Vigilance, A Message To The Press

__________________________________________________________________
The current administration bears close watching: they are liable to take us to the brink of some private ‘Christian’ jihadist event for which they feel totally justified in their Machiavellian formula for domination of the world’s populations. They have started with America, but if you read more than your own newspaper, you will see that many of the same events happening today in America are also happening in England and elsewhere in Europe. This ‘cabal’ does not start or end in this country. A word to the wise, kids—we have a problem, and that problem is much larger than what’s happening in Washington, D.C..

Bush and Cronies are machinators enough to give us Iraq on a much broader scale in order to divert attention from their aims and problems (whatever they may be), but they can not do so without the consent of whoever pulls their strings. These ‘leaders’ of America are sociopaths to the highest degree and despite appearing to rant here, I would highly suggest that you keep your eye on the horizon for what’s coming next. Syria?

If my premise is correct, then it does not matter what occurs in the way of small and/or large conflagration: any event will result in decreasing the ‘burden’ on the chosen 1%--witness the aftermath of hurricane Katrina and other natural disasters that have occurred recently: nothing is being accomplished in New Orleans. A successful Diaspora has taken place right under our noses, the culture and people (the poor people, that is) are scattered to the winds never to return to their homes. Land has been usurped by the wealthy 1%, contracts issued without bids: you know the drill.

I suggest, rather than a retrospective press, that you look forward and try to out-think these people currently manipulating our country, and perhaps our world: look at the worst case scenario and go out on the limb of the tree of prediction—the ‘Neocons’ have had 30 years to invent the outcome for tomorrow, and whatever you can imagine is probably not nearly as horrible as what they have planned for our future.

If you want insight into what your future holds, come ‘down here’ and talk to the other 1% of us who are struggling to buy gas to get to work to earn money that doesn’t stretch far enough to buy food, pay rent, afford medical care. Luxuries are dental care, food, medicine, shelter—the things that ‘rich’ reporters take for granted because the financial squeeze hasn’t touched your level of the economic/sociological triangle as yet.

Until you tell the story of our country from this perspective, you are not telling the truth about what is happening in this country, and you are not facing the truth of what your future holds.

__________________________________________________________________

October 31, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Ending the Fraudulence

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Let me be frank: it has been a long political nightmare. For some of us, daily life has remained safe and comfortable, so the nightmare has merely been intellectual: we realized early on that this administration was cynical, dishonest and incompetent, but spent a long time unable to get others to see the obvious. For others - above all, of course, those Americans risking their lives in a war whose real rationale has never been explained - the nightmare has been all too concrete.

So is the nightmare finally coming to an end? Yes, I think so. I have no idea whether Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, will bring more indictments in the Plame affair. In any case, I don't share fantasies that Dick Cheney will be forced to resign; even Karl Rove may keep his post. One way or another, the Bush administration will stagger on for three more years. But its essential fraudulence stands exposed, and it's hard to see how that exposure can be undone.

What do I mean by essential fraudulence? Basically, I mean the way an administration with an almost unbroken record of policy failure has nonetheless achieved political dominance through a carefully cultivated set of myths.

The record of policy failure is truly remarkable. It sometimes seems as if President Bush and Mr. Cheney are Midases in reverse: everything they touch - from Iraq reconstruction to hurricane relief, from prescription drug coverage to the pursuit of Osama - turns to crud. Even the few apparent successes turn out to contain failures at their core: for example, real G.D.P. may be up, but real wages are down.

The point is that this administration's political triumphs have never been based on its real-world achievements, which are few and far between. The administration has, instead, built its power on myths: the myth of presidential leadership, the ugly myth that the administration is patriotic while its critics are not. Take away those myths, and the administration has nothing left.

Well, Katrina ended the leadership myth, which was already fading as the war dragged on. There was a time when a photo of Mr. Bush looking out the window of Air Force One on 9/11 became an iconic image of leadership. Now, a similar image of Mr. Bush looking out at a flooded New Orleans has become an iconic image of his lack of connection. Pundits may try to resurrect Mr. Bush's reputation, but his cult of personality is dead - and the inscription on the tombstone reads, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Meanwhile, the Plame inquiry, however it winds up, has ended the myth of the administration's monopoly on patriotism, which was also fading in the face of the war.

Apologists can shout all they like that no laws were broken, that hardball politics is nothing new, or whatever. The fact remains that officials close to both Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush leaked the identity of an undercover operative for political reasons. Whether or not that act was illegal, it was clearly unpatriotic.

And the Plame affair has also solidified the public's growing doubts about the administration's morals. By a three-to-one margin, according to a Washington Post poll, the public now believes that the level of ethics and honesty in the government has declined rather than risen under Mr. Bush.

So the Bush administration has lost the myths that sustained its mojo, and with them much of its power to do harm. But the nightmare won't be fully over until two things happen.
First, politicians will have to admit that they were misled. Second, the news media will have to face up to their role in allowing incompetents to pose as leaders and political apparatchiks to pose as patriots.

It's a sad commentary on the timidity of most Democrats that even now, with Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, telling us how policy was "hijacked" by the Cheney-Rumsfeld "cabal," it's hard to get leading figures to admit that they were misled into supporting the Iraq war. Kudos to John Kerry for finally saying just that last week.

And as for the media: these days, there is much harsh, justified criticism of the failure of major news organizations, this one included, to exert due diligence on rationales for the war. But the failures that made the long nightmare possible began much earlier, during the weeks after 9/11, when the media eagerly helped our political leaders build up a completely false picture of who they were.

So the long nightmare won't really be over until journalists ask themselves: what did we know, when did we know it, and why didn't we tell the public?

· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Thoughts on Digesting the “Big Enchilada”

Money does not outweigh the masses—it may be that we, the people, will prevail over attacks against the Constitution of the United States of America by those who are intent on destroying the meaning of this document which is the cornerstone of American democracy. Who knows how this document’s demise would affect our future as free Americans? And who knows what the point of all this seeming conspiracy has been?

I, for one, sense that the rape of American rights by a Neo-Conservative hidden agenda is not over: perhaps the very people, our press, whom we depend upon to ultimately protect us from these infringements upon our liberty are naive as only those who are more priviledged due to youth and education can be naïve. They are just now awakening to the horrors of this administration, while those of us in the lowest level of the economic triangle (the other 1%) have had to deal with the inequities of the Bush administration and the last three decades of openly Machiavellian inequities on a daily basis.

The Neo-conservative agenda has been fomenting in our midst for 30 years, according to sources such as Kevin Phillips, et alia, and according to my own experience as a member of that other 1%. When Reagan became governor of California budget cuts released the inmates of mental institutions into the populace of Santa Cruz County, Calilfornia, and indeed, all over the State of California. There is no need to enumerate the problems inherent in this malfeasance: the imagination, and indeed, memory, is sufficient enumeration of unmedicated mental patients loose in the general populace during those times. Those of us connected in some small way to county services looked at each other with disbelief—this condition must (and would) get better, we told each other. We voted. We complained. We endured, and each year and with each election, social conditions continued to deteriorate and we began to accept these woeful conditions as the norm: we became more enured to the sufferings we saw among those even less fortunate that ourselves. Editorials were written. Opinions were espoused. Nothing changed, except that circumventing the will of the American people became business as usual.

Thirty years: three decades—three decades—of the gradual erosion of benefits and rights have gradually climbed the sociological triangle until the effects touch the educated, the privileged, the more affluent, members of society. These members still have a lot to learn. They are just now waking up. In another 30 years, democracy as we know it will have fallen victim to the interests of greed. In another 30 years the naivety of the educated elite will have cost us the elements of democracy which we hold most dear.

Yes, the system is working, but it is working too slowly and the system which we count on to protect us is held in check by the disbelief that there are those in power who are deliberate in their efforts to undermine liberty. There are those in office who knowingly and deliberately stand on the heads of the poorest to gain material wealth. There are those in office who represent the highest financial interests of corporations rather than the people who elected them to office.

This is real, kids, and not an exercise in a classroom debate. This current state of political affairs is not going to go away just because you have lifted a few rocks and exposed a few snakes. You must continue to fight the good fight: you must continue in eradicating these enemies of American democracy. As we have seen, exposing these people does not guarantee that their actions will change for the betterment of America ideals or her neediest citizens.

__________________________________________________________________
October 30, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

One Step Closer to the Big Enchilada

By FRANK RICH

TO believe that the Bush-Cheney scandals will be behind us anytime soon you'd have to believe that the Nixon-Agnew scandals peaked when G. Gordon Liddy and his bumbling band were nailed for the Watergate break-in. But Watergate played out for nearly two years after the gang that burglarized Democratic headquarters was indicted by a federal grand jury; it even dragged on for more than a year after Nixon took "responsibility" for the scandal, sacrificed his two top aides and weathered the indictments of two first-term cabinet members. In those ensuing months, America would come to see that the original petty crime was merely the leading edge of thematically related but wildly disparate abuses of power that Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, would name "the White House horrors."

In our current imperial presidency, as in its antecedent, what may look like a narrow case involving a second banana with a child's name contains the DNA of the White House, and that DNA offers a road map to the duplicitous culture of the whole. The coming prosecution of Lewis (Scooter) Libby in the Wilson affair is hardly the end of the story. That "Cheney's Cheney," as Mr. Libby is known, would allegedly go to such lengths to obscure his role in punishing a man who challenged the administration's W.M.D. propaganda is just one very big window into the genesis of the smoke screen (or, more accurately, mushroom cloud) that the White House used to sell the war in Iraq.

After the heat of last week's drama, we can forget just how effective the administration's cover-up of that con job had been until very recently. Before Patrick Fitzgerald's leak investigation, there were two separate official investigations into the failure of prewar intelligence. With great fanfare and to great acclaim, both found that our information about Saddam's W.M.D.'s was dead wrong. But wittingly or unwittingly, both of these supposedly thorough inquiries actually protected the White House by avoiding, in Watergate lingo, "the big enchilada."

The 601-page report from the special presidential commission led by Laurence Silberman and Charles Robb, hailed at its March release as a "sharp critique" by Mr. Bush, contains only a passing mention of Dick Cheney. It has no mention whatsoever of Mr. Libby or Karl Rove or their semicovert propaganda operation (the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG) created to push all that dead-wrong intel. Nor does it mention Douglas Feith, the first-term under secretary of defense for policy, whose rogue intelligence operation in the Pentagon supplied the vice president with the disinformation that bamboozled the nation.

The other investigation into prewar intelligence, by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a scandal in its own right. After the release of its initial findings in July 2004, the committee's Republican chairman, Pat Roberts, promised that a Phase 2 to determine whether the White House had misled the public would arrive after the presidential election. It still hasn't, and no wonder: Murray Waas reported Thursday in The National Journal that Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby had refused to provide the committee with "crucial documents," including the Libby-written passages in early drafts of Colin Powell's notorious presentation of W.M.D. "evidence" to the U.N. on the eve of war.

Along the way, Mr. Fitzgerald's investigation has prompted the revelation of much of what these previous investigations left out. But even so, the trigger for the Wilson affair - the administration's fierce effort to protect its hype of Saddam's uranium - is only one piece of the larger puzzle of post- and pre-9/11 White House subterfuge. We're a long way from putting together the full history of a self-described "war presidency" that bungled the war in Iraq and, in doing so, may be losing the war against radical Islamic terrorism as well.

There are many other mysteries to be cracked, from the catastrophic, almost willful failure of the Pentagon to plan for the occupation of Iraq to the utter ineptitude of the huge and costly Department of Homeland Security that was revealed in all its bankruptcy by Katrina. There are countless riddles, large and small. Why have the official reports on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo spared all but a single officer in the chain of command? Why does Halliburton continue to receive lucrative government contracts even after it's been the focus of multiple federal inquiries into accusations of bid-rigging, overcharging and fraud? Why did it take five weeks for Pat Tillman's parents to be told that their son had been killed by friendly fire, and who ordered up the fake story of his death that was sold relentlessly on TV before then?
These questions are just a representative sampling. It won't be easy to get honest answers because this administration, like Nixon's, practices obsessive secrecy even as it erects an alternative reality built on spin and outright lies.

Mr. Cheney is a particularly shameless master of these black arts. Long before he played semantics on "Meet the Press" with his knowledge of Joseph Wilson in the leak case, he repeatedly fictionalized crucial matters of national security. As far back as May 8, 2001, he appeared on CNN to promote his new assignment, announced that day by Mr. Bush, to direct a governmentwide review of U.S. "consequence management" in the event of a terrorist attack. As we would learn only in the recriminatory aftermath of 9/11 (from Barton Gellman of The Washington Post), Mr. Cheney never did so.

That stunt was a preview of Mr. Cheney's unreliable pronouncements about the war, from his early prediction that American troops would be "greeted as liberators" in Iraq to this summer's declaration that the insurgency was in its "last throes." Even before he began inflating Saddam's nuclear capabilities, he went on "Meet the Press" in December 2001 to peddle the notion that "it's been pretty well confirmed" that there was a direct pre-9/11 link between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence. When the Atta-Saddam link was disproved later, Gloria Borger, interviewing the vice president on CNBC, confronted him about his earlier claim, and Mr. Cheney told her three times that he had never said it had been "pretty well confirmed." When a man thinks he can get away with denying his own words even though there are millions of witnesses and a video record, he clearly believes he can get away with murder.

Mr. Bush is only slightly less brazen. His own false claims about Iraq's W.M.D.'s ("We found the weapons of mass destruction," he said in May 2003) are, if anything, exceeded by his repeated boasts of capturing various bin Laden and Zarqawi deputies and beating back Al Qaeda. His speech this month announcing the foiling of 10 Qaeda plots is typical; as USA Today reported last week, at least 6 of the 10 on the president's list "involved preliminary ideas about potential attacks, not terrorist operations that were about to be carried out." In June, Mr. Bush stood beside his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, and similarly claimed that "federal terrorism investigations have resulted in charges against more than 400 suspects" and that "more than half" of those had been convicted. A Washington Post investigation found that only 39 of those convictions had involved terrorism or national security (as opposed to, say, immigration violations). That sum could yet be exceeded by the combined number of convictions in the Jack Abramoff-Tom DeLay scandals.

The hyping of post-9/11 threats indeed reflects the same DNA as the hyping of Saddam's uranium: in both cases, national security scares are trumpeted to advance the White House's political goals. Keith Olbermann of MSNBC recently compiled 13 "coincidences" in which "a political downturn for the administration," from revelations of ignored pre-9/11 terror warnings to fresh news of detainee abuses, is "followed by a 'terror event' - a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning." To switch the national subject from the fallout of the televised testimony of the F.B.I. whistle-blower Coleen Rowley in 2002, John Ashcroft went so far as to broadcast a frantic announcement, via satellite from Russia, that the government had "disrupted an unfolding terrorist plot" to explode a dirty bomb. What he was actually referring to was the arrest of a single suspect, Jose Padilla, for allegedly exploring such a plan - an arrest that had taken place a month earlier.

For now, it's conventional wisdom in Washington that the Bush White House's infractions are nowhere near those of the Nixon administration, as David Gergen put it on MSNBC on Friday morning. But Watergate's dirty tricks were mainly prompted by the ruthless desire to crush the political competition at any cost. That's a powerful element in the Bush scandals, too, but this administration has upped the ante by playing dirty tricks with war. Back on July 6, 2003, when the American casualty toll in Iraq stood at 169 and Mr. Wilson had just published his fateful Op-Ed, Robert Novak, yet to write his column outing Mr. Wilson's wife, declared that "weapons of mass destruction or uranium from Niger" were "little elitist issues that don't bother most of the people." That's what Nixon administration defenders first said about the "third-rate burglary" at Watergate, too.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Any Rock Will Do

Me, I’m a bus rider, so I had several moments of righteously gloating laughter when the gas prices went astronomical at the expense of over-caffeinated, over-paid, under-worked yuppies driving enormously uncontrollable SUV’s while talking on their cell phones with one hand and juggling hot Starbucks’ with the other.

The idea that they were paying $3.00 a gallon for the privilege of condescendingly glancing my way while I waited for the bus in all kinds of nasty weather was infinitely pleasing to me.

Although I have never cared for the condescension of these professional types, when I noticed that the previously shiny power wagons were increasingly dusty, (perhaps indicating a choice made between gas and the almost-religious detailing of these behemoths), I did have the grace to smile benignly as they guzzled past. Ah, status...and the lack of same.

Now, word has it that the oil companies (Bush Cronies all) made quarterly profits of almost $10 billion dollars. That’s a lot of zeros, folks. The running-scared Republicans are now making noise about telling the oil companies how to spend their ill-gotten gains.

Right.

Where were they when the prices went up? Where were they when the prices stayed up long enough to give their oil cronies historically record profits?

Where are they now, really, except looking for the nearest rock under which to hide?

___________________________________________________________________

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gasoline28oct28,0,5958364.story?track=tothtml

THE NATION

Frist Calls for Hearings on Fuel Profits

With Democrats making gas prices a campaign issue, more in the GOP are asking why oil industry earnings are breaking records.

By Richard SimonTimes Staff WriterOctober 28, 2005WASHINGTON — Oil industry executives will be summoned to Capitol Hill to explain why gasoline prices are so high — the latest effort by Republican lawmakers to head off political fallout from high fuel costs.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) called Thursday for hearings into fuel prices, becoming the second congressional Republican leader this week to raise questions about the soaring profits of an industry that long has been a GOP ally.With the industry posting record profits, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) earlier called on oil companies to plow more money into increasing fuel supplies and lowering costs to consumers.

"Our free market works best when all know and follow the rules of the road," Frist said in a statement on his request for hearings. "If there are those who abuse the free-enterprise system to advantage themselves and their businesses at the expense of all Americans, they ought to be exposed, and they ought to be ashamed.

"The GOP moves come in response to an aggressive Democratic effort to highlight energy prices as an issue in next year's congressional elections, from staging press conferences at gas stations to pushing for a windfall profits tax on oil and gas companies.

"Very simply, these guys are running for cover," oil economist Philip K. Verleger Jr. said of the GOP efforts.

The Bush administration also is expected to soon come out in support of additional federal aid to help low-income families pay projected increases in heating bills.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said he was skeptical that hearings would accomplish anything."We've had hearings," he said. "What's needed is action."

Wyden has called for government investigations into price gouging and other alleged industry misconduct.

Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine), however, welcomed Frist's move. "At a time when the American people are struggling to pay their energy bills and the residents of my own state of Maine will be hard-pressed to pay their home heating costs this winter, it is deeply concerning and, frankly, outrageous that oil companies are boasting record-breaking profits," she said.

On Thursday, Exxon Mobil Corp. reported a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, its biggest ever.

Details of the hearings still must be worked out, such as when they will occur, who will be asked to appear and whether witnesses will be put under oath.

Frist asked the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee to conduct the hearings jointly. He also asked the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to begin an inquiry into price gouging. Frist said that "if the facts warrant it," he would support a federal law against price gouging.

Oil industry executives were called to Capitol Hill during the 1970s energy crisis and received a bipartisan grilling about their profits, among other things. During a six-hour hearing before a panel headed by Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson (D-Wash.), the oilmen turned aside attacks, denying misconduct and defending their earnings. Oil company executives also defended their pricing at Senate hearings in 1980 and 2000.

Legislation has been introduced in the Senate to offer the industry tax breaks to encourage the construction and expansion of refineries. But additional tax breaks for the oil and gas industries are likely to face trouble, given the latest earnings reports.

Profligate

The problem isn’t with employer sponsored health care: the roots of the problem with insuring Americans are the exorbitant charges for drugs, medical equipment, hospital supplies, and anything needed by healthcare providers in order to treat the ills of our populace. Regulation of the drug and hospital supply industry is necessary to alleviate the high prices we are paying for health care in this country, and also to allow the profligate charges by the insurance companies to be obvious.

To do so would require that our current crop of legislators back away from the trough long enough to realize that the economic boundaries are moving up the economic triangle and as we, the lowliest of the poor, are treated, so will they be. Their turn is coming because the economic rape of America and her citizens will not cease until the 1% of the richest are the only inhabitants of our planet: perhaps with a small percentage of the healthiest workers left to sustain the everyday needs of the rich, something akin to the futuristic novel, ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’.

Synopsis
Based on Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, THE HANDMAID'S TALE presents a harrowing vision of (as the film's opening legend reads) 'the very near future.' In Gilead, formerly the United States, a series of ecological disasters rendering most women infertile has been followed by a coup d’état by puritanical right-wing fundamentalists. Attempting to escape the increasingly unjust and brutal oligarchy, Kate is captured by border guards while her husband is killed and her daughter lost. Because she is fertile, Kate is sent for training as a handmaid, where she meets the defiant Moira. Kate then becomes handmaid to the Commander and is forced to enact a ceremony, based on the biblical story of Rachel, in which she lies between the Commander and his infertile wife, Serena Joy, so he can impregnate her. The ceremony leaves Serena Joy angry, the Commander unfulfilled, and Kate humiliated, rebellious, and desperate for freedom.

__________________________________________________________________
October 26, 2005

Wal-Mart Memo Suggests Ways to Cut Employee Benefit Costs

By STEVEN GREENHOUSEand MICHAEL BARBARO


An internal memo sent to Wal-Mart board of directors proposes numerous ways to hold down spending on health care and other benefits while seeking to minimize damage to the retailer's reputation. Among the recommendations are hiring more part-time workers and discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart.

In the memorandum, M. Susan Chambers, Wal-Mart's executive vice president for benefits, also recommends reducing 401(k) contributions and wooing younger, and presumably healthier, workers by offering education benefits. The memo voices concern that workers with seven years' seniority earn more than workers with one year's seniority, but are no more productive.
To discourage unhealthy job applicants, Ms. Chambers suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering)."

The memo acknowledged that Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, had to walk a fine line in restraining benefit costs because critics had attacked it for being stingy on wages and health coverage. Ms. Chambers acknowledged that 46 percent of the children of Wal-Mart's 1.33 million United States employees were uninsured or on Medicaid.

Wal-Mart executives said the memo was part of an effort to rein in benefit costs, which to Wall Street's dismay have soared by 15 percent a year on average since 2002. Like much of corporate America, Wal-Mart has been squeezed by soaring health costs. The proposed plan, if approved, would save the company more than $1 billion a year by 2011.

In an interview, Ms. Chambers said she was focusing not on cutting costs, but on serving employees better by giving them more choices on their benefits.

"We are investing in our benefits that will take even better care of our associates," she said. "Our benefit plan is known today as being generous."

Ms. Chambers also said that she made her recommendations after surveying employees about how they felt about the benefits plan. "This is not about cutting," she said. "This is about redirecting savings to another part of their benefit plans."

One proposal would reduce the amount of time, from two years to one, that part-time employees would have to wait before qualifying for health insurance. Another would put health clinics in stores, in part to reduce expensive employee visits to emergency rooms. Wal-Mart's benefit costs jumped to $4.2 billion last year, from $2.8 billion three years earlier, causing concern within the company because benefits represented an increasing share of sales. Last year, Wal-Mart earned $10.5 billion on sales of $285 billion.

A draft memo to Wal-Mart's board was obtained from Wal-Mart Watch, a nonprofit group, allied with labor unions, that asserts that Wal-Mart's pay and benefits are too low. Tracy Sefl, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart Watch, said someone mailed the document anonymously to her group last month. When asked about the memo, Wal-Mart officials made available the updated copy that actually went to the board.

Under fire because less than 45 percent of its workers receive company health insurance, Wal-Mart announced a new plan on Monday that seeks to increase participation by allowing some employees to pay just $11 a month in premiums. Some health experts praised the plan for making coverage more affordable, but others criticized it, noting that full-time Wal-Mart employees, who earn on average around $17,500 a year, could face out-of-pocket expenses of $2,500 a year or more.

Eager to burnish Wal-Mart's image as it faces opposition in trying to expand into New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, Wal-Mart's chief executive, H. Lee Scott Jr., also announced on Monday a sweeping plan to conserve energy. He also said that Wal-Mart supported raising the minimum wage to help Wal-Mart's customers.

The theme throughout the memo was how to slow the increase in benefit costs without giving more ammunition to critics who contend that Wal-Mart's wages and benefits are dragging down those of other American workers.

Ms. Chambers proposed that employees pay more for their spouses' health insurance. She called for cutting 401(k) contributions to 3 percent of wages from 4 percent and cutting company-paid life insurance policies to $12,000 from the current level, equal to an employee's annual earnings.

Life insurance, she said, was "a high-satisfaction, low-importance benefit, which suggests an opportunity to trim the offering without substantial impact on associate satisfaction." Wal-Mart refers to its employees as associates.

Acknowledging that Wal-Mart has image problems, Ms. Chambers wrote: "Wal-Mart's critics can easily exploit some aspects of our benefits offering to make their case; in other words, our critics are correct in some of their observations. Specifically, our coverage is expensive for low-income families, and Wal-Mart has a significant percentage of associates and their children on public assistance."

Her memo stated that 5 percent of Wal-Mart's workers were on Medicaid, compared with 4 percent for other national employers. She said that Wal-Mart spent $1.5 billion a year on health insurance, which amounts to $2,660 per insured worker.

The memo, prepared with the help of McKinsey & Company, said the board was to consider the recommendations in November. But the memo said that three top Wal-Mart officials - its chief financial officer, its top human relations executive and its executive vice president for legal and corporate affairs - had "received the recommendations enthusiastically."

Ms. Chambers's memo voiced concern that workers were staying with the company longer, pushing up wage costs, although she stopped short of calling for efforts to push out more senior workers.

She wrote that "the cost of an associate with seven years of tenure is almost 55 percent more than the cost of an associate with one year of tenure, yet there is no difference in his or her productivity. Moreover, because we pay an associate more in salary and benefits as his or her tenure increases, we are pricing that associate out of the labor market, increasing the likelihood that he or she will stay with Wal-Mart."

The memo noted that Wal-Mart workers "are getting sicker than the national population, particularly in obesity-related diseases," including diabetes and coronary artery disease. The memo said Wal-Mart workers tended to overuse emergency rooms and underuse prescriptions and doctor visits, perhaps from previous experience with Medicaid.

The memo noted, "The least healthy, least productive associates are more satisfied with their benefits than other segments and are interested in longer careers with Wal-Mart."

The memo proposed incorporating physical activity in all jobs and promoting health savings accounts. Such accounts are financed with pretax dollars and allow workers to divert their contributions into retirement savings if they are not all spent on health care. Health experts say these accounts will be more attractive to younger, healthier workers.

"It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one," the memo said. "These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."

Ron Pollack, executive director of Families U.S.A., a health care consumer-advocacy group, criticized the memo for recommending that more workers move into health plans with high deductibles.

"Their people are paying a very substantial portion of their earnings out of pocket for health care," he said. "These plans will cause these workers and their families to defer or refrain from getting needed care."

The memo noted that 38 percent of Wal-Mart workers spent more than one-sixth of their Wal-Mart income on health care last year.

By reducing the amount of time part-timers must work to qualify for health insurance, Wal-Mart is hoping to allay some of its critics.

One proposal under consideration would offer new employees "limited funding" so they could "gain access to the private insurance market" after 30 days of employment while waiting to join Wal-Mart's plan.

Such assistance, the memo stated, "would give us a powerful set of messages to use in combating critics. (For instance, 'Wal-Mart offers associates access to health insurance after they've worked with us for just 30 days.')"

Steven Greenhouse reported from New York for this article, and Michael Barbaro from Bentonville, Ark.

__________________________________________________________________
October 26, 2005

Editorial

Stalking the Poor to Soothe the Affluent

Impoverished Americans are being set up as targets this week in Congress's desperate attempt to find budget cuts after four straight years of tax cuts for the affluent. House Republicans propose harmful cuts in Medicaid access and benefits, while forcing another 10 hours of work from welfare families and giving states free rein to pile more draconian reductions onto the most vulnerable citizens.

This gross political posturing does not even translate into true savings. While imperiously proclaiming cuts of $50 billion over five years, Congressional leaders are determined to fiddle more harmfully with the revenue half of the budget and to pass an additional $70 billion in upper-bracket tax cuts.

The proposals would have the federal government - supposedly the protector of the neediest - give the states broad leeway to restrict current benefits; to require co-payments by the poor for medicine and for care by doctors and emergency rooms; and to cut preventive care for children, who represent half of the Medicaid roll. The food stamp program would probably also be hit with a $1 billion cut, and even welfare payments to elderly people who are sick would be crimped by using federal bookkeeping tricks.

One particularly boneheaded proposal would severely cut the funds for child support enforcement by $4 billion. This program currently returns $4 in benefits from natural parents for every dollar invested.

The proposals are so appalling that moderate Republicans are even said to be considering a show of life on the floor. In contrast, Senate Republicans are shaping cuts that would spare the poor's Medicaid and other safety nets, while finding savings in Medicare overpayments.

The Senate approach is obviously preferable, but it is also rooted in the G.O.P.'s pre-election fiction that overspending is the basic problem. The tax cuts should be scuttled and the poor protected.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

__________________________________________________________________

October 26, 2005

Editorial

A Ban on Voter Registration

Hurricane Katrina made it politically necessary for Republican Congressional leaders to tone down their effort to kill off federal programs for affordable housing. But it has not stopped them from dragging their feet on an important bill to create a valuable housing fund by tapping into a small portion of the after-tax profits of the federally backed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The fund would initially be aimed at the hurricane-ravaged gulf states, but would eventually help to house poor, elderly and disabled people nationally.

Not satisfied with just delaying the bill, House ideologues are advocating an outrageous and potentially unconstitutional provision that would bar the nonprofit groups that build most affordable housing from participating in the fund if they also participate in even nonpartisan voter registration. This would force such nonprofits to choose between their historically important roles: promoting civic engagement and providing housing and other services for low-income people. The provision would conflict with state laws that require housing grant recipients to do things like register voters and would put the federal government in the unacceptable position of actively discouraging political participation.

The long-overdue housing fund contains numerous safeguards that would prevent grant recipients from using federal dollars for advocacy. A measure that would bar them from nonpartisan activities has absolutely no place in a democracy.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company


__________________________________________________________________
prof·li·gate
'prä-fli-g&t, -"gAt
adjectiveLatin profligatus, from past participle of profligare to strike down, from pro- forward, down + -fligare (akin to fligere to strike); akin to Greek phlibein to squeeze
1 : completely given up to dissipation and licentiousness
2 : wildly extravagant - prof·li·gate·ly adverb
__________________________________________________________________

What's a Free Press Worth?

Two editorials here today which demonstrate the value of a free press, but these editorials which should inspire action are only valid if action is inspired. We are becoming a nation of indifferent and soporific people who are content to see the status quo maim and reshape to its own image the Neo-conservative vision of America. Nothing much seems to be happening in New Orleans, except that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the American worker. Editorials call the president “Hurricane George”.

That's too close to humor for me, and there is nothing funny about what's happening in our country.

There is much to compare George W. Bush to King George of England, the tyrant whose actions called forth the independence of the American Revolution. We desperately need another American Revolution to wrest America from these “Neo-Americans” who are merely fascist criminals hiding behind the priviledges of high office. Get rid of them.
_________________________________________________________________

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 - 12:00 AM
Permission to reprint or copy this article or photo, other than personal use, must be obtained from The Seattle Times. Call 206-464-3113 or e-mail resale@seattletimes.com with your request.

Labor's Hurricane George

New Orleans offers a quick study of Bush labor policy in action: On Aug. 29, Hurricane Katrina strikes, causing widespread destruction. Four days later, President Bush commits $10.1 billion of the taxpayers' money to rebuilding New Orleans.

Four days after that, he suspends the Davis-Bacon Act — the law that requires federal contractors to pay workers the going local rate.

Illegal immigrants, willing to work at less-than-prevailing wages, stream into New Orleans. And a mere six weeks after the last evacuee leaves the Superdome, we hear of complaints by illegal workers that employers are stiffing them of their meager pay.

So here you have it, a lesson on how to crush the market for blue-collar labor. And it could have been done in four PowerPoint slides.

In the Bush view, market forces may do their magic for some Americans, but not for others. They can operate freely when they raise the prices for stocks, oil or real estate. But when they raise the price for American labor, something must be done.

If you really believe in market economics, and there is a labor shortage in New Orleans, why even bother suspending the Davis-Bacon Act? Any attempt to lower labor costs when the laws of supply and demand are pushing them upward should be futile.

A market knows how to deal with shortages. When there's a shortage of something, the price for it automatically rises. That applies to oranges, rhinestones or labor. If you can't find help, you raise the pay, and the workers will come. That's the way markets work.

There's only one sane explanation of why Bush would try to lower wages in a tight labor market: He intended all along to flood the market with cheap foreign workers.

It's a simple setup: (1) Get rid of Davis-Bacon, so contractors can offer below-market pay that Americans and legal immigrants won't touch; (2) continue to disregard the law that forbids companies to hire undocumented workers; (3) when people complain that the workers restoring New Orleans are not legal, say that they are taking jobs no American wants.

The one price that may never rise, in the Bush mindset, is the price of labor. Companies must cope with rising costs for energy, drugs or land. If they can't deal with it, they go out of business. But cheap labor is somehow an entitlement.

Bush had no problem imposing tariffs on steel to protect domestic companies from foreign competition. But he expects American workers to compete with the several billion people around the world who want their jobs.

Meanwhile, the market for upper-income workers remains protected and respected. All nod in agreement when the hotel executive defends his $10 million pay package as the going rate for a man of his talents. But supply-and-demand explanations never seem to apply to the compensation offered the woman who cleans the rooms.

High wages for the workers rebuilding New Orleans should be a good thing. They would bring back people who had fled the region. And they would attract other Americans looking for good jobs. More people with more money in their pockets are the formula for jump-starting the devastated Gulf economies.

On a national level, better wages for laborers would help reduce the growing income gap between the richest Americans and the working class.

A total mystery is why the sweating masses let the Bush administration do this to them with so few political repercussions. Are they stoned in front of their televisions?

The people are actually riled up by the labor free-for-fall, we are told. But then Bush gets up and gives his phony tough talk on immigration. He promises more money for police action at the borders and says nothing about doing the only thing that can ever solve the problem: prosecuting employers who hire illegal workers. How about using the new detention-center beds for them?

If rock bottom is where Bush wants American wages to go, we have more ways to get there. We could bring back child labor. We could reinstitute slavery, which is not far off when companies stop paying illegal laborers for the work they've done.

Could the day be near when Bush announces that America needs people to do the work illegal aliens won't do?

Providence Journal columnist Froma Harrop's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. Her e-mail address is fharrop@projo.com

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

___________________________________________________________________

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-wilkerson25oct25,0,3717361.story?track=tothtml

The White House cabal

By Lawrence B. WilkersonLAWRENCE B. WILKERSON served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell from 2002 to 2005.October 25, 2005IN PRESIDENT BUSH'S first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security — including vital decisions about postwar Iraq — were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New American Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005. But it's absolutely true.

I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal. Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy.

This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."

But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.

I watched these dual decision-making processes operate for four years at the State Department. As chief of staff for 27 months, I had a door adjoining the secretary of State's office.

I read virtually every document he read. I read the intelligence briefings and spoke daily with people from all across government. I knew that what I was observing was not what Congress intended when it passed the 1947 National Security Act.

The law created the National Security Council — consisting of the president, vice president and the secretaries of State and Defense — to make sure the nation's vital national security decisions were thoroughly vetted. The NSC has often been expanded, depending on the president in office, to include the CIA director, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Treasury secretary and others, and it has accumulated a staff of sometimes more than 100 people.

But many of the most crucial decisions from 2001 to 2005 were not made within the traditional NSC process. Scholars and knowledgeable critics of the U.S. decision-making process may rightly say, so what?

Haven't all of our presidents in the last half-century failed to conform to the usual process at one time or another? Isn't it the president's prerogative to make decisions with whomever he pleases? Moreover, can he not ignore whomever he pleases?

Why should we care that President Bush gave over much of the critical decision-making to his vice president and his secretary of Defense?

Both as a former academic and as a person who has been in the ring with the bull, I believe that there are two reasons we should care. First, such departures from the process have in the past led us into a host of disasters, including the last years of the Vietnam War, the national embarrassment of Watergate (and the first resignation of a president in our history), the Iran-Contra scandal and now the ruinous foreign policy of George W. Bush. But a second and far more important reason is that the nature of both governance and crisis has changed in the modern age.

From managing the environment to securing sufficient energy resources, from dealing with trafficking in human beings to performing peacekeeping missions abroad, governing is vastly more complicated than ever before in human history. Further, the crises the U.S. government confronts today are so multifaceted, so complex, so fast-breaking — and almost always with such incredible potential for regional and global ripple effects — that to depart from the systematic decision-making process laid out in the 1947 statute invites disaster.

Discounting the professional experience available within the federal bureaucracy — and ignoring entirely the inevitable but often frustrating dissent that often arises therein — makes for quick and painless decisions.

But when government agencies are confronted with decisions in which they did not participate and with which they frequently disagree, their implementation of those decisions is fractured, uncoordinated and inefficient.

This is particularly the case if the bureaucracies called upon to execute the decisions are in strong competition with one another over scarce money, talented people, "turf" or power.

It takes firm leadership to preside over the bureaucracy. But it also takes a willingness to listen to dissenting opinions. It requires leaders who can analyze, synthesize, ponder and decide. The administration's performance during its first four years would have been even worse without Powell's damage control.

At least once a week, it seemed, Powell trooped over to the Oval Office and cleaned all the dog poop off the carpet. He held a youthful, inexperienced president's hand. He told him everything would be all right because he, the secretary of State, would fix it. And he did — everything from a serious crisis with China when a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft was struck by a Chinese F-8 fighter jet in April 2001, to the secretary's constant reassurances to European leaders following the bitter breach in relations over the Iraq war. It wasn't enough, of course, but it helped.

Today, we have a president whose approval rating is 38% and a vice president who speaks only to Rush Limbaugh and assembled military forces. We have a secretary of Defense presiding over the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of our overstretched armed forces (no surprise to ignored dissenters such as former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki or former Army Secretary Thomas White).

It's a disaster. Given the choice, I'd choose a frustrating bureaucracy over an efficient cabal every time.

Welcome To My World ,Or, (You Are SO Screwed)

American Dream at stake in Delphi-UAW showdown

Sun Oct 16, 2005 1:16 PM ET

By Tom Brown

DETROIT, Oct 16 (Reuters) - At first glance, the showdown between turnaround specialist Steve Miller and organized labor would seem to be good news for the U.S. auto industry. For auto workers, though, it could mean the end of the American Dream.

The hard-charging Miller, who took over as chief executive at giant auto parts maker Delphi Corp. in July, and steered it into Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Oct. 8, wants steep wage and benefit concessions from the United Auto Workers and other unions as part of its reorganization.

If he gets what he wants, it could open the door to dramatic cuts in pay and benefits for UAW-protected hourly workers at General Motors Corp. and Ford Motor Co. giving Detroit's distressed automakers sorely needed labor-cost relief.

At the very least, Delphi could exert strong influence on the UAW's negotiations with GM, Ford and the Chrysler arm of DaimlerChrysler, when new labor contracts are hammered out in 2007.

"More than anything it tells the UAW that their bargaining power is gone," said David Cole, who heads the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based, Center for Automotive Research. "The market is defining wages and benefits of the future and the best they can hope for is to work collaboratively with the companies to survive."

By indicating that he wants to slash UAW wages of $27.50 to as little as $10 an hour, Miller is asking for a fight, however, and UAW leaders have already warned that he may face a potentially crippling strike. In Detroit, where working-class Americans have long been able to lift themselves into the middle-class through well-paid jobs in the auto industry, he also risks becoming Public Enemy No. 1.

Until now the UAW, which is Delphi's largest union, has enjoyed wages and benefits that are the gold standard of industrial America, even as other unions including the Teamsters and United Steelworkers suffered serious setbacks. But with Miller, who took Bethlehem Steel into bankruptcy in 2001, the good times may finally be over.

"THE GREAT AMERICAN DREAM"

In remarks last week, which angered the UAW's leaders, Miller said globalization had swept over the workers in Delphi's factories, effectively ending their pursuit of "the Great American Dream."

His trump card lies in the fact that he could quickly start selling off Delphi's assets. Apart from job losses, shortages of key components could have an industry wide impact. GM, former parent of the top U.S. parts supplier, is its biggest customer and most vulnerable.

"If we do all this right, Delphi will remain one of the world's leading global automotive suppliers," Miller said. "But if we do it badly, Delphi may be broken up into small pieces. The impact of the collapse could potentially injure most of the world's automakers and perhaps fatally wound General Motors."

Henry Ford was credited with a stroke of genius by creating a whole new group of consumers for his company's products back in 1914. Ford doubled the pay of his workers, saying he wanted them to make enough to buy the Model T's they built. But 91 years later Delphi workers could soon find a new car, built with the parts they produce, totally out of their reach.

"This is a total reversal of Henry Ford's landmark insight," said Alan Tonelson, a research fellow with the U.S. Business and Industry Council, who blames many of the domestic auto industry's problems on bad U.S. trade policy, outsourcing and globalization, not U.S. labor costs.

"You have these U.S. parts companies and the U.S. automakers themselves trapped in this cost-cutting spiral which winds up driving down the wages of many of the customers that they're relying on to buy their products," he said.

"The bottom line that Delphi and companies like it seem to be serving up is that it is not possible to manufacture sophisticated products in the United States while paying First World costs. But that is not an acceptable message for this country," he said.

"Whether it be in the trade union movement or the captains of industry, the vision that we have for America ought to be for a better America," said Richard Shoemaker, the UAW vice president responsible for contract negotiations with both GM and Delphi.

"It ought to be a vision of how we make life better for those people that live here; not a vision for dismantling the manufacturing base and taking the quality of life that we've known and enjoyed down to that of a Third World country," Shoemaker told Reuters.

He did not elaborate, but the UAW's membership has fallen by about half from a peak of 1.5 million in the 1970s as the number of well-paid, unskilled manufacturing jobs declined across America.

(Additional reporting by David Bailey, Chicago)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now. Let’s see what happens when the sissies who sat on their asses while the poorest of us got reamed with no benefits and low wages get a taste of what it’s like to survive on $9.00 an hour. Serves ‘em right. It also means that as these folks get their bit of the ‘American Dream’ shoved down their throats we will see some kind of uprising in America against the rich who control these wages.

At that point with federal troops in place in the states (under the guise of ‘natural disaster’ or ‘bird flu’) and the “Patriot Act” controlling all manner of labels and definitions these uprisings will be labeled ‘acts of terrorism’ and ‘traitorous’ and the people who seek to organize these formerly higher paid Americans will be spirited away and incarcerated who-knows-where for who-knows-how-long and ‘legal’ will have an entirely different meaning from what it meant last year or the year before.

The “Patriot Act” also controls our right of free assembly, and so we will not be able to gather in groups to organize in order to fight these issues.

What I find dismaying is that rank and file Americans—our backbone of citizenry are so oblivious and indifferent to these events and the potential that these events have to turn America into a fascist state controlled by the likes of George W. Bush who is no more than a puppet for some organization or another who pulls his strings. It sure as hell ain’t Karl Rove or any other individual: we’re talking maybe the top 1% of the top 1%...bankers, oil men, vastly entrenched financiers and despots who seek not only to control America but our planet. Global domination? You bet.

America as an ideal of freedom in the world no longer exists. It’s dead, and we are not even at the wake yet. We haven’t got the call that tells us our country is dead—and when the majority of us finally get the word we will find in place laws that do not allow us to change the events that we detest.

Sissies

Every newspaper in the country has articles about the abuse of ethics by our elected officials. Every newspaper in the country has stories about the criminal doings of Republicans. Every newspaper has articles about Democrats winning whatever elections are coming our way, as if a Democratic White House, and Democratic Congress will save us from the crunching jaws of the ‘Richest 1%’. Don’t hold your breath...

The Richest 1% are also Democrats, more than likely Libertarians, Independents. Whatever. It is not that one party or the other will step to the fore to save the rest of us on this Titanic of a ship of state where 99% of us are locked in steerage while the first class 1% are stepping into life boats.

We need a total overhaul of values. We need to re-acquaint ourselves, from top to bottom of the economic scale, with what’s right and what’s wrong. It is not sufficient to spout so-called ‘Christianity’ out one side of your mouth while scheming to rob the poor of even more rights and benefits with the other. The earth is running out of resources, and the economic top 1% are consuming these resources at a hugely larger proportion than the poorest 99%.

There is probably no help for that...this ol’ Blue Marble hanging in endless space is about to run out of the things we need to sustain life: air, water, food: you know, things, which by their absence define places like The Moon, Mars, Saturn, Pluto—you know, BARREN PLANETS. And with the rate of consumption of the 1%, and the seeming desire of that 1% to destroy the other 99% of us, we are in a fight for our very existence and the existence—the LIFE in our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Money will not protect you from a lack of air. Money will not protect you from a lack of water. Money will not protect you from a lack of food, and truth be told, I see the top 1% as fat cattle, dulled and stupid enough to eat when things go bad on this planet. And I see the remains of the 99%, crazed by hunger and fear hunting the sissy 1%-ers. The masses will always prevail.

China is seeking to do business with our closest neighbors: here come the masses. Ever read John Hershey’s book “White Lotus”? There is no way America can stand against an invasion of our borders by the Chinese, and the hope is that China will always seek to control the masses by reducing the privileged classes to field hands.

So. Let the sissies have their dreams. Let the comprador peasants have their dreams of being members of that almighty 1%. Me and mine will bide our time and feel the honest justification and relief when that silly 1% gets their comeuppance. We all know how to work. We all know how to knuckle-under to authority. We all know that money is no protection from reality. We aren’t sissies.

Facing The Wall

Thoughts on Social Darwinism, also know as Neo-Conservativism:

I recently read a very interesting book, entitled “American Dynasty”, by Kevin Phillips and while some of the book may be false (I have no idea whether it is or not), parts of it ARE true, based on the schedule of past events available to me with just a quick and incomplete search of the records available on the internet, various news sources (reputable), and my own experience.

I feel like such a total idiot: these neo-conservatives have been working their Machiavellian agenda for roughly three decades, and I have been alive and somewhat sentient and the events of the current times have come to pass through a carefully calculated formula marching towards a future tyranny unlike anything we have seen since the times of Hitler.

Just a scanning of “American Dynasty” will show you how the Neo-Conservative agenda is nothing more than another cover-up for the Bush agenda...Machiavelli tells one to smile, speak religion, and then to do what one wants to do to achieve ones ends. Bush, as Mr. Phillips calls it, is a ‘serial prevaricator’...an enormously successful liar who sees no wrong in lying to 99% of us to achieve the ends of the rich 1%.

So, in reality, that leaves 99% of us (for you other idiots out there) with no future other than a gradual declination of rights and abilities to do basic things like live under a roof, eat, stay warm, and feed our children.

I am so disheartened after reading this book that turning my head towards the wall seems like the only solution to an undercurrent of despair for the future of my family and my country. I am not, however, that kind of gal and my anger perks just beneath the surface.

I find enormous hope in the works of Joy DeGruy Leary, Ph.D. Her book, “Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America's Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing” is due out very soon, and I think that one surefire way to deal with the Neo-Conservative agenda lies in joining poor whites and poor blacks—the poor of all stripes and colors—and her book and theories may be a focal point for all of us, no matter our color.

Voting is not a sure thing, as we’ve seen time and again—the Republican/Neo-Conservatives/Bushes feel perfectly justified in stealing our votes to replace them with more lies. Bush lost the presidency by 500, 000 popular votes, and gained the presidency by one vote through the Supreme Court. He then gave countless favors to the family of the Justice who voted that one vote. It’s in the book, kids...it is a fact.

I am not greatly concerned with exact quotes here, for as I have stated before, I am not a scholar of such things—as a mother, a grandmother, a potential great-grandmother, as the product of a matriarchal southern family, as the seed of the future, I write from my emotional stand...we are lost if we do not rise. Today.

1% Solution?

_____________________________________________________________
Straight to the pockets of Bush’s 1%...are we really surprised? What’s remarkable is that we are, it seems, helpless to prevent these inequities, and it would seem, are quite content to go back to sleep as events transpire that change forever the concepts of democracy and freedom in this country. These brave journalists are ringing the bells of alarm as loudly as they can, and no one is heeding the warning.
___________________________________________________________________
October 13, 2005

Housing

$11 Million a Day Spent on Hotels for Storm Relief

By ERIC LIPTON
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 - Straining to meet President Bush's mid-October deadline to clear out shelters, the federal government has moved hundreds of thousands of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina into hotel rooms at a cost of about $11 million a night, a strategy local officials and some members of Congress criticize as incoherent and wasteful.

The number of people in hotels has grown by 60 percent in the past two weeks as some shelters closed, reaching nearly 600,000 as of Tuesday. Even so, relief officials say they cannot meet the deadline, as more than 22,000 people were still in shelters in 14 states on Wednesday.

The reliance on hotels has been necessary, housing advocates say, because the Federal Emergency and Management Agency has had problems installing mobile homes and travel trailers for evacuees and has been slow to place victims in apartments that real estate executives say are available throughout the southeast.

Hotel costs are expected to grow to as much as $425 million by Oct. 24, a large expense never anticipated by the FEMA, which is footing the bill. While the agency cannot say how that number will affect overall spending for storm relief, critics point out that hotel rooms, at an average cost of $59 a night, are significantly more expensive than apartments and are not suitable for months-long stays.

Officials in cities from Dallas to Atlanta, which are accommodating thousands of evacuees, give credit for getting 90 percent of the victims out of shelters. But they say they are frustrated by FEMA's record in helping place people in more adequate housing.

"Deplorable. Disappointing. Outrageous. That is how I feel about it," said the Atlanta mayor, Shirley Franklin, a Democrat, in a telephone interview on Wednesday. "The federal response has just been unacceptable. It is like talking to a brick wall."

Even conservative housing experts have criticized the Bush administration's handling of the temporary housing response. "I am baffled," said Ronald D. Utt, a former senior official at the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Reagan administration aide who is now a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative research organization. "This is not incompetence. This is willful. That is the only way I can explain it."

Nicol Andrews, a FEMA spokeswoman, said the federal government was moving as quickly as it could to find temporary housing. But the scale of the catastrophe has made it difficult, she said.
"Clearly we have never encountered the size and scope of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina," she said. "Housing half a million people is a challenge by any standard."

The American Red Cross started the hotel program days after Hurricane Katrina struck, when it became clear that the shelters it had opened were not adequate to deal with the 600,000 to 700,000 families displaced by the storm, a spokeswoman, Carrie Martin, said.

The hotel program was intended to last a couple of weeks but has twice been extended by FEMA. Now Red Cross officials are saying there is no end to the initiative, which pays for 192,424 rooms in 9,606 hotels across the United States, in a range of cities as diverse as Casper, Wyo., and Anchorage, Alaska.

Congress last month appropriated a $62.3 billion for the relief effort, most of it designated for FEMA. The agency had told Congress that it expected to spend more than $2 billion to buy up to 300,000 travel trailers and mobile homes to house displaced residents. The agency also planned to give out $23.2 billion in assistance to victims for emergency needs and for temporary housing and housing repairs.

But the temporary housing program has been troubled since the start, observers say. Instead of setting up as many as 30,000 trailers and mobile homes every two weeks, as of Tuesday, just 7,308 were occupied. Even counting berths on the four ships that FEMA has leased and rooms on military bases and elsewhere, the agency has provided only 10,940 occupied housing units for victims in the three Gulf states.

FEMA, reacting to criticism that it might create super-concentrated slums, has scaled back plans to build so-called FEMAvilles with up to 25,000 trailers.

Even a less ambitious plan - complexes with 200 or so units - has been slow to unfold. FEMA officials cite the reluctance by some rural parishes or landowners to welcome evacuees.

But landowners and some state officials in Louisiana blame bureaucratic fumbles by FEMA. Bill Bacqué, co-owner of a trailer park in Lafayette, La., said he offered property for 45 trailers within days of the storm. Negotiations with FEMA were still under way this week, he said. "Things do not move fast," Mr. Bacqué said.

Late last month, FEMA began handing out $2,358 for three months so that families in shelters or hotels could rent apartments.

To date, more than 415,000 households have been approved for that aid, totaling $979 million. But FEMA officials cannot say how many families have used the money for apartments, or simply spent it on expenses while also living in a government-financed hotel room.

David Degruy, his wife, Debra, and their six children, of New Orleans, have done just that while staying in two rooms paid for by FEMA at the Greenway Inn and Suites in Houston.

"We're trying to save the money so that when do get in a house we'll be able to buy things," Mr. Degruy said. "We eat out sometimes, we buy clothes, personal hygiene things."

Some officials criticize FEMA for a passive approach in dealing with cities and hurricane evacuees.

Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, who sits on a House panel that helps oversee the housing effort, complained that it was unreasonable for the federal government to expect that a family led by jobless parents, with no car, little savings and little familiarity with a new city could independently find an apartment.

"The administration's policy is incoherent and socially seriously flawed," he said in an interview.
Real estate officials say that although there are few available apartments in Louisiana, there are many vacancies in apartment buildings across the South, including perhaps 300,000 in Texas alone.

"What are these guys doing?" Jim Arbury, an official with the National Multi Housing Council, a group of building owners and managers, said of FEMA. "All of this housing is available now."
Some housing experts say the Bush administration should follow the approach taken after the 1994 Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, when displaced residents were given prepaid housing vouchers instead of having to negotiate and pay a lease on their own.

"We are wasting money hand over fist because we did not deploy the right policy tools," said Bruce Katz, a vice president at the Brookings Institution, a liberal research group in Washington. "We could have thousands, if not tens of thousands of families, in stable permanent housing right now. And we would not have to turn to these costly measures, like hotels, motels and cruise ships."

Ms. Andrews, the FEMA spokeswoman, defended the housing policy. "The program is designed to give those who it affects the most the control over their own lives," she said.

Some cities, including Houston and San Antonio, have taken an active role in helping families find housing by creating their own voucher program, identifying vacant units, paying for six-month leases and then turning over the unit to the evacuees. FEMA has promised to reimburse the cities for the housing costs.

"You can't just give people a check and say, 'Good luck, we will see you,' " said San Antonio's assistant city manager, Christopher J. Brady. "It would not be a sufficient solution."

FEMA officials said other cities can set up similar programs. But Mayor Franklin of Atlanta and Mayor Laura Miller of Dallas have said they cannot do so without being paid in advance by the federal government.

Expressing frustration that she could not offer more help to the 39,000 displaced people who have come to Georgia, Mayor Franklin said FEMA's expectations that her city could advance housing money were unrealistic.

"Our government is not large enough to do that," she said. "We can't absorb the costs."
Thayer Evans contributed reporting from Houston for this article, Lily Koppel from Baton Rouge, and Andy Lehren from New York.

· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
_________________________________________________________________

Benefits to the 1% instead of the poorest among us: again, no surprises here unless you count the total disbelief that this can be happening in the (formerly) greatest country in history at a time when all eyes are watching these events transpire, and the events are being remarked upon by credible journalists, and nothing, NOTHING, is changing the forward momentum of the crooks who rob the poor to pay the rich.
____________________________________________________________

October 13, 2005

Editorial

Budget Cowardice in the Capitol

Congressional Republicans are trying to invoke the cost of reconstruction from Hurricane Katrina to justify cutting even more deeply and cruelly into programs that help the poorest Americans. Prodded by self-proclaimed budget hawks, the House speaker, Dennis Hastert, suddenly wants to up the ante in Congress's budget plan - to $50 billion from $35 billion - for five years of cuts in basic programs. Billions for food stamps, Medicaid and welfare reform would be lopped off.

Much of this is transparent posturing for next year's elections. The same lawmakers who cheered on President Bush's reckless tax cuts for the affluent, killing the surpluses and creating mammoth debt, are trying to transform themselves into responsible budgeteers.

The budget process was also a mess well before Katrina struck. But the cost of repairing the storm damage makes facing reality more urgent. For a starter, the next bout of upper-bracket tax-cut extensions should be indefinitely shelved. And Congress should return to the pay-as-you-go discipline that produced the surpluses of the 1990's. The cynical plan in the House would mandate offsets for spending programs only, not for tax cuts.

Once again, the nation must hope that Republican moderates and Democrats in the Senate take a stand, but not for another split-the-difference budget. There's plenty of egregious pork protected by Congress in highway and Pentagon spending bills, like the bridge to nowhere and the inoperable antimissile shield. Dozens of comparable revenue wasters have been identified.

The independent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities points to the timely warning from Congress's Medicare advisory commission that billions will be wasted under the new drug subsidy program unless Congress fixes the windfall formulas for managed care companies.
Sadly, there is less political risk in exploiting Katrina to compound the suffering of the poor.


· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
__________________________________________________________________

We “poor and near-poor” who have the most to lose have the insight into these machinations that rich folks would probably call “street sense”. We have the under-educations of experience unbiased by propaganda that enable us to see the wickedness and evil intents of the Bush Administration, but no power to effect change. We are dependent on the monied folks, the educated folks, the ‘movers and shakers’ to finally sway the most powerful among us to change the course of events. If you love America, and you love what she stands for, and you love your freedoms as American Citizens, then you must help the poor among us, else, when the poorest have been euthanized by whatever means, then the next level is closer to your level. There will always be a ‘bottom level’ of the pyramid to dissolve and destroy until only the 1% is left on planet Earth. Perhaps, if we are stupid enough to continue to allow this to happen, then we deserve the annihilation that will surely befall us.
___________________________________________________________

October 13, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Bush's Pledge? The Joke's on the Poor

By BOB HERBERT

A Page 1 article in The Times on Tuesday carried the following headline: "Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate."

I might have started laughing if the subject weren't so serious. Who in their right mind - liberal, moderate, Rotarian, contrarian - could have possibly thought that George W. Bush and his G.O.P. Wild Bunch (Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay et al.) had suddenly seen the light ("Eureka! We've been wrong!") and become serious about engaging the problem of poverty in America?

The article noted that some liberal activists had hoped that the extraordinary suffering caused by Hurricane Katrina might lead to a genuine effort by the administration and Congress to address such important poverty-related matters as health care, housing, employment and race.
After all, the president himself had gone on national television from the French Quarter of the stricken city of New Orleans and promised "bold action."

"As all of us saw on television," said Mr. Bush, "there is also some deep, persistent poverty in this region as well. That poverty has roots in a history of racial discrimination, which cut off generations from the opportunity of America. We have a duty to confront this poverty with bold action. So let us restore all that we have cherished from yesterday, and let us rise above the legacy of inequality."

I assumed that most people watching the president realized that he was deeply embedded in a Karl Rove moment. The speech was a carefully scripted, meticulously staged performance designed primarily to halt the widespread criticism of Mr. Bush's failure to respond more quickly to the tragedy.

As the president spoke, it never occurred to me that anyone would buy into the notion that Mr. Bush and his supporters would actually do something about poverty and racism. Someone who believed that could probably be persuaded to make a bid on eBay to buy the Brooklyn Bridge.

Mr. Bush is the standard-bearer par excellence of his party's efforts to redistribute the bounty of the U.S. from the bottom up, not the other way around. This is no longer a matter of dispute. Mr. Bush may not be the greatest commander in chief. And he may not be adept at sidestepping the land mines of language. ("I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here.") But if there's one thing the president has been good at, it has been funneling money to the rich. The suffering wrought by Katrina hasn't changed that at all.

One of the first things the president did in the aftermath of Katrina was to poke his finger in the eyes of struggling workers by suspending the requirements of the Davis-Bacon Act in the storm-ravaged areas. Passed during the Great Depression, the law requires contractors on federally funded construction projects to pay at least the prevailing wage in the region.

This is one more way of taking money from the working poor and handing it to the wealthy. A construction laborer in New Orleans who would ordinarily be paid about $9 an hour, the prevailing wage in the city, can now be paid less. So much for the president's commitment to fighting poverty.

Poverty has steadily increased under President Bush, even as breathtaking riches (think tax cuts, cronyism, war profiteering, you name it) have been heaped upon those who were already wealthy. Class divisions are hardening, and economic inequality continues to increase dramatically.

Mr. Bush's political posturing (his speeches, his endless trips to the Gulf Coast) is not meant to serve as a beacon of hope for the downtrodden. It is a message to middle-class voters, who have become increasingly disturbed by the president's policies and were appalled by the fact that he seemed unmoved by the terrible suffering that followed Hurricane Katrina.

The man who campaigned as a compassionate conservative and then turned the federal government into a compassion-free zone is all but handing out press releases that say, "I care."
He cares all right. About his poll ratings. In the end, much of the money to help lower-income victims of the recent storms will most likely be siphoned from existing, badly needed and already underfunded programs to help the poor and near-poor.

A real effort to fight poverty and combat discrimination? From this regime? You must be joking.

· Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

In spite of the general leanings of our lawmakers and journalists and public opinion, the criminals of the Bush administration who would deprive us of our rights as stated by the Constitution and The Bill of Rights continue to press to put American active duty military into our states. They are doing it in spite of our open eyes and will not rest until this country is in a state of tyranny controlled by whatever puppet masters are pulling Bush’s strings.
_________________________________________________________

washingtonpost.com

Pentagon Plans to Beef Up Domestic Rapid-Response Forces

By Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff WriterThursday, October 13, 2005; A04

The U.S. military is planning a more rapid, robust role for active-duty forces in responding to catastrophic disasters or terrorist attacks, a senior Pentagon official said yesterday, describing the demand for large-scale military resources in such cases as "inevitable."

Paul McHale, assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, stressed, however, that the expanded active-duty military response would be limited to rare, mass calamities or attacks in which thousands of lives were at risk -- such as a category 4 hurricane, or a terrorist strike involving chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Federal troops might also play a role in enforcing a quarantine in the case of a pandemic outbreak of avian flu or other disease, McHale said, although initially that job would fall to National Guard forces under the command of state governors.

"We are looking at a wide range of contingencies potentially involving Title 10 forces [federal troops] if a pandemic outbreak of a biological threat were to occur," said McHale.

In contrast, the Pentagon does not intend to take the lead in responding to the dozens of "major disasters" such as floods declared every year, McHale said. And even in catastrophic events, the Pentagon's goal would be to provide a rapid, early response and then to quickly transfer responsibilities to civilian authorities, he said.

The planning for an expanded Pentagon role in domestic catastrophes comes amid escalating demands on U.S. forces, which today not only are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan but are also carrying out disaster-relief missions in Pakistan, Guatemala, and domestically along the Gulf Coast.

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, at a conference with Central American defense ministers in Florida, yesterday advocated closer military cooperation as a way to better address threats from terrorists and drug traffickers, as well as natural disasters.

The Pentagon is drafting recommendations for improving the military's response to devastating attacks or disasters as part of a government-wide review of "lessons learned" from Hurricane Katrina.

"It is almost inevitable that the Department of Defense will play a very substantial role in providing resources, equipment, command and control, and other capabilities in response to a catastrophic event," McHale said. Only the Pentagon can "marshal such resources and deploy them as quickly . . . during a time in which thousands of American lives may be at risk."

One major focus will involve identifying a larger active-duty force that will be organized and trained to respond immediately -- along with the National Guard -- to a domestic crisis, McHale said. Advance planning between the active-duty personnel and the Guard is vital -- in contrast to the cooperation that he said unfolded during Katrina "on the fly" -- albeit by "superb leaders."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company
__________________________________________________________________

Who's Your Mommy?

washingtonpost.com

For President Under Duress, Body Language Speaks Volumes

By Dana MilbankWednesday, October 12, 2005; A07

It's only 6:17 a.m. Central time, and President Bush is already facing his second question of the day about Karl Rove's legal troubles.

"Does it worry you," NBC's Matt Lauer is asking him at a construction-site interview in Louisiana, that prosecutors "seem to have such an interest in Mr. Rove?"

Bush blinks twice. He touches his tongue to his lips. He blinks twice more. He starts to answer, but he stops himself.

"I'm not going to talk about the case," Bush finally says after a three-second pause that, in television time, feels like a commercial break.

Only the president's closest friends and family know (if anybody does) what he's really thinking these days, during Katrina woes, Iraq violence, conservative anger over Harriet Miers, and legal trouble for Bush's top political aide and two congressional GOP leaders. Bush has not been viewed up close; as he took his eighth post-Katrina trip to the Gulf Coast yesterday, the press corps has accompanied him only once, because the White House says logistics won't permit it.

Even the interview on the "Today" show was labeled "closed press."

But this much could be seen watching the tape of NBC's broadcast during Bush's 14-minute pre-sunrise interview, in which he stood unprotected by the usual lectern. The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts. Bush has always been an active man, but standing with Lauer and the serene, steady first lady, he had the body language of a man wishing urgently to be elsewhere.

The fidgeting clearly corresponded to the questioning. When Lauer asked if Bush, after a slow response to Katrina, was "trying to get a second chance to make a good first impression," Bush blinked 24 times in his answer.

When asked why Gulf Coast residents would have to pay back funds but Iraqis would not, Bush blinked 23 times and hitched his trousers up by the belt.

When the questioning turned to Miers, Bush blinked 37 times in a single answer -- along with a lick of the lips, three weight shifts and some serious foot jiggling. Laura Bush, by contrast, delivered only three blinks and stood still through her entire answer about encouraging volunteerism.

Perhaps the set itself made Bush uncomfortable. He and his wife stood in casual attire, wearing tool belts, in front of a wall frame and some Habitat for Humanity volunteers in hard hats. ABC News noted cheekily of its rival network's exclusive: "He did allow himself to be shown hammering purposefully, with a jejune combination of cowboy swagger and yuppie self-consciousness."

Perhaps, too, the president's body language said nothing about his true state of mind. But the White House gave little other information that might shed light on this. A White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, entered the press cabin on Air Force One to brief reporters at 1:58 p.m. He left two minutes later, after answering the only question by saying, "We don't have anything to announce."

The one newspaper reporter allowed to travel with Bush as part of the White House's "pool" system reported back to her colleagues after the "Today" event: "we were at a distance and could not hear what was being said (a theme of the day)."

Other than the "Today" appearance, Bush delivered a one-minute talk to military recovery workers ("I'm incredibly proud of the job you have done") and a two-minute statement outside a school ("out of the rubble here on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi is a rebuilding").

Certainly, Bush retained many of the gestures that work well for him: the purposeful but restrained hand gestures, the head-tilted smile of amusement and the easy laugh. But he seemed to lose control of the timing. He smiled after observing that Iraqis are "paying a serious price" because of terrorism.

As Lauer went through his introduction, the presidential eyes zoomed left, then right, then left and right again, then center, down and up at the interviewer. The presidential fidgeting spiked when Lauer mentioned the Democratic accusation that Bush was performing a "photo op."

Bush pushed out his lower front lip, then licked the right corner of his mouth. Lauer's query about whether conservatives "are feeling let down by you" appeared to provoke furious jiggling of the right leg.

Bush joked about his state of mind when Lauer asked Laura Bush about the strain on her husband. "He can barely stand!" the president said, interrupting. "He's about to drop on the spot." But the first lady had a calming influence on the presidential wiggles. When Laura Bush spoke about her husband's "broad shoulders," the president put his arm around her -- and the swaying and shifting subsided.

The president, now on more comfortable terrain, delivered a brief homily about "the decency of others" and "how blessed we are to be an American." Through the entire passage, he blinked only 12 times.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company