Cheney Defends Efforts to Obtain Records

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January 15, 2007

By MARK MAZZETTI

Vice President Dick Cheney yesterday defended efforts by the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency to obtain financial records of Americans suspected of terrorism or espionage, calling the practice a “perfectly legitimate activity” used partly to protect troops stationed on military bases in the United States.

But the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee expressed concern over the expansion of the military’s domestic intelligence collection efforts and said his committee would investigate how the Pentagon was using its authority.

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” Mr. Cheney said “national security letters” issued to banks and credit agencies were an essential tool for investigating terrorism cases in the United States.

He said the Pentagon had crossed no legal boundaries in issuing the letters independent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“There’s nothing wrong with it or illegal,” Mr. Cheney said. “It doesn’t violate people’s civil rights. And if an institution that receives one of these national security letters disagrees with it, they’re free to go to court to try to stop its execution.”

Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat who is the new chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said his panel would examine the matter. Mr. Reyes also indicated that he might renew efforts to pass a law requiring various agencies to get court approval before issuing national security letters.

“Any expansion by the department into intelligence collection, particularly on U.S. soil, is something our committee will thoroughly review,” he said in a statement issued to the news media.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon has issued hundreds of letters to American banks and other financial institutions seeking information about suspects in counterterrorism or counterespionage investigations.

Banks are not required to hand over the information, but Pentagon officials said that financial institutions usually complied.

The C.I.A. also uses the letters as an investigative tool, but issues them far less frequently than does the Pentagon, intelligence officials said.

The use of the national security letters by the Pentagon and the C.I.A. was first reported in The New York Times yesterday.

By law, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. are barred from any domestic law enforcement activities. But government officials said that their authority to issue the letters dated back several decades and was strengthened by the USA Patriot Act, an antiterrorism law passed in 2001.

Mr. Cheney said yesterday that the letters were valuable for protecting American forces stationed at hundreds of bases in the United States.

Since Sept. 11, the Pentagon has increased its domestic intelligence collection efforts to help ensure that American bases are protected from potential terrorist attacks.

The efforts have been criticized by civil liberties organizations, who say the Pentagon is using “force protection” to spy on Americans and collect information on groups like war protesters.

The American Civil Liberties Union said yesterday that it had “serious concerns” about the use of the letters by the Pentagon and the C.I.A., and it called for a Congressional investigation to examine the frequency and legal basis for the records demands, along with civil liberties safeguards in place.

“This country has a long tradition of rejecting the use of the C.I.A. and the Pentagon to spy on Americans, and rightfully so,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the A.C.L.U.’s Washington office. “Today’s published report that the Pentagon and C.I.A. have been relying on ‘national security letters’ to collect the financial records of Americans without judicial supervision or Congressional oversight raises a host of questions that need to be answered.”

Pentagon officials said the financial documents obtained through the national security letters usually did not establish an individual’s links to terrorism or espionage and had rarely led to criminal charges.

But officials said the records still had intelligence value, and the Pentagon plans within the next year to incorporate the records into a database at its Counterintelligence Field Activity office.

With the Democrats now in charge of both houses of Congress, the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees are planning hearings on various intelligence programs conducted by the Bush administration since Sept. 11, 2001.

At the top of the agenda are hearings on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program and the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects.

Mr. Reyes indicated yesterday that the military’s domestic collection efforts could also be a priority for his committee.

“We want our intelligence professionals to have strong tools that will enable them to interrupt the planning process of our enemies and to stop attacks against our country,” his statement said.

“But in doing so, we also want those tools to comply fully with the law and the Constitution.”

A Capitol Hill Mystery: Who Aided Drug Maker?

Published on Friday, November 29, 2002 by the New York Times

by Sheryl Gay Stolberg

WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 — Lobbyists for Eli Lilly & Company, the pharmaceutical giant, did not have much luck when they made the rounds on Capitol Hill earlier this year, seeking protection from lawsuits over a preservative in vaccines. Senator Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, tucked a provision into a bill that went nowhere. When lawmakers rebuffed a request to slip language into domestic security legislation, a Lilly spokesman said, the company gave up. Now, in a Washington whodunit worthy of Agatha Christie, the provision has been resurrected and become law, as part of the domestic security legislation signed on Monday by President Bush. Yet in a city where politicians have perfected the art of claiming credit for deeds large and small, not a single member of Congress — or the Bush administration — will admit to being the author of the Lilly rider. "It's turning into one of Washington's most interesting parlor games," said Dave Lemmon, spokesman for Senator Debbie Stabenow, Democrat of Michigan, who has promised to introduce legislation to repeal the provision. "There's a lot of guessing, a lot of speculation as to who did this." The provision forces lawsuits over the preservative, developed by Eli Lilly and called thimerosal, into a special "vaccine court." It may result in the dismissal of thousands of cases filed by parents who contend that mercury in thimerosal has poisoned their children, causing autism and other neurological ailments. Among them are Joseph and Theresa Counter of Plano, Tex., devoted Republicans whose party allegiance has run smack into family ties. The Counters' 6-year-old son, Joseph Alexander, was normal and healthy until he was 2, they say. Then he took an unexplained downward slide. Today, the boy struggles with words. He cannot zip his pants, snap buttons or tie his shoes. His parents say tests eventually showed that he had mercury poisoning, which they attribute to vaccines. They sued last year. "I know that our legislative system can be very, very messy at times," said Mr. Counter, a political consultant, who with his wife has spent many thousands of dollars on medical care and therapy for their son. "But for them to attempt this, in the dead of night? It disgusts me. This morning, I am ashamed to be a Republican." With lawmakers now scattered across the country, Washington is rife with speculation about who is responsible for aiding Lilly, a major Republican donor. During the 2002 election cycle, the company gave more money to political candidates, $1.6 million, than any other pharmaceutical company, with 79 percent of it going to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit research group that monitors campaign finances. Critics of the provision, mainly Democrats and trial lawyers, are quick to point out that the White House has close ties to Lilly. The first president Bush sat on the Lilly board in the late 1970's. The White House budget director, Mitchell E. Daniels Jr., is a former Lilly executive. The company's chairman and chief executive, Sidney Taurel, was appointed in June by President Bush to serve on a presidential council that will advise Mr. Bush on domestic security. The White House, however, has said that it did not ask Congress for the provision. Rob Smith, a spokesman for Lilly, said that the company's lobbyists "made absolutely no contact with Mitch or anyone in his office about this," and that Mr. Taurel "did not at any time ask" for any favors. "It's a mystery to us how it got in there," Mr. Smith said of the provision. Senator Frist has said it is a mystery to him as well. As the Senate's only doctor, he sought to include the provision in legislation that would promote the availability of vaccines. But the vaccine bill is stalled; Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate health committee, opposes it. Mr. Frist's spokesman said he did not seek to have the provision included in the domestic security bill. On Capitol Hill, Congressional aides-turned-detectives have traced the emergence of the provision to the Veterans Day weekend. Flush from their party's victories on Election Day, and with a mandate from President Bush to pass a domestic security bill, Republican negotiators in the House and Senate holed up for three days in the Capitol to hammer out the details, said Richard Diamond, spokesman for the retiring House majority leader, Representative Dick Armey of Texas. One aide said the language mysteriously appeared in the House version of the bill in entirely different type than the rest of the measure, as though someone had clipped it out of Mr. Frist's legislation and simply pasted it in. Mr. Diamond said all the negotiators supported the move, but would not say who was responsible. "If you want to give somebody credit for it," he said, "Mr. Armey takes ultimate credit. It's his bill. We are happy to wrap ourselves around it, but Mr. Armey is not a doctor, like Senator Frist. He's the source of the language." Whether thimerosal is truly harmful is the subject of intense scientific controversy. Earlier this year, the National Academy of Sciences issued a report saying there was no scientific evidence either to prove or disprove a link between thimerosal and brain disorders like autism. But the academy did find that such a link was "biologically plausible," and so it urged pharmaceutical companies to eliminate thimerosal, which has already been removed from many vaccines, as quickly as possible. The Lilly rider closes a loophole in a 1986 law that requires victims to file claims with the vaccine court, which awards payments from a taxpayer-financed compensation fund, before going to civil court. But the law covered only vaccines themselves, not their ingredients, which meant people like the Counters could sue ingredient manufacturers like Lilly directly. While Washington debates the origins of the provision, families are fuming. Some say the government fund will do them no good, because they have missed the statute of limitations — three years from the date symptoms first appear — for filing claims. Scott and Laura Bono of Durham, N.C., say that while their son Jackson, now 13, showed symptoms similar to autism six or seven years ago, it was not until August 2000 that they learned he had mercury poisoning. They filed suit just the other day. Aware of the controversy, lawmakers in both parties have pledged to alter the thimerosal rider, but are arguing about how to do so. While many Democrats want it repealed, Republicans have suggested that they may simply alter the language to apply to future cases only. "I'll believe it when I see it," said Mr. Waters, the Counters' lawyer. In the meantime, Mr. Smith, the Lilly spokesman, said his company would soon go to court to seek dismissal of the suits. That news made Theresa Counter cry. "It just makes me sick," she said. "I cannot tell you how devastating it is to think that we might have to start all over." Copyright The New York Times Company

Sam Bodman's Smokestacks

Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One of Texas's Worst Polluters

By JASON LEOPOLD

In the bizarro world that President Bush lives in, it pays-literally-to be a miserable failure, a criminal and a corporate con man. Those are just some of the characteristics of the dastardly men and women who were tapped recently to fill the vacancies in Bush's second-term cabinet.

But one of the President's most outrageous decisions (besides naming Alberto Gonzales, who concocted a legal case for torturing foreign prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Attorney General) has got to be choosing 66 year-old Sam Bodman to serve as Secretary of Energy. This is a guy who for a dozen years ran a Texas-based chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country's worst polluters.

It's not just a few clouds of smoke emanating from an oil refinery or a power plant that got Bodman's old company, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, those accolades. It was the 54,000 tons of toxic emissions that his company's refineries released into the air in the Lone Star state in 1997 alone that made Cabot the fourth largest source of toxic emissions in Texas. Cabot is the world's largest producer of industrial carbon black, a byproduct of the oil refinery process.

In 2000, the year Bodman left Cabot to join the Bush administration as Deputy Commerce Secretary, Cabot accounted for 60,000 of the more than half-a-million tons of toxic emissions released into the Texas air, according to report by the Texas State Summary of Emissions.

A loophole created in the 1972 Texas Clean Air Act exempted or "grandfathered" industrial plants built before 1971 from new, stricter pollution control rules. But in the mid-1990s companies such as Cabot were supposed to curb the pollution coming from its refineries. Environmentalists demanded that then Gov. Bush rein in the polluters and close the so-called grandfather loophole as the air in Texas became smoggier.

Instead, in 1997, then Gov. Bush asked two oil company executives to outline a voluntary program that allowed the grandfathered polluters to decide on their own exactly how much to cut the pollution at their plants. The oil execs summoned a meeting of two dozen industry reps at Exxon offices in Houston and presented them with the program.

In a memo obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, one executive wrote that "clearly the insiders from oil and gas believe that the Governor's office will 'persuade' the (Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission) to accept what program is developed between the industry group and the Governor's Office."

"And they did. And two years later this joke of a program was enacted into law by a bill written by the general counsel for the Texas Chemical Council who also lobbies for energy and utility companies. The bill was denounced by newspapers across the state," according to a March 5, 2000 report in The Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

According to people familiar with the legislation, Sam Bodman was part of the original working group that drafted legislation that then Gov. Bush signed into law that basically permitted Cabot and other companies to continue to emit the same level-and in some cases more-toxic emissions as they had been years earlier without so much as receiving a slap-on-the-wrist by then Gov. Bush.

Bodman personally contributed $1,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and $20,000 to Republican committees in the 1999-2000 election. Bodman is the wealthiest member of the Bush administration. His net worth is estimated to be between $42 million and $164 million, the bulk of it in Cabot stock, deferred compensation and other benefits.
Bodman shoddy environmental record aside, he may also be complicit in one of Africa's deadliest wars.

In October 2002, Bodman's former company came under fire when a United Nations Panel of Experts produced a report accusing the company, along with several other US corporations, of helping to fuel the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) while he ran Cabot by purchasing coltan from Congo during the conflict and illegally plundering the country's vast natural resources.

Cabot has publicly denied the allegations in the UN report, but a report by the Belgian Senate states that Eagle Wings Resources International had a long-term contract to supply Cabot with coltan, which it too purchased from Congo during the war. Eagle Wings was also identified in the UN report as contributing to the war.

In response, environmental Friend of the Earth United States (FOE) and the UK-based human rights group Rights and Accountability in Development (RAID) filed a complaint with the US State Department last August against Cabot and several other western corporations for its role in aiding the rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo by conducting business there, essentially inadvertently aiding a violent conflict that contributed to widespread human rights abuses.

RAID and FOE filed a complaint with the U.S. State Department last August claiming Cabot and other western corporations having violated the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) "Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises," a set of international standards for responsible corporate behavior.

The UN panel said in its report that a "three-year investigation found that sophisticated "elite networks" of high-level political, military and businesspersons, in collaboration with various rebel groups, intentionally fueled the conflict in order to retain control over the country's vast natural resources. The Panel implicated many Western companies for directly or indirectly helping to fuel the war."

The State Department is the agency in charge of deciding whether US companies breach the OECD guidelines. Despite the allegations included in the UN report and the complaint filed by the two activist groups, the State Department has refused to launch an independent investigation into whether Cabot, under Bodman's leadership, and the other US companies might have contributed to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

According to the UN report, an increase in the export of columbo tantalite, otherwise known as coltan from which the metal tantalum is extracted, in 1999 and 2000 resulted in "a sharp increase in the world prices of tantalumleading to a large increase in coltan production in eastern DRCWhile the processors of coltan and other Congolese minerals in Asia, Europe and North America may not have been aware of what was happening in the DRC, the Panel's investigations uncovered such serious concerns that it was decided to raise the international business community's awareness"

Cabot is the world's largest refiner of coltan. The other US corporations identified in the UN report, Kemet and Vishay, both purchase processed tantalum from Cabot. Under Bodman's leadership an unknown amount of the coltan Cabot Corporation was purchasing could have originated from the DRC. Cabot Corporation has stated publicly that "to the best of its knowledge none [of its coltan came] from environmentally sensitive areas in Africa, but it can't be sure."

As Energy Secretary, Bodman will be looking out for the energy behemoths he used to commiserate with while he was chairman and chief executive of Cabot, Vice President Dick Cheney being one of them. Many of those energy corporations have donated millions to fund President Bush's inaugural parties. And Cheney wants Bodman to reward their pals by making a convincing case why the President's controversial energy policy should sail through Congress, the environment be damned.

Jason Leopold is the author of the forthcoming book Off the Record: An Investigative Journalist's Inside View of Dirty Politics, Corporate Scandal, and a Double Life Exposed (Rowman & Littlefield). He can be reached at jasonleopold@hotmail.com. Visit his website at www.jasonleopold.com

Daily Reckoning excerpt

"A banana republic is also characterized by a ruling class that curtails
people's personal freedoms and is moving toward a heavy-handed military
dictatorship under the excuse of fighting guerilla (or terrorist)
opposition groups or enemies. Moreover, the fact that the ruling class or
elite comes from different political parties isn't a relevant factor in
classifying a country as a banana republic; what IS relevant is the
determination of the elite, irrespective of which party its members belong
to, to shift wealth from the majority of the people (the masses) to
themselves, usually through simply printing money and incurring chronic
budget deficits, and frequently also through senseless warfare."

I hate to get off on a rant....

I hear liberals constantly bemoan the fact that inequality exists in society due to the fact that the wealthy in the country continue to grow wealthier at an increasing rate while the wage earning public’s real wages have been stagnant for a great while. What’s the answer? Why get government involved of course by increasing the minimum wage and such other nonsense.

They can never see that the real reason that a privileged few reap vast amounts of money while others fall behind is due to the fact that government, contrary to what liberals would have us believe, has a vested interest in making sure that corporations are protected from competition and awarded monopolies in certain sectors of the American economy. The banking industry, petroleum, defense and pharmaceuticals just to name a few are a virtual protectorate of the government. With high government positions and advisory panels being stacked with industry insiders such as the former CEO of Goldman Sachs Henry Paulson being the Secretary of the Treasury.

The unholy alliance between government and certain big business in the United States creates the conditions that allow the gigantic disparities between the haves and have nots to become further exacerbated each year. The villain du jour this Christmas season was the executives working for the banking industry who received eight figure bonuses.

What does one expect when the fed has been creating liquidity in the market place ever since the tech bubble burst in 2000? The business of finance(ing), i.e. writing and selling mortgages has been in a bull market since interests rates were brought down by the Federal reserve beginning in 2000. The majority of mortgages get bundled up and sold to the J.P. Morgans and Goldman Sachs of the world who then sell them into the international market as mortgage backed securities, or derivatives. The windfalls earned by investment houses recently are directly attributable to the rise in speculation brought on by the federal reserves low interest rates.

Now that it seems the air has begun to leak out of the housing bubble leaving millions of Americans holding mortgages greater than the actual value of their home, or in car lingo, “upside down.” Wild speculation drove the housing market up past sustainable levels, leaving middle America holding the bag.

Even if the derivatives markets crash due to the underlying assets being over valued and many mortgage lenders and banks go under, which has begun to happen already, who gets hurt? Certainly not Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein who received a $53 million bonus this year.

No it’s the people on the bottom who will suffer, the roofer, the electrician, the carpenter, the bricklayer. And then, because of the public outcry, politicians will seize a greater portion of the economy, but this time it will be health care and insurance companies that will receive the spoils of government policies and their CEO’s will have windfall bonuses until they fall out of favor with the public and the cycle will start all over again. No matter who’s in charge, if you aren’t connected with the privileged class or a Washington insider, you will schlep harder and for less money. Because whether its democrats or republicans in charge the government must inflate the currency to pay its debts, and the subsequent inflation is like a thief picking your pocket. Convert your money to something else and move before it’s too late!

Bush Claims Right to Open Mail

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Thursday, January 4, 2007; 12:38 PM

The New York Daily News today reports on a signing statement President Bush quietly issued two weeks ago, in which he asserts his right to open mail without a warrant.

Signing statements have historically been used by presidents mostly to explain how they intend to enforce the laws passed by Congress; Bush has used them to quietly assert his right to ignore those laws.

James Gordon Meek writes about the latest: "President Bush has quietly claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant, the New York Daily News has learned.

"The President asserted his new authority when he signed a postal reform bill into law on Dec. 20. Bush then issued a 'signing statement' that declared his right to open people's mail under emergency conditions.

"That claim is contrary to existing law and contradicted the bill he had just signed, say experts who have reviewed it. . . .

"Most of the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act deals with mundane reform measures. But it also explicitly reinforced protections of first-class mail from searches without a court's approval."

The signing statement said, in part:

"The executive branch shall construe subsection 404(c) of title 39, as enacted by subsection 1010(e) of the Act, which provides for opening of an item of a class of mail otherwise sealed against inspection, in a manner consistent, to the maximum extent permissible, with the need to conduct searches in exigent circumstances, such as to protect human life and safety against hazardous materials, and the need for physical searches specifically authorized by law for foreign intelligence collection."

Meek notes that White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore denied Bush was claiming any new authority.

Here is the signing statement in question. Here is information on the bill in question.

It shouldn't be a surprise that although Meek was almost two weeks late with this story -- which was a matter of public record -- he still got a scoop.

Bush's signing statements have been widely ignored by the traditional media, with the significant exception of Boston Globe reporter Charlie Savage, who is on book leave right now.

And sadly, most of the questions about signing statements that I raised in a Nieman Watchdog essay last June still remain unaddressed. Foremost among them: Are these signing statements just a bunch of ideological bluster from overenthusiastic White House lawyers -- or are they actually emboldening administration officials to flout the laws passed by Congress? If the latter, Bush's unprecedented use of these statements constitutes a genuine Constitutional crisis.

07 Predictions: James Kunstler

I will be so bold to say that I called the housing crash correctly last year, though the worst symptoms are slow to present for technical reasons. There's no question that the action on the real estate scene changed drastically in mid-year. The implosion of this mighty structure of fraud, folly, and misinvestment so far has taken place in such breathtaking slow-motion that its victims have not really felt the pain from the falling bricks yet. By late summer, buyers started evaporating. Real estate signs planted in lawns last June are still sitting there on New Years. Prices have come down a bit in many markets, including most of the hotties such as Florida, Phoenix, Las Vegas, San Diego, and Boston. But the buyers are still not bidding. Meanwhile, the sellers have dug in, determined to get something at least close to their wished-for inflated prices, egged on by their representatives, the realtors. This mutually reinforcing psychology cannot hold indefinitely. Many of these sellers don't have the luxury to wait around forever. Some have had to move to other houses in other places because of job changes, and are stuck paying two mortgages. Many are stuck with "creative" mortgages that all the evil ingenuity of the human mind conjured in recent years to enable the feckless to live above their means -- adjustable rate, payment optional, no money down contracts that suckered buyers into booby-trapped obligations whose initial low-interest terms lured them in and are now set to blow up in their faces as terms automatically re-set upwards to higher rates and "optional" deferred payments get backloaded onto the principal, putting the mortgage holders so far underwater on their contracts that a tour of the Titanic would feel like a day at the beach.
The trouble is, when both the sellers and their agents decide to get with the reality program and lower their prices, they will only stimulate a massive death spiral of house price deflation as buyers see the numbers go lower and hold out longer in the expectation that prices will go down even further. That would, of course, put more sellers into gross distress and lead them either to dump their properties or enter the cold waters of default and foreclosure. The whole process could run for a couple of decades, and as that occurs it will be made much much worse by oil depletion -- as so many suburban houses drastically lose locational value, combined with the consequences of poor construction carried out in cheap materials like vinyl and chipboard.
Add to this that the late stages of the hyper-boom caused so much "product" to be brought onto the market by the "production home builders" that there now exists an unprecedented oversupply of exactly the kind of crappy suburban houses (in all price ranges) that are bound to lose value going just a little bit forward. Foreclosures will only add more to the oversupply. In the subprime mortgage niche, defaults are officially reported to be running at 20 percent. Foreclosures are trailing because the process is so awkward, and many have not yet shown up in the housing markets. I predict that foreclosures on subprime mortgages will run above the 50 percent range when all is said and done.
As the music stops in the lending rackets, liquidity in the form of mortgage backed securities and other sources of hallucinated "money" will dry up, and will start to make itself felt in all the other arenas and regions that "money" has been migrating to. Jobs associated with house-building and all those ancillary enterprises -- big box shopping, chain restaurant revenues, car sales -- will disappear and incomes with them. Many home sales in past decade were made to people benefiting directly from the housing bubble. (The sheer number of real estate agents in America more than doubled since 2001.) This evaporation of both credit and incomes will impact the so-called "consumer economy", said to make up 70 percent of the total US economy. In other words, the term "depression" might be applicable as this economy lurches into actual contraction of more than a few percentage points.
This scenario suggests that earnings in corporations listed on the public stock exchanges -- the companies that elude acquisition by "private equity" -- would necessarily see severe drops in earnings, and therefore in stock value. While many commentators view the rise in the Dow as just another symptom of inflation -- asset inflation -- the activity in these assets -- companies making, doing, and selling things -- must be reported on a quarterly basis. And if that activity is trending strongly downward, then stock prices will trend down even if the value of the dollar is going down and it takes more dollars to buy an equivalent share of stock year-over-year. So I would conclude by again predicting a substantial drop in the Dow and other equity markets. To some extent, it seems to me that the 2006 blow off in stock prices was just another symptom of the finance sector being decoupled from economic reality since real GDP probably contracted one percent in the second half of the year while misreporting and delusional thinking drove stock prices up.
One would think that the US dollar is poised to take a beating, and indeed the signs have been abundant that this is underway -- especially when the value of the dollar started to implode against the Euro around Thanksgiving. It has leveled off since then. But since then there have been other moves around the world to de-link commodity prices from the US dollar and restate them in Euros, especially oil, and the dollar's plunge will probably continue. A lot of commentators around the web have pointed out the side benefit for the US government to promote dollar inflation: to inflate itself out of crushing debt. But the government can't accomplish this without destroying the purchasing power of ordinary Americans and whatever remains of their meager savings. I'd have to conclude that the Federal Reserve is out of tricks for goosing economic activity. Their last major trick was hitching a jive economy to a real estate bubble by making loan money available to any jabonie with a pulse and promoting the demise of lending standards. The gambit lasted five years and is now blowing up in America's face.

The Energy Predicament

Oil ended 2006 roughly where it began, at just over $60 a barrel. This reassured the public that all talk about Peak Oil was hysterical blather from a lunatic fringe. It was reinforced by publication of the mendacious Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) report issued this fall -- a tragic document put out by a giant public relations firm representing the oil industry -- with the mission of staving off windfall profits taxes and other regulatory moves that a true resource emergency might recommend.
But beyond this debate, in the background, another ominous trend can account for the stalling of oil prices in 2006 -- totally unrecognized by the public and ignored by the news media: prices on the oil futures market leveled off because the Third World has effectively dropped out of bidding for it -- and using it. They cannot afford it at $60-a-barrel. The Third World has entered an era of energy destitution and it is manifesting in symptoms such as local resource wars, genocides, falling life expectancies, and in many places a near-total unraveling of the sociopolitical order. American mall-walkers and theme park visitors are oblivious to this tragic process, but it is perhaps the major reason why we are not now suffering from $100-per-barrel (or greater) oil prices (with the consequent unraveling of our sociopolitical and economic order).
The major trend on the oil scene the past 12 months is the apparent inability of the world to lift total production above 85 million barrels a day -- with demand now rising above that line. It is unclear how much more demand destruction will come out of the Third World before bidding intensifies between the developed nations. One commentator in particular, Dallas geologist Jeffrey Brown --a frequent contributor on the web's best oil debate site, TheOilDrum.com -- is advancing the idea that we are entering an oil export crisis that will presage a more general permanent world-wide oil emergency. Brown holds that the major oil exporting nations are using so much of their own product, because of rising populations, that their net exports are falling at an alarming rate, perhaps as much as 9 percent annually. This trend combines with general depletion rates now said to be around 3 percent a year.
The question of total oil reserves around the world remains somewhat murky, but Brown, Kenneth Deffeyes of Princeton, and others using a straightforward mathematical model, have stated that the world is roughly at the same point in all-time production as the Lower-48 United States was at in 1970, when America passed its all-time production peak. We know for certain that three of the four super giant oil fields (Daqing in China; Cantarell in Mexico; Burgan in Kuwait) are past peak and there is plenty of evidence that the greatest of them all, 50-year-old Ghawar in Saudi Arabia is not only past peak but perhaps "crashing" into a super-steep decline.
Discovery of new oil to replace the production from declining fields remains paltry. Chevron announced it's "Jack" discovery in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico with great fanfare this year, but neither conclusively demonstrated that all the wished-for oil was down there (between 3 and 15 billion barrels, Chevron said) or that they could get it out of there in a way that made sense economically, since the oil was extraordinarily deep and difficult to lift up.
Meanwhile, companies developing tar sand production in Alberta announced that their costs of production were rising substantially, while a reckoning lay ahead as to how much of Canada's fast-disappearing natural gas reserves will be squandered in melting tar. The oil shale project is going nowhere. American corporate farmers have entered into a racket with congress to subsidize ethanol production from corn and biodiesel fuel from soybeans. The American public remains ignorant of the tragic futility of this project, which depends on oil-and-gas "inputs" to keep the crop yields up and ultimately is a net energy "loser." As the world crosses into the uncharted territory of "The Long Emergency," Americans will find themselves having to chose between eating food and making fuel to keep the car engines running.
The signal failure of public debate in this country is embodied in our obsession with this particular theme -- how to keep the cars running by other means at all costs. Everybody from the greenest enviros to the hoariest neoliberal free market pimps believe that this is the only thing we need to worry about or talk about. The truth, of course, is that we have to make other arrangements for virtually all the major activities of everyday life -- farming, commerce, transport, settlement patterns -- but we are so over-invested in our
suburban infrastructure that we cannot face this reality.
The bottom line for oil in 2007: expect the bidding on the futures markets to regain intensity between the US, China, Europe, and Japan. A contracting US economy could take some demand out of the picture, but the sad truth is that we burn up most of the oil we use in cars, and American life is now so hopelessly based on incessant motoring that citizens cannot even go down to the unemployment office without driving. Geopolitical events can only make the oil supply situation worse and probably will. (See ahead.)
We are probably also in the early stages of a natural gas crisis in the US. Over the next decade, the gap between US demand for natural gas and dwindling supply may amount to one-and-a-half times the current equivalent of our oil imports. This is a staggering deficit. Natural gas is used for heating in more than half the houses in the US and accounts for just under 20 percent of our total electricity production. Domestic supply is crashing. We are drilling as fast as we can, with more and more rigs each year, just to to keep up. To make matters worse, the means of gas delivery -- through a vast web of pipeline networks around the nation -- makes "just-in-time" delivery the norm and, tragically, also makes "just-in-time" pricing normal, too. Thus, gas prices are responding only to the shortest-term signals -- for instance, unusually mild winter weather -- rather than to the catastrophic long-term reserve picture. Finally, we are unlikely to solve our natural gas problems with imports for technical reasons having to do with the cost and difficulty of moving the stuff by means other than pipelines and for geopolitical reasons, namely that most of the remaining gas in the world is in Asia. Bottom line: we could enter a home heating and electricity production crisis anytime. Massive price increases are likely to be required in order to reduce demand to the level of available supplies. This will be one of the major factors in the disabling of suburbia -- which is to say, normal American life.

Addendum to Clausewitz

by Fred Reed

It's all but official: The war in Iraq is lost. Report after leaked report says so. Everybody in Washington knows it except that draft-dodging ferret in the White House. Politicians scurry to avoid the blame. One day soon people will ask aloud: How did we let 3000 GIs die for the weak ego of a pampered liar and his desperate need to prove he's half the man his father was?

The troops from now on will die for a war that they already know is over. They are dying for politicians. They are dying for nothing. By now they must know it. It happened to us, too, long ago.

The talk among pols now is about finding an "exit strategy." This means a way of pulling out without risking too many seats in Congress. Screw the troops. We must look to the elections. Do we really want an exit strategy? A friend of mine, with two tours in heavy combat in another war, has devised a splendid exit strategy. It consists of five words: "OK. On the plane. Now." Bring your toothbrush. Everything else stays. We're outa here.

It is a workable exit strategy, one with teeth, and comprehensible to all. But we won't use it. We will continue killing our men, calculatedly, cynically, for the benefit of politicians. The important thing, you see, is the place in history of Bush Puppy. Screw the troops.

Face it. The soldiers are being used. They are being suckered. This isn't new. It happened to my generation. Long after we knew that the war in Vietnam was lost, Lyndon Johnson kept it going to fertilize his vanity, and then Nixon spoke of the need to "save face"—at two hundred dead GIs a week. But of course Johnson and Nixon weren't among the dead, or among the GIs.

I saw an interview on television long ago in which the reporter asked an infantryman near Danang, I think, what he thought of Nixon's plan to save face. "His face, our ass," was the reply. Just so, then, and just so now. Screw the troops. What the hell, they breed fast in Kansas anyway.

Soldiers are succinct and do not mince words. This makes them dangerous. We must keep them off-camera to the extent possible. A GI telling the truth could set recruiting back by years.

The truth is that the government doesn't care about its soldiers, and never has. If you think I am being unduly harsh, read the Washington Post. You will find story after story saying that the Democrats don't want to do anything drastic about the war. They fear seeming "soft on national security." In other words, they care more about their electoral prospects in 2008 than they do about the lives of GIs. It's no secret. For them it is a matter of tuning the spin, of covering tracks, of calculating the vector sum of the ardent-patriot vote which may be cooling, deciding which way the liberal wind blows, and staying poised to seem to have supported whoever wins. Screw the troops. Their fathers probably work in factories anyway.

Soldiers do not realize, until too late, the contempt in which they are held by their betters. Here is the psychological foundation of the hobbyist wars of bus-station presidents. If you are, say, a Lance Corporal in some miserable region of Iraq, I have a question for you: Would your commanding general let you date his daughter? I spent my high-school years on a naval base, Dahlgren Naval Proving Ground as it was then called. Dahlgren was heavy with officers, scientists, and engineers. Their daughters, my classmates, were not allowed to associate with sailors. Oh yes, we honor our fighting men. We hold them in endless respect. Yes we do.

For that matter, Lance Corporal, ask how many members of Congress have even served, much less been in combat. Ask how many have children in the armed services. Look around you. Do you see many (any) guys from Harvard? Yale? MIT? Cornell? Exactly. The smart, the well-off, the powerful are not about to risk their irreplaceable sit-parts in combat. Nor are they going to mix with mere high-school graduates, with kids from small towns in Tennessee, with blue-collar riffraff who bowl and drink Bud at places with names like Lenny's Rib Room. One simply doesn't. One has standards.

You are being suckered, gang, just as we were.

It is a science. The government hires slick PR firms and ad agencies in New York. These study what things make a young stud want to be A Soldier: a desire to prove himself, to get laid in foreign places, a craving for adventure, a desire to feel part of something big and powerful and respected, what have you. They know exactly what they are doing. They craft phrases, "Be a Man Among Men," or "A Few Good Men," or, since girls don't like those two, "The Few, The Proud." Join up and be Superman.

Then comes the calculated psychological conditioning. There is for example the sense of power and unity that comes of running to cadence with a platoon of other guys, thump, thump, thump, all shouting to the heady rhythm of boots, "If I die on the Russian front, bury me with a Russian c__t, Lef-rye-lef-rye-lef-rye-lef..." That was Parris Island, August of '66, and doubtless they say something else now, but the principle is the same.

And so you come out in splendid physical shape and feeling no end manly and they tell you how noble it is to Fight for Your Country. This might be true if anyone were invading the country. But since Washington always invades somebody else, you are actually fighting for Big Oil, or Israel, or the defense industry, or the sexual ambiguities who staff National Review, or the vanity of that moral dwarf on Pennsylvania Avenue. You will figure this out years later.

Once you are in the war, you can't get out. We couldn't either. While your commander in chief eats steak in the White House and talks tough, just like a real president, you kill people you have no reason to kill, about whom you know next to nothing—which one day may weigh on your conscience. It does with a lot of guys, but that comes later.

You are being suckered, and so are the social classes that supply the military. Note that the Pentagon cracks down hard on troops who say the wrong things online, that the White House won't allow coffins to be photographed, that the networks never give soldiers a chance to talk unedited about what is happening. Oh no. It is crucial to keep morale up among the rubes. You are the rubes. So, once, were we.

Smoke and Mirrors

A group of military experts consisting of three retired generals and two academics advised Bush not to withdrawal troops from Iraq, yesterday. Wow, what a surprise!
Expecting anybody military to suggest a decrease in troop strength in Iraq is like expecting a race car driver to suggest the best thing for racing is to go slower, it aint gonna happen.

So Bush continues pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans by seeking “advice” from “experts.” These sessions are little more than staged events the outcome of which are determined in advance for the benefit of the emperor. Bush will go before the public and claim that he has listened to the advice of the military and low and behold, withdrawing from Iraq would not be pertinent, the military says so!

In scripted testimony the five agreed, “…the Army and Marine Corps both need to be bigger, and also need bigger budgets.”

White House officials emphasized that although the experts gave a bleak assessment, they still believe the situation in Iraq is "winnable."
"I appreciate the advice I got from those folks in the field," Bush said after emerging from the morning session. "And that advice is . . . an important component of putting together a new way forward in Iraq."
The carefully choreographed meetings are coming on the heels of the release last week of the Iraq Study Group's report, which pronounced the situation in Iraq "grave" and recommended fundamental shifts in how the Bush administration handles the war. To stem the deteriorating situation in Iraq, the report said, the administration should shift the focus of its military mission from direct combat to training Iraqi troops, while pressing harder for a diplomatic solution by engaging Iran and Syria -- something Bush has pointedly refused to do. - Washington Post

What are we to make of these meetings? Simple, when the Iraq Study Group issues it’s report condemning the administration for it’s handling of the war, the White House cobbles together their own panels whose suggestions come out in opposition to what the Baker commission recommends so that it appears that the President is open to differing opinions. In reality it is just political cover for “stay the course.” The faces may have changed but the policy stays the same.

Debt

U.S. government debt now tops $9 trillion, before taking into account its unfunded obligations for Social Security and Medicare -- debts that the retiring boomers will soon have their hands out to collect.

After adding in Social Security, Medicare and all the government's other pay-later obligations, the current debt actually comes in at over $60 trillion-an amount so large, not one person in a million has a real sense of it. So let's try to put that number into perspective.

A trillion is 1000 X 1000 X 1000 X 1000, or a million millions. In his first address to Congress, President Reagan, himself a big spender, accurately pointed out that a stack of $1,000 bills four inches high makes you a millionaire, and that a trillion dollars would be a stack 67 miles high!

The U.S. government owes 60 of those sky-piercing stacks of $1,000 bills.

It's a lot of money. And it's not just any kind of money. Amazingly, this unbacked currency of a bankrupt government is still the reserve currency of virtually every nation in the world today. But not, we think, for much longer.

To service its debt and keep the game going, the U.S. government must sell on the order of $2.5 billion per day in new Treasury bills, much of it to foreigners already sitting on something like $6 trillion of U.S. paper.

Absent the foreign buyers of U.S. Treasury securities, the whole scam begins to unravel. And once it begins to unravel in earnest, with wealthy foreigners and then governments rushing to switch out of dollars, the speed and steepness of the monetary collapse will be breathtaking.

Daily Reckoning excerpt

And along the same lines, a dinner companion said on Saturday night,
"What is really driving the U.S. economy is the war in Iraq and the war
against terror."

"They're spending $75 billion per quarter...that's $300 billion a year.
And it's in addition to the regular budget. People think that money goes
to building roads and schools in Iraq. But most of it - all but 15% or so
- is spent in the United States. It goes to contractors for computer
programs, weapons, and supplies. That has a huge impact on the economy.
And that's why there is so little opposition to the war. People know that
when the war stops, the economy goes into recession."

Our friend is a contractor for the Pentagon:

"It is unbelievable how much money is being spent. They are spending
billions right on the Pentagon building itself. And now there's a lot of
argument about where the money is being spent. People in New York are
complaining about spending money in Montana. And they've got a point, of
course. Montana is not exactly the front lines in the war against terror.
But from a defensive point of view, almost all the money is wasted anyway,
so it probably doesn't make much difference. "

What a strange and wonderful war. Rather than tightening our belts, the
war is taken as a pretext to spend more money.

Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law

Fine Print in Defense Bill Opens Door to Martial Law
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

It’s amazing what you can find if you turn over a few rocks in the anti-terrorism legislation Congress approved during the election season.

Take, for example, the John W. Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2006, named for the longtime Armed Services Committee chairman from Virginia.

Signed by President Bush on Oct. 17, the law (PL 109-364) has a provocative provision called “Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies.”

The thrust of it seems to be about giving the federal government a far stronger hand in coordinating responses to Katrina-like disasters.

But on closer inspection, its language also alters the two-centuries-old Insurrection Act, which Congress passed in 1807 to limit the president’s power to deploy troops within the United States.

That law has long allowed the president to mobilize troops only “to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

But the amended law takes the cuffs off.

Specifically, the new language adds “natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack or incident” to the list of conditions permitting the President to take over local authority — particularly “if domestic violence has occurred to such an extent that the constituted authorities of the State or possession are incapable of maintaining public order.”

Since the administration broadened what constitutes “conspiracy” in its definition of enemy combatants — anyone who “has purposely and materially supported hostilities against the United States,” in the language of the Military Commissions Act (PL 109-366) — critics say it’s a formula for executive branch mischief.

Yet despite such a radical turn, the new law garnered little dissent, or even attention, on the Hill.

One of the few to complain, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., warned that the measure virtually invites the White House to declare federal martial law.

It “subverts solid, longstanding posse comitatus statutes that limit the military’s involvement in law enforcement, thereby making it easier for the President to declare martial law,” he said in remarks submitted to the Congressional Record on Sept. 29.

“The changes to the Insurrection Act will allow the President to use the military, including the National Guard, to carry out law enforcement activities without the consent of a governor,” he said.

Moreover, he said, it breaks a long, fundamental tradition of federal restraint.

“Using the military for law enforcement goes against one of the founding tenets of our democracy.”

And he criticized the way it was rammed through Congress.

It “was just slipped in the defense bill as a rider with little study,” he fumed. “Other congressional committees with jurisdiction over these matters had no chance to comment, let alone hold hearings on, these proposals.”

No matter: Safely tucked into the $526 billion defense bill, it easily crossed the goal line on the last day of September.
Silence

The language doesn’t just brush aside a liberal Democrat slated to take over the Judiciary Committee come January. It also runs over the backs of the governors, 22 of whom are Republicans.

The governors had waved red flags about the measure on Aug. 1, sending letters of protest from their Washington office to the Republican chairs and ranking Democrats on the House and Senate Armed Services committees.

No response. So they petitioned the party heads on the Hill — Sens. Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and Harry Reid, D-Nev., Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and his Democratic opposite, Nancy Pelosi of California.

“This provision was drafted without consultation or input from governors,” said the Aug. 6 letter signed by every member of the National Governors Association, “and represents an unprecedented shift in authority from governors . . .to the federal government.”

“We urge you,” they said, “to drop provisions that would usurp governors’ authority over the National Guard during emergencies from the conference agreement on the National Defense Authorization Act.”

Again, no response from the leadership, said David Quam, the National Governors Association’s director of federal relations.

On Aug. 31, the governors sent another letter to the congressional party leaders, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who had met quietly with an NGA delegation back in February.

The bill “could encroach on our constitutional authority to protect the citizens of our states,” they protested, complaining again about how the provision had been dumped on a midnight express.

“Any issue that affects the mission of the Guard in the states must be addressed in consultation and coordination with governors,” they demanded.

“The role of the Guard in the states and to the nation as a whole is too important to have major policy decisions made without full debate and input from governors throughout the policy process.”

More silence.

“We did not know until the bill was printed where we stood,” Quam said.

That’s partly the governors’ own fault, said a Republican Senate aide.

“My understanding is that they sent form letters to offices,” she said. “If they really want a piece of legislation considered they should have called offices and pushed the matter. No office can handle the amount of form letters that come in each day.”

Quam disputed that.

“The letter was only the beginning of the conversation,” he said. “The NGA and the governors’ offices reached out across the Hill.”
Blogosphere

Looking back at the government’s chaotic response to Katrina, it’s not altogether surprising that the provision drew so little opposition in Congress and attention from the mainstream media.

And of course, it was wrapped in a monster defense bill related to the emergency in Iraq.

But the blogosphere, of course, was all over it.

A close analysis of the bill by Frank Morales, a 58-year-old Episcopal priest in New York who occasionally writes for left-wing publications, spurred a score of liberal and conservative libertarian Web sites to take a look at it.

But a search of The Washington Post and New York Times archives, using the terms “Insurrection Act,” “martial law” and “Congress,” came up empty.

That’s not to say the papers don’t care: There’s just too much going on in the global war on terror to keep up with, much less write about such a seemingly insignificant provision. The martial law section of the Defense Appropriation Act, for example, takes up just a few paragraphs in the 591-page document.

What else is in there? More intriguing stuff, it looks like — and I’m working my way through it.

It's official...Civil War

WASHINGTON, Nov 28 (Reuters) - Over White House objections, The New York Times and other U.S. news outlets have adopted the term "civil war" for the fighting in Iraq, reflecting a growing consensus that sectarian violence has engulfed the country.

After NBC News' widely publicized decision on Monday to brand the conflict a civil war, several prominent newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, pointed to their use of the phrase.

"It's hard to argue that this war does not fit the generally accepted definition of civil war," New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said in a statement.

The Bush administration has for months resisted the notion that Iraq is embroiled in a civil war, a position analysts say is hard to justify. Experts predict a shift in language could deepen public discontent with U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Asked at a news conference in Estonia on Tuesday what the difference was between the current bloodshed and civil war, President George W. Bush said the latest bombings were part of a 9-month-old pattern of attacks by al Qaeda militants aimed at fomenting sectarian violence by provoking retaliation.

White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley said the Iraqis "don't talk of it as a civil war" because the army and police had not fractured along sectarian lines and the government continued to hold together.

U.S. officials' reluctance to use the words "civil war" is more than a semantic difference. The phrase carries a political dimension as well because it could further weaken Americans' support for a war that has already helped remove Bush's Republican Party from control of Congress.

Sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shi'ites has increased dramatically this year. Multiple bombings in a Shi'ite neighborhood of Baghdad last Thursday killed more than 200 people and drew reprisal attacks in Sunni neighborhoods.

Analysts say the U.S. public will not tolerate troops being used as referees between warring Iraqi factions.

MSNBC, NBC's cable network, on Tuesday displayed a graphic reading "Iraq: The Civil War" in its Iraq coverage. Other U.S. networks said they would continue reporting under broader terms like "War in Iraq."

The shift in coverage reflects a growing consensus among foreign-policy experts that the conflict is a civil war, said American University communications professor Chris Simpson.

"When those elites shift, the media typically follows," Simpson said. "To some extent the media do play a role in shaping that opinion, but mostly they follow it."

The Los Angeles Times said it had adopted the term in October "without public fanfare," making it the first major news outlet to use the term.

The Christian Science Monitor and McClatchy Newspapers, which include the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the Sacramento Bee, are among the other newspapers that have described the bloodshed as a civil war.

The New York Times said it would use the term sparingly and not to the exclusion of other labels, as the conflict also has elements of an insurgency, an occupation, a battle against terrorism and "a scene of criminal gangsterism."

The Washington Post said it has no policy to describe the conflict.

CNN, ABC and CBS said some of their correspondents have referred to the rising sectarian violence as a civil war, or examined the debate among experts over whether the term is appropriate.

The decision not to label the conflict a civil war "does not in any way diminish the sheer volume of reporting we're doing from there," ABC spokesman Jeffrey Schneider said. "That reporting certainly points toward civil war."

A Fox News spokeswoman said, "We have no plans to change our usage." -


As I wrote in October concerning the decision of the networks to ban the term "Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party" when referring to the Georgia-Florida game, "What makes this dangerous is that it is the climate in the country. The university president’s didn’t come up with this out of the blue; they take it from the leadership of the nation, the Bush administration.

They are the masters of “new-speak”; re-defining an issue to lessen the impact on the public. That’s why the media refers to the civil war in Iraq as “sectarian-violence”.

The problem with re-defining an issue is that regardless of what you call something, it doesn’t affect the reality of it. Giving euphemistic titles to tough issues is just a way to avoid dealing with them, which is quickly becoming Americas’ favorite pastime."

I am glad to see that the election results have weakened Bush enough so that the media is beginning to take seriously it's responsiblity to report the news accurately.

Regardless of how it is called the situation in Iraq has been a civil war for over a year at least.

Police State Outrages

Ex-Guards, Nurse Charged in Camp Death


Services held for woman slain by Atlanta police


Killing of groom by NYPD sparks questions

Mexican workers replaced with felons

Am I the only one who sees the irony in replacing supposed criminals with convicted criminals?

Stillmore — Felons on probation and homeless men have filled some of the poultry jobs left by illegal Mexican laborers deported in raids two months ago.
About 40 convicted felons from the Macon Diversion Center are bused in each day to work at the Crider Poultry plant in Stillmore — the focus of the raids.-AJC link

The Mexicans who’ve committed the outrageous crime of entering the country to work at low paying menial jobs will be replaced by tried and convicted felons? Yeah, that should work out nicely, just good old hard working church going fellows who’ve fallen on some hard luck.

Hopefully we can revisit this story in a year and see how the well the cons are working out.

As for the homeless men, well I’m sure their turnover will be low.

Give me a break. The plant will be out of business in a year or relocated.

Leaving Iraq, Honorably

Leaving Iraq, Honorably

By Chuck Hagel
Sunday, November 26, 2006

There will be no victory or defeat for the United States in Iraq. These terms do not reflect the reality of what is going to happen there. The future of Iraq was always going to be determined by the Iraqis -- not the Americans.

Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism. There will be no military victory or military solution for Iraq. Former secretary of state Henry Kissinger made this point last weekend.

The time for more U.S. troops in Iraq has passed. We do not have more troops to send and, even if we did, they would not bring a resolution to Iraq. Militaries are built to fight and win wars, not bind together failing nations. We are once again learning a very hard lesson in foreign affairs: America cannot impose a democracy on any nation -- regardless of our noble purpose.

We have misunderstood, misread, misplanned and mismanaged our honorable intentions in Iraq with an arrogant self-delusion reminiscent of Vietnam. Honorable intentions are not policies and plans. Iraq belongs to the 25 million Iraqis who live there. They will decide their fate and form of government.

It may take many years before there is a cohesive political center in Iraq. America's options on this point have always been limited. There will be a new center of gravity in the Middle East that will include Iraq. That process began over the past few days with the Syrians and Iraqis restoring diplomatic relations after 20 years of having no formal communication.

What does this tell us? It tells us that regional powers will fill regional vacuums, and they will move to work in their own self-interest -- without the United States. This is the most encouraging set of actions for the Middle East in years. The Middle East is more combustible today than ever before, and until we are able to lead a renewal of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, mindless destruction and slaughter will continue in Lebanon, Israel and across the Middle East.

We are a long way from a sustained peaceful resolution to the anarchy in Iraq. But this latest set of events is moving the Middle East in the only direction it can go with any hope of lasting progress and peace. The movement will be imperfect, stuttering and difficult.

America finds itself in a dangerous and isolated position in the world. We are perceived as a nation at war with Muslims. Unfortunately, that perception is gaining credibility in the Muslim world and for many years will complicate America's global credibility, purpose and leadership. This debilitating and dangerous perception must be reversed as the world seeks a new geopolitical, trade and economic center that will accommodate the interests of billions of people over the next 25 years. The world will continue to require realistic, clear-headed American leadership -- not an American divine mission.

The United States must begin planning for a phased troop withdrawal from Iraq. The cost of combat in Iraq in terms of American lives, dollars and world standing has been devastating. We've already spent more than $300 billion there to prosecute an almost four-year-old war and are still spending $8 billion per month. The United States has spent more than $500 billion on our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And our effort in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate, partly because we took our focus off the real terrorist threat, which was there, and not in Iraq.

We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build. We've been funding this war dishonestly, mainly through supplemental appropriations, which minimizes responsible congressional oversight and allows the administration to duck tough questions in defending its policies. Congress has abdicated its oversight responsibility in the past four years.

It is not too late. The United States can still extricate itself honorably from an impending disaster in Iraq. The Baker-Hamilton commission gives the president a new opportunity to form a bipartisan consensus to get out of Iraq. If the president fails to build a bipartisan foundation for an exit strategy, America will pay a high price for this blunder -- one that we will have difficulty recovering from in the years ahead.

To squander this moment would be to squander future possibilities for the Middle East and the world. That is what is at stake over the next few months.

The writer is a Republican senator from Nebraska.

Superpower?

Is the United States the sole superpower? What if any evidence do we have to support this contention? Supposedly the United States has the most well trained, well equipped military on the planet. Why then are American troops bogged down in a war nearly four years on in the backwater of Iraq? Why hasn’t the greatest military might on the face of the earth made short work of a rag tag Iraqi resistance? Why hasn’t the mighty American military quelled the uprising in Mesopotamia?

There is no question that the United States spends more on it’s military than any other country, that is indisputable. But what kind of value are we getting for our money?

During the early days of the occupation of Iraq a common complaint of soldiers and their families was that soldiers did not have the proper armor for their persons and their vehicles.

How is it possible that the greatest military force on planet earth could send troops into harms way without the proper armament? How do we as a people reconcile the discrepancy?

A very well known episode occurred in Kuwait when Army Spc. Thomas Wilson asked Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, “Why do we soldiers have to dig through local landfills for pieces of scrap metal and compromised ballistic glass to uparmor our vehicles?"

Rumsfeld’s response was, "As you know, you have to go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you want."

We are told that we have the most modern, sophisticated, well trained and without a doubt the most well funded Army in the world. We are told this over and over and over again. How is it that our troops were scavenging materials out of dumps to armor their vehicles? How can the United States have the best military on the planet when it’s soldiers and vehicles aren’t armored to the greatest degree? How?

Perhaps we’ve been lied to.

There is no question that the United States spends more money on the military than any other ten nations combined, but maybe all of that money isn’t getting to where it is supposed to. If soldiers are digging around in scrap heaps and families are purchasing body armor in the private sector then obviously something is amiss.

It’s no secret that Americans pay more for their military than any other country on the planet. Where is the money going if it isn’t getting to troops in the field?

The top ten defense contractors made 94.8 billion dollars in 2005. Over the last four years the CEO’s of these companies have made over half a billion dollars. Lockheed Martin earned 19.4 billion in 2005. Boeing made 18.5 billion. Northrop Grumman brought in 13.5 billion.

So yes the United States spends obscene amounts of money on “defense”. Yet for all of that money being spent troops are sent into battle ill equipped.

Military units are also being forced to pull multiple tours of combat duty in Iraq. The third infantry division based in Georgia will be embarking on their third tour of duty in Iraq next year.

“The multiple deployments and rapid turnaround are evidence that the service is stretched so thin it may have to request broader access to National Guard units to meet demands being made on it, Army officials said recently at an infantry conference at Fort Benning.”- Atlanta Journal Constitution

Let’s stop kidding ourselves and pretending that our military is invincible when there is no evidence to support that notion. The military is made up of regular Americans just like the rest of us. They have been overstretched and poorly equipped since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq. National Guard and reserve units have been used in place of regular army military units without reasonable explanation.

These reserves are supposed to be on call primarily for times of disaster or disturbance on the state level. The fact that Louisiana and Mississippi units were deployed to Iraq when Hurricane Katrina hit is thought to be of major significance in the lack of response to the New Orleans disaster.

“The deployment of thousands of National Guard troops from Mississippi and Louisiana in Iraq when Hurricane Katrina struck hindered those states' initial storm response, military and civilian officials said Friday.

Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, said that "arguably" a day at most of response time was lost due to the absence of the Mississippi National Guard's 155th Infantry Brigade and Louisiana's 256th Infantry Brigade, each with thousands of troops in Iraq.

"Had that brigade been at home and not in Iraq, their expertise and capabilities could have been brought to bear," said Blum.”-CNN

Liberalism’s Flaw

If you listen to liberals for very long you will begin to notice several tenets they generally espouse. Since we’ve just had an election, I want to point out one of the more popular creeds that we’ve heard from liberals of late.

Liberals rightly point out that the right wing is intolerant of homosexuals unless you are a high level republican staff member or congressman and then you have to remain in the closet, ala Mark Foley.

Liberals rightly point out that the gay marriage bans on the ballot recently in many states are discriminatory. They rightly point out that discriminating against a group of people is a bad thing.

They will point this out until they need discrimination to serves their own ends.

The curtains aren’t even measured in the congressional offices and already you are beginning to hear the chorus coming from the left to re-institute the estate tax.

See liberals are against discrimination, unless they perceive you to be rich and then it is perfectly acceptable to discriminate. Liberals have no problem with the government confiscating your money when you die.

They ordinarily couch their argument by saying that the estate tax is only applicable for two percent of the population or some figure there about. But if the law applies to only two percent of the population then it is discriminatory by definition.

A law that doesn’t apply equally to the entire population is precisely what liberals will tell you is wrong with a ban on gay marriage. But the class envy leftists easily turn a blind eye when it comes to what they perceive as sticking it to the rich.

Liberals will yell at the tops of their lungs about oil companies receiving tax breaks from the government. They have a valid point.

Corporations don’t deserve tax breaks that the rest of us cannot take advantage of, just as certain segments of the population do not deserve to have to an unequal portion of their money taken by the government.

Whether the discrimination is based on race, religion, sexual orientation or financial status, it is still discrimination. Laws need to apply equally no matter a person’s account balance. Aren’t we told constantly that laws shouldn’t favor the rich, the inverse applies as well.

If a rich man is pulled over for speeding doesn’t he get the same fine a poor man receives? The law sees no distinction. Why should the law apply differently when it comes to a person’s estate?

Liberal arguments will vary across the spectrum as to the reasons why it is beneficial for the government to confiscate someone’s money. What it boils down to however is a seemingly innate class envy that is ingrained in most liberals.

It’s fairly easy to fall into this trap when we see all of the corruption and graft that has taken place in Washington lately. If you are of a mind to say that the rich have benefited disproportionately from tax breaks, I won’t argue with you. The income tax is unconstitutional to start with and no matter what, it is always the middle and lower income folks who pay the most, they’re the majority of the population. But that still doesn’t give the government just cause to confiscate people’s money at the barrel of a gun because they die.

Hubris

"Far be it from me to dispute the Bush administration's inability to carry out its announced intentions, but these were always pipe dreams that couldn't have been implemented even by the most competent regime imaginable. The U.S. occupation is being defeated by objective circumstances, i.e., the near-complete absence of support from the Iraqi people, and not by the exigencies of American politics. While this may strike a blow at the conceit that U.S. troops are invincible and only need to muster an act of will in order to achieve victory, this mindset is itself typical of the hubris that tempted us to invade in the first place.

I contend that these results were eminently foreseeable, that in fact they were foreseen by the very policymakers who urged us on to war. Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Iraqi demographics and the history of the country since the fall of the Ottomans could have confidently predicted the disaster we are seeing. The dynamics of the conflict in Iraq lead, ineluctably, to war with Iran: that is the likely culmination of events, if we stay on the present course. And it is one that the Bush administration apparently has no appetite for, at least at the present time – although some would disagree." - Justin Raimondo

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead!

Rumsfeld out, Bush picks Gates

By RON HUTCHESON
McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Chastened by a “thumpin’” at the polls, President Bush heeded voters’ call for change Wednesday by ousting Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Bush’s surprise decision to replace Rumsfeld with former CIA director Robert Gates was the most dramatic event in a series of rapid-fire developments triggered by the Democratic takeover in Congress.

Gates is a protege of Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to the first President Bush, and a member of the bipartisan Iraq study group led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker, who perhaps was the senior Bush’s closest adviser. That commission is expected to deliver its report to the president as early as next week.

The mainstream foreign-policy experts are not poised to make radical suggestions, but official Washington has expected both parties to seize on their ideas for political cover.

Gates’ selection to lead the Pentagon was the latest evidence that the senior Bush — often reported to be skeptical about U.S. involvement in Iraq — might be advising his son on how to extricate U.S. forces with minimal political and diplomatic damage.

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., who would head the Senate Foreign Relations Committee if Democrats capture the Virginia Senate seat and control of the Senate, said he understood Gates “has a much more pragmatic and realistic view of the place we find ourselves” in Iraq and is much more willing to work with the uniformed military than Rumsfeld was.

Unhappiness with the war was a major element of voter dissatisfaction Tuesday — and the main impetus for Rumsfeld’s departure.

His ouster came a week after Bush told reporters he wanted the defense secretary to stay on the job until end of his presidency. Despite what he said, Bush had already concluded he wanted “a fresh perspective” at the Pentagon, although he had not interviewed Gates or worked out final details of Rumsfeld’s resignation.

Bush said he kept his intentions secret before the elections because, he said, he did not want U.S. military personnel to think he was making key decisions “based upon politics.”

Rumsfeld showed little of his characteristic cockiness at a brief appearance with Bush and Gates later Wednesday, but he maintained his sense of humor.

“I have benefited greatly from criticism,” he said, borrowing a line from Winston Churchill, “and at no time have I suffered a lack thereof.”

Members of Congress from both parties welcomed Rumsfeld’s departure as a sign that Bush is open to new ideas on Iraq. Critics say the 74-year-old defense secretary:

• Ignored his commanders’ advice

• Invaded Iraq with too few troops

• Set a tone that encouraged the abuse of war captives

• Failed to develop a credible postwar plan

• Imposed backbreaking burdens on the Army and Marine Corps

In contrast to Rumsfeld, Gates is considered a pragmatic foreign policy realist, with a tendency to see the world in shades of gray, rather than black and white.

“This is the death knell of the neoconservative approach,” Biden said. “I think the president is going to necessarily have to find new ground.”

However, Bush signaled he would continue to oppose a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq until victory is within reach.

“The election has changed many things in Washington, but it has not changed my fundamental responsibility, and that is to protect the American people from attack,” Bush said. “If the goal is success, we can work together. If the goal is get out now, regardless, then that’s going to be hard to work together.”

Hearst Newspapers and The Washington Post contributed.

THE RUMSFELD FILE

The defense secretary will be remembered as ...

• The square-jawed face behind the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan

• The man who introduced America to “shock and awe” bombing in Baghdad

• The leader who twice offered his resignation during the furor over prisoner abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq

• A hard-liner who supported U.S. tactics handling terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

QUOTE: “It will be a different Congress, a different environment, moving toward a presidential election and a lot of partisanship, and it struck me that (leaving now) would be a good thing for everybody.”

Dems Take Congress

The tsunami that everyone supposed would careen onto the political landscape, last night did just that. The republicans were resoundingly thrashed at the polls losing, as of this time, 27 seats in the house. It looks like the Dems will also take the Senate but Virginia and Montana have yet to be called.

The mood of the country has been fiercely anti-administration as Bush seems to be totally oblivious to the growing chorus of Americans speaking out against the war in Iraq. The most blatant corruption in generations has been splashed across the news practically daily for quite a while.

Bush’s evangelical base has been sorely depressed by the revelation that a multitude of closeted gay men fill the upper ranks of the republican leadership’s staff, as well as some members themselves. Many republicans that I’ve spoken to lately were just plainly disgusted with the party as a whole.

The Republicans, for their part, will now become preoccupied with identifying the reasons for their stunning defeat – and making sure it doesn't happen again. What is clear is that the neoconservative principles embodied by this administration – not only a foreign policy of unmitigated aggression, but also a high-spending, big-government domestic policy that has thrown overboard the old conservatism of fiscal restraint and reflexive opposition to centralized power – have led the GOP down the garden path to disaster. The Iraq war was a gigantic albatross hung 'round the neck of Republican candidates on every level: even Lincoln Chafee, who had distanced himself from the president and did not approve of the Iraq war, was felled in the November massacre. The voters punished the Republican Party because they identified it with the War Party – and all Republicans suffered as a result. Republican moderates suffered such major casualties this time around that they appear headed for extinction: Rep. Jim Leach, perhaps the leading moderate figure with any national prominence, was also defeated in his reelection bid. – Justin Raimondo

Will the Democratic take over result in a new policy on Iraq? Will the overreaching legislation the administration has shoved down American’s throats get rolled back? Is it a new day in America? We shall see….

Go team!

It is often with a great sense of irony that an American, who is interested, will find his nation's history. At the present time, days before the 2006 mid-term elections, the national mood of the United States is a seething contempt for the current regime, which is a republican Senate, House and President.

The nearly four year old "war" in Iraq has degenerated into…a war. Exactly what war was supposed to look like prior to our invasion of Mesopotamia is anyone's guess. The American public however is a fickle lot and with the epidemic of attention deficit disorder plaguing a fairly large segment, it's no wonder that Americans have become somewhat disheartened by our lack of a clear cut football-esque type victory over the desert tribes, although our aim was never to battle them, only their despotic regime.

So to set the stage for those who may read this at some point in the future I will describe the teams as they now sit. As was stated previously the republicans maintain majorities in all branches of the government. The democrats need to take fifteen seats in the house to gain a majority and about eight in the Senate. Democrats are charged and republicans are dispirited. All prognostications seem to indicate that democrats will sweep into Washington on a tsunami wave of upheaval.

The current regime has drawn the ire of the American public in a number of ways, foremost of which is a perceived abuse of executive power. I'll use the word perceived for this purpose basically because it all depends on which team you happen to cheer for as to whether you "perceive" the abuse of power or whether you tend to ignore it. If you cheered the republicans at the beginning of this high stakes match you will have a tendency to support all of the invasive measures the president claims to have, such as, warrantless wiretapping of American civilians, suspending habeas corpus, torturing prisoners, and invading foreign countries, just to name a few.

At first a great majority of the country was supportive of these measures because of the hijacked jets that were flown into the World Trade Centers and the pentagon. Overnight the stars and stripes appeared on practically every bumper in America. America was ready for vengeance and George Bush was just the man for the job. The congress unflinchingly passed the Patriot Act into law with most members having never read it. That was the first mistake.

Then the Congress approved giving the president the power to make war on whomever he decided was behind the Trade Center attacks. This was mistake number two.

Without going into an in depth history of the past four years, suffice it to say that after not too long a time the bumper sticker flags went away and people got back to disliking each other. The entire notion that somehow, because the United States was the victim of a terrorist attack, civility would permeate the nation and crime would disappear and everyone would get along forever and ever was an altogether deluded concept in the first place. No, the terrorist attacks did not change the demeanor of the United States, but the Bush administration did.

So now the power grab by the neo-cons, the splendid war that didn't go as planned, the fiasco in New Orleans, and the virtual laundry list of corrupt republican politicians has most of the American public pretty well disgusted, and rightly so.

I want to state clearly that this time it is the democrats who want to limit the power of the executive and it is the republicans that want us to believe the president should be given broad powers, outside the scope of the constitution. It wasn't always like this.

At one time, the folks on the left cheered for dictatorial powers for the president.

"Flynn's prototype American fascist was not a thug in a brownshirt or SS uniform; it was the American statesman who sought to erode the people's power in Congress and to concentrate undue authority in the hands of the President (Roosevelt). Flynn warned against militarism and imperialism; yet his cry for constitutional government was to become purely a rallying cry for the Right-wing in American life. Liberals then defended the tradition of Presidential power, which was conceived as the repository of all virtue in political life. "

When the democrats take back the Congress we'll see if they truly do loathe the new powers of the executive as much as they tell us they do. No, they will quickly adjust to aggressive wars, deficit spending, invasive snooping, and a host of other issues they now find distasteful. And the republican team will suddenly realize that maybe it isn't such a good idea for a president to be able to designate people "enemy combatants" on a whim and that exit strategies actually are necessary when it comes to war. (Like they told us when Clinton went to war in Bosnia.)

Yes the tables will turn and the people who cheer for things now will in the future scream about them. And people who loathe a thing right now will lobby dearly for the same thing later. And people will adjust their "beliefs" to the prevailing wind as necessary and believe the things they need to believe when they need to believe them.