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.
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005 - 12:00 AM
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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

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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.