stupid they think the exercise may be.

In our democracy, lawmakers are compelled to spend their days maneuvering for trivial advantages that nobody will remember by dinnertime.

In our democracy, presidential aspirants spend a few months fighting a general election but two years positioning themselves for the primaries. That means they spend the bulk of their time in transcontinental cattle calls, competing to most assiduously flatter the prejudices of their most febrile supporters. They traffic in pre-approved bromides while searching with their hyperattenuated antennas for their party’s maximum sweet spot of approval, love and applause.

In our democracy, top officials lead frantic, overscheduled lives, with almost no time alone and with major decisions made by instinct during rushed limo rides from one forgettable event to another. They spend their days talking, and pretty soon they become human jukeboxes — their snippets of conversation are just chunks of oft-repeated material they have retrieved from the stump speech audio collection in their heads.

In short, our democracy, at least as it has evolved, takes individuals who are reasonable in private and it churns them through a public process that is almost tailor-made to undermine their virtues. The process of perpetually kissing up to the voters destroys the leadership qualities the voters are looking for in the first place: tranquillity of spirit, independence of mind and a sensitivity to the contours and complexity of reality.

The best politicians try to build a fortress around their private lives to protect themselves from the ravages of the process all around them. They try to separate their real belief from their public spin. They stage little rebellions against members of their political base, who would otherwise be their slavemasters. They try not to let the bloated public persona smother the little voice within.

But this week it has become clear what an uphill struggle that is. This week, everyone senses that we have reached a crucial juncture in the Iraq war debate. This week, in private, everyone acknowledges how complex the choices are. Everyone senses that the policy being promoted possibly won’t work and could have ruinous consequences. This week, the mood — in private — is sober and anxious.

And yet the politicians have completely failed to institutionalize that sense of sobriety in the public sphere. Instead of having a serious debate, the Senate disgraced itself with mind-bendingly petty partisanship. Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential candidates engaged in an unholy bidding war to get out of Iraq soonest, which had nothing to do with realities in Iraq and everything to do with applause lines in Iowa.

In a week when the private mood was grave, the public action was partisan and shortsighted. Instead of trying to educate public opinion by stressing the realities described in the National Intelligence Estimate, the political class, by and large, publicly ignored those findings. The Republicans maintained near lock-step solidarity even though privately, Republican opinions are all over the place. The Democrats ignored the intelligence community’s warning about withdrawal after spending three years blasting the Bush administration for ignoring intelligence.

In private, we have a decent leadership class. In public, it’s rotten.

David Brooks, The New York Times, Politics, U.S. Government, Congress, Senate, Foreign Policy, International Relations, news, commentary, op ed

Senate Republicans call Democrats’ bluff on Iraq war resolution

By Bill Van Auken
WSWS
8 February 2007

The so-called “debate” over Iraq in the US Senate suffered an ignominious collapse this week, as the Republicans, working with the White House, exploited the two-faced position of the Democrats to torpedo their effort to pass a non-binding resolution opposing the administration’s military escalation.

The result was no debate and no vote on a measure that would have done nothing, in any case, to halt the deployment of an additional 21,500 American combat troops to Iraq, an escalation that is already well underway.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Democrat of Nevada) summed it up best in a barb that, while meant for Senate Republican leaders, actually described the entire proceedings: “This is all a game to divert attention from the fact that we have before us now an issue that the American people want us to address.”

What Reid failed to add was that the Democratic-backed compromise resolution—drafted by Republican Senator John Warner of Virginia and cosponsored by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan—was itself an evasion of the real demand of the majority of the American people for an end to the Iraq war and the withdrawal of US troops.

Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (Democrat of Illinois), in criticizing the Republican minority, acknowledged the toothless character of the resolution he and the rest of the Democratic leadership was backing. “If the Republicans in the Senate cannot swallow the thin soup of the Warner resolution,” he asked, “how are they going to stomach a real debate on Iraq?”

The resolution merely expressed disagreement with the “surge” in troop levels ordered by the White House, while pledging that Congress would not eliminate or cut funding for “troops in the field.” It supported the administration’s claim that the president, as “commander-in-chief,” has unfettered power to determine the course of the war. Finally, it expressed general support for continuing the war, stating in its preamble, “[T]he United States’ strategy and operations in Iraq can only be sustained and achieved with support from the American people and with a level of bipartisanship.”

The Republicans were able to easily outflank the Democratic leadership and block a debate on the resolution by exploiting this underlying bipartisan support for the US aggression in Iraq.

The Republicans insisted that not only the Democratic-backed resolution be debated and brought to a vote, but also two opposing Republican resolutions. The first, drafted by Arizona Senator John McCain, supported the “surge” while calling for benchmarks to be imposed on the Iraqi government. The second, drafted by New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg, took no position on the escalation in Iraq, but affirmed that “no funds should be cut off or reduced for American troops in the field.”

The White House and the Senate Republicans, as well as the Democratic leadership, knew that the Democrats could not obtain the 60 votes needed to initiate a debate and vote on the Warner-Levin resolution, while the Gregg resolution would easily exceed the 60-vote hurdle. This was so because many Democrats, petrified of being attacked for “not supporting the troops,” would vote for the White House-backed measure. The result would be passage of a resolution essentially supporting the administration’s war policy.

Consequently, the Democratic leadership refused the Republicans’ offer to allow all three resolutions to be debated and voted on.

An attempt to obtain the required three-fifth’s majority to bring the Warner-Levin resolution to the floor failed badly, receiving only 49 votes. All but two Republicans voted against, including its author, Warner, as well as other prominent Republican backers of the anti-“surge” resolution such as Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

Explaining why Gregg’s proposal would have garnered substantial Democratic support—and displaying in the process the utter cowardice and duplicity of the Democrats’ position—Majority Leader Reid said, “There isn’t a Democrat here that wants to take monies away from the troops.”

All the talk about “supporting the troops” is a threadbare political subterfuge for continuing to support the war. It is obvious that on such a basis no serious action can to taken to stop the mass killing of Iraqis and the mounting toll of dead and wounded Americans.

This phony argument is used by the Democrats as an alibi for not employing one of the constitutional means at their disposal to end the war—cutting off funds.

Gregg’s resolution amounted to calling the Democrats’ bluff. Administration spokesmen and congressional Republicans have dared the Democrats to back up their criticisms of Bush’s war policy by making use of the power of the purse to withhold funds, knowing that the Democrats have no stomach for such action and are desperate to avoid a constitutional confrontation with the White House.

Now the Democratic leadership in the House of Representatives has vowed to hold its own debate on a nonbinding resolution beginning next Tuesday. Simpler House rules allow a resolution to be brought to the floor and passed by a straight majority vote.

The House Democratic leaders had planned to introduce a carbon copy of the Senate’s Warner-Levin resolution. However, the Washington Post reported Wednesday that “after assessing the morass on the other side of the Capitol, they are now considering a more narrow statement of objection to Bush’s proposal.”

The Senate Democrats’ evasion of Gregg’s resolution is an indication of what is to come.

This will soon become apparent as Congress considers the Bush administration’s budget proposal, calling for a staggering $245 billion more to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Included in this funding proposal is $5.6 billion to pay for deploying the 21,500 troops that make up Bush’s “surge.”

The failure of the Senate to even conduct a debate on the war exposes the deepening crisis of democratic processes in the US. An election in which a majority of the people decisively repudiated the policies of the Bush administration and expressed a clear desire for the Iraq war to be ended is ignored. The views of the broad mass of people can find no reflection within the official institutions or either of the two parties.

Both parties represent the interests of a financial oligarchy that is determined to assert US hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf by means of military force. It is these profit interests that lie behind the mantra repeated by both Republican and Democratic politicians that “failure is not an option.”

The ludicrous spectacle of a non-vote on a nonbinding resolution as the carnage in Iraq mounts is one more verification that the demand for the withdrawal of US troops cannot be realized through reliance on Congress and the Democrats. It requires the independent political mobilization of the working people against war and the system that creates it.

See Also:

Bush’s budget priorities: war and the wealthy [7 February 2007]

Presidential candidates strike antiwar pose at Democratic National Committee meeting [7 February 2007]

Bush wants to make tax cuts for the rich permanent [7 February 2007]

US Federal Reserve chairman issues warning on social inequality

By David Walsh
WSWS
8 February 2007

In a speech to the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, America’s central banker and one of the most powerful figures in the country, became the latest member of the US establishment to issue a caution about the growth of social inequality.

In his comments, Bernanke identified an obvious social reality and attempted, at the same time, to conceal both the true dimensions and causes of inequality in the US. Nevertheless, his remarks possess a certain political significance. A growing nervousness exists within the ruling elite about the consequences of a quarter century of its own policies, which have created extraordinary levels of social polarization. Sooner or later, such prominent figures recognize, this will have explosive consequences.

The federal reserve chairman’s comments broke no new ground. On the contrary, he repeated all the nostrums that the American elite repeats to itself and those who will listen about the essentially sound state of the US economy and the benefits it bestows on nearly everyone.

Bernanke began by paying tribute to what he claimed was a “bedrock American principle,” that “all individuals should have the opportunity to succeed on the basis of their own effort, skill, and ingenuity. Equality of economic opportunity appeals to our sense of fairness, certainly, but it also strengthens our economy. If each person is free to develop and apply his or her talents to the greatest extent possible, then both the individual and the economy benefit.”

He quickly added, however, “Although we Americans strive to provide equality of economic opportunity, we do not guarantee equality of economic outcomes, nor should we. Indeed, without the possibility of unequal outcomes tied to differences in effort and skill, the economic incentive for productive behavior would be eliminated, and our market-based economy—which encourages productive activity primarily through the promise of financial reward—would function far less effectively.”

This is the standard argument offered by apologists for capitalism—that inequality is good because the pursuit of financial gain is the only motivation that drives individual and social progress.

Bernanke then changed direction again, adding, “we also believe that no one should be allowed to slip too far down the economic ladder, especially for reasons beyond his or her control.”

After paying tribute to the supposed flexibility and adaptability of America’s “market economy,” Bernanke touched on his central political theme, that the economy’s “very dynamism sometimes creates painful dislocations, as when a shift in consumer demand, the advent of new technology, or new competition leads to the closing of a factory or causes a worker’s skills to become obsolete. If we did not place some limits on the downside risks to individuals affected by economic change, the public at large might become less willing to accept the dynamism that is so essential to economic progress.” [Emphasis added]

In extremely muted and diplomatic language, this was a warning about the possibility of social upheaval. Throughout his speech, Bernanke, as he did in an address last August on globalization, associated opposition to inequality only with Luddite resistance to a ‘more open’ economy and its global integration.

What the fed chairman proposed in his Omaha speech was modest indeed, merely that “people should receive some insurance against the most adverse economic outcomes, especially those arising from events largely outside the person’s control.”

He asserted that while “the average standard of living in this country has improved considerably over time . . . by many measures, inequality in economic outcomes has increased over time as well, albeit at varying rates.”

Bernanke proceeded to discuss some of the figures on social inequality in the US.

He noted that wages at the 50th percentile (“the median wage”) had risen approximately 11.5 percent between 1979 and 2006, while wages at the 10th percentile (“near the bottom of the wage distribution”) had climbed just 4 percent and earnings at the 90th percentile (“close to the top of the distribution”) had jumped 34 percent. Bernanke pointed out that the worker at the 90th percentile now earned 4.7 times as much as the worker at the 10th percentile, compared to a ratio of 3.7 in 1979.

The federal reserve chairman went on to say that greater inequality was also evident in other measures of financial well-being, such as real household income. Figures showed, he said, that the share of the national income received by households in the top fifth of the income distribution rose from 42 percent in 1979 to 50 percent in 2004 (a 19 percent increase), while the share of the bottom 20 percent of households had declined from 7 to 5 percent (a 29 percent decline). He took note of the fact that the wealthiest 1 percent of households had seen its share of after-tax income increase from 8 percent in 1979 to 14 percent in 2004 (a 57 percent jump).

Except in regard to this last figure, Bernanke chose not to mention the extent to which enhanced wealth and social position has accrued not primarily to the top 20, 10 or even 5 percent, but, above all, to the richest 1 percent, and within that, to the top 0.1 percent of the population (about 300,000 people), a group that now receives some 9 percent of the entire income paid out every year in the US. These truly astonishing levels of social inequality did not come in for scrutiny in Bernanke’s address. However, his figures were damning enough.

Bernanke then outlined what he took to be the “underlying sources” of this glaring inequality. Arguing that increases in living standards and the growth rate of productivity were linked, he attributed the growing gap between the incomes of high school graduates and those workers with bachelor’s degree (or higher) to “improvements in information and communications technologies ... [that] have raised the productivity of high-skilled workers much more than that of low-skilled workers.”

The gap between the median weekly earnings of the more highly educated worker and those of the less educated has approximately doubled since 1979 (according to Bernanke’s own statistics). That hardly explains, however, why the average CEO in the US in 1978 earned 35 times an average worker’s wage, whereas in 2005 he or she earned 262 times the pay of the average worker ($10,982,000 compared with $41,861), i.e., nearly a 750 percent increase (a fact not mentioned by the federal reserve chairman). In other words, in 2005 the average American CEO earned more in one work-day (there are 260 in a year) than an average worker earned in 52 weeks.

Bernanke suggested that technological changes, “such as those that have swept the communications industry,” had contributed to the rise of a category of “super-stars” in the sports and entertainment worlds. He illustrated this by referring to the salary of the Boston Red Sox’s Manny Ramirez, who earned $22.5 million last season.

No doubt there is something distorted and even disturbing about the sums paid out to athletes, actors, models and such. However, first, it should be noted that the companies for which such individuals work are making massive profits off their efforts; second, that their high-earning years are often extremely limited; and, third, that these figures pale anyway when compared to the amounts being paid out to corporate CEOs and such.

One only has to recall the $44 billion paid out in Wall Street bonuses this Christmas, to a few thousand traders and speculators—$16 billion by investment banker Goldman Sachs alone. Moreover, the average pay of the top 100 hedge fund managers in 2005, according to Alpha magazine, was $363 million.

Bernanke chose to draw a veil over figures like that. When it came to the issue of executive compensation, he preferred to speak in generalities. No salary figures were mentioned. He blandly commented that some commentators “note that substantial increases in the size and scope of the largest corporations have raised the economic value of skilled corporate leadership. However, critics have responded that increases in CEO pay may have been amplified by poor corporate governance, including the substantial influence that some CEOs appear to have had over their own pay. This debate will no doubt continue.”

He suggested that another source of the growing inequality was the increased “flow of people across borders” as part of the general process of global economic integration. “In recent decades, most immigrants to the United States have arrived with relatively low levels of skills. By itself, this pattern of immigration increases measured inequality because it leads to an increase in the relative size of the low-wage work force. Standard economic reasoning also suggests that the immigration of such workers should reduce the relative wages of less-skilled domestic workers.” In other words, a pool of super-exploited immigrant labor is used to drive down living standards of a substantial section of the working class.

Bernanke also pointed to the decline in union membership. “The sources of the decline in union membership are much debated, and certainly long-run structural changes in the economy, such as the decline in manufacturing employment, have played a role. Whatever the precise mechanism through which lower rates of unionization affected the wage structure, the available research suggests that it can explain between 10 percent and 20 percent of the rise in wage inequality among men during the 1970s and 1980s.”

Turning to the policy implications of the growing social inequality, Bernanke referred to the need to establish “the right tradeoff between allowing strong market-based incentives and providing social insurance against economic risks.” He rejected approaches that “would inhibit the dynamism and flexibility of our labor and capital markets or erect barriers to international trade and investment.”

He proposed instead to allow “growth-enhancing forces to work,” but to try and cushion the most severe blows and “resulting dislocations” by helping workers retrain and search for new work, as well as improving the portability of health and pension benefits. Bernanke also urged increased investment in education, arguing that “that workers with more education are better positioned to adapt to changing demands in the workplace.”

No one who follows American politics will have confidence that a single one of Bernanke’s extremely limited social proposals will be acted upon. At every level of government, spending on education and worker or youth job training is under the budgetary axe.

In a speech delivered in New York January 31, George W. Bush made similar comments. He declared, “I know some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic economy is leaving working people behind. We have an obligation to help ensure that every citizen shares in this country’s future. The fact is that income inequality is real; it’s been rising for more than 25 years.” He attributed the gap to an economy that “increasingly rewards education, and skills because of that education.” He added, “The key to rising in this economy is skills—and the government’s job is to make sure we have an education system that delivers them.” No one takes such remarks seriously.

While the extreme right, embodied in the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and various think-tanks like the Cato Institute, continues to pretend that the growth in social inequality has either been exaggerated or not taken place at all, wide layers of the population consider it a pressing matter. According to a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll conducted in December, three-quarters of the population considers inequality a major issue.

Bloomberg reports that among those “earning less than $40,000 a year, 84 percent called the gap a serious problem, with more than half saying it’s ‘very serious.’ Among those earning more than $100,000, more than three in five said it’s a serious concern. Those in the middle-income group making between $40,000 and $60,000 were almost as concerned as the least wealthy.”

Contrary to the claims of Bernanke and other establishment representatives, the massive growth in social inequality is not the result of inevitable global economic trends. The social chasm opened up over the past quarter-century is the result of definite policies and political processes. Ruling elites throughout the world, taking advantage of the national-based labor organizations, which have proved worthless in the face of a globalized economy, and the demise of the Soviet Union, which also collapsed ultimately as the result of the national policies of the Stalinist bureaucracy, have declared war on the living standards, jobs and rights of the working population.

In the US, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have presided over a social transformation, making sure that enormous wealth has continued to flow unhindered into the hands of a tiny elite, whose wealth is now simply unimaginable. The financial oligarchy that has been consolidated has no intention of giving up a penny of its ill-gotten gains without a struggle.

See Also:

Safety improvements stall since Sago disaster: New year begins with more coal miners’ deaths in US [5 February 2007]

Deadly house fire in Petersburg, Virginia: the human cost of social inequality [1 February 2007]

The Gates Foundation and the rise of “free market” philanthropy [22 January 2007]

Bush wants to make tax cuts for the rich permanent

By Joanne Laurier
WSWS
7 February 2007

President George W. Bush’s budget proposal calls for making permanent the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts scheduled to expire at the end of 2010. This would further widen the chasm between the wealthy elite and the rest of the population.

A study conducted by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a liberal think-tank, argues that the cost of financing the array of cuts implemented by the Bush administration and Congress since 2001—including cuts in personal income tax, the repeal of the estate tax and reductions in capital gains and dividend tax—would be about $3.5 trillion over the next decade, when the cost of additional interest on federal debt is included.

The tax cuts, a wholesale looting of the federal treasury to the advantage of the rich, have been promoted by the administration as an economic boon. The CBPP report debunks claims such as “they [the tax cuts] pay for themselves,” or Bush’s assertion in November that the cuts were responsible for economic growth.

The reality is that if the tax cuts were made permanent, the top one percent of US households would receive more than $1 trillion in tax benefits in the decade from 2008 through 2017—nearly one third of the tax cuts’ total value. Households with annual incomes over $1 million, representing some 0.3 percent of the population, would receive tax cuts equaling $739 billion, or 22 percent of the total value of the tax cuts.

The bottom 60 percent of households would collect only 12 percent of the total value—less than half the amount that would go to the top one percent.

In current dollars, the magnitude of the tax cuts by 2012, with their impact fully felt, would be staggering. Cuts for those households making over $1 million would exceed what the federal government spends annually on K-12 education, as well as spending on medical care for veterans and medical research conducted by the National Institutes of Health.

The cost of cuts for the top one percent of households would exceed the combined 2006 budgets of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. This income group would receive tax relief that tops the entire 2006 budget for Department of Homeland Security and the budget of the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

The CBPP argues that the “2001 and 2003 ‘tax cuts’ are best seen as net tax cuts for the top 20 percent of households, as a group, financed by net tax increases or benefit reductions for the remaining 80 percent of households, as a group.”

Bush’s budget proposes to make permanent the tax cuts, in addition to balancing the budget by 2012. The CBPP points out that this will require substantial cuts to domestic programs, amounting to almost $150 billion over the next five years “in an array of domestic non-entitlement programs, including education programs, veterans’ programs, environmental programs, and others.”

However, the projected cuts to domestic programs in each of the next five years would be less than the cost of tax handouts for households making over $1 million. For example, budget cuts for domestic programs in 2012 in Bush’s budget would equal $41 billion, while tax benefits for those making over $1 million would be $73 billion.

Moreover, according to the CBPP, “Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years. Legislation enacted since 2001 has added about $2.3 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2006, with half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).”

The CBPP writes that when the Treasury Department staff simulated the economic repercussions of extending the tax cuts, they found that if the cuts were not offset by spending reductions, then their extension would decrease long-term economic growth.

“Supporters of the tax cuts have sometimes sought to bolster their case by understating the tax cuts’ costs, overstating their economic effects, or minimizing their regressivity,” contends the report. It points out that the administration, when discussing tax revenue growth since the implementation of the cuts, typically refers to revenue growth since 2004. This is duplicitous, being that as a share of the economy, revenues in 2004 were at their lowest level since 1959, and therefore a certain recovery was inevitable.

Because the revenue growth over the current business cycle as a whole has been negative, after adjusting for inflation and population growth, “the current revenue ‘surge’ is merely restoring revenues to where they were a half decade ago . . . Revenues in 2006 are still more than $200 billion short of where they would have been had they grown at the rates typical in other recoveries,” explains the study. While the administration credits the tax cuts with a drop in the projected fiscal year 2006 deficit to “only” $248 billion, the budget would be balanced without the cuts, since the total cost of tax cuts enacted since 2001 was $251 billion in 2006.

“This means that even with the spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the response to Hurricane Katrina, the federal budget would essentially be in balance now if the tax cuts had not been enacted, or if their costs had been offset . . . To put the long-run cost of the tax cuts in perspective, the 75-year Social Security shortfall, about which the President and Congressional leaders have expressed grave concern, is about one-third the cost of the tax cuts over the same period,” states the CBPP.

It should be noted that in 2004 the top one percent of US households held a larger share of total pre-tax income than in any year since 1929, with the exception of 1999 and 2000, the height of the dot-com boom.

See Also:

Bush’s budget priorities: war and the wealthy [7 February 2007]

Bush to propose record US war budget [5 February 2007]

Congressional Democrats embrace Republican resolution on Iraq [2 February 2007]

Bush’s budget priorities: war and the wealthy

By Jerry White
WSWS
7 February 2007

President Bush released his 2008 budget on Monday outlining his administration’s right-wing agenda of extending tax cuts for the wealthy, boosting the Pentagon budget to an all-time record and slashing vital social programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

While the $2.9 trillion budget proposal is only the beginning of protracted wrangling between the White House and the Democratic Congress, the resulting deal will resemble Bush’s plan in its broad outlines. Like the Republicans, the Democrats accept unquestioningly the premise that the social needs must take a back seat to the priorities of waging imperialist war and protecting the profits of America’s financial aristocracy.

In his written budget message to Congress Bush said his plan would lead to a balanced budget by 2012, with no need for raising taxes. “My formula for a balanced budget,” he said, “reflects the priorities of our country at this moment in its history: protecting the homeland and fighting terrorism, keeping the economy strong with low taxes and keeping spending under control while making federal programs more effective.”

As many analysts have pointed out, the accounting methods used by the White House to project a balanced budget in five years involve arbitrary and evidently false assumptions, including deliberate underestimations of the current deficit and exaggerated revenue predictions. As in all recent budgets, from both Democratic and Republican administrations, the surplus in the Social Security Trust Fund is counted as reducing the deficit, although it will be required in the future to pay benefits to retirees.

The estimated $142 billion for spending on the war in Iraq does not include the costs associated with the deployment of an additional 21,500 US troops to the country. Last week the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a yearlong surge would require $27 billion in additional spending because of the number of support personnel needed to support the greater number of combat troops.

Finally, the budget makes the projection that the cost of the war in Iraq—which is expected to be at least $163 billion this year—will drop to $50 billion in 2009 and fall to zero the following year. Bush quickly declared that the cost reduction was not based on any actual plans to reduce the US presence in the country, and administration officials said the 2009 figure was seen as a “placeholder” to be adjusted in the future. In fact the current war budget includes more than one billion dollars for the expansion of permanent US military bases in Iraq as well as Afghanistan.

The administration’s budget figures are not only bogus, but brazenly so. If a major corporation presented such numbers in its financial report, the CEO and CFO could be arrested for fraud, under the provisions of legislation passed after the Enron collapse. The Bush administration can only proceed as it does because it is assured that the Democratic Party and the media will respond with only the most tepid criticism.

Regardless of the posturing by the White House and the Democratic Party about balancing the budget, the US government is facing a mounting fiscal crisis. Its day-to-solvency is maintained through massive borrowing, particularly from the Chinese and Japanese central banks. Once a limit is reached to this debt bubble—whether sparked by an international crisis or a domestic economic downturn—the government of the day will announce that it has no choice but to carry out the virtual elimination of whatever social spending remains.

Bush’s proposal to make permanent his tax cuts to the wealthy—now scheduled to expire in 2010—would deepen the financial crisis by reducing government revenue by an estimated $3.4 trillion between 2008 and 2017. According to the Tax Policy Center, the extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts would give those with incomes greater than $1 million—the wealthiest 0.3 percent of the US population—an additional $162,000 a year in after-tax income by 2012. For the bottom 20 percent of the population, their share of the cuts that year would average $45. (See “Bush wants to make tax cuts for the rich permanent.”)

While providing further handouts to the rich, Bush’s budget request complains about what he calls “the unsustainable growth of federal entitlement programs” and proposes unprecedented cuts in Medicare, the federally administered health insurance program for people 65 and older, as well as many with disabilities, and Medicaid, the US health care program for low-income individuals and families. The budget calls for a reduction in spending for Medicaid and Medicare by $102 billion over the next five years, under conditions in which the number of uninsured people in the US has reached nearly 47 million, jumping 6.8 million since 2000.

Half of Medicare beneficiaries earn below $20,000 a year and 90 percent suffer from at least one chronic illness. The proposed cuts would force them to pay higher premiums for prescription drugs and doctors’ services. Bush proposes to make permanent cuts in Medicare payments to health care providers, such as hospitals and nursing homes, so that they would never receive enough to keep up with rising costs.

The president also proposed cuts in the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which provides insurance to lower-income children whose parents earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. The program actually contributed to lowering the proportion of children without health insurance despite the general increase in the uninsured population. Nevertheless the president’s budget calls for an additional $5 billion over current spending levels for the next five years, less than half of what would be needed to maintain coverage for the present number of enrolled children, not to mention increased demand in the future. Despite the fact that some 6 million children are uninsured, the new budget will limit eligibility to young people with family incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level or $38,000 for a family of four. In budget documents the administration complained that 16 states currently provide coverage for children above that level.

The budget also calls for a 18 percent cut in the $2.2 billion home energy assistance program, which provides low-income elderly people and others in low-income households help with high winter heating bills. The human impact of such a cut can be seen in the suffering caused by the current sub-zero weather in the Midwest and Northeast and the frequent tragedies caused by makeshift heating devices used by families who have had their utilities shut off due to non-payment.

According to the Administration’s own figures, the number of children in low-income families who receive child-care assistance would be cut by 300,000 between 2006 and 2010. Funding for the Head Start program would be cut $100 million below the 2007 level in the House-passed continuing resolution, even before adjusting for inflation, a reduction that would follow several years of essentially frozen funding.

According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) many low- and moderate-income children, families, and elderly individuals would be hit by several cuts at the same time. For example, the 440,000 low-income seniors who now receive a modest bag of foodstuffs each month to help keep them from running out of food would lose that aid; the program providing it would be terminated. These poor elderly individuals, one-third of them over 75, could face cuts both in food assistance and in help paying their heating bills at the same time.

The administration also wants to eliminate the Perkins loan program and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants (SEOG) that help low and middle-income families pay for college. While some of these savings will be channeled into the current Pell Grant program for lower-income students, the elimination of Perkins loans and the SEOG program will have a devastating effect on middle-income working class families and older students trying to cope with rising education costs.

The administration says its budget will limit the growth of all federal programs, outside of defense and homeland security, to one percent, well below the rate of inflation. The proposals actually constitute a cut of up to $4 billion in discretionary funding, according to CBPP. Since 1978 the proportion of the federal budget dedicated to discretionary spending has fallen from 23 percent to 10 percent.

The new budget includes $725 billion for the Pentagon war machine, together with tens of billions more for nuclear weapon development in the Department of Energy budget, as well as CIA and other non-Pentagon military spending. Since Bush entered office, the military budget has more than doubled and in real terms, military spending is now higher than it has been at any time in the past half-century—even at the height of the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union. (See “Bush to propose record US war budget”). The new budget proposes $117 billion through 2013 to increase the size on the Army and Marine Corps. In addition there is money to hire 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and build hundreds of more miles of fence along the US-Mexico.

While differing on specific proposals in the budget, the congressional Democratic leadership limits its criticism to the margins. There is a fundamental consensus in the two big business parties on making working people pay for the war in Iraq and future military adventures and on continuing the reactionary social policies that have driven social inequality to unprecedented levels in America.

One of the first actions of the new Democratic congressional majority was the adoption of a “pay as you go” rule that obliges Congress to cut spending to the cover the cost of any increased outlays in other parts of the budget. As the New York Times noted, “While Democrats criticized Mr. Bush for what the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, called ‘wrong priorities,’ they conceded privately that Mr. Bush was correct in warning that the unchecked growth of entitlement programs would eventually break the federal bank.”

The Times reported that the Democrats would negotiate with the White House for an increase in the payroll tax to finance future Social Security benefits, possibly combined with “a curb on some benefits.” Even if such a deal cannot be reached with Bush, it would no doubt be on the agenda of a Democratic president if elected in 2008.

While the budget presented the new Democratic majority with the first opportunity to re-write the administration’s policies, the Times added, “[I]n practice the Democrats know that the only place they can find the revenue to restore the administration’s proposed spending cuts would be to cut back on military spending, delay their stated intentions to balance the budget or rescind the Bush tax cuts in future years. They are not especially eager to do any of these.”

See Also:

Bush wants to make tax cuts for the rich permanent [7 February 2007]

Bush to propose record US war budget [5 February 2007]

Congressional Democrats embrace Republican resolution on Iraq [2 February 2007]