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In This Edition

Greg Palast puts us on, "The Fast Track Trade Jihad."

Al Martin shows us the frightening future in, "Citizen, Can I See Your ID?"

Mary McGrory gives us, "Fear In A Handful Of Dust'."

Norman Solomon tunes us into, "The Televised Greatness Of George W. Bush."

Joe Conason explains NYC politics in, "Ferrer’s Friends Could Hurt Green."

Gene Lyons talks about, "Bush's Wasted Opportunity."

Ann Thomas cuts through the spin in, "Suffer The Little Children."

Ted Rall gives us, "Bombing Without Thinking: A Rational Alternative."

Stan Goff says, "The So-Called Evidence Is A Farce."

Chris Floyd explains the rules to these, "Mind Games."

Peter Jennings wins the Vidkun Quisling Award

Molly Ivins is, "Seeking Short, Simple Solutions."

David Podvin and Carolyn Kay report on, "Democracy, General Electric Style."

And finally in "Parting Shots Hank Blakely is back with another tale of Smirky in, "The Big Bamboozle: Danger Are My Bidness" but first Uncle Ernie laments, "Sometimes I Wish I Was Wrong."

This week we spotlight the cartoons of Doug Marlette with additional cartoons from Tom Tomorrow, Ben Sargent, Lederman, Ted Rall, Rayberry, Rex Babin, Jeff Danziger, Bill Day, Chris Whitehouse, GWBush Art, Chadsux and Political Strikes.

Plus we have all of your favorite departments! Welcome one and all to "Uncle Ernie's Issues & Alibis." We hope you enjoy your stay!




How We Should Rebuild The World Trade Center






Sometimes I Wish I Was Wrong

By Ernest Stewart

Back on September 11th it occurred to me that this was far to much a coincidence to be anything less than planned. Our intelligence agency's i.e. FBI CIA NSA etc. knew the terrorists were coming and did nothing to stop them. The rumors for weeks had been Sadam Insane and his "Take a" Bath Party were the ones behind it. So I thought it would just be a couple weeks before our ground troops would be in Baghdad. I knew Poppa Smirk had been twisting on a spit for the last ten years bemoaning the fact that he listened to Colin Powell and ended up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not to mention any chance of reelection. Old Sadam has been thumbing his nose and laughing his ass off at Poppa ever since.

Since the coup d' etat was all about giving Poppa a second chance at ruling the world I knew sooner or later we'd be going back to Iraq but every word out of Foggy Bottom was screaming Osama, Osama, Osama. This struck me as funny until I realized Vice-Emperor Cheney had a deal to pipe Russian oil and gas through a rather hostile Afghanastan. Yes lets take care of business first before we seek revenge. Now that the end of the Taliban is in sight I see where our attention will fall next, right on Iraq. This along with the certain overthrow of the military regime in Pakistan for backing us, should give Osama and pals the "Holy Jihad" against this country that they've been dreaming of.

Like the once sane Cat Stevens said the other night, although he didn't agree with the hit put on Salmond Rushdie being a good Muslim he would have to go along with it, oh joy. If a once liberal person like Stevens would okay murder because someone told him too what will the rank and file Muslims do? Will we soon have 1,000,000,000 potential suicide bombers heading for America? Will our own citizens heed the call of the Imams and Mullahs? Still like that old time religion do you?

Meanwhile our own political masters are setting up the Office of Fatherland Security, yes I know but lets call a spade a spade shall we. Who do you fear more America, a hand full of running scared terrorist or our own home grown types? Now off go the National Guard and Army reserves to urban commando school to learn how to man the check points. To ask us for our papers at the airports, the checkpoints around government offices, the check points on the major highways, the checkpoints at our schools, the checkpoints at sports arenas, the checkpoints at concerts, at train stations, at bus stations, at shopping malls, at your front door, at well ... you get the picture! If not read Al Martin's column below, a very scary read indeed!

Of coursed Smirky and his Nazi pals have been quick to take advantage of America's fear. The corporate controlled media have been fanning the flames of panic making much ado out of molehills, spreading panic every time you turn on the tube or radio or pick up a newspaper. The reich-wingers are having a field day stealing money from tax payers, the poor and old folks to pay for this madness. And the really scary thing is America is lining right up to proudly march off behind our Texas Prairie Monkey all the way to Doomsday.

Normally I would laugh at them a bit, shake my head and wonder how people can be so stupid. But the ante has been upped. The rules have been changed and there is no longer anything to laugh about. We are certainly standing on the brink of destruction. And unlike our atheist opponents in the cold war our current enemies both foreign and domestic are all counting on an afterlife. The Russian and Chinese knew there was no afterlife and took great pains to keep from ending the only life we have. Now we have an Emperor who thinks he's going to meet Jesus and group of guys who are happy to die for their god in order to get to paradise and get at all them virgins. Be afraid America, be very afraid.

You may want to start stocking up on freeze drieds, large caliber weapons, a good solid granite cave and a large drug supply! Knowing when to leave and where to hide may be lives most important lessons!

Last chance to read the 1st chapter of my new book,
"The Red King's Horror." Chapter 2 goes up November 1st.

And finally for all you trick or treaters here's my Halloween poem,
"On All Hallows Eve!"
© 2001 Ernest Stewart






The Fast Track Trade Jihad

by Greg Palast
for the Observer

After the attack on the World Trade Center, some enterprising hucksters here in New York tried to sell little bags of ashes to victims' families, supposedly of their missing kin.

The stomach-churning commercialization of mass murder didn't bottom out there. Barely had the towers hit the ground when U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick proclaimed the way to defeat Osama bin Laden was to grant George W. Bush extraordinary 'fast-track' trade treaty negotiating authority. Ambassador bin Zoellick, speaking from what looked like a cave on Capitol Hill, surrounded by unidentified Republicans, said Americans had to choose: for free trade or for terrorism.

You'd think Democrats would blast Zoellick for this crude, heartless and somewhat oddball maneuver to jam through Bush's big business agenda while a nation mourned. But this week, war-spooked Democrats in Congress are expected to vote to revive the moribund trade legislation. 'Fast-track' gives Bush carte blanche authority to bargain a big expansion of the World Trade Organization's powers in anticipation of the WTO confab scheduled for Qatar in three weeks. 'Fast-track' also greases approval for a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).

The announcement was followed by a disturbing CNN video tape of corporate lobbyists dancing in the streets and handing out sweets to children.

In a September 24 speech before the Institute for International Economics, Trade Ambassador Zoellick laid the groundwork for a new McCarthyism aimed at anti-globalization dissidents. "Terrorists hate the ideas America has championed around the world," he said. "It is inevitable that people will wonder if there are intellectual connections with others who have turned to violence to attack international finance, globalization and the United States."

The implied evil link between opponents al-Queda and opponents of the WTO came to him, he said, from New Republic Magazine. This is the same journal, by the way, whose featured columnist suggested, "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity."

Exactly what are the particulars of the US trade agenda for the WTO that are supposed to make terrorists shake with fear? There are two holy grails in Zoellick's trade crusade which go by the benign namesm "national treatment in services" and "investor-to-state dispute resolution."

Want to keep the Royal Post - pardon me, Consignia - in government hands, or air traffic control? Not a chance, says John Howard of the US Chamber of Commerce. As Howard explained it to me, a WTO 'national treatment' clause will take that decision out of the hands of pesky parliaments, requiring government agencies to bid against foreign operators.

Which brings us to the Machiavellian side of these trade proposals (already promoted, by the way, by EU negotiators). Should Bechtel or any other foreign corporation challenge the continued public ownership of the London Underground, it will fall to Tony Blair to defend government ownership. If you suspect Blair's minions might not argue too forcefully before the disputes panel, you'll never find out. Unlike British and American court proceedings, WTO tribunals are closed and secretive.

A Blair or a Bush or any potentate hostile to state-owned enterprises can use a 'national treatment' rule as a sword in their jihad against their own government's agencies.

The other codicil sought by fast-track globalizers, "Investor-to-state dispute resolution," has already been deployed in the NAFTA zone. (NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, is where US industry uses Canada and Mexico for target practice to test trade weapons they will take international through WTO.)

Investor-to-state dispute resolution allows a foreign corporation wronged by violations of a trade pact to receive compensation from the miscreant nation's treasury. It all sounds quite fair. In practice under NAFTA, corporations have used the system to demolish local governments' environmental and consumer protections. In 1997, a state government in Mexico attempted to stop an American operator building a toxic waste dump in an ecological preservation zone. A NAFTA disputes panel ordered Mexico to pay $15.6 million (£10.4 million) to Metalclad for delay of its polluting plan.

The most dangerous case comes before a NAFTA panel this week. Loewen Corp, a big Canadian funeral home chain, is deeply unhappy about American tort law. In 1996, a Mississippi jury ruled that Loewen breached a contract and bullied a small operator as part of a schme to monopolize the industry and raise prices. Rather than appeal the verdict to a higher court, Loewen settled for $150 million - then whipped around and demanded the US government refund the sum and then some -- $725 million.

In LOEWEN V. MISSISSIPPI JURY, the Canadian operator demands that a NAFTA panel overturn basic procedures of the US civil justice system as an illegal barrier to trade. While the case is pending on the facts, the disputes panel has accepted jurisdiction. That ruling in effect makes NAFTA, not the US Supreme Court nor our Constitution, the ultimate legal authority of North America. Small wonder that American and European business chiefs are chanting "Disputes Resolution is Great!" outside the walls of Doha, Qatar, as the WTO prepares for the ministerial meeting.

If Zoellick's statements on terror and trade sound a bit over the top, he is only reflecting the Bush Administration's sense of panic over the Qatar confab which, even before September 11, was heading toward collapse and cancellation. WTO President Michael Moore failed to stampede less developed counties into putting a new round of comprehensive trade talks on the Qatar agenda.

Add to that the US President's lack of authority to negotiate, and who would bother to fly to the Gulf state, especially now? Hence, Zoellick's whipping skeptical Democrats about the head and shoulders with the Stars and Stripes.

The Trade Representative had a second target in his trade-or-terrorism tirade: the alliance of greens, populists and unionists who beat back prior attempts at 'fast track' legislation even when Congress was in Republican hands. Zoellick hopes to discredit this effective coalition by wrapping the anti-globalization movement in bin Laden's turban.

Lamentably, Zoellick is getting a lot of help on his smear campaign from befuddled souls within the anti-globalization movement itself. Bush's trade chief quotes gleefully from an Earth Island Journal writer who took the ill line that the attack on the Trade Center was some kind of extension, if misguided and criminal, of the struggle against globalization.

Bin Laden, born with a silver Rolls in his mouth and a stock portfolio to rival any Rockefeller, hardly qualifies as a class warrior. Nevertheless, Earth Island Journal's opportunistic hijacking of the mass murder to promote its agenda is not exceptional. There's a horrific weirdness in hearing both Zoellick and an unforgivable number of European Leftists (friends who should know better) calling the twin towers symbols of American capitalism.

EXCUSE ME, but until I began scribbling for The Observer, I worked on Floor 50 of the North Tower - which stood, among New Yorkers, as a symbol of American SOCIALISM. These government-owned skyscrapers housed the Port Authority, proprietor of subways, bridges and more, America's first line of defense against the privatization jihad sweeping the rest of the planet.

It is eery, anguishing and vile to watch Bush's free-market fanatics join together with a self-absorbed element of the left to use this tragedy to sell us their phoney little bags of political ashes.

Special thanks to Mary Bottari of Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch for expert explanation and nonpareil research material.
© 2001 Award-winning investigative reporter Greg Palast writes, Inside Corporate America, fortnightly in the Observer (London), Sunday paper of Britain's Guardian. At http://www.GregPalast.com you can read and subscribe to Greg Palast's columns





Citizen, Can I See Your ID
by Al Martin

What has not been explained to the American people is the reason why 35,000 Army Reservists and 65,000 National Guard have been called up. It is to maintain internal checkpoints. It has nothing to do with the external "War on Terrorism." All of these people are being trained at the US Army School of Urban Control at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. CNN actually showed an urban training mock-up, what they're training on, and what the new Internal Security checkpoint is going to look like. It was mighty sinister looking.

There was a barrier that went across the road. To the right was an elevated shed like structure, elevated perhaps fifteen feet in the air. It had a small second story that was open. On it was a sign that read "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." There were sandbags and the wooden arm that crossed the road read "100% ID Checked." Then there was a small shed to the right with a small barbed wire area behind that. On this structure was a sign, which read, "All citizens not having proper identification will be detained. All foreign nationals will be detained. All citizens who are deemed to be acting in a suspicious manner will be detained." At each of these posts there will be six armed Army or National Guard reservists with M-16's with full field kit. On top of the structure to the rear, the open structure on top, there's a man with a machine gun emplacement.

They showed the actual mockup used for training purposes. They had new uniforms. They weren't in their regular uniforms. It's a new gray uniform with a gray helmet and a visor so you can't see their eyes. The only thing you can see is from their lips down because they said that's "to prevent any retribution" from people who don't like this new idea.

This uniform looked exactly like the Imperial Storm Troopers from "Star Wars" except instead of white, it was gray. All the helmets have little transceivers so they can communicate with each other. There will be six guards at each internal security checkpoint. And there's another warning on the inside of the barbed wire enclosure, "Any detainees attempting to escape will be shot." It was a yellow and red sign inside the detainment area.

The only person who actually spoke on camera during this story was a sergeant, an Army Reservist sergeant. You could tell that he completely disagreed with what was going on. You couldn't hear the question being asked, but he was looking at the camera and he said, "We're here to protect the people." Then he put his head down and shook his head, and you could tell he didn't believe a word of what he was saying -- like it was some big frigging joke.

Then they showed the procedure they were using to train these guys. An average American car, like a Ford or a Chevy, drives up and there's supposed to be a husband and wife in the front seat and a couple of kiddies in the back. So they drive up to the checkpoint, and the corporal comes up to the car and says, "May I see your identification, citizen."

They call everyone "citizen." I swear to God, I'm not making this up. Then the guy asks for his driver's license, then something else and something else. Then he says, "Very good, citizen."

There's a spot on the gate that goes across the road that they had x-ed out. But you could tell what it said because the sergeant alluded to it. It said, "All citizens are required to present their National Identification Cards." But they left it blank as a black spray-painted out spot because the legislation for that hasn't happened yet.

The big sign on the side of the one and half story shed with the machine gun nest on top said "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." And now we're all supposed to say, "Hail the Republic." That's the new mantra. They showed a bunch of guys being trained at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, probably enlisted and reservists and such. And they kept raising up their right arm saying, "Hail the Republic."

The sergeant even said that they are duplicating the ancient Roman Legions salute to Caesar, using the right arm upraised with the fist. Instead of "Hail Caesar," though they say, "Hail the Republic."

This is what's coming. People don't believe it or people don't understand it but when 80% of the people support whatever "security" measures are necessary.

What does it all mean? We all better start worrying when George Bush starts to play the fiddle.

Congress is supposed to be recessed for the rest of the year, but they will be giving the Administration extraordinary wartime authority -- pursuant to all remaining legislation. In other words, they will simply allow the Administration to act under pending statutes. They are simply going to transfer to the Administration emergency wartime power to act under bills, which are still pending, even though they haven't been passed.

The implication is that we will be under a defacto state of martial law soon. There are 100,000 military being trained for these internal security checkpoints. When they were showing the lines of enlisted and reserve people being trained in this camp, with M-16s in their hands, I can tell you I don't think any of them would hesitate to shoot at American citizens. I think they're being indoctrinated. The indoctrination they're going through is obvious. The enlisted people are being told by the drill sergeant that they are being given extraordinary authority that "your job is to protect the security of the State at all costs."

There is a direct parallel between the old Soviet Union and the East Bloc and what we are doing. We are establishing internal travel restrictions on the American people. We are essentially following the Soviet textbook. In the Soviet Communist Bloc, for example, there were checkpoints in every city. You had to have what's called an "internal travel visa." You had to have that visa stamped at every checkpoint in every city. Then they checked you out at every entrance to every city. Then if you checked out, they would affix a visa stamp and charge you ten marks for it. It was a real racket.

What will be interesting to see is what kind of a racket is going to go along with these internal security check points. In other words, how much of a "toll" are they going to charge? They're going to have to do something to pay for all of this and one of the obvious ways to pay for it would be to charge everyone a one or two dollar "toll."

And this is what we should be looking forward to - toll booths around the nation. They're not saying this yet, but obviously in an effort to pay for this, there's going to be some sort of a "security tax." Since this system is incredibly cumbersome (having to stop every single vehicle and check identification) and we've been taught to be suspicious of driver's licenses because it's so easy to obtain false driver's licenses, the implication is that national security cards are the only thing that will eventually be accepted as identification. The further implication is that in order to accommodate traffic (this will create traffic jams miles and miles long), there would be a separate line for those carrying pre-approved internal visas whose allegiance to the government has already been checked.

The sergeant on the news report said that all the people involved (100,000 military people) are being forced to swear new loyalty oaths to the United States. He just mentioned the government's overall policy, which Bush talked about last week, that all federal civilian employees are going to have to take new oaths of allegiance to the "Republic." And that extends to some members of the military who will be involved in internal security.

Surprisingly enough all these border checks, you would think, would be handled directly by the military - or under the auspices of the military. They're not. They're under the auspices of "Homeland Security." What it means is that you have 100,000 troops (reservists and national guards people) based in the United States, which will be seconded to the Office of Homeland Security. Their ultimate jurisdiction is being transferred from the Department of Defense to the Office of Homeland Security.

In other words, the Office of Homeland Security is gaining a militarized division of 100,000 troops. It's finally getting some of the liberals nervous. But it's coming. Day after day, they're showing polls that seventy to eighty percent of the American people are prepared to approve whatever security measures are "necessary" to "fight terrorism."

* * * MILITARY FRAUD DEPT.: According to the Friendly Colonel, the Redstone Arsenal base commander was chortling over the fact that the accuracy of the missile strikes in Afghanistan thus far was 37%. He was actually chortling on how "high" the accuracy rate has been. The general's exact words were that "the defense contractors will get paid as long as the things go off and hit the right country." Also, the Friendly Colonel realizes the reason the FBI didn't stop all those weapons shipments from Huntsville Alabama (See previous story http://www.almartinraw.com/column22.html)

What they were doing was pre-positioning materiel in Pakistan. That leads one to the conclusion which he had already made earlier - that somebody knew this war was going to happen, possibly as long as six months ago (May 2001). In other words, they didn't know specifically the target, but somebody thought it likely that a "terrorist event" would happen that would precipitate a response by the US in Afghanistan.

And Where Did the "Mushrooms" Go? (See previous column http://www.almartin.raw/column32.html) They were intended for use by US armed forces. In other words, they were pre-staging supplies. That's where the "mushrooms" (anti-personnel land mines) went. He got an explanation how these "mushrooms" are used by Special Forces when they are clearing an area. When an area is being swept, they drop this weapons system behind them - to protect their rear and also to prevent anyone else from re-infiltrating an are which has already been cleared. The specific use of these mushrooms is in a sweep operation. When forces sweep an area and they don't want the area re-infiltrated they leave this passive weapons system behind. These weapons are principally used in an urban warfare environment.

The only correlation that can be made is that there would be an attack against the United States of sufficient size which would warrant a response, hence the predisposition of these weapons system, like these mushrooms which are under intense international criticism by an anti-land mine group in London.

The general also said that they're "re-ordering missiles like crazy - the Cruise and Tomahawk missiles." They are being reordered and Rockwell is building them as fast as they can. Cruise Missiles are about $1.6 million each, and the Tomahawks, which are larger, longer range, more advanced with a heavier payload, are about $3.5 million each.

He estimated that about 300 missiles have been used so far. It's not big money, but these missile systems are extremely profitable to build. They have a simple guidance system, a simple conventional explosive, and the micro-processors necessary for the look-forward view capacity is pretty simple. All they have to do is not hit the side of a mountain on the way to their target…

* * * MEDIA DEPT.: According to a reliable inside source, all the mainstream media outlets have received a confidential memorandum from the White House asking that they change the monikers they're using "Homeland Security" to "Home Front Security." Apparently they believe that "Home Front Security" sounds more patriotic and less sinister than "Home Land Security."

They have also asked the media not to show any more footage of the urban training and internal security checkpoints and to minimize the coverage of any "future" troop movements within the United States. The implication is that when these internal security checkpoints get set up, there will be a lot of movement of troops, helicopters, etc. So as not to disturb the domestic tranquility of the people by telling the people the truth, the government is asking the media to limit coverage of any domestic troop movements.

All the media will comply because they're all dying to jump on the government line. MSNBC has in fact changed their moniker form "Homeland Security" to "Home Front Security." "Home Front" is more homey sounding and much more patriotic. It strikes a chord with a lot of people especially older people who remember this being so extensively used for security measures put in place during the Second World War.

* * * EDUCATION/ INDOCTRINATION DEPT.: A warning of note -- Mothers of America beware. Last week during National Patriotism Day, sixty million American schoolchildren were supposed to stand up and say the Pledge of Allegiance together.

There was a little known and briefly shown incident on TV about a teacher in New Jersey. He was a fifth grade teacher who changed the words of the Pledge of Allegiance from "I pledge allegiance to the flag" to "I pledge allegiance to the Office of Homeland Security." Subsequently it was noted that in his opinion children are never too young to be taught obedience to the State. It should also be noted that the teacher in question who professed to be a loyal Vietnam veteran with a flat top hairdo, a Marine Corps. tattoo on his arm and a Timex watch, and replete with a polyester tie. He rather looked like some sort of reject for the corner stool at the local VFW, when he explained that "he never saw a commie he didn't want to bomb."

* * * HISTORY OF FBI ANTI-TERRORISM SUCCESS DEPT.: In 1995, pursuant to the first round of "anti-terrorism" legislation a/k/a HR1701, the FBI was given a special $300 million grant to track down terrorist assets worldwide.

After a five-year search and an expenditure of $300 million of American taxpayers' money, they managed to find one bank account belonging to the Hamas terrorist group. It was in a savings bank in New Jersey, and it had $17000 in it.

The Treasury Department's current pronouncements that the terrorist assets they're freezing every day is just so much nonsense. They're not giving us any details about who owns these accounts or how they know they're connected to terrorist groups. One of the accounts they seized in California? Upon further investigation, it turned out that the account with $346 in it was in fact the coffee and donut fund for the local Arab American Chamber of Commerce.

* * * FREEDOM OF SPEECH DEPT.: Having gone out to the $8.99 All You Can Eat Chinese Buffet with a bunch of cohorts, we found out that unbeknownst to us, there was an FBI agent sitting in the booth nearby. He was there not in an official capacity, but just having dinner with his wife. Anyway, we were talking about the new Office of Homeland Security and what the internal checkpoints were going to look like and what the new parameters of our new National Identity cards will be and, of course, referencing George Bush as George "Never Saw a Document He Didn't Want to Shred" Bush. And we talked about the number of civil rights that the American people will be giving up in this new campaign against terrorism.

When we got up to leave, the FBI agent said to me, "Hey pal, best flap your gums while you can because a year from now I'll have the power to arrest you for such seditious talk."

He was wearing his FBI badge on the inside to ensure that he would get his 15% discount at the restaurant.

My pals are all older and they're afraid that they'll get their Social Security checks taken away from them for hanging out with me. Then I told the FBI agent that, "Hey, we're just speaking the truth." And he said, "Like I said, seditious talk."

So remember - the new government mantra is "Speaking the truth about government misdeeds and abuses of power equals sedition."

* * * AS SEEN ON TV DEPT.: The new checkpoints have been established and they look just like the mockups that were shown on TV. There's a large red and yellow placard that says "Homeland Security Internal Checkpoint." You have to show your driver's license to go through and you're told that soon even that will not be sufficient. There was a company of National Guard setting up an ancillary facility. They had their new gray helmets with the visors on, so you couldn't see their eyes. And it is true. We went through the checkpoint.

And yes, they really do address you as "Citizen."
© 2001 Al Martin






Fear In A Handful Of Dust

By Mary McGrory

"I will show you fear in a handful of dust," T.S. Eliot wrote in "The Waste Land" in 1922. He could have been describing the Congress today.

A handful of anthrax particles sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) has sent Capitol Hill into an orbit of jitters and confusion and set off a civil war (luckily only of words) between the House and Senate.

On Tuesday afternoon, Daschle set off alarm bells by calling the bacteria in his mail "potent." On Wednesday, he sponsored a news conference where a military expert claimed that the anthrax was "garden variety." Were the terms mutually exclusive? No one knew enough to know or ask.

The House reacted strongly to the news that terrorism had blasted through the ancient privileges and new barricades that protect the Senate to invade the Hart Office Building. Thirty one employees tested positive for exposure, which is not to say infection, a distinction overlooked in the rush to panic. Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced that the House would shut down. Actually, the Senate is doing pretty much the same thing, to do an environmental sweep. It just isn't saying so.

The Senate entrance offered a strange sight at 11 o'clock Wednesday morning. Tense groups of reporters surrounded senators emerging from an emergency bipartisan session in their dining room. Their message: The show must go on. The House was condemned for overreacting. The buzz around the edges of the little clots was that Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) was going to have a word with Hastert to straighten him out about the protocol and priorities of not giving in to terrorists, whoever they are.

Farm boys among the senators comprised the instant new elite that has sprung up since the horror at the Hart Building, a third of which has been sealed off ever since. Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) was offering the morning's most potent reassurance: "I grew up with anthrax, we had it all the time. You just took penicillin."

Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) was another with first-hand knowledge of the barnyard plague who didn't think it should be allowed to shut down the government, which of course, was the terrorist vision. "Just because the stuff was highly concentrated doesn't mean necessarily it was potent."

At 12:45 p.m., in the little park opposite the Capitol, Daschle appeared, accompanied by Republican leader Lott and a phalanx of experts in the fields of environment and public health, all of whom offered various forms of reassurance.

A much-decorated major general from Fort Detrick named Jon Parker pronounced the Daschle strain to be "a garden variety of anthrax" and found it to be "sensitive to all kinds of antibiotics." This was good news to the hundreds, including Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), who had taken Cipro.

But within the hour, Hastert had resurfaced to restate his fears that the anthrax might have traveled through ventilating ducts or tunnels, which necessitated a shutdown for proper house cleaning. House Democratic leader Dick Gephardt (Mo.) chimed in unhelpfully with a first-time claim that the Daschle strain was "weapons grade."

With all the speculation and expertise being flung around, no one wanted to talk about the greatest mystery, which is not the strength of the anthrax or its contagious quality, but who's spreading it around. Is Osama bin Laden laughing up his sleeve again, or is this the work of home-grown, garden-variety terrorists? How did it strike a 7-month-old baby who visited ABC News, or get into the offices of New York Gov. George Pataki's police detail? The governor was not tested for anthrax but took Cipro anyway, against all medical advice.

As the crisis unfolded, the chief executive was taking his own advice. President Bush took off for Shanghai on schedule. He has played a confusing hand in the reassurance game. When the FBI issued a warning last week of further trouble, he dismissed it as more evidence, without specifics, of a vigilant government at work.

Perhaps his most baffling prescription for peace of mind was his curious treatment of the vice president. While the rest of us were flying or buying or going to baseball games, Dick Cheney was stashed out of sight in an undisclosed safe location. He was not even allowed to go to his office, in the interests of "continuity." Was someone after the vice president? Did the president know something we didn't know?

Legislative and executive have both struck out now in helping us learn to live with terrorism. Maybe it's time for homeland security czar Tom Ridge to speak up.
© 2001 Mary McGrory






The Televised Greatness Of George W. Bush

By Norman Solomon

President Bush's upward spike of popularity owes a lot to his presence on television -- a medium that has not always been so kind. At times, under pressure, he has earned many comparisons to a deer in headlights. But after a wobbly performance on Sept. 11, Bush got into a groove of seizing the TV opportunity and making the most of it.

Today's television environment is, more than ever, warmly hospitable to simple -- and simplistic -- declarative statements. That's just as well for Bush, who has shown a distinct tendency to get entangled in a morass of fragmentary linguistic riffs. Last year, on many occasions, he seemed painfully anxious to make his way to the end of sentences without further embarrassment. But now, for the most part, it's a very different story.

For insights about recent shifts of George W. Bush's persona on television, I contacted media critic Mark Crispin Miller, whose 1988 book "Boxed In: The Culture of TV" was a groundbreaking analysis of the tube. In the book, he disputed the customary image of the U.S. president as a "mighty individual" -- and identified that image as "a corporate fiction, the careful work of committees and think tanks, repeatedly reprocessed by the television industry for daily distribution to a mass audience."

Boosted by family ties and powerful corporate backers, Bush won the presidency (though not the popular vote) while projecting an affable personality that some have found endearing. But even while carrying out weighty duties of the presidency with all its trappings, he struck many Americans as a lightweight, ill-suited for the job. A turning point came with his dramatic speech to a joint session of Congress in mid-September.

The rave media reaction "was understandable," Miller told me, "because it actually reflected less on Bush's speech per se than on the moment's strange and terrifying context. The speech was deemed 'Churchillian' because the audience (the American people, the Congress, the media) was so desperate for a proper leader at that fearful moment. At that moment of catastrophe, there was so fierce a hunger for a national father-figure that the audience saw one in the president, who therefore came across like Churchill, or like FDR, despite his lack of stature -- which, prior to the shock, had been quite clear to most observers."

Miller's book "The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder," published a few months ago, warns against assuming too much about the significance of Bush's habitual tongue-tangles. It's a cautionary note that now rings especially true. The man in the White House is shrewd and capable of high-impact rhetorical feats.

Since Sept. 11, Miller says, President Bush "has continued, by and large, to speak with more authority than usual." While acknowledging that Bush "has at times reverted to his usual gaffery" (as in his announcement that "ticket counters and airplanes will be flying out of National Airport"), Miller observes that "on the subject of 'America's new war' -- 'the focus of this administration' -- Bush has managed to ad lib with an overall coherence that is, for him, extraordinary."

Miller adds that "the president has lately spoken relatively well for the same reason that he's always broken into sudden fits of lucid English -- because, in speaking of our national mission of revenge, he's speaking from the heart." In fact, George W. Bush "has always spoken clearly on those subjects that genuinely matter to him. Thus it is that, when he talks about baseball, say, or about his property in Crawford, he has no problems with his syntax, grammar or vocabulary."

Professor Miller, who specializes in media studies at New York University, contends that Bush also "is most articulate when speaking cruelly -- on the value of the death penalty, or when cracking jokes, or when saying no. It's when he tries to sound a higher note -- idealistically, or out of magnanimity, or on his trademark theme of 'compassion' -- that Bush starts speaking broken English, because, like most of us, his tongue will not cooperate when he is being insincere."

These days, President Bush is evidently sincere about wanting the missiles to keep flying and the bombs to keep falling on Afghanistan -- circumstances that notably enhance his verbal skills. The fact that large numbers of Afghan people are now facing imminent starvation due to the ongoing attacks does not seem to bother our nation's leading compassionate conservative. "The president," says Miller, "has lately spoken with unusual coherence in his off-the-cuff remarks -- because his subject nowadays is war."
© 2001 Norman Solomon writes a syndicated column on media and politics. His latest book is "The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media."






Ferrer’s Friends Could Hurt Green

It’s hard to tell exactly what Fernando Ferrer and his prominent supporters think they’re doing right now. Assuming that the final vote counts in the Democratic primary runoff eventually show that Mark Green won, the post-primary media crusade that the Ferrer camp is mounting against him right now can only depress Democratic turnout in November and perhaps elect a Republican Mayor. Much worse, it could exacerbate racial and ethnic tension.

This is a very curious activity for activists and officeholders who profess to be progressive Democrats. Among them are several Democratic members of Congress, most notably Charles Rangel of Harlem; the chairman of the Democratic organization in the Bronx, Roberto Ramirez; former Deputy Mayor Bill Lynch, who holds the rank of vice chairman on the Democratic National Committee; and Dennis Rivera, the president of the hospital-workers’ union, Local 1199.

They’re angry about the negative tactics used by the Green campaign in the final hours before the runoff on Oct. 11. They point not only to a Green television commercial whose tagline—"Can we afford to take a chance?"—struck them as an appeal to white fear, but to anonymous telephone calls and fliers that warned about the Reverend Al Sharpton’s influence over Mr. Ferrer.

Conversations with several of the furious Ferrer backers suggest that their anger is genuine, however exaggerated and tinged by previous personal animosities toward Mr. Green. They have produced no proof whatsoever that the Green campaign was responsible for those racially charged fliers and phone calls, which he has disowned and denounced. And their complaint about the TV ad sounds pretty silly, since that sort of tagline is a cliché of negative political advertising, used by all kinds of candidates against one another regardless of race, creed or color.

As this dispute grows nastier, there are several facts that voters of all ethnic groups should remember.

The Ferrer campaign depended heavily on Mr. Sharpton—a lifelong, enthusiastic and unapologetic exploiter of racial tensions—to mobilize its vote. The Ferrer campaign launched the first negative assault during the runoff, when its candidate stood chortling alongside Ed Koch while the former Mayor brayed so loudly about the "obnoxious" personality of Mr. Green—a theme Ferrer supporters continued to emphasize. The Ferrer campaign attempted to smear William Bratton as an enemy of minority communities, even though Mr. Ferrer had eagerly praised the former police commissioner years earlier, when that seemed more opportune.

Embittered critics of Mr. Green now portray the Ferrer candidacy as a historic bid for Latino empowerment, and grumble that his defeat represents a betrayal by the Democratic Party of loyal constituencies long awaiting their turn in City Hall. There is a false note in this woeful song, however. If the Ferrer campaign represented a crusade for political equity, then why did Mr. Rivera, for example, dawdle so long before endorsing him at the last minute? Why did Mr. Rivera’s union almost choose Mr. Green instead, just after Labor Day? Why did Mr. Sharpton flirt so ostentatiously with a Green endorsement?

Presumably they were just playing the games that power brokers play, hedging and bargaining in the traditional style that often lurks behind progressive rhetoric. Both Mr. Rivera and Mr. Sharpton have found reasons to cozy up to Republican candidates in years past when that best served their institutional interests.

Just four years ago, Mr. Rivera unceremoniously dumped the Democratic challenger to Rudolph Giuliani, despite all of the Mayor’s many offenses to minority voters and union workers, and stood beside him for a smiling photo op just before Election Day. In 1986, Mr. Sharpton essentially sold his support to Senator Alfonse D’Amato, in exchange for a $550,000 federal grant to a drug-rehab center run by a Sharpton ally. (That episode became one of many counts in Mr. Green’s ethics complaint against the former Senator.) Indeed, Mr. Sharpton regularly threatens to bolt to the Republicans, whenever he isn’t seeking a Democratic nomination for himself.

Power brokers like winners, and cynics might think that Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Rivera were initially attracted to Mr. Green because he appeared so likely to win the Democratic nomination all year. Yet there was another factor that permitted the Public Advocate to come as close as he did to winning the support of the hospital workers and even the Sharpton faction.

Before their memories were clouded by the pain of defeat last week, people like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Rivera surely recalled that Mr. Green was among the few white politicians in New York who was unafraid to stand by David Dinkins during the worst days of his Mayoralty.

Both Mr. Green and his angry critics face an important test. He has to set aside his pride to reassure them that he really seeks to unify the city across racial lines, regardless of past conflicts. And they must abandon the impulse for retribution at a moment when New Yorkers need unity more than ever.
© 2001You may reach Joe Conason via email at: jconason@observer.com.






Bush's Wasted Opportunity

By Gene Lyons

At this writing, it's hard to say anything worthwhile about how the war on terrorism is going. As most Americans understand, bombing defenseless Afghanistan is the easy part. All the hard choices and the tough fighting lay ahead. Complex military and geopolitical puzzles will need to be solved. Sad to say, one's confidence in President Bush's ability to make the right calls has not been enhanced by recent cave-ins to the dimwit right on the relatively mundane domestic issues of stimulating the economy and airline safety.

Even as Washington pundits exult over his newfound "legitimacy," Bush appears to be blowing the political opportunity of a generation. With the nation united behind him and the "religious right" weakened by the crackpot pronouncements of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the president had an excellent chance to move toward the center and away from the puerile anti-government rhetoric and save-the-millionaires economics of House Republicans like Dick Armey and Tom de Lay. Instead, the White House has embraced them for reasons that virtually defy rational explanation. Last Oct. 12, the House Ways and Means Committee shoved through a bogus economic "stimulus" bill in the form of $100 billion tax giveaway to the same wealthy individuals and corporations who were already the prime beneficiaries of Bush's earlier tax cut. Passed on a party line vote, the House bill would do little to help the economy in the short run, and much to destabilize the federal budget years hence.

At Democratic insistence, $300 checks will be sent to workers whose salaries were too low to get income tax rebates last summer. Because it's sure to be spent at once on necessities, this cash should give the economy a modest boost. But what have income tax cuts that award an added $39 billion to the richest one quarter of taxpayers between 2003 and 2005 got to do with today's recession? Absolutely nothing. Ditto for repealing the corporate minimum tax on profitable companies which would otherwise pay none. Temporarily speeding up depreciation on business investment might help in the short run; doing so permanently weakens the incentive and hurts the treasury. And so forth.

Even Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has called the bill "more than we'd like" and mocked the House drafting session as "show business for lobbyists." Its spirit was parodied by Washington Post columnist Mike Kinsley, who urged Congress "to seriously consider special tax considerations, regulatory relief and possibly even direct financial subsidies for people named "Mike" or "Michael." In this time of crisis, we cannot allow superficial considerations of fairness to prevent us from doing what is necessary to ensure that this essential group of Americans is fully engaged in the war effort."

The White House wants to trim the numbers some, but basically supports the House bill. The Wall Street Journal reports rumors that if O'Neill doesn't get on board, he'll be fired. Which can only mean that President Bush, as many suspect, either can't do the arithmetic, or means to use the campaign against terrorism as a pretext to return the country to rising interest rates and permanent budget deficits. Apparently just so the Scrooge McDucks of the GOP right can hoard heaps of currency to roll in. If Bush's economic policies are unwise, going along with de Lay and the boys on the crucial issue of airline safety is downright irrational. As a 1996 commission chaired by, yes, Al Gore, tried to convince GOP pols in the first place, preventing terrorists from using domestic airliners as weapons of war is a national security issue. Last week the U.S. Senate voted 100-0 to put the Department of Justice in charge of airport security and impose a $2.50 tax on airline tickets to pay for it.

Amazingly, House anti-labor union fanatics led by de Lay and Armey oppose the bill on the stated grounds that the private rent-a-cop firms who've done such a fine job so far can continue to do so more efficiently. Meanwhile, the U.S. Attorney in Philadelphia has indicted officials of Argenbright, the nation's largest airline security firm, for repeatedly violating FAA standards-including falsifying records to hide employees' criminal records.

What de Lay and company really fear is adding 28,000 unionized workers to the federal payroll. Somebody needs to remind them that the New York City cops and firemen who responded so heroically to the World Trade Center attacks were members of the strongest municipal unions in the country-career professionals whose pride, dedica-tion, and, yes, brotherhood, have everything to do with the fact that making the force isn't a minimum wage stopgap but the ambition of a lifetime. Astonishingly, President Bush has sided with the House know-nothings, and threatened to enforce their wishes by executive order--bad politics, bad for the country, but good in the long run, I suppose, for the Democratic party.
©2001 Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.





Quotable Quote

"Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation
must begin by subduing the freeness of speech."
... Ben-Jamin' Franklin






Suffer The Little Children

By Ann Thomas

Pardon me if I don't fall all over myself praising Bush, as many pundits and mouthpieces did last night, for his new plan to "help" the children of Afghanistan.

The Shrub has announced that he'd like for all children to send a dollar to the "Fund for Any Surviving Afghan Kids" or whatever it's called. There are approximately seventy million children in the U.S., so if each one of them sent in a dollar, that'd be a whopping $70 million in aid. Of course, Bush is hoping that their parents will kick in a bit as well to increase the pot.

Why does this make me angry?

The U.S. has pledged to give $320 million in aid to the people of Afghanistan. That's certainly better than nothing, but does it mean that Bush gives a flying damn for the civilians whose lives are being further destroyed by his new oil war? Of course not; it's a PR move and nothing more, and anyone with a grain of common sense knows it.

Now Bush has decided that the Afghan people need a bit more help. Is he pledging more aid? Hell, no - he's asking our kids to give it. The people of America, he claims, are "the most generous in the world", though how he could know this without visiting other countries and actually getting to know the people there is beyond me.

Last night, shortly before Bush's press conference, John King of CNN said that Bush planned to bring up the subject of humanitarian aid (I suppose his plan to milk the American people for relief money was supposed to be a big deal) because, and I quote, "He wants to feed the Afghan people even while he bombs their country".

Well, bully for him. He wants to make sure they have a peanut butter sandwich before we drop a bomb on them. What a guy.

Speaking of dropping bombs, the US military has been dropping food packages on Afghanistan - your tax dollars at work. First, we dropped 37,000 food packages, which was touted by the media as evidence of Shrub's compassion. Thirty-seven thousand meals don't go very far in a country where millions are starving. And of course, there's no guarantee that the Afghan people will get to eat those meals...there are more land mines in Afghanistan than in any country in the world. You'd have to be pretty hungry to run across a mine-strewn field to get to a meal, but the people there ARE pretty hungry, so you can bet that's what they're doing. The children, whom Bush professes to care so much about, are no doubt among those risking - literally - life and limb to get a meal.

We claim that we have to drop the food packages because it's the only safe way to get food to the people. Yet the reason it's no longer safe to take food into the country by traditional methods is because we're bombing the hell out of the country.

But no fear - we're going to help those children, according to Bush. We're going to help them by coercing the people of the US to donate money, which will no doubt pay for more pretty packages to be dropped over a mine-ridden field. And if it's not enough food for the Afghan people now, it might be eventually, because they are dying. We've already killed at least one child with our bombs; he won't be the last. What, I wonder, was the cost of the bomb that killed him? How many children would it have fed?

Some might say that the US, in this current economy, can't afford to give more than $320 million in aid to Afghanistan. Well, perhaps we can't. But we could sure afford to give $15 BILLION in aid to the airline corporations, a portion of which will be kicked back to the Republicans and the Bush administration in return for letting the airlines "police themselves" with regards to security.

Fifteen billion dollars averages out to roughly two hundred and ten dollars for every child in the U.S.

I'll tell you why I'm angry. I'm angry because our government gave an ungraspable sum of money to corporations whose skinflint practices may have enabled the terrorists to hijack four planes and kill thousands of people, but when it comes to giving money to starving people who have done nothing - NOTHING - to us, Bush gives a paltry $320 million and then states that anything more will have to be donated voluntarily by the American people, who are already feeling the pinch of the Bush economy. Oh, but not the American people in general -- the CHILDREN.

I don't doubt that many, many children will faithfully send in their dollar and actually believe that they are helping their counterparts in Afghanistan. They'll do it because their parents will tell them it's the right thing to do, and of course, helping starving children IS the right thing to do. But what are our children learning? That it's okay to bomb people if we also send them a meal now and then? That our government can't afford to help starving children because it's spending too much money on corporate welfare and tax cuts, so it's up to us to do so?

Here's an idea: have our government give $15 billion in aid to the people of Afghanistan, and $320 million in aid to the airlines. And then encourage the American people to donate to the airlines to help them out further. We could call the project "Schoolkids for Corporations".

In a perfect world...
© 2001 Ann Thomas






Bombing Without Thinking: A Rational Alternative

by Ted Rall

Beware collateral damage, for today's hey-nothing-personal victims give rise to tomorrow's terrorists. As this goes to press, a bestiary of bombs-a few 500-pounders here, some "bunker busters" there-is falling on Afghan cities. Gulf War mythology of ordinance IQ notwithstanding, 21st century bombing is hardly a precision art. Smart or dumb, some bombs will always go off-course. And bombs hit things that then blow up, killing people who weren't themselves targets. Sometimes civilians hang out where they shouldn't. And sometimes information about bombing targets is just plain wrong or out-of-date.

The bottom line is this: Ordinary Afghan people, men and women and children who have never done anything wrong to anyone, are getting mangled and killed by American bombs. The innocents have spouses, parents and friends, and these spouses, parents and friends may quite naturally end up hating those who mangled and killed their loved ones. That hate festers, and some of these people will eventually be persuaded that vengeance will soothe their pain. And one day they'll fly planes into office buildings or blow themselves up in shopping malls or do something else we haven't dared imagine yet.

Needless to say, getting even for the 9-11 attacks doesn't do much good if our vengeance only creates more terrorism, which we will then feel compelled to avenge.

And yet: the right-wingers are absolutely correct when they assert that doing nothing is not a viable option. Whether September 11th was something we "had coming" or not, giving peace a chance is not something we can imagine at the moment: there is no peace to give a chance to. And no nation is worthy of the name unless it's willing to react to the murder of its citizens with force. Bush is, like it or not, doing something. People respect that, even if that something later turns out to be counterproductive.

There is, however, an intelligent middle ground between mindless bombing and mindless pacifism. A thoughtful solution - neither "liberal" nor "conservative" -- can be found by applying what we Americans are best at: simple common sense.

The Objectives

Like the "war on drugs" and the "war on poverty", a "war on terrorism" is too vast, vague and nebulous to "win". Our first priority ought to be to bring the surviving perpetrators of the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center to justice; if they end up dead in the attempt, so be it.

Second, while we'll never eradicate the possibility of terrorist attacks on American soil we can minimize their number and their intensity when they do occur. This requires a delicate combination of force and tact: We must be kind as well as forceful.

What To Do

Afghanistan's Taliban regime is at most indirectly involved with the September 11th hijackings. (The Bush Administration admits that it couldn't indict Osama or the Taliban on the evidence it currently possesses.) Follow the passports: 18 out of the 19 hijackers were Egyptian; 1 was Saudi. The smart money points to one of the Middle East's most venerable militant Muslim organizations, Gama'at al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group. Founded by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Gama'at al-Islamiyya is best known for the November 1997 massacre of 62 tourists at the Temple of Luxor in Egypt and the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though the Islamic Group is composed of numerous splinter cells whose ideologies vary, they share a common aim: the replacement of the secular government of Hosni Mubarek by an Islamic theocracy. The Islamic Group resents the U.S. for propping up the Mubarak government, and for its support for Israel.

According to most reports, Egyptians are the main suspects for September 11th. So why are we attacking Afghanistan? American intelligence should work with the Egyptian government to track down any members of Gama'at al-Islamiyya who had anything to do with the New York and Washington attacks and put them on trial for mass murder. Arresting murderers ought to take precedence over bombing the places where they trained.

A targeted approach would demonstrate to all but the most fanatic elements in the Arab world that the United States is a nation whose retribution is measured and just. It would also serve to destroy the one network to have drawn the most American blood-and reduce the odds of a repeat performance.

Though we should continue providing economic and military assistance to Israel, that aid ought to be predicated on several conditions. First, all Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories ought to be closed. Second, Israel should guarantee an end to its more egregious human rights abuses, such as the demolition of Arab homes and rocket attacks on civilian targets. Finally, internal border blockades of Gaza and the West Bank should be permanently halted. This bilateral policy-supporting Israel while refusing to tolerate religious apartheid-would show that we stand behind our friends but only to the extent that they behave in a civilized fashion. Best of all, it would end the absurd state of affairs in which a superpower is repeatedly manipulated by a resource-free desert nation the size of New Jersey.

We should drop sanctions and military action against Iraq and Afghanistan in exchange for verifiable assurances that neither nation will harbor terrorists who target the United States. Then we should pour in humanitarian assistance to show ordinary Muslims that Americans care about their plight. Let a co-opted postwar Taliban root out Al Qaeda and other groups in their territory; it's a hell of a lot easier to let the locals do the dirty work than to send in American ground troops.

But first, let's stop this stupid bombing.
© 2001 Ted Rall






The So-Called Evidence Is A Farce
By Stan Goff

I'm a retired Special Forces Master Sergeant. That doesn't cut much for those who will only accept the opinions of former officers on military matters, since we enlisted swine are assumed to be incapable of grasping the nuances of doctrine.

But I wasn't just in the army. I studied and taught military science and doctrine. I was a tactics instructor at the Jungle Operations Training Center in Panama, and I taught Military Science at West Point. And contrary to the popular image of what Special Forces does, SF's mission is to teach. We offer advice and assistance to foreign forces. That's everything from teaching marksmanship to a private to instructing a Battalion staff on how to coordinate effective air operations with a sister service.

Based on that experience, and operations in eight designated conflict areas from Vietnam to Haiti, I have to say that the story we hear on the news and read in the newspapers is simply not believable. The most cursory glance at the verifiable facts, before, during, and after September 11th, does not support the official line or conform to the current actions of the United States government.

But the official line only works if they can get everyone to accept its underlying premises. I'm not at all surprised about the Republican and Democratic Parties repeating these premises. They are simply two factions within a single dominant political class, and both are financed by the same economic powerhouses. My biggest disappointment, as someone who identifies himself with the left, has been the tacit acceptance of those premises by others on the left, sometimes naively, and sometimes to score some morality points. Those premises are twofold. One, there is the premise that what this de facto administration is doing now is a "response" to September 11th. Two, there is the premise that this attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was done by people based in Afghanistan. In my opinion, neither of these is sound.

To put this in perspective we have to go back not to September 11th, but to last year or further.

A man of limited intelligence, George W. Bush, with nothing more than his name and the behind-the-scenes pressure of his powerful father-a former President, ex-director of Central Intelligence, and an oil man-is systematically constructed as a candidate, at tremendous cost. Across the country, subtle and not-so-subtle mechanisms are put into place to disfranchise a significant fraction of the Democrat's African-American voter base. This doesn't come out until Florida becomes a battleground for Electoral College votes, and the magnitude of the story has been suppressed by the corporate media to this day. In a decision so lacking in legitimacy, the Supreme Court will neither by-line the author of the decision nor allow the decision to ever be used as a precedent, Bush v. Gore awards the presidency of the United States to a man who loses the popular vote in Florida and loses the national popular vote by over 600,000.

This de facto regime then organizes a very interesting cabinet. The Vice President is an oil executive and the former Secretary of Defense. The National Security Advisor is a director on the board of a transnational oil corporation and a Russia scholar. The Secretary of State is a man with no diplomatic experience whatsoever, and the former Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The other interesting appointment is Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld is the former CEO of Searle Pharmaceuticals. He and Cheney were featured as speakers at the May, 2000, Russian-American Business Leaders Forum. So the consistent currents in this cabinet are petroleum, the former Soviet Union, and the military.

Based on the record of Daddy Bush, in all his guises, and the general trajectory of US foreign policy as far back as the Carter Administration, I feel I can reasonably conclude that Middle Eastern and South Asian fossil fuels are one of their major preoccupations. Not just because this klavern has some very direct financial interests in fossil fuel, but because they surely know that worldwide oil production is peaking as we speak, and will soon begin a permanent and precipitous decline that will completely change the character of civilization as we know it within 20 years. Even the left seems to be in deep denial about this, but the math is available. And, no, alternative energies and energy technologies will not save us. All the alternatives in the world can not begin to provide more than a tiny fraction of the energy base now provided by oil. This makes it more than a resource, and the drive to control what's left more than an economic competition.

I further conclude that the economic colonization of the former Soviet Union is probably high on that agenda, and in fact has a powerful synergy with the issue of petroleum. Russia not only holds vast untapped resources that beckon to imperialism in crisis, it remains a credible military and nuclear challenger in the region.

We have not one, but three members of the Bush de facto cabinet with military credentials, which makes the cabinet look quite a lot like a military General Staff. All this way before September

11th. Then there's the subject of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. NATO might have expected consignment to the dustbin of the Cold War after the Eastern Bloc shattered in 1991. Peace dividend and all that. But it didn't. It expanded directly into the former states of the Eastern Bloc toward the former Soviet Union, and contributed significant forces to the devastation of Iraq-a key country in the world oil market, over which control translates into the ability to manipulate oil prices.

NATO is a military formation, and the United States exerts the controlling interest in it. It seemed like a form without a function, but it remedied that pretty quickly.

Then when Yugoslavia refused to play ball with the International Monetary Fund, the US and Germany began a systematic campaign of destabilization there, even using some of the veterans of Afghanistan in that campaign.

NATO became the military arm of that agenda-the break-up of Yugoslavia into compliant statelets, the further containment of the former Soviet Union, and the future pipeline easement for Caspain Sea oil to Western European markets through Kosovo.

You see, this is important to understand, and people-even those against the war talk-are tending to overlook the significance of it. NATO is not a guarantor of international law, and it is not a humanitarian organization.

It is a military alliance with one very dominant partner. And it can no longer claim to be a defensive alliance against European socialists. It is an instrument of military aggression.

NATO is the organization that is now going to thrust further along the 40th parallel from the Balkans through the Southern Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union. The US military has already taken control of a base in Uzbekistan. No one is talking about how what we are doing seems to be a very logical extension of a strategy that was already in motion, and has been in motion for two decades. Once we recognize the pattern of activity designed to simultaneously consolidate control over Middle Eastern and South Asian oil, and contain and colonize the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan is exactly where they need to go to pursue that agenda.

Afghanistan borders Iran, Pakistan, and even China but, more importantly, the Central Asian Republics of the former Soviet Union, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. These border Kazakhstan. Kazakhstan borders Russia. Turkmenistan sits on the Southeastern quadrant of the Caspian Sea, whose oil the Bush Administration dearly covets.

Afghanistan is necessary for two things: as a base of operations to begin the process of destabilizing, breaking off, and establishing control over the South Asian Republics, which will begin within the next 18-24 months in my opinion, and constructing a pipeline through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan to deliver petroleum to the Asian market.

The BBC was recently told by Niaz Naik, a Pakistani Foreign Secretary, that senior American officials were warning them as early as mid-July that military action for mid-October was being planned for Afghanistan. In 1996, the Department of Energy was issuing reports on the desirability of a pipeline through Afghanistan, and in 1998, Unocal testified before the House Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific that this pipeline was crucial to transport Caspian Basin oil to the Indian Ocean.

Given this evidence that a military operation to secure at least a portion of Afghanistan has been on the table, possibly as early as five years ago, I can't help but conclude that the actions we are seeing put into motion now are part of a pre-September 11th agenda. I'm absolutely sure of that, in fact. The planning alone for operations, of this scale, that are now taking shape, would take many months. And we are seeing them take shape in mere weeks.

It defies common sense. This administration is lying about this whole thing being a "reaction" to September 11th. That leads me, in short order, to be very suspicious of their yet-to-be-provided evidence that someone in Afghanistan is responsible. It's just too damn convenient. Which also leads me to wonder-just for the sake of knowing-what actually did happen on September 11th, and who actually is responsible.

The so-called evidence is a farce. The US presented Tony Blair's puppet government with the evidence, and of the 70 so-called points of evidence, only nine even referred to the attacks on the World Trade Center, and those points were conjectural. This is a bullshit story from beginning to end. Presented with the available facts, any 16-year old with a liking for courtroom dramas could tear this story apart like a two-dollar shirt. But our corporate press regurgitates it uncritically. But then, as we should know by now, their role is to legitimize.

This cartoon heavy they've turned bin Laden into makes no sense, when you begin to appreciate the complexity and synchronicity of the attacks. As a former military person who's been involved in the development of countless operations orders over the years, I can tell you that this was a very sophisticated and costly enterprise that would have left what we call a huge "signature".

In other words, it would be very hard to effectively conceal.

So there's a real question about why there was no warning of this. That can be a question about the efficacy of the government's intelligence apparatus. That can be a question about various policies in the various agencies that had to be duped to orchestrate this action. And it can also be a question about whether or not there was foreknowledge of the event, and that foreknowledge is being covered up. To dismiss this concern out of hand as the rantings of conspiracy nuts is premature. And there is a history of this kind of thing being done by national political bosses, including the darling of liberals, Franklin Roosevelt. The evidence is very compelling that the Roosevelt Administration deliberately failed to act to stop Pearl Harbor in order to mobilize enough national anger to enter the World War II.

I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks.

Follow along:

Four planes get hijacked and deviate from their flight plans, all the while on FAA radar. The planes are all hijacked between 7:45 and 8:10 AM Eastern Daylight Time.

Who is notified?

This is an event already that is unprecedented. But the President is not notified and going to a Florida elementary school to hear children read.

By around 8:15 AM, it should be very apparent that something is terribly wrong. The President is glad-handing teachers.

By 8:45, when American Airlines Flight 11 crashes into the World Trade Center, Bush is settling in with children for his photo ops at Booker Elementary. Four planes have obviously been hijacked simultaneously, an event never before seen in history, and one has just dived into the worlds best know twin towers, and still no one notifies the nominal Commander in Chief.

No one has apparently scrambled any Air Force interceptors either. At 9:03, United Flight 175 crashes into the remaining World Trade Center building. At 9:05, Andrew Card, the Presidential Chief of Staff whispers to George W. Bush. Bush "briefly turns somber" according to reporters.

Does he cancel the school visit and convene an emergency meeting? No.

He resumes listening to second graders read about a little girl's pet fucking goat, and continues this banality even as American Airlines Flight 77 conducts an unscheduled point turn over Ohio and heads in the direction of Washington DC.

Has he instructed Chief of Staff Card to scramble the Air Force? No.

An excruciating 25 minutes later, he finally deigns to give a public statement telling the United States what they already have figured out; that there's been an attack by hijacked planes on the World Trade Center.

There's a hijacked plane bee-lining to Washington, but has the Air Force been scrambled to defend anything yet? No.

At 9:30, when he makes his announcement, American Flight 77 is still ten minutes from its target, the Pentagon.

The Administration will later claim they had no way of knowing that the Pentagon might be a target, and that they thought Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but the fact is that the plane has already flown South and past the White House no-fly zone, and is in fact tearing through the sky at over 400 nauts.

At 9:35, this plane conducts another turn, 360 degrees over the Pentagon, all the while being tracked by radar, and the Pentagon is not evacuated, and there are still no fast-movers from the Air Force in the sky over Alexandria and DC.

Now, the real kicker: A pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddle-jumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas, conducts a well-controlled downward spiral, descending the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes, brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of this building at 460 nauts.

When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddle-jumper school began to lose ground, it was added that they received further training on a flight simulator.

This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on I-40 at rush hour by buying her a video driving game. It's horse shit!

There is a story being constructed about these events. My crystal ball is not working today, so I can't say why.

But at the least, this so-called Commander-in-Chief and his staff that we are all supposed to follow blindly into some ill-defined war on terrorism is criminally negligent or unspeakably stupid. And at the worst, if more is known or was known, and there is an effort to conceal the facts, there is a criminal conspiracy going on.

Certainly, the Bush de facto administration was facing a confluence of crises from which they were temporarily rescued by this event. Whether they played a sinister role or not, there is little doubt that they have at the very least opportunistically pounced on this attack to overcome their lack of legitimacy, to shift the blame for the encroaching recession from capitalism to the September 11th terror attack, to legitimize their pre-existing foreign policy agenda, and to establish and consolidate repressive measures domestically and silence dissent. In many ways, September 11th pulled the Bush cookies out of the fire.

And given them the green light to begin constructing a long-term scenario within which to establish fascistic control measures at home and abroad as a citadel for the ruling class in the catastrophic conjuncture that we are entering based on the end of oil.

This elephant in the living room is being studiously ignored. In fact, the domestic repression has already begun, officially and unofficially. It's kind of a latter day McCarthyism. I participated in a teach-in at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on the 17th of September, and though not a single person on the panel excused or justified the attacks, and every person there offered either condolences and prayers for the victims, we were excoriated within two days as "enemies of America." Yesterday an op-ed called for my deportation (to where, one can only guess). Now Herr Ashcroft is fast tracking the biggest abrogation of US civil liberties since the so-called anti-terrorism legislation after the Oklahoma City bombing - which by the way hasn't resulted in anti-terrorism but in the acceleration of the application of the racist death penalty. The FBI has defined terrorist groups not by whether any given group has ever acted as terrorists, but by their beliefs. Some socialists and anti-globalization groups have already been identified by name as terrorist groups, even though there is not a single shred of evidence that they have ever participated in any criminal activity. It reminds me of the Smith Act that was finally declared unconstitutional, but only after a hell of a lot of people served a hell of a long time in jail for the crime of thinking.

I think this also points to yet another huge problems that the Bush regime was facing. Worldwide resistance to the whole so-called neoliberal agenda, which is a prettied up term for debt-leverage imperialism. While debt and the threat of sanctions has been used to coerce nations in the periphery, we have to understand that the final guarantor of compliance remains military action. For a global economic agenda, there is always a corresponding political and military agenda.

The focal point of these actions in the short term is Southern Asia, but they have already scripted this as a worldwide and protracted fight against terrorism.

It's far better than drug wars as a rationalization, and the drug war thing was being discredited in any case. Leftists are regaining power and popularity in Venezuela, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Brazil, and Argentina. Cuba has gained immense prestige over the last few years. The empire is beginning to unravel. We can hardly justify intervention in these places by saying they are not towing the economic line by allowing the absolute domination of their societies by transnational corporations. That exposes the agenda. So we simply claim they are supporting terrorism.

It's for all these reasons I say the left has missed the boat on this one, by allowing them to get away with rushing past the question of who did what on September 11th. If the official story is a lie, and I think the circumstantial case is strong enough to stay with this question, then we really do need to know what happened. And we need to understand concretely what the motives of this administration are.

And we need to understand more than just their immediate motives, but where the larger social forces that underwrite our situation right now are headed. I do not think this administration is engaged in the deliberative process of a political grouping that is on top of their game. They are putting together some very deliberative technical solutions in response to a larger situation that it slipping rapidly out of their control. Like clear cutting. There's a very smart technology being employed to do a very dumb thing.

What they are responding to is not September 11th, but the beginning of a permanent and precipitous decline in worldwide oil production, the beginning of a deep and protracted worldwide recession, and the unraveling of the empire.

This brings me to a point about what all this means for Americans' security, which they are perfectly justified to worry about. The actions being prepared by this administration will not only not enhance our security, it will significantly degrade it. Military action against many groups across the globe, which is what the administration is telling us quite openly they are planning to do, will put a lot of backs against the wall. That can't be very secure.

The concept of war being touted here is a violation of the principles of war on several counts, and will inevitably lead to military catastrophes, if you're inclined to view this from a position of moral and political neutrality.

And the people who are now in possession of half the world's remaining oil reserves are subject to destabilization for which we can't even pretend to predict the consequences-but loss of access to critical energy supplies is certainly within the realm of possibility. Worst of all, we will be destabilizing Pakistan, a nuclear power in an active conflict with its neighbor, and we will be provoking Russia, another nuclear power. The security stakes don't get any higher, and Americans can ill afford to ignore nukes.

And I think that this domestic agenda is a tremendous threat to the security of anyone who is critical of the government or their corporate financiers, and we already know that the real threats are against populations that can easily be scapegoated as the domestic crisis deepens. There is a very real threat right now of creeping fascism in this country, and that phenomenon requires its domestic enemies. Historically those enemies have included leftists, trade unionists, and racially and nationally oppressed sectors. This whole "state of emergency" mentality is already being used to quiet the public discourses of anti-racism, of feminism, of environmentalism, and of both socialism and anarchism. And while there is token resistance by officials to anti-Muslim xenophobia, the stereotypical images have saturated the media, and the government is already beginning to openly re-instate racial profiling. It is only a short step from there to go after other groups. We have long been prepared by the ideologies of overt and covert racism, and racism as both institution and corresponding psychology in the United States is nearly intractable.

It's for all these reasons that I say emphatically that we can not accept anything from this administration; not their policies nor their bullshit stories. What they are doing is very, very dangerous, and the time to fight back against them, openly, is right now, before they can consolidate their power and their agenda. Once they have done that, our job becomes much more difficult.

The left, if it has the capacity to self-organize out of its oblivion, needs to understand its critical roles here. We have to play the role of credible, hard-working, and non-sectarian partners in a broader peace-movement. We have to study, synthesize, and describe our current historical conjuncture. And we have to prepare leadership for the decisive conflict that will emerge to first defeat fascism then take political power.

Rosa Luxemburg's words are truer than ever right now. We are not faced with a choice between socialism and capitalism, but socialism or barbarism.

And what we can least afford are denial and timidity.
© 2001 Stan Goff





Mind Games
By Chris Floyd

"Every nation has a choice to make. In this conflict, there is no neutral ground." -- George W. Bush, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.

"These events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of the infidel." -- Osama bin Laden, Sunday, Oct. 7, 2001.

They say that great minds think alike -- and not-so-great ones do, too, apparently. Thus here we are: two spoiled rich boys made by their fathers' money and connections have now divided the world up between them, and are basically proposing to kill everyone who doesn't agree with them.

Ah yes, welcome to the 21st century!

The Mirror Crack'd

"Tweedleedum and Tweedledee/They're throwing knives into the tree/Living in the Land of Nod/Trusting their fate to the hands of God." -- Bob Dylan, from "Love and Theft," released Sept. 11.

Both Bush and bin Laden spent sybarite youths, indulging idly and amply in the pleasures of the flesh -- on someone else's dime -- before embracing a fundamentalist religious faith that provides divine sanction for a narrow set of self-selected cultural norms while consigning all unbelievers to eternal damnation. Bush, for example, is on record as saying that all Jews are going to hell; a belief no doubt shared by his semblable, bin Laden. True, Bush later weasel-worded the issue, but his literalist faith, which he publicly affirms at every possible opportunity, is crystal-clear on this point.

Now both of these zealous believers have shimmied up the greasy pole of power -- without the nuisance of actually being elected by popular vote -- from whence they can rain death on their enemies, secure in the knowledge that they are fulfilling the will of God.

Or rather, the will of an Iron Age deity cobbled together out of the noblest aspirations, deepest fears and foulest hatreds of myriads of different tribes; a will derived from ancient grab-bags of diverse texts and fragments -- accretions of mangled history, confused traditions, inspired poetry, mystical ecstasy, mass murder, chaos and longing.

Their own limited understanding of these makeshift compendiums is the ultimate authority by which the two unchosen ones send out men to kill and die.

Plainly, this is madness. But this is the world we all must live in now. "There is no neutral ground." If we oppose or question the policies of the U.S. government, then we are supporting terrorism and "must pay the price." If we oppose the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent people by stateless renegades, then we are "infidels," marked for death.

That "choice" is the limit of our freedom in this glorious new age: trapped between two Tweedles.

Dark Valley

But if we must choose, then of course we will go with Bush. After all, of the two, he is the greatest hypocrite, and therefore there's a little more room for maneuver under his dread edict. For he doesn't really mean it when he says he will attack and punish all those who "harbor and succor terrorism." He's certainly not going to bomb, say, Saudi Arabia, which has bankrolled the deadly Hamas terrorist network for years, and spent billions during the 1980s on Saddam Hussein's efforts to build a nuclear bomb -- an attempt at terror on a global scale, which the U.S. knew about and tacitly approved as part of its years-long succor of the bloodthirsty autocrat.

And certainly, Bush is not going to bomb the U.S. government, which has provided major succor to state and private terrorism over the years, in Indonesia, Guatemala, Iraq, Iran, the Congo (remember George Senior's good buddy, Mobutu?), Angola, Chile, Lebanon, Cambodia (remember U.S. support for the genocidal Pol Pot when he was fighting the Vietnamese infidels?), El Salvador, Colombia, and that first bold step toward empire, the Philippines, where more than 200,000 natives died as U.S. forces set out to, in President McKinley's words, "Christianize" the country. The Filipinos were already Catholics, but McKinley obviously shared Bush's self-selected fundamentalist Protestant cultural norms.

And Bush is surely not going to send cruise missiles into the George Bush Center for Intelligence, headquarters of the CIA, which trained, harbored, and succored the living daylights out of the same rabid Islamic extremists who've lately been practicing the agency's "covert ops" techniques to such deadly effect in New York and Washington. Nor will he direct the forces of "Operation Enduring Freedom" to overthrow the enduring despotisms of his good friends and allies in Saudi Arabia (whose draconian brand of Islam was the Taliban's model) or Pakistan (the military dictatorship that succored the Taliban and now harbors terrorists rampaging in Kashmir) or the Afghan Northern Alliance (that collection of warlords whose depredations, which include tying miscreants to two separate tanks and tearing them in half, are scarcely less heinous than those of the Taliban).

No, George is true-blue for God, but he also has a soft spot for Mammon; and an even softer spot for Dick Cheney, who spent much of the last decade scheming with his fellow oil barons to get a pipeline from the virgin fields of the Caspian Sea -- where $4 trillion in profits are waiting for them -- through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean. Cheney's business interests in oil and arms, temporarily divested while he helps direct American policy in energy and defense, rival those of the Bushes and bin Ladens. Or as the Chicago Tribune noted last year: "War is big business, and Dick Cheney is right in the middle of it."

And now we're all "right in the middle of it." But the all-too-human greed of Pious George and Deadeye Dick will no doubt trump the apocalyptic implications of Bush's political theology -- a welcome hypocrisy in the face of bin Laden's homicidal sincerity. The hypocrites will triumph, as they usually do, thank God, and their depredations will be lighter, more bearable (unless you happen to live in Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Congo, etc.). But the price will be high: a "free world" less free, less tolerant, more brutalized; a world passed into the shadows.

The Mirror Crack'd
© 2001 Chris Floyd



Dead Letter Office

Heil Bush,

Dear Propaganda Ansager Jennings,

Congratulations you have just been awarded the Vidkun Quisling Award for 2001. Your name will now live throughout history with such past award winners as Marcus Junius Brutus, Judas Iscariot, Benedict Arnold, Vidkun Quisling and last year's winner Volksjudge Antoni (light-fingers) Scalia.

Without your help shilling for us, spinning the truth, telling out right lies and ignoring the real news, holding onto power after our Coup D' Etat would have been impossible. With the help of our mutual friends, the other "Media Whores," you have made it possible for all of us to goose-step off to a brave new bank account.

Along with this award there will be an Iron Cross 2nd class presented by our glorious Fuhrer Herr Bush at a gala celebration in der Fuhrer Bunker (formally the White House) on 12-15-2001. We salute you Herr Jennings! Sieg Heil!

Signed,
Deputy Fuhrer Cheney

Heil Bush







Seeking Short, Simple Solutions

By Molly Ivins

AUSTIN -- Afghanistan is to nation-building what Afghanistan is to war -- pretty much the last place on earth you'd choose, if you had any choice at all. I point this out not to oppose the idea, about which I think we have no choice, but to underline that the task is hard, long and incredibly complicated. President Bush has said that from the beginning, but it cannot be said too often.

There are some signs of what could become a dangerous division in what has been an unusually unified America since this crisis began, and they have to do with a class difference in information. To oversimplify, those who are getting their information from the Internet and/or a broad range of publications are having conversations with one another that are radically different from those heard on many radio talk shows. This is more than the simplistic jingoism that is a constant in American life; this is simplistic jingoism with a dangerously short attention span. The "let's nuke 'em" crowd is still looking for a short, simple solution, and there just isn't one. More stark evidence of this is the poll of Pakistanis just released by Newsweek, and the numbers need to be read carefully: While 51 percent support their government's cooperation with the U.S. during the crisis, 83 percent are sympathetic to the Taliban, and almost half believe Israel was behind the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Fortunately for us, bin Laden and the Taliban are taking care of that theory. I think one of the few mistakes the Bush administration has made so far in this was to criticize the networks for putting on bin Laden -- we want everybody to hear him claim credit for those attacks.

While some of us search for the answer to the question, "Why do they hate us?" the voices on radio talk shows are answering, "Who cares? Nuke 'em." Those inclined to think that's not a bad plan might keep in mind the already-classic lead by Barry Bearak of The New York Times: "If there are Americans clamoring to bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age, they ought to know that this nation does not have far to go. This is a post-apocalyptic place of felled cities, parched land and downtrodden people." One downside to the short-simple-answer school is that those folks are going to become extremely frustrated. As others have observed, talk radio is often not so much a forum for discussion as it is a medium for venting anger, so perhaps it serves a useful purpose. But it also seems to foment anger.

In a continuing effort to focus on the practical, I see no reason not to lay out the evidence against bin Laden. It's being leaked to the media so widely one can only assume that's a policy. The Taliban are now saying they will turn bin Laden over to a third party if they see evidence. We don't want to negotiate? Fine, we don't have to talk to them. We can just make the information public for everyone, with the exception, obviously, of shielding investigative tools. The money trail offers insights on the daunting complexity of what we face. Some of the charitable money we are questioning, from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, goes to the madrasas -- religious schools of varying quality. Some offer education, some educate solely for jihad; many of the Taliban are graduates of these schools. The madrasas, in addition to religious education, provide room and board for the boys of poor families. In Pakistan, where almost the entirety of the budget goes to the military and debt service, the madrasas represent almost the whole of civil society for the poor. When experts talk about building a civil society, they mean from scratch.

While some of us are talking about how to build a civil society, achieve energy independence and settle long-standing international disputes, others are reacting like the waitress in an Austin drinking establishment, who refused to serve the East Indian guest of a regular patron, repeatedly calling him a terrorist and insisting that he leave. That's the reaction gap that concerns me.
© 2001 Molly Ivins






Democracy, General Electric Style
By David Podvin and Carolyn Kay

Shortly after George W. Bush declared his candidacy for president in June of 1999, General Electric Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Jack Welch was contacted by Bush political advisor Karl Rove. Welch later informed associates that Rove told him a Bush administration would initiate comprehensive deregulation of the broadcast industry. Rove guaranteed that deregulation would be implemented in a way that would create phenomenal profits for conglomerates with significant media holdings, like GE. Rove forcefully argued that General Electric and the other media giants had a compelling financial interest to see Bush become president.

Welch told several people at GE that the conversation with Rove convinced him that a Bush presidency would ultimately result in billions of dollars of additional profits for General Electric. Welch believed that it was his responsibility to operate in the best interest of GE shareholders, and that now meant using the full power of the world’s biggest corporation to get Bush into the White House.

Toward that end, Welch said that he would finally deal with a longstanding grievance of his: the ludicrous idea that news organizations should be allowed to operate in conflict with the best interests of the corporations that own them.

Since the beginning of the country, it has been considered appropriate for the business community to exercise its right to aggressively support the candidate that best represented its interests. The new dimension that Welch introduced was the concept that the mainstream media should aggressively advance the political agenda of the corporations that own it. He did not see any difference between corporate journalism and corporate manufacturing or corporate service industries. Business was business, and the difference between winners and losers was profit, whether you were selling nuclear power or ads on the network news. From Welch’s perspective, it was insanity, not to mention bad business practice, for the corporate owners of the mainstream media to restrain themselves from using all of their assets to promote their financial well being. In general, he saw corporate news organizations as untapped political resources that should be freed from the burden of objectivity.

Specifically, NBC News was an asset owned by the shareholders of General Electric. It existed to make profits and to serve the interests of those who owned GE stock. Period. Anything else, Welch told associates, was "liberal bullshit".

In 1988, NBC News president Lawrence Grossman insisted to Welch that news was a public trust and should not be subjected to the same pressure to make profits that was applied to other GE units. Welch fired him.

In 1999, the GE chairman decided that it was no longer good enough for NBC News to just be profitable. Seven years of a frequently uncooperative Democratic Administration, combined with the Rove-inspired vision of spectacular profits through deregulation, now motivated Welch to take action.

He began to aggressively, but very discreetly, evangelize the gospel of corporate media as corporate lobbying tool. It was not a new concept; in the opinion of many, it was already the status quo. But from Welch’s point of view, the corporate news organizations were not living up to their potential.

The mainstream media could make George W. Bush president. That would be good for Americans who believed in free markets and the merit system, Welch said.

Better yet, it would help to make General Electric even more successful and dominant, which had been Welch’s obsession for decades. Jack Welch believed that, despite earning millions annually in salary and bonuses, he was the most underpaid employee at GE. From the time he started running the company in 1981 to the end of 1999, the stock's total return (price appreciation and dividends) had been seven thousand percent. Given the brilliance of that performance, how could he possibly be overpaid, or even fairly paid? From Welch’s perspective, it was the pennies-per-hour workers in General Electric’s Asian sweatshops who were overpaid, because their individual contributions to the big picture were so meager.

The philosopher Ayn Rand wrote, "The actual performance of men in society is a constant, fierce, undefined struggle between the genius and the parasite…"

To Welch, although George W. Bush might not be a genius, his policies would encourage those who were geniuses to be even more innovative and productive. Fewer government regulations and lower corporate taxes would create technological advancement, thereby benefiting society more than all of the do-gooder social programs combined ever could. The country would be run for the benefit of the "A" people who achieved great things, not the "C" people who merely existed. In such a laissez faire environment, the powerful would be unshackled to become even more powerful, and no corporation in the world was more powerful than General Electric.

By contrast, Welch viewed Al Gore as the candidate of the parasites. Gore voters were not the generators of wealth; they were the consumers of taxes. Welch privately described the typical Gore voter as "someone who needs all these goddamned social programs because she’s too goddamned dumb to keep her legs crossed and too goddamned lazy to get an abortion."

This view of the world led Welch to implore associates at GE that doing whatever it took to get George W. Bush into the presidency was not only good for General Electric, it was good for America.

Having satisfied himself that his cause was just, Welch focused on putting his candidate in the White House with the tireless determination of a man whom Business Week described as having "an unbridled passion for winning".

He had previously personally reviewed the launch of CNBC. He now turned his attention to "reforming" the editorial content of NBC News. Welch had already secured his place as one of the business titans of the twentieth century. He expressed few regrets to confidantes, but he was wistful about his belief that GE would have made even more money if NBC News had just been tougher on a politically vulnerable Arkansas governor in 1992. With only about two years left prior to his mandatory retirement, one of Jack Welch’s last significant contributions would be to permanently eliminate the irrational belief that corporate journalists should ever be allowed to act in a way that damaged the corporate balance sheet.

For public consumption, he said the obligatory things about GE’s commitment to "journalistic integrity and independence". Privately, he saw only two differences between his employees who reported the news and those who made toasters: one, the toaster makers were "less full of shit", and, two, the journalists were not working in the best interests of the GE team.

This second point infuriated him. It galled Welch to hear what he considered to be holier-than-thou pronouncements of personal moral superiority coming from journalists whom he viewed to be inferior to himself in just about every conceivable way. GE signed their paychecks, and then in the name of "journalistic integrity and independence", they reported things that damaged the company. NBC News had even publicized that the federal government caught a GE defense subsidiary stealing massive amounts of taxpayer money. From the Welch perspective, tolerating this kind of insubordination was crazy. He did not view reporters as guardians of the truth or gatekeepers of democracy; for the most part, he saw them as "leftist slackasses".

Welch was absolutely determined to make his employees at NBC News finally genuflect to the most sacred words in his vocabulary: GE bottom line.

He perceived that there was a widely believed American myth of well-intended journalists selflessly seeking the truth, and that there would be hell to pay if a business leader like him were to overtly force reporters to be good corporate soldiers. So, being a very bright guy, he largely left the journalists at NBC alone.

Publicly.

In private, Welch was proud to have personally cultivated Tim Russert from a "lefty" to a responsible representative of GE interests. Welch sincerely believed that all liberals were phonies. He took great pleasure in "buying their leftist souls", watching in satisfaction as former Democrats like Russert and MSNBC’s Chris Matthews eagerly discarded the baggage of their former progressive beliefs in exchange for cold hard GE cash. Russert was now an especially obedient and model employee in whom the company could take pride.

''It's a double-edged sword to be under Jack's detailed look,'' one GE executive told Fortune Magazine. ''If you do well, it's great. If you don't, it's bad news."

It was bad news for NBC correspondent Claire Shipman, who made the mistake of offering a positive opinion of Al Gore on the air. Jack Welch, chairman and chief executive officer of a $350 billion conglomerate, responsible for overseeing the highly diversified activities of hundreds of thousands of employees working in over one hundred countries, was so incensed by her disobedience that he took time out of his busy schedule to personally confront her about it.

She no longer works for NBC. And her managing editor, Tom Brokaw, did not stand up for her right to journalistic independence from the corporate lord.

"I think Jack Welch’s the smartest boss I’ve ever had and he signs my paychecks," said Brokaw, exhibiting a profound understanding of the situation.

Over the years, Welch had occasionally interfered with NBC News. During the 1987 stock market crash, he ordered Grossman to forbid his journalists from using the term "Black Monday" out of concern that a panic by investors would depress GE stock.

The Welch mission was to tame the rest of them at NBC News, and to do so in a way that did not cause any journalistic prima donnas to attract unwanted public attention by openly revolting. Beyond that, Welch hoped to quietly convince other media conglomerates that the great visionary (himself) was once again in the vanguard of an exciting and highly profitable corporate trend: the total destruction of any wall that separated the newsroom from the boardroom.

Welch decided that the key factor in bringing the corporate newsrooms into line would be to change the process through which journalists were compensated and promoted. When he took over at GE, Welch believed that the way in which people were being advanced rewarded mediocrity. The unworthy candidates were being weeded out, but so were the most worthy. As in many companies, managers were hesitant to promote highly gifted subordinates who could later become rivals.

Welch has repeatedly been named the most admired executive in America, an assessment that he considered to be valid years before anyone outside GE had heard of him. His supreme self-confidence allowed him to demand that the best and the brightest be promoted, secure in the knowledge that no one could possibly be better or brighter than Jack Welch. As a result of aggressive management training that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, GE developed the strongest stable of managers in corporate America.

Welch believed that the promotion practices at NBC News encouraged disloyalty to General Electric. It was his observation that "journalistic excellence" seemed to be the flimsy, intangible standard for getting ahead in the news division. He decided that the criteria had to be changed to encourage loyal contributions to the employer, which was GE. The crucial step that Welch took was to make it well known throughout NBC News that the standard for the promotion of journalists would be the same as it was for every other employee in the corporation: outstanding contribution to the financial well being of General Electric.

The journalists who had their paychecks signed by Welch knew that favorable coverage of George W. Bush would be considered an outstanding contribution to the financial well being of General Electric.

In fairness, it should be noted that Jack Welch did not believe he was doing anything wrong by covertly maneuvering news coverage in favor of Bush. Apparently, Jack Welch has never believed that he was doing anything wrong.

Author William Greider documented the criminal and civil record of General Electric during the late 1980s and early nineties. Over a five year period, Jack Welch’s company attempted to pay a $1.25 million bribe to a Puerto Rican official for a $92 million dollar power plant contract and three GE executives were imprisoned as a result; GE defrauded the army on a $254 million contract for battlefield computers and paid tens of millions of dollars in fines; GE allegedly overcharged the army for battle tank parts and paid a $900,000 settlement; GE paid a $32 million settlement for discriminating against women and minorities; GE defrauded the air force on a missile contract and paid $1 million in fines; GE was identified as being responsible for at least 47 Superfund toxic cleanup sites; GE paid a $3 million settlement for allegedly altering labor vouchers in order to overcharge the Pentagon on jet engine contracts; and GE paid an undisclosed amount for knowingly selling defective nuclear reactor parts.

The scandals for Welch and General Electric continued through this year. Since 1992, GE has been forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in court judgments and fines for endangering Americans by illegally and repeatedly dumping toxic waste and chemicals, stealing from the military, operating unsafe workplaces, engaging in deceptive advertising, contaminating the Hudson and Housatonic Rivers, selling defective nuclear reactor parts (again), allowing safety violations at a fuel fabrication plant, polluting the air and contaminating the soil and groundwater in several states, creating asbestos-related health hazards in England, contaminating drinking water in Puerto Rico and bribing the Puerto Rico Water Resources Authority, polluting several northeastern states with PCBs, overcharging on mortgage insurance, practicing money laundering and unfair debt collection, bribing a foreign government, and knowingly broadcasting a phony news story. The company also had to admit that it invented three hundred fifty million dollars in nonexistent profits.

This is a partial list of the illegal activities perpetrated by General Electric under the leadership of Jack Welch. Mr. Welch claimed that the quickest way for a GE employee to get fired was to commit "an integrity violation". Employees who committed the "integrity violation" of missing an earnings target usually did get fired; those who committed the "integrity violations" listed in the preceding two paragraphs rarely got fired. America’s most admired executive prided himself on knowing every aspect of his company, but he also passionately declared that he was ignorant of all wrongdoing by his company. The leader who micromanaged GE to the point of insisting on reviewing the scripts for refrigerator commercials contends that he only learned after the fact that General Electric was constantly committing serious crimes.

Following the conversation with Rove, Welch instructed a subordinate to impress on senior NBC executives that the news division would now be expected to show the same unqualified devotion to General Electric that was required of every other unit. He was unusually circumspect because he realized that Clinton appointees in the Federal Communications Commission would have taken a dim view of his activities. Welch knew from his company’s countless run-ins with the law that the authorities could be outmaneuvered if things were handled with finesse.

He quietly began to dramatically change the way that things were done at NBC News. A link was established between the producers of the Sunday morning program Meet The Press and the opposition research team of the Republican Party. Delighted G.O.P. operatives were soon boasting that Tim Russert would go on the air just minutes after receiving their allegations of wrongdoing by Al Gore, and would repeat their charges verbatim. Russert was not functioning as a journalist; he had crossed the Rubicon and was acting as a mouthpiece for General Electric’s favorite political party. Welch greatly appreciated Russert, whose multi-million dollar contract he personally negotiated. The message circulated throughout NBC News that Russert was an excellent role model for reporters who wanted to succeed in the organization. Reporters at NBC News did not have to be verbally instructed on how to get ahead; they clearly saw that the Russert approach was handsomely rewarded by top management.

Reporter Andrea Mitchell of NBC Nightly News was married to Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan, who was a longtime Republican and protégé of Ayn Rand. Mitchell was a Welch favorite because he liked her "objectivity", which meant that she never had a positive word to say about Democrats. After the election, it was Mitchell who repeatedly lied when reporting that Clinton aides had vandalized the White House and stolen from Air Force One. Bush operatives were later quoted as saying that the phony vandalism story was a big help in creating the desired contrast between the "sleazy" Clinton years and the "breath of fresh air" that George W. Bush wanted to represent. Mitchell never retracted or apologized when the Government Accounting Office proved that she had been dishonest, and she was never disciplined.

There is also no evidence of Mitchell ever being angrily confronted by Jack Welch.

Welch told associates that he enlisted two members of the GE board to assist him in shaping the coverage of the election by other news organizations. Robert Wright had previously been appointed by Welch to run NBC. Welch assigned him and his fellow GE board member, money center bank executive Sandy Warner, to use their contacts in broadcasting and finance. They quietly encouraged the executives of the mainstream media organizations to rethink the relationship between news divisions and business objectives.

Wright offered the carrot. Usually through underlings, he contacted the executives of America’s most influential media conglomerates. Bush held a huge post-impeachment lead over Gore in the early presidential polls. The executives were told that Bush was going to have a massive advantage in campaign finances, and that he was almost certainly going to be elected president. Under a Bush administration, the big media outfits would be free to prosper as never before, because the federal government would cease to put limitations on their operations and expansion. A Bush administration would mean untold riches for the industry.

Wright was also the former chief executive of GE Capital, a money center powerhouse that contributes more than a third of GE’s profits, and would be the nation’s twentieth largest corporation as a stand-alone company. He knew that General Electric would win big, even when it was not directly involved in the inevitable media mega-mergers that were certain to be approved by a Bush administration. According to Fortune Magazine, "Capital's growth comes in many forms, but nothing equals the bottom-line boost of a big acquisition." GE would make huge profits by purchasing media conglomerates and by financing the deals of others.

Warner and his associates wielded the stick. As chairman of banking institution J.P. Morgan, he had great credibility when he argued that the key to winning the media competition in a laissez faire Bush era would be access to investment capital for the purpose of acquiring competitors. Those who had the best relationships with the big international banks, brokerage houses, and investment banking firms would be the predators; those who had trouble raising money would be the prey.

There were never any explicit threats, but the implication was unavoidable: Bush is going to win, so you can join the team now or you can be on the outside looking in later. The only thing that will be affected is your livelihood.

They did not have to use pressure tactics to convince Mel Karmazin of Viacom/CBS. Karmazin had always viewed news as an underprofitable millstone around the neck of the entertainment division. His vision was to make Viacom a vast network of interlocking media interests that would cross promote their products in order to maximize profit. Though CBS News had a reputation for being more liberal than its counterparts, Karmazin’s only political objective was to expand his business. The prospect of having an administration that would allow him to build an empire without interference was compelling.

Karmazin was also excited by assurances that Bush would appoint an ineffectual lackey to head the Federal Communications Commission. Karmazin’s Infinity Broadcasting had been acquired by CBS in the deal that gave him operational control of the entire network. Over the years, the FCC had fined Infinity millions of dollars because of the profane and lewd behavior of Karmazin’s most profitable broadcaster, Howard Stern. The Stern broadcasts generated massive profits and wonderful cross promotion, so the fines could have been viewed as the cost of doing a phenomenally profitable business. However, the painful aspect to Karmazin were the delays in approving broadcast mergers that occurred because FCC commissioners were alienated by Stern’s scornful defiance of them. Karmazin seethed at being harangued by the federal government just because his meal ticket spewed profane and racist epithets over the public airwaves, and performed social services like arranging for a high school boy to attend his prom with a porn star whose claim to fame was having intercourse with five hundred men in one day.

Millions of Americans supported Bush because they believed he would promote family values; Karmazin threw the support of CBS News behind Bush on the basis that family values were a campaign mirage, and that Bush had no intention of implementing them into public policy. While Bush has been president, Stern has continued to shout the same vulgarities and peddle the same sleaze over the air, but the intense pressure that was applied by the FCC during the Democratic era has not continued during the "family values" administration.

Karmazin personally contributed a thousand dollars each to the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore and John McCain, who was the Senate chairman of the Commerce Committee before which Viacom would have to do business.

The contribution that George W. Bush received from Mel Karmazin was infinitely more valuable: uncritical coverage by CBS News. When Bush stumbled and lost the New Hampshire primary, and when he repeatedly tripped over his invented facts in the first debate, and even when he staggered at the very end of the campaign after having been caught lying about his drunk driving arrest, the adjective that CBS News reporters most frequently used to describe him was "likeable".

The attitude at ABC was an extension of the personality of Disney Chairman Michael Eisner. Eisner does not like those who make waves, as the host of Politically Incorrect recently learned. After Bill Maher said that it was cowardly of America to fight battles by launching missiles from a safe distance, Eisner went out of his way to very publicly slap Maher down. This episode provided outsiders with a rare glimpse inside the corporate culture of the happy company that Mickey Mouse built: do not rock the boat or you’re in trouble. "Eisner will always stand up for principle, no matter what the cost," says a former Disney executive, "as long as that principle involves increasing his personal compensation."

As a result, the candidate who held out the prospect of fabulous wealth for the broadcast industry got favorable coverage from ABC News. In fact, Bush received better coverage than Gore from the entire mainstream media.

A study produced by the Project for Excellence in Journalism and the Princeton Survey Research Associates examined 1,149 stories from 17 news publications, programs and websites. The research revealed that there were almost twice as many positive stories about Bush as there were about Gore. Even more important than this blatant pro-Bush bias, the study found that the coverage de-emphasized the philosophical differences between the candidates. This was critical, because public opinion polls showed that the voters agreed with Gore on the issues. By robbing Gore of his greatest advantage, the media organizations were Bush’s greatest allies.

A study by the Pew Research Center examined 2,400 newspaper, TV, and Internet stories. Researchers reported that three quarters of the coverage emphasized allegations that Gore was dishonest and corrupt. The study found that a majority of the stories about Bush emphasized that he was a "different kind of Republican," which was the Bush campaign’s chosen theme.

This was not a conspiracy, nor was it an accident. It was self-interest.

The rapacious values of the networks mirrored those in the management of print journalism and the banking community in general. The emphasis in private meetings and phone conversations was that Bush would definitely call off the federal watchdogs, which would allow the giant media conglomerates to grow as large as they chose. The inconvenient pretense of federally licensed broadcasters having to serve the public interest would finally be gone. Without the intrusive feds butting in, the media giants would be free to "maximize their potential". Translated into English, this meant that the extraordinarily valuable public ownership and control of the airwaves would essentially be transferred to the media conglomerates for no cash down and monthly payments of zero.

"A promise made is a promise kept." This was George W. Bush’s frequent pledge during the campaign, and when it came time to repay his media allies for providing him with an uncritical convoy to the White House, he kept his promise. Soon after assuming office, Bush appointed Colin Powell’s son to head the Federal Communications Commission. Michael Powell could not be doing a better job of aiding the media conglomerates at public expense if his name were Michael Welch, Michael Karmazin, or Michael Eisner, Jr. One of Powell’s first moves was to announce that the regulation prohibiting ownership of both television stations and newspapers in the same city is going to be changed. "There is something offensive to First Amendment values about that limitation," he said.

There is something extraordinarily profitable to the media giants about having that limitation lifted. Without the federal government insisting on diversity in local markets, the vast multinational media corporations will be able to monopolize the flow of information in cities across America. Their potential for greater power and wealth is almost incalculable.

The deregulation of the American media, quietly promised by Bush and currently being implemented by Powell, will create countless billions of dollars of profits for the broadcasting industry. Al Gore opposed deregulation on the basis that a greater concentration of media power would damage the ability of the American people to get a diversity of information.

More than any other position he took, it cost him the presidency.

Welch’s successful behind-the-scenes campaign to influence media coverage in a way that would get Bush into the White House has not been visible to the public, with one exception. On election night, according to an eyewitness, Welch was so angry that his own NBC News team would not call the race for Bush that he personally went to the studio from which Tom Brokaw was anchoring the coverage. Welch quietly watched the broadcast for a few minutes. Two people who were present claim that, when Brokaw and Tim Russert did not take the hint that their boss had come into the newsroom because he wanted something from them, he explicitly announced that he wanted them to call the election for Bush.

They did. As a result, Bush entered the Florida recount phase with the tremendous advantage of having already been declared the winner.

Congressman Henry Waxman questioned NBC News president Andrew Lack about the incident. Waxman requested that Lack turn over to Congress the in-studio tapes that were recorded that night, so that what Welch had allegedly done could be verified. Lack, testifying under oath, agreed to do so.

As of this writing, he has refused to honor his commitment.

Aside from his one emotional faux pas on election night, Welch did a masterful job of discreetly maneuvering behind the scenes. He convinced his media conglomerate competitors that they all had a compelling interest in discarding journalistic objectivity and helping Bush into the presidency. For the public, the only telltale sign of the Welch effort was the end product: the campaign coverage itself. From the mainstream media’s unprecedented pre-primary build-up of George W. Bush to their declaration that he had won the Florida recount before all of the votes had been reviewed, never before has a presidential candidate received such active support from corporate journalism.

There were two men who had stood in the way of a George W. Bush presidency. Prior to facing Bush, John McCain and Al Gore both had reputations for being decent men who had honorably served their country in Vietnam and Washington. Based on their résumés, each of them was much more qualified to be president than Bush.

After the mainstream media got through with them, the two men were hardly recognizable. In the Republican primaries, McCain was recast from an ethical war hero to a mentally unbalanced flake who was in favor of breast cancer and whose wife was a junkie. In the general election, Gore was transformed from a bright and decent public servant into a congenital liar, a delusional criminal, and a traitor.

At the same time, George W. Bush somehow managed to fecklessly stumble through the entire campaign obstacle course without being harmed by his almost total lack of leadership experience, his highly suspicious military record, his two decades of alcohol and drug abuse, his alleged involvement in an illegal abortion, his shady business dealings, his record of corruption while governor of Texas, his losing battle with the English language, his unfortunate habit of repeatedly being caught telling blatant lies, and his positions on the major issues that consistently conflicted with the majority of voters. It helped that his opponent was unwilling to go for the jugular; it helped even more that the mainstream media considered any and all Bush vulnerabilities to be "charming".

The only real harm that the media did to Bush during the whole campaign was the revelation that he had been arrested for drunk driving in Maine. This story was not broken by ABC or NBC or CBS or The New York Times or the Washington Post or any member of the media Consortium; it was made public by a relatively obscure newspaper in Maine. In fact, the immediate reaction by all of the aforementioned media giants was to falsely accuse Gore of leaking the story. This flailing, ad hominem defense of their chosen candidate betrayed a certain unhappiness on the part of the mainstream media that the news of Bush having lied about his crime had become public knowledge.

The New York Times typified the mainstream media’s coverage of the 2000 election. The editorial board of the Times officially endorsed Al Gore for president, but it is the news section of the Times that is the common reference point, and that sets the tone for the rest of the media’s day to day coverage. In the all-important news section of The New York Times, George W. Bush was being followed by softer than mush reporter Frank Bruni, whose coverage of the candidate was so lovingly tender that Bush identified Bruni as "my favorite reporter".

The Times reporter who was assigned to track Gore was Katherine Seelye, who sat on the campaign plane alongside her pal Ceci Connolly of the Washington Post. Together with the Times’ Richard Berke, they were able to wreak a level of havoc on the Gore campaign that the Bush team never even came close to approaching. Between them, these reporters who were working for America’s two leading "liberal" newspapers managed to falsely accuse Gore of taking credit for having invented the Internet, falsely accuse Gore of claiming to have discovered the toxic waste at Love Canal, and falsely accuse Gore of lying about being the inspiration for the male lead character in "Love Story".

They also falsely accused Gore of insisting that he had been serenaded to sleep as a child to the tune of "Look For The Union Label". The candidate had actually been making a joke that was greeted with laughter by his union audience.

After the crucial first presidential debate, the unholy triumvirate falsely accused Gore of lying about an anecdote involving an old lady and her prescription medicine (the lady confirmed Gore’s account), falsely accused Gore of lying about an anecdote involving a Florida schoolgirl having to stand in class because of equipment shortages (the girl confirmed Gore’s account), and falsely accused Gore of lying about going to a fire in Texas with the head of FEMA (it was actually the number two man at FEMA, but the mainstream media did not allow for the possibility that Gore made inadvertent mistakes).

These phony accusations, not the Times low impact endorsement, had a major effect on the campaign. Every time Gore generated some momentum, the three deceitful journalists wrote of another unsubstantiated allegation that claimed the Democratic nominee was crazed with a compulsion to lie.

The New York Times Company and The Washington Post Company will both make massive deregulation-related profits under Bush that they could never have gained under Gore. Their reporters who lied about Gore were never punished, just as Andrea Mitchell of NBC was never punished for repeatedly lying about White House vandalism. In fact, all of these dishonest reporters have greatly prospered.

Once again, it is wrong to confuse self-interest with conspiracy. This is the Welch paradigm in action: It is the job of corporate reporters to help advance the corporate cause. There was no conspiracy on the part of the mainstream media organizations to usher Bush into the presidency. There was also no conspiracy on the part of the mainstream media organizations to lie, en masse, about Clinton aides vandalizing the White House and burglarizing Air Force One.

But the mainstream media organizations did lie. Some people have expressed skepticism that at least one intrepid corporate reporter has not revealed the truth about what transpired in 2000. If the charges of the mainstream media coordinating an effort at the highest levels to skew their campaign coverage in favor of Bush were true, the skeptics contend, then certainly one reputable mainstream reporter would have gone public with the story.

Daniel Schorr has been enshrined in the Hall of Fame of the Society of Professional Journalists. In 1976, he was fired by CBS News when he sent a secret congressional intelligence report to the Village Voice after CBS had refused to reveal the story to the public. According to Schorr, he was punished by network executives who had reached a deal with the White House to go easy on the administration.

Schorr was fired for reporting the truth when it conflicted with the interests of his employer.

Two Fox News reporters in Tampa, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, assembled a report revealing the covert use of a potentially harmful synthetic milk-producing hormone that was being injected into dairy cows throughout much of America. Fox executives killed the story out of concern that the dairy industry would retaliate by refusing to purchase commercials on the network. The reporters were so concerned about the safety of consumers that they defied their bosses and released the report to the public. Fox immediately fired them.

Akre and Wilson were fired for reporting the truth when it conflicted with the interests of their employer.

NBC’s own Arthur Kent was a star foreign correspondent after gaining fame as the intrepid "Scud Stud" during the Gulf War. But when Kent was reassigned to the NBC news magazine Dateline, he was appalled to see what corporate journalism in America had become.

"A climate was being created in which corruption was imminent," Kent told the Ottawa Sun. "Once I had been convinced to join Dateline, I warned them in writing that the editorial direction of the program was dangerous and that the manipulation and re-editing of stories was going to cause trouble."

Kent offered to resign, but Jack Welch would not allow an uncooperative journalist to get off the hook quite that easily. Kent was reassigned to cover the war in Bosnia under ridiculously hazardous conditions. When he refused, NBC publicly called him a coward, effectively ending his career with the network.

After an expensive battle, Kent won a court ordered apology and substantial financial damages. He stated that the important aspect of the trial was the revelation of how General Electric and NBC now operate.

"It was a GE-style, hardball approach: If you're not going to work for us, you're not going to work for anybody," he said. "They were seen by the public to have lied."

But the ethical journalist who called them on their lies had now gone off to Europe in search of a country with freedom of the press. And every journalist who remained at NBC learned from watching the Kent episode that insisting on telling the truth in their reports was extremely hazardous to their vocational health.

Kent was fired for demanding to report the truth when it conflicted with the interests of his employer.

The process of natural selection is the answer to the skeptics who question why no mainstream journalist has reported on this matter. The mainstream reporters who had the integrity to tell the truth, even if doing so would get them fired, have already been fired. The reporters who currently work for corporate news outlets keep their jobs by obeying the implicit corporate rules that have been put in place by executives like Jack Welch.

If not for the successful effort by Welch to manipulate media coverage of the election and the Florida recount, George W. Bush would not be president today. The Consortium ballot study was started by the same forces that had carried Bush across the finish line. The study was their attempt to universally legitimize the Bush presidency at a time when it looked as though there would otherwise be congressional gridlock that would limit how much Bush could accomplish for his campaign contributors.

Welch and the others who have been involved in covertly promoting Bush interests did not expect that the ballot study would reveal a decisive Gore victory. Although Consortium members disingenuously claim that the outcome of the study is unknown, they are aware that the observers in the coding rooms who were familiar with Florida voting patterns were able to perceive a dominant Gore trend.

The members of the Consortium are now stuck with a result that they view as being counterproductive to attaining their financial objectives. There is increasing recognition on the part of the public that something about the current delay in publishing the ballot study is not kosher.

The public pressure to release the results is making it likely that the Consortium will feel the need to reveal something. The precedent in this situation is the Miami Herald method of distortion, wherein the recount numbers proved that Gore won but the headlines claimed that Bush won. The Consortium could reprise that approach.

It could seek to obscure and confuse the situation by having various Consortium members issue conflicting accounts of who won. This would explain why the Wall Street Journal is participating in a recount after editorializing that any further recounts would be "un-American". few more votes than Bush, but it really was too close to call, and the Consortium members can’t even agree among themselves who won, so it is impossible to ever really know for certain."

It is now improbable that the Consortium will claim that Bush got the most votes because too many people who are intimately familiar with the process would publicly refute such a blatant lie.

Patriots who believe that democracy must be more than an empty cliché, and who want the unvarnished truth about the real winner of the 2000 presidential election, are severely limited in what they can do. We live in a pseudo democracy that has neither a free mainstream press nor a functioning opposition party. The current occupant of the White House is illegitimate by any standard other than "the ends justify the means". The Supreme Court is corrupt. Most Americans have "moved on" and "gotten over it".

For the minority in this country, those who are emotionally capable of confronting unpleasant facts, the truth is as clear as it is unpopular: America is now a place in which the son of a former leader who used to control the secret police was appointed to run the country by his daddy’s judges after his brother pulled an electoral fast one for him in the southern part of the country. The military contributed to the outcome by accusing the opposition leader of being "unpatriotic", and by demanding that illegally cast military votes for Bush be counted as valid. The mainstream media protects its financial interests by smearing any dissidents as "fringe people".

Many Americans prefer to dismiss these contentions as a "conspiracy theory". Doing so is far less painful than coming to terms with the fact that this type of election result happens routinely around the world, but only in countries where self-government is rhetoric instead of reality. We are programmed from early childhood to recite that America is a democracy, yet even the most powerful programming is vulnerable to being overwhelmed by the truth. The unresolved question is how much truth will be required before it registers with the general public that they really have lost, in the words of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the right to have their votes counted.

In 2000, Americans witnessed convoluted vote counting methods in Florida that were designed to disqualify as many voters as it took in order to declare that the winner was the candidate who received fewer votes statewide and nationally. We saw a Supreme Court decision that was so surrealistically disgraceful that none of the five members of the majority was willing to claim authorship of it and, for the only time in the history of the Court, the majority declared that its decision did not establish a precedent. There was no conspiracy involved in the Supreme Court decision, either. There was only the self-interest of five amoral judges taking advantage of an opportunity to increase their power by disregarding the law and selecting a president who would add to their conservative majority.

The Consortium now has ironclad proof that the wrong man is in the White House, and the mainstream media preemptively insist that it doesn’t matter. NBC News analyst and Welch protégé Tim Russert recently said, "The issue of legitimacy has been resolved." He does not want the results of the ballot study to be released.

Neither does Mr. Berke of The New York Times, a member of the Consortium. Berke recently wrote that releasing the results would be divisive, and that it really doesn’t matter who won. It is unusual, to say the least, for a reporter to write that a project on which his newspaper has just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars doesn’t matter. It is even more unusual for the paper to then publish such heresy.

Of course, Berke knows that reporting the truth would not be divisive if the ballot study had proven that the man who really won the election is currently president. Berke has at least one contact inside the ballot study who has also spoken with MakeThemAccountable. We can therefore report with certainty that Mr. Berke wrote his rationalization for withholding the truth only after he was informed by an inside source that the study definitively proves that Al Gore won Florida.

Berke also claimed that the reason the Consortium members have delayed releasing the results of the ballot study is that the war on terrorism has monopolized the attention of all of their political reporters. This is an uncommonly transparent lie, even for the congenitally dishonest Mr. Berke. He is a political reporter who works for a Consortium paper, and his own attention has not been monopolized by the war on terrorism. He has spent his time since September 11 continuing his two-year disinformation campaign to sell George W. Bush to the American people. Berke wrote on October 20 that Gore supporters are privately expressing to him that they are "relieved" that the Supreme Court selected Bush to be president.

Brave reporters like Walter Cronkite are now distant memories of the pre-Welch era of journalism; the modern guardians of the truth are opportunistic prostitutes like Tim Russert and abject liars like Richard Berke. It is difficult to find any journalists in the corporate media who believe that the true outcome of the balloting in Florida matters. The people whose lives are supposedly dedicated to reporting the truth are adamant that, in the case of which candidate actually won the presidency, reporting the truth just doesn’t matter.

In a democracy, it would matter. In a democracy, the identity of the person who was given the right to govern by the voters would be of paramount importance. In a democracy, the will of the people would be the single most important story possible, even more important than salacious stories about Democratic officials cavorting with Washington interns.

Who won the election does not matter when there is General Electric style democracy. GE has a long history of participating in governance around the world. The company has protected its financial interests by involving itself through active intervention and bribes in Indonesia, Mexico, Lesotho, Egypt, Israel, and Japan, among other countries.

For many years, human rights activists have cautioned that allowing multinational corporations to impose their will on people in foreign countries is a dangerous policy. There have been warnings that one day, corporations like General Electric might not feel constrained to limit their interference in the leadership selection process to places like Indonesia. They might decide that there is nothing sacred about national boundaries anywhere. Liberals have been called paranoid for warning that the same corporations that tampered with governments in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia would eventually decide that the will of the voters in the United States is not sacrosanct, either.

In 2000, the paranoid warnings became reality. General Electric and like-minded interests were able to defy the will of the majority of the American people and drag into the White House the least qualified major party presidential candidate in the history of the country. Since gaining office, George W. Bush has been slavishly devoted to enacting the corporate agenda. Even during a time of war, he has been focused on relentlessly advocating the interests of those who made him president.

Six days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Bush FCC appointee Michael Powell announced a ruling that affected corporations having licenses to operate 130 UHF TV stations broadcasting on certain frequencies. The FCC gave the media companies approval to sell those taxpayer-owned licenses and keep the tens of billions of dollars that will be generated by the sales.

It was never a conspiracy. It was always greed. The corporate elite and their media Consortium have literally hundreds of billions of reasons to do what it takes to keep Bush in power. Whether they ever publicly report the inconvenient truth of the decisive Gore victory is problematic. It ultimately depends on whether the American people are so insistent in their demand to see the accurate outcome, that continuing to conceal the truth will cause more trouble for the media conglomerates than it is worth to them.

In the absence of overwhelming public pressure by citizens who value democracy more than multinational corporations value money, the members of the Consortium will honor the paradigm of Jack Welch: They will disregard all principles of journalism, in order to do what is best for the corporate bottom line.

Epilogue: Jack Welch retired as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric on September 7, 2001. According to Business Week, "Welch's leadership style has become so embedded in the organization that even his retirement is unlikely to erode his impact". He is currently employed as a management consultant to major corporations that he refuses to identify.
© 2001 David Podvin and Carolyn Kay



The Cartoon Corner

This edition we're proud to showcase the cartoons of Doug Marlette






To End On A Happy Note ...

SKY PILOT
By The Animals

He blesses the boys as they stand in line
The smell of gun grease and the bayonets they shine
He's there to help them all that he can
To make them feel wanted he's a good holy man
Sky pilot.....sky pilot
How high can you fly
You'll never, never, never reach the sky

He smiles at the young soldiers
Tells them its all right
He knows of their fear in the forthcoming fight
Soon there'll be blood and many will die
Mothers and fathers back home they will cry
Sky pilot.....sky pilot
How high can you fly
You'll never, never, never reach the sky

He mumbles a prayer and it ends with a smile
The order is given
They move down the line
But he's still behind and he'll meditate
But it won't stop the bleeding or ease the hate
As the young men move out into the battle zone
He feels good, with God you're never alone
He feels tired and he lays on his bed
Hopes the men will find courage in the words that he said
Sky pilot.....sky Pilot
How high can you fly

You'll never, never, never reach the sky
You're soldiers of God you must understand
The fate of your country is in your young hands
May God give you strength
Do your job real well
If it all was worth it
Only time it will tell

In the morning they return
With tears in their eyes
The stench of death drifts up to the skies
A soldier so ill looks at the sky pilot
Remembers the words
"Thou shalt not kill"
Sky pilot.....sky pilot
How high can you fly
You never, never, never reach the sky
© 2001 Burdon/Briggs/Weider/Jenkins/McCulloch





Here are a few EXECUTIVE ORDERS associated with FEMA that would suspend the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. These Executive Orders have been on record for nearly 30 years and could be enacted by the stroke of a presidential pen:

#10990 allows the government to take over all modes of transportation and control of highways and seaports.
#10995 allows the government to seize and control the communication media.
#10997 allows the government to take over all electrical power, gas, petroleum, fuels and minerals, public and private.
#10998 allows the government to take over all food supplies and resources, public and private, including farms and equipment.
#11000 allows the government to mobilize American civilians into work brigades under government supervision; allows the government to split up families if they believe it necessary.
#11001 allows the government to take over all health, education and welfare functions and facilities, both public and private.
#11002 designates the Postmaster General to operate a national registration of all persons: men, women and children, for government service.
# 11003 allows the government to take over all airports and aircraft, including commercial aircraft.
#11004 allows the Housing and Finance Authority to relocate communities, build new housing with public funds, designate areas to be abandoned as "unsafe", and establish new locations for populations.
#11005 allows the government to take over railroads, inland waterways and storage facilities, public and private.
#11051 specifies the responsibility of the Office of Emergency Planning and gives authorization to put all EOs into effect in times of increased international tensions and economic or financial crisis.
#11310 grants authority to the Department of Justice to enforce the plans set out in EOs, to institute industrial support, to establish judicial and legislative liaison, to control all aliens, to operate penal and correctional institutions, and to advise and assist the President. M
#11049 assigns emergency preparedness function to federal departments and agencies, consolidating 21 operative EOs issued over a fifteen year period.
# 11921 allows the Federal Emergency Preparedness Agency to develop plans to establish control over the mechanisms of production and distribution, of energy sources, wages, salaries, credit and the flow of money in U.S. financial institution in any undefined national emergency. It also provides that WHEN A STATE OF EMERGENCY IS DECLARED BY THE PRESIDENT, CONGRESS CANNOT REVIEW THE ACTION FOR SIX MONTHS.






Activist Alerts

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing." ... Edmund Burke



THE MEDIA COVER-UP OF THE GORE VICTORY
By Maggie.

Yesterday, after I sent out the first batch of messages regarding the cover-up of the final results of the Florida vote count, I received a telephone call from someone who, like David Podvin’s source, does not want to be named. He worked on the NORC recount. Although he was not privy to any final numbers, he confirmed David’s story, in the sense that the trend was obviously toward many, many more votes for Gore than were included in the totals certified by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

The Florida Ballot Project page of the University of Chicago National Opinion Research Center (NORC)’s website contains the following text:

We have now completed all data-collection operations for the Florida Ballot Project. In recent weeks, we have developed computer databases that contain the results of the ballot examinations. At this moment, the databases are essentially complete.

The next step is to release the data to our clients, the media group, who will analyze the data and report initial findings. After a brief embargo, we will make the databases available to the public through our website.

No schedule has been set for that process. The media group has postponed release because of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

I received a telephone call this morning from someone who also wants to remain anonymous, a member of the political press who has contacts in the higher echelons of both the Democratic and the Republican parties. He spoke to a University of Chicago official this past Monday (The New York Times’ announcement of an indefinite postponement was made on the previous Thursday), who said that the results "will be released soon."

Let’s make sure that happens. I invite you to write to members of the consortium and to NORC demanding the release of the data.

The New York Times Co., letters@nytimes.com
Dow Jones & Co. (Wall Street Journal), http://public.wsj.com/tour/ijcontact.html
The Associated Press, opinion@thewire.ap.org
The Washington Post Co., letters@washpost.com
Cable News Network, http://www.cnn.com/feedback/
The Palm Beach Post, pbonline@pbpost.com
The St. Petersburg Times, letters@SPTimes.com
Tribune Co., ctc-TribLetter@Tribune.com
NORC, norcinfo@norcmail.uchicago.edu

I’ll keep you updated on any additional information I receive.
© 2001 G.A.G.



TO: All Those Interested In A Candlelight Vigil Planned For December 12, 2001.

I have rewritten a suggested letter for requesting a Proclamation in recognition of the events of December 12th. I suggest the you get these written and in the mail as soon as possible. I have always requested these from the Governor of my state. I have tried to write this so as not to give the Republican Governors an excuse for not issuing you a proclamation. In Florida, the governors office issues very a very fancy proclamation that would rival the Declaration of Independence to organizations, groups requesting them. They are fantastic attention getters when trying to get media coverage for your event. When I send out my announcements to the local TV stations, Radio, Newspapers, etc, I always include a copy of the proclamation. Other suggestions would be to ask your Senators, your Mayor, to also prepare a similar proclamation. I ask all of them. The worst that can happen is that they will say no. If they say no, chalk it up on your little list of who NOT to vote for next time! Submit the wording for the proclamation below to your elected officials and ask them to prepare a proclamation for your event.

Proclamation

The National Candlelight Vigil- 2001 December 12, 2001

I hereby officially recognize and honor

The National Candlelight Vigil-2001 and I urge all citizens of ( Your State name )to join me in this recognition. The National Candlelight Vigil to be held on December 12, 2001, to remind citizens of the United States of America of the need for Voter Reform to and protest the one year anniversary of the Supreme Court decision. This Vigil will also remember those killed in the senseless criminal terrorist acts committed upon New York City, Washington, DC & Pennsylvania. These acts of terrorism killed U. S. citizens as well as citizens of many other nationalities.

As Governor of (State Name ) I commend The National Candlelight Vigil, 2001 for their dedication to people entitled to vote & in remembrance of those innocent people killed by acts of terrorism.


© 2001 G.A.G.

SUPPORT THE OREGON DEMOCRATS' PROPOSAL TO IMPEACH THE FELONIOUS FIVE!

Here's what you can do to help:

1. Write your members of Congress and urge them to support the Democratic Party of Oregon's resolution.

2. Contact your local and/or state Democratic Party office urging them to also support the resolution.

3. Contribute to the Democratic Party of Oregon. We plan to continue to promote this resolution and your contribution, no matter how small, will help us in this fight for democracy. Click on Democratic Party of Oregon to send your support today!


Supreme Injustice
by STEVE COBBLE

Lest we forget--just over six months ago, the Rehnquist Court stole an election in broad daylight. In fear of the truth, the Scalia Five intervened to block all votes from being counted, an action "unprecedented" (both historically and judicially) in US history. Though the June 12 "anniversary" went unnoticed by the media, we must never forget.

Was it the worst Supreme Court decision in US history, as American University Constitutional scholar Jamin Raskin has suggested? Considering that Raskin is a staunch civil rights advocate, the very thought that he would rank Bush v. Gore lower than both the Dred Scott and Plessy rulings is instructive. Nor does Raskin stand alone in his opinion of this judicial coup.

Justice John Paul Stevens: "One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. I respectfully dissent."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: "In sum, the Court's conclusion that a constitutionally adequate recount is impractical is a prophecy the Court's own judgment will not allow to be tested. Such an untested prophecy should not decide the Presidency of the United States. I dissent." And related is the unsigned per curiam decision of the Scalia 5, a transparent attempt to try to avoid history's scarlet letter.

Hendrik Hertzberg, former presidential speechwriter: "The election of 2000 was not stolen. It was expropriated."

David Kairys, Temple University: "We had a constitutional crisis, and it was Bush v. Gore. History will not be kind."

Suzanna Sherry, Vanderbilt University: "There is really very little way to reconcile this opinion other than that they wanted Bush to win."

Jeffrey Rosen, legal scholar: "They have...made it impossible for citizens of the United States to sustain any kind of faith in the rule of law as something larger than the self-interested political preferences of William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, and Sandra Day O'Connor."

Randall Kennedy, Harvard University: "But we should also insist that there be no confirmation for Scalia-like champions of the right-wing agenda. The Supreme Court has hurt its own reputation by wrongly intervening to ensure the victory of George W. Bush. Those who abhor what the Court did should say so and say so loudly and clearly."

Jesse Jackson and John Sweeney: "But if it comes down for justices to the 14th amendment and the promise of equal protection, one can only hope for the sake of the country that they consider how not counting all the votes mirrors too closely the habits of heart and mind that brought us slavery and segregation--the original sins of our nation that the equal protection clause sought to repair."

And, of course, Vincent Bugliosi, prosecutor of Charles Manson and author of several bestselling true-crime books, in The Betrayal of America: ". . . the Court committed the unpardonable sin of being a knowing surrogate for the Republican Party instead of being an impartial arbiter of the law.... [The Court searched] mightily for a way, any way at all, to aid their choice for president, Bush, in the suppression of the truth, finally settling, in their judicial coup d'État, on the untenable argument that there was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause..."

Recent polls indicate the public's growing dissatisfaction with the results of the Scalia Five's decision. A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center and Princeton Survey Research Associates (June 13-17) showed George W. Bush's job approval rating at just 50 percent, down six points from March; the New York Times survey with CBS News (June 14-18) put the rating at 53 percent, down seven points from March. And Democracy Corps's Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll (June 11-13) found that 48 percent of likely voters think the nation is currently on the "wrong track." Perhaps most tellingly, 25 percent of voters in the Democracy Corps poll said that the phrase "not really elected President" describes Bush "very well," with another 15 percent saying that it describes him "well"--in other words, six months after the Scalia Five coup, 40 percent of likely voters still believe Bush was not really elected President.

What then, is to be done?

The least we can do is know our own history, and to understand that what the Injustices did was an insult to the dreams and ideals of Lexington and Concord, Valley Forge and Jefferson and Paine, Gettsyburg and Lincoln and Douglass, Selma and King, Seneca Falls and Anthony, Delano and Chavez, Flint and Debs and Lewis. We can bear witness to injustice, in the nonviolent protest tradition of Thoreau, Gandhi, King, Havel, Robinson, Chavez.

The Scalia Five's judicial coup came down on the second Tuesday last December. So, on the second Tuesday of July, July 10, 2001, the Tuesday after the Pro-Democracy Convention in Philadelphia, the Tuesday between Independence Day and Bastille Day, the Institute for Policy Studies and friends are calling for a peaceful, nonviolent vigil at the Supreme Court building, at noon.

On July 10--and each Tuesday at noon from then on--let's gather at the scene of the crime, and bear witness to the truth. The Scalia Five won't be there; but we should be.

Bring a candle or a bell, like the Czechs a decade ago. Bring a copy of the Voters' Bill of Rights, or the US Constitution. Send an e-mail to all your friends, with your favorite quote from this list. Bring Pablo Neruda's and Marge Piercy's poems. Bring the next generation, so they will never forget. Bring your commitment to restore, rebuild, and expand American democracy. The Supreme Court cheated. Democracy lost. For now.
©2001 STEVE COBBLE


Send $100 or $1000 to The Heritage Foundation or Other Right-Wing Groups

This ultra-conservative group needs donations! Lend them a helping hand by sending them a few $100 or $1000 bills ... Confederate ones! Click here to print or download the bills. Send them to other right-wing groups as well!

And if you still want to annoy the Heritage Foundation, you can always go to their online donation form as soon as you try to leave the page, a pop-up window appears asking why you decided not to donate. Give them an explanation, but remember to be polite!


TO OUR REPRESENTATIVES AND SENATORS IN THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS

We, the undersigned voters, know that our cherished democracy is endangered from within by the grave and potentially fatal flaws in our voting systems exposed by the Presidential Election of 2000.

As our elected representatives, you have the duty, the opportunity, and the privilege to correct these flaws and to restore fair and honest elections throughout our nation. To this end, we charge you to construct and pass a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS, which shall include:

Strict enforcement and extension of the Voting Rights Act to prevent the disenfranchisement of voters and require full investigation and criminal prosecution of any offenders;

Standardized, easily understandable federal election ballots

Funding to replace old and unreliable voting machines to ensure that every vote is counted fairly and accurately

Genuine campaign finance reform that bans campaign contributions from special interests

Replacement of the Electoral College with a majority-rule election, or substantial reform of the Electoral College to allow for proportional representation

Measures to increase voter participation by eliminating bureaucratic hurdles to voter registration and turnout, including language barriers, physical barriers, archaic equipment, and lack of resources

Enactment and enforcement of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS will restore trust in our government and encourage participation in our democratic processes. The linchpin of a democracy is the process by which we select our representatives and leaders. The right to vote is our defining right as citizens of this nation. We call upon our elected representatives to protect our Constitution from abusive exercise of government power by enacting a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

We pledge our full and constant support for enactment of a VOTERS BILL OF RIGHTS.

BOYCOTTS


Top twenty Republican donors with global consumer brands:

1 Philip Morris - $4,554,732
2 BP (ARCO) - $1,865,458
3 Am way - $1,729,500
4 News Corp - $1,204,950
5 Enron - $1,146,615
6 Citigroup – $1,079,225
7 MCI Worldcom - $1,074,608
8 Federal Express (FDX Corp) - $1,057,550
9 Pfizer - $1,051,225
10 Chevron Texaco - $862,056
11 Bristol-Myers Squibb - $848,556
12 Revlon Group/ MacAndrews & Forbes - $761,000
13 Limited Inc - $750,000
14 Glaxo-Wellcome - $702,795
15 Walt Disney - $663,625
16 Anheuser-Busch - $663,025
17 Archer Daniels Midland - $660,000
18 Microsoft - $644,816
19 Coca Cola - $610,875
20 Schering-Plough - $600,685



"Lie" isn't an adequate word for what Republicans say. We need a new term; I propose anti-truth, as in, "There are lies, damned lies, and Republican anti-truths." Like matter and anti-matter, Republicans and the truth just can't occupy the same space. What they say goes all the way through and past "untrue" into the realm of turning reality inside out, tying a knot in it, and yanking hard.
M.E. Cowan




CONTRIBUTING LINKS



















Parting Shots...



The Big Bamboozle: Danger Are My Bidness

I knew she was trouble the minute she come through my door.

It started back in January, when I got the call from Rove. It was a cool night in D.C., the kinda night what got a thousand stories - alluva 'em sad. It was the kinda night your granma'd tell you about when she was a few over the line. It was the kinda night what makes a man's hand itch to hold a dame or a glass a' ice-cubes - splashed with just enough Jack to keep 'em from gettin' lonely. It was the kinda night made a man sorry he'd give all that up. That's the kinda night it was.

"It's your 37.5 cents, Rove," I said, forgettin' for a moment, and reachin' down into my desk drawer. My hand come up empty. And sad. "But let's make it quick. I got a lotta regrettin' ahead a' me, and only the night to do it in".

"George," he said, "what's that music you're playing in the background?"

"It's a little thing called 'One More for the Road', Karl," I said, "What's on your mind, fella?"

"I just talked to Christie Whitman. I think she's ready to play ball"

"You can't play ball without what you know the game. Does she know the game, Karl?"

He didn't say nothin' right away. "I have no earthly idea what you are talking about, George," he said finally.

I chuckled. "I guess you don't Karl. I guess you don't" I chuckled again, this time for emphasis.

"George," he said, sighing, "Do you want to talk to her or not?"

"Sure, Karl, sure," I said, "What's the difference, in a kill-crazy town like this?"

He sighed again and hung up.

I swiveled my chair to face the night. It was the kinda night that - but then you know all that.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

She showed up in my doorway the next afternoon, right on time. My doorway looked pretty happy about it, and I could see why.

She was wearin' a black dress with about a thousand polka dots - each one a center a' lastin' interest. She had on a wide-brimmed black hat that shaded her face so that all's you could see was her eyes; eyes that cut right through you, eyes that went clear on out the wall behind you, then around the corner and down the street a ways. Them kinda eyes.

She come in like a cool drink a' water on a hot day, and poured herself into the chair across from me.

Governor Whitman," I said, 'cause we had to start somewhere.

"Call me Christie," she breathed, "Christie Todd."

"What can I do you for...Christie Todd?"

She took a unfiltered Camel from a silver case. I got a match and flick-lit it with my thumbnail. It flared up, got caught in my nail. Burned my thumb. I dropped it.

Third time today.

I lit another one. She covered my mitt with her slim fingers and drew it to her cigarette. She leaned back and blew a smoke ring in my direction. "You know what I want," she said. Her voice was hot and smoky like a trash fire, cool and distant like a union audience, a kick in the gut like by a Emu, that's what they was like.

Yeah. Yeah, sure. I knew what she wanted. But I knew I had t' be careful. She was tough, plenty tough. I seen the news pictures with her friskin' suspects and wearin' a big grin. They say humans is the only ones what show their teeth when they're happy.

But then they say a lotta things.

"You want the EPA.," I said simply. You think you're woman enough to handle it?" She looked at me hard, like a SAT test. "Yeah. You man enough to give it to me?"

I heard this question lotsa times before, and I didn't have no better answer this time than all the others.

"Listen, sister," I said, "I ain't got the time for all this Percy Flage. This is politics, baby. It's the big supermarket. It's a fast flight on the red-eye to a little town called 'mid-term elections' - ever hear a' it? Sometimes your ticket gets stamped 'No Return'. So I gotta know, baby, and I gotta know now, you on board or what?"

She just stared at me for a moment. "You, know," she said finally, "You're really something."

"Thanks," I chuckled appreciably, "You're aces with me too, kid." For a moment our eyes locked and our hands almost touched, then I come to myself, and sat back. "I could listen to you butter me up all day, sweetheart, it's good for my girlish complexion. But just to move this pow-wow off the dime, why don't you lead the next dance?"

"Okay," she said, "But I need to explain something first."

"Sure, kid, I said. It's your 37.5 cents". I sat back and absent-minded reached down into the drawer again.

Damn.

"You see," she said, "I work in a dirty state -"

"They're all dirty, baby," I consoled.

"No, no," she said, "I mean it's got a lot of pollution. New Jersey is the most polluted state in the country"

I chuckled inside my head. Actual, my own Texas is the most polluted, but I wanted to see how she handled herself when she thought the game was goin' her way. There'd be plenty a' time later to see how she did when it wasn't.

It was late afternoon now, and the sun slantin' through the blinds casted zebra stripes over the room. When the stripes come to her, they seemed to go crazy, makin' all kinds of fascinatin' twists and turns 'all over her, like a drunk's ski-trails.

For a while I was imaginin' myself skiin'.

"Please understand," she went on, "When I first became Governor, I was pretty disdainful of all the environmental preaching. I thought most of the laws were silly and anti-business. But, after a while, I began to see that they had helped to bring pollution down without hurting the economy at all - quite the reverse."

She shrugged. "So, for the rest of my term I've been increasingly pro-environment. Now people who wouldn't even talk to me in the early days, people whom I now respect, have come to respect me, too! I...I think it would kill me to lose that respect."

She leaned forward, and her perfume rang my bell like the he-man test in a carnival "I must know," she said, "That I can count on you; that I can depend on you to back me up. I want so badly to do a good job. It's the only reason I'm thinking of leaving the Governorship."

I wasn't havin' none a' that on my plate. "I like violins, too, sweetheart, why don't you play yours a little louder? Or, better still, why don't we can the malarkey and get down to the real reasons you're pullin' out early."

I leaned forward and started tickin' points off on my fingers. "In the first place, Jersey's a two-term state. You're at the end a' the road next year anyhow. Second, your tax-cut chickens is comin' home to roost this year, and the Governor's chair is gonna turn into a hot seat right soon. Third, you only won the last two elections by a one-point margin, so I wouldn't give you two cents for your chances in a real Senator race. Finally, Colin's gettin' Secretary a' State, and I don't see no other Cabinet spot for you. Way I see it? EPA's about the only shot left on your table."

I leaned back again. "That sound right to you?"

She looked at me like she'd fell off the roof. She wasn't ready for that. I may not be a genius, but if it's one thing I know, it's all the ways somebody can be behind the eight-ball. It's my best area of expert. I can be real smart about that.

She lowered her head quietly. I thought I heard a sniffle. "All right! All right!" she said, finally, "It's true! I've no where else to turn! But promise me you'll be on the level with me." She wiped her eyes, "Will you give me a square deal?" she said.

I said, "Yes," right off, 'cause I've discovered how much it depresses people if I answer that question any other way.

"I knew it," she said, all relieved, "They told me you were a right guy". Which caused me to raise my eyebrows a little. I didn't know who'd said that, but I didn't think I liked it. I been in the GOP a long time, and I know once they hang that "trustworthy" label on you, brother, you're finished,.

But I put my paw over hers, and said, "I promise. You got my word on it as a honorary Junior Texas Ranger."

Then I sat back. "What's your first prioritizin'?" I asked.

"I've been thinking about that," she said, "I think we should focus on global warming and the Kyoto accords. I remember that you campaigned on reducing carbon dioxide emissions, which I fully support too. Then there's the Clinton administration's initiative on reducing arsenic levels - that looks pretty good to me too. Are those all right with you?"

"Listen," I said, "When it comes to the environment you got cart blank, you are It, the big kahuna, numero uno 'round here"

"But what...what about your advisors on the Council on Environmental Quality? Won't they want a say in all this?"

"I don't even know what that is. How many ways I gotta say this, sweetheart? You're the boss, the big cheddar, the last word, la ultima, and you don't need to clear nothin' with nobody 'cept me. Got it?" And I shook her hand.

She looked at me grateful. Then, without a word further, she got up and was gone. Gone like a prayer in a crap game, gone like a rose in a hail storm, gone like a mother's kiss on the first day of school. That kinda gone.

I just sat there for a few minutes, reflectin'. Then with a slow sigh, I started my calls. First I called Karl to tell him I got his recommendations about how we should dump the Kyoto accord, Carbon Dioxide emissions reduction, and scotch the arsenic regulations. Told him if he liked it, it was jake with me. Then I called Condie, told her Christie would be comin' on board and would need a little watchin', and that I was makin' her personal responsible for seein' to it that Christie took things in the right direction.

Then I hung up and reached into my drawer.

Empty as a party platform.

I kinda hated to do it to the poor kid, but it's a tough game in a tough town, and she ought a' know the score by now. Way I see it, she's like what in my flyin' days we useta call a "wind dummy." Sometimes when you're about to land, and you don't know which way the wind's blowin' you push the wind dummy out and watch how it falls. All the way down.

Other thing is, EPA Administrator's just about the only job in the government where you is guaranteed to catch hell from all sides all the time. It may not hurt to have Christie in a place where she can't make nothin' but enemies for a few years. We ain't all that far from 2004, and intra-party rivals got a habit a' poppin' up like Whack-A-Moles.

I sighed again, turned up the volume on "One More for the Road", turned out the lights, and let the night swallow me like a goldfish at a frat party.

It was that kinda night.
© 2001 Hank Blakely





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Issues & Alibis Vol 1 # 33 © 10/26/2001

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