Friday, August 29, 2003

Race for the Cure

Most of us know someone who has had breast cancer who have survived, traumatized and scarred, and worrying about the possibility of a relapse; or who have died as a result. My sister-in-law Betts, my harp teacher Val, my friends Leslie and Bonnie have all faced this devastating disease. I want no other woman to face the fear of death or disfigurement again.

And so, at the ripe old age of 49, I find myself putting on running shoes for the first time in many years and doing what I can to raise money, in honor of the women who have had breast cancer and in hopes of a cure.

Come join me in this 5K run Sunday morning, September 14th. If you would like to pledge money to help find a cure and assist women who are fighting breast cancer, go to my fundraising page and pledge what you can. Every little bit helps.

Thanks,
Bob

Wednesday, August 27, 2003

GAO Cites Corporate Shaping of Energy Plan

By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 26, 2003; Page A01

The White House collaborated heavily with corporations in developing President Bush’s energy policy but repeatedly refused to give congressional investigators details of the meetings, according to a federal report issued yesterday.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said in the report that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham privately discussed the formulation of Bush’s policy “with chief executive officers of petroleum, electricity, nuclear, coal, chemical and natural gas companies, among others.”

An energy task force, led by Vice President Cheney, relied for outside advice primarily on “petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas, electricity industry representatives and lobbyists,” while seeking limited input from academic experts, environmentalists and policy groups, the GAO said. 

The task force was one of Bush’s highest priorities after his inauguration and was launched on his 10th day in office. None of the group’s meetings was open to the public, and participants told GAO investigators they “could not recollect whether official rosters or minutes were kept,” the report said.

Yesterday’s report was the culmination of a lengthy legal battle between Congress and the Bush administration over the secrecy of government deliberations. The GAO sued in federal court for access to records of Cheney’s task force, but dropped the action after a decisive court setback, followed by pressure from Republicans. The GAO said its information was incomplete because of administration intransigence. Although the Energy Department released e-mails, letters and calendars that reflected heavy input from corporations, the GAO report provided the first systematic look at the extent to which the administration relied on corporations and insisted on secrecy in developing its policy, issued in May 2001.

Among the previously disclosed meetings were private sessions for Kenneth L. Lay, then the chairman of Enron Corp., the Texas energy trading company that collapsed in the nation’s largest accounting scandal. Lay was given a 30-minute meeting with Cheney and a conference with a top aide for the task force.

David M. Walker, comptroller general of the United States and head of the GAO, said in an interview that the standoff over the task force documents called into question the existence of “a reasonable degree of transparency and an appropriate degree of accountability in government.”

Walker said the energy investigation was the first instance since he took office in November 1998 in which the GAO was unable to do its job and produce a report according to generally accepted government auditing standards.

“The Congress and the American people had the right to know the limited amount of information we were seeking,” Walker said.

The White House issued no substantive response. Jennifer Millerwise, Cheney’s spokeswoman, said the White House hopes “that everyone will now focus as strongly as the administration has on the substance of meeting America’s energy needs.”

David S. Addington, the vice president’s counsel, said in a letter to Congress last year that the task force, formally the National Energy Policy Development Group, met with “a broad representation of people potentially affected by the group’s work,” including state and local regulators, labor unions and wildlife advocates.

After this month’s blackouts crippled much of the Northeast and Midwest, GOP congressional leaders vowed to move swiftly after Labor Day on energy legislation that is based on Bush’s policy and includes plans for shoring up the nation’s electricity grid. The legislation has been stalled for more than two years; Democrats say that is because of Bush’s insistence on tax breaks and other incentives for energy production, including oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

The report provides Democrats with ammunition for their contention that Bush’s energy policy is filled with favors for corporate interests. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), who joined the request for the GAO probe when he was chairman of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said voters should know what role energy companies played in writing the policy. “They will never know the full truth because the White House chose to stonewall instead of cooperate with investigators,” said Lieberman, a presidential candidate.

The report said several corporations and associations, including Chevron Corp. (now part of ChevronTexaco Corp.) and the National Mining Association, gave detailed energy policy recommendations.

ChevronTexaco declined to comment.

Carol Raulston, a senior vice president of the National Mining Association, said the recommendations were given to both parties and published on the group’s Web site. She said the most important one was funding for research into clean-coal technology. Cheney’s report adopted that plan.

The task force was “a centralized, top-down” process that involved several hundred federal employees but relied little on nonpolitical expertise in the government, the GAO report said. It said the Interior Department, which manages many of the federal lands where White House officials want to increase oil and gas exploration, “was not assigned a lead role in writing any of the [task force] report chapters.”

The report documents $861,250 in administration spending on the policy. But that amount does not include spending by the White House, where the task force recommendations were produced and most of the meetings were held.

Of the 77 pages Cheney’s office provided the GAO, two-thirds contained no cost information, and the remaining third included “miscellaneous information of little or no usefulness,” the report said.

The vice president’s office “stated that it would not provide any additional information,” the investigators wrote. An unusually caustic GAO news release complained of the office’s “persistent denial of access” to task force records.

In December, U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled that the GAO had no legal standing to sue the vice president for refusing to turn over the documents. That vindicated the argument of administration lawyers that such suits could encroach on the ability of the president and vice president to receive unvarnished advice. The GAO in February dropped its pursuit of the case.

Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club are pursuing a separate legal battle for the energy records. A federal appeals court panel ruled last month that the groups could be entitled to documents from Cheney’s staff. The Justice Department has asked the full appeals court to review the ruling.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company

homepage: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44891-2003Aug25?language=printer

Friday, August 22, 2003

Lootocracy

Bush tries to exempt powerful from all limits on taking what they want. As 2001 Nobel economics laureate George Akerlof said recently, in calling the administration “the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history, “This is not normal government policy. What we have here is a form of looting.”

Paul Loeb
workingforchange.com
08.21.03

If you run a lootocracy, you have no conception of sufficiency. You set up the rules to grab as much money as you can, as if you’ve won a supermarket shopping spree. You also concentrate power, the better to arrange the world for your benefit. Unchecked by modesty, satiety, or shame, you take all you can get away with. You loot until someone stops you.

The word lootocracy was originally coined to describe the corrupt cartels that have ruled and plundered countries like Nigeria, Kenya, and some of the former Soviet Republics. But with an amazingly small amount of national debate, George Bush is installing a more global and sophisticated version—one where those on top can do whatever they choose without the slightest constraints. Bush began his presidency by giving the wealthiest five percent of all Americans massive tax breaks of $75 billion a year. He paid for them in part by cutting child abuse prevention, community policing, Americorps, low-income childcare, health care, housing, and even support for military families. This spring he passed another round of cuts, $35 billion a year targeted overwhelmingly to the same lucky lootocrats.

You’d think these victories would leave the Bush administration and its core supporters satisfied that they’d transferred more than enough wealth to the very richest Americans. You’d also think they might have noticed that the first tax cut neither created new jobs or stemmed the continuing loss of existing jobs. But no. House Republicans have now just voted to end the Estate Tax permanently. If the Senate goes along, this will transfer a trillion dollars more, over the coming two decades, to an even tinier group of individuals. And key Republican strategist Grover Norquist promises more cuts down the line, explaining, “My goal is to cut government… down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” Conservatives once preached fiscal restraint. Now strategists like Norquist view massive deficits as a tool to strip away government’s ability to affect public life. And the administration neglects practically every real need so they can shift as much money as possible away from communities that could use it the most to those who already have more than they know what to do with.

As 2001 Nobel economics laureate George Akerlof said recently, in calling the administration “the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history, “This is not normal government policy. What we have here is a form of looting.”

It’s not just taxes. Previous administrations have certainly been corrupted by a coziness with the wealthy and powerful. That’s why we need to follow the path of public election financing that’s been pioneered by states like Arizona and Maine. But Bush’s regime descends to new depths in institutionalizing an America (and indeed a world) that is there for the taking. Private HMOs craft health bills. Oil, coal, and nuclear industries create energy policy in secret meetings. Chemical companies write environmental regulations. Timber companies promote a “Healthy Forests Initiative” letting them cut just about at will. Credit card companies rewrite bankruptcy laws. Fresh from cozying up to Saddam Hussein, Halliburton and Bechtel get offered instant contracts for the new Iraqi occupation. Bush appointees to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission let Enron manipulate West Coast energy prices, then stick California ratepayers with $12 billion of onerous long-term contracts after the company collapses. The administration is now pushing to cut back 70 years of extra pay for overtime and to sharply restrict ordinary citizens’ ability to challenge gross abuses of corporate power through class action lawsuits.

Appropriately, one of the new key coordinators of these efforts is Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family controls the largest private health care company in the country, HCA Columbia. HCA profits bankrolled Frist’s initial Senate run, and the company just paid the largest fine in American corporate history—$1.7 billion—for defrauding Medicaid, Medicare, and the health program that serves the military services. You’d think Frist would be shy about eroding further public checks on corporate malfeasance. But in a lootocracy, Frist’s background and approach are business as usual.

A lootocracy embodies power as its own end, overriding any challenges, criticisms, or constraints. Open markets and deregulation have long been core conservative principles, but this administration pushes them farther than ever. They treat environmental laws, even ones enacted by Republicans, as obstacles to be evaded or demolished, opening up every possible domain to be auctioned off to the highest (or best-connected) bidder. They also treat the government’s own workforce as expendable, eroding longstanding union and civil service protections, outsourcing key tasks, and doing their best to muzzle employees who challenge the administration’s priorities, whether staffers of the Environmental Protection Agency or generals opposing the Iraq war.

The notion that the world should be run at the discretion of the powerful also underpins Bush’s foreign policy. We see the same lust for control, the same assumption that those in charge can do whatever they can get away with, the same sense that disagreement is forbidden. We see the same denial of long-term costs and consequences.

Not all empires become lootocracies, but the more unaccountable power is, the greater the temptation to plunder. With a weapons budget greater than every other nation combined, our massive technological might threatens to flatten any nation that challenges us. If the UN supports our actions, we hail this as a mandate. If the UN doesn’t, we act anyway, ignoring all international rules, and assemble a “coalition of the willing” reminiscent of children parading their imaginary friends. Given that the real threats of terrorism fly no national flags, the administration can always manufacture some excuse for intervention, as some of its key officials did in overthrowing democracies and supporting dictatorships during the Cold War. Instead of acknowledging the prime lesson of Sept 11, the profound interconnectedness of our world, this administration asserts the raw rule of power, confident that it will always prevail.

Think about Bush’s rejection of international treaties, whether on war crimes, land mines, child labor, women’s rights, tobacco control, nuclear testing, small arms regulation, or biological weapons. To take the example of global warming, an international consensus of scientists agrees that it’s a real and critical issue. If we fear Islamic terrorism, the desperation that feeds it will hardly be reduced by predicted outcomes like the flooding of Egypt’s prime agricultural land, the Nile Valley. But Bush refuses to be bound by either the international scientific consensus or the most modest attempts, like the Kyoto protocol, to enact it into policy. His most recent EPA report on the state of the environment edited out real discussion of the issue entirely. To Bush, the powerful are exempt from any limits on their right to take what they want.

Having already enacted far too much of its agenda, this administration relentlessly pursues the rest. Now that they control the Senate and House, and have a largely sympathetic Supreme Court, those who embrace an ethic of unlimited greed seem to have more power than ever.

But this power is still subject to check by real-world consequences and by the activism through which we make the issues real to our fellow citizens. The Iraq occupation becomes more of a quagmire each day. Terrorist bombs explode in Morocco, Algeria, and a once seemingly pacified Afghanistan. In the wake of the Iraq war, the Pew Foundation’s Global Attitudes Project finds majorities in Islamic countries like Indonesia, Jordan, Morocco, and Pakistan saying they have “confidence in Bin Laden to do the right thing in world affairs.” That’s a staggeringly troubling response, all the more since after 911 many of these same people were mourning in commiseration with our loss. Meanwhile, every community in this country has seen services for the poor and vulnerable—and much of the middle class—decimated by national budget cuts. We need to tell the buried stories that highlight the costs.

This administration’s arrogance has begun to produce a major citizen Response—potentially as broad as any since the height of the 1960s. We saw this most visibly before the Iraq War. Many who spoke out then are beginning to work toward the 2004 election. Those of us who marched and spoke out now need to reach out to friends, neighbors, and communities about the staggeringly destructive implications of a world where the powerful do whatever they choose.

There’s a widespread temptation to identify with the winners. But in a lootocracy we all lose out. We lose our voice, our democracy, our confidence that we won’t be bankrupted by medical bills or thrown into the street, our certainty that our air and drinking water are safe, our security against the bitter anger of new generations of terrorists. Ultimately, we lose our democracy. Those are the stakes, at home and abroad. We need to be clear about them. If we can give our fellow citizens sufficient context to reflect, most Americans will recognize that they don’t want a world run by the Enrons and WorldComs. And that the administration’s actions do not serve their interest, but only the interests of the small group that’s on top. They don’t want their communities plundered or abandoned. They don’t want to cannibalize the earth. They want a relationship with the world that makes us more safe, not less.

Whatever particular issues we care about and take on, we also need to focus on the larger pattern—the destructiveness of a regime based on pillage. The very outrageousness of this administration’s reach must inspire us to act for a vision based on connection, respect, and learning to live within our limits. For only by rejecting the ethic of relentless taking do we honor the common ties that bind us all.
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Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See  http://www.soulofacitizen.org for more information. To receive Paul’s articles directly, send a blank message to  paulloeb-articles-subscribe@onenw.org

homepage: http://www.workingforchange.com/article.cfm?itemid=15481
address: Working For Change

Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Leave No Millionaire Behind

By the numbers alone, the Bush administration’s economic policy has been a disaster. And the middle class and poor are paying for the failure. Driven by hollow political priorities, the Bush administration’s disastrous economic policies are undermining our national ideals.

The President and his party have cooked up the ultimate recipe for keeping political power. A nation in a constant state of anxiety—over the threat of terrorism, or a potential war—is a nation off balance. And that insecurity is the perfect cover to divert public attention from the country’s serious domestic problems and the administration’s political agenda.

Figures Don’t Lie
By Arthur I. Blaustein

The “Bush doctrine” opens the door to a series of pre-emptive wars against “evil” regimes, ostensibly to protect the United States and bring security, stability, safety and democracy to the citizens of Damascus, Tehran, and Pyongyang—as the president claims to be doing in Baghdad and Kabul. Meanwhile, the administration shows little or no concern for the security, stability and safety of the citizens of Los Angeles, New York, Cleveland, or thousands of other cities and small towns across America, who are facing enormous economic and social difficulties.

Just like in the “The Wizard of Oz,” when we finally get to see who is operating the smoke-puffing machine, we find a consummate pitchman. In Bush’s case, the man behind the screen is a flag-waving, lapel-pin wearing, anti-terrorist fear monger who labels his opponents anti-patriotic. He has done a clever job of manipulating the mass media, but in reality his smooth imagery and charming personality are subtly undermining America’s values. While he composes hymns to individualism, Sunday piety, trickle-down economics, and family values, he is trying to gut every program providing for social, economic, and environmental justice. America’s families need less pious rhetoric, and more policies geared toward a healthy economy, secure jobs, decent health care, affordable housing, quality public education, renewable energy and a sustainable environment. Bush seems unable—or unwilling—to grasp that the government has an important leadership role in this. In fact, the only policy that Bush seems energized by is one of tax giveaways for the rich and for corporate America.

At present, there exists an air of suspended belief over the radical changes of the past two years. That is because the layoffs, shutdowns, cutbacks, and reduced paychecks have been obscured by the events of September 11 and the nation’s subsequent focus on terrorist alerts and the Iraq war. But those changes are taking a huge toll. Bush’s economic policy, which in turn determines social policy, is much like the iceberg waiting in the path of a steaming Titanic.

Bush does not seem to understand that, while it is not a sin to be born to privilege, it is a sin to spend your life defending it. John F. Kennedy and Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that. They knew the narrowness privilege can breed. This administration, despite its early pledges to provide a policy of “compassionate conservatism” has in fact adopted policies that amount to a war against the poor and the middle class. The tax and budget cuts were not made in order to jumpstart the economy or balance the budget; they were simply massive cash transfers. Social programs are being slashed to pay for tax giveaways for the wealthy and new defense contracts for arms makers who just happen to be big campaign contributors. Moreover, this was accomplished in a policy vacuum. The administration has not provided the American people with a strategic vision as to how this excessive and bloated arms build-up fits into our larger defense, anti-terrorist, or foreign policy. Is it in the national interest to relegate our most precious assets—our human and natural resources—to the junk pile while we increase the pace of an arms race where overkill has long been achieved? Do we really need to spend $9 billion on a missile defense system that doesn’t work?

Thomas Jefferson warned us that we could be free or ignorant, but not both. We have not taken that warning to heart. We have not had a serious national debate about the Bush administration’s policies because the mass media have treated politics—as well as economic and social policy—as entertainment: a combination of hype and palliative. The political and economic life of the country has been reduced to little more that a struggle for partisan power, the results not unlike the score of a football game: BUSH WINS AGAIN or SENATE DEMS BEATEN. There seems to be no sense of higher good, no question of national purpose, no hope for critical judgment. Hype has impoverished our political debate, undermining the very idea that public discourse can be educational and edifying—or that national public policy can grow out of reflective discussion and shared political values. We have sought simplistic answers to complex problems without even beginning to comprehend our loss.

Which brings us to the difficult and complex issue of the inter-relationship between America’s economic and social policy, and how these policies are shaped by politics in Washington. A fundamental assumption underlies the administration’s domestic approach—an assumption so ill-conceived that it seriously jeopardizes any prospects for solving our nation’s pressing domestic needs. It is the illusion that economic policy can be separated from social policy.

This is impossible, and the consequences of believing it are grave. By separating economic theory from social policy, and by pursuing the former at the expense of the latter, the administration has adopted a strategy of brinkmanship that could lead to social disaster. The drastic cuts being made in basic social and human service programs will exact painful and immediate social and human costs, and they will also appear as direct financial costs—in terms of illiteracy, incarceration, and ill-health, among others—at future times in different ledgers.

The administration’s contention that renewed economic growth as a consequence of tax cuts for the rich will eventually “trickle down” to the poor flies in the face of everything we know about poverty today. The best research indicates the opposite. Growth in the private economy has had a declining role in reducing poverty, and virtually all of the reduction in poverty since the mid-1960s has been brought about by the expansion of national social insurance and income-transfer programs of the kind now under attack by the Bush administration.

In addition to the massive tax cuts, the administration proposes to privatize or turn over to the states vast portions of the nation’s social, education, housing and health programs—a move that amounts to reneging on our social and moral commitments as a nation. The real issue is not public versus private or federal versus state; rather, it is the diminution or avoidance of any national standards of responsibility and accountability. Worse than that, Mr. Bush seems to be denying that this responsibility even exists. Successful and effective national programs are being replaced with an inequitable, inconsistent patchwork of systems run by states—a patchwork that is restrictively financed, more bureaucratic, less accountable, and subject to intense local, political, and fiscal pressures. Instead of the more efficient government that Bush promises, we will have fifty bureaucratic and anachronistic messes: government by provisional catastrophe. The question becomes whether basic human services will be provided at all.

For true conservatives, the ideological implications behind Bush’s economic policies must be disturbing, in that they depart from the genuine conservative philosophies that have played such an important role in American history. Historically, conservatives have not promised lower taxes or economic privatism. Traditionally, conservative leaders have focused on the underlying problems of the human community—issues of leadership, of equality of opportunity, of continuity and order, of the obligations of the strong to the weak, and of the safeguards needed to keep the privileged from abusing their power.

By contrast, the Bush administration encourages us to revert to our basest inclinations: Look out for number one; write off those who can’t make it as shiftless, a drag on the economy. Our moral decline deepens as we condone the sheer political power of special and self-serving private economic interests—wealthy campaign contributors and corporate powers—over the legitimate moral authority that represents our nation’s best public interests. Rather than opportunity, equality, justice, and vitality, the Bush prescription for economic stimulus amounts to inequality, economic cronyism, and acquiescence. People programs are out and tax avoidance schemes are in. Human needs are made subordinated to political and technical arrogance.

Recently, I took the opportunity to reread Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and the Federalist Papers, and recalled that our founding fathers were well aware that politics and economics were interrelated faces of power, each necessitating its own checks and balances. What impressed me most, though, was their mature leadership, one that was based on a genuine commitment to the struggle for social, political, and environmental justice as well as economic opportunity. A commitment to this sense of public interest is just as important today.

Only those people have a future, and only those people can be called humane and historic, who have an intuitive sense of what is significant in both their national and public institutions, and who value them. It is this conviction and the continuing belief in the common-sense vision of the American promise that demand that we begin a serious national dialogue over our country’s economic and social policies. The Bush administration’s radical and dangerous changes have occurred without any serious national debate. Mr. Bush seems to think that his electoral “mandate,” as suspect as it was, has changed our government from a representative democracy to economic royalism.

The Bush economic policies—and the overtly antisocial political priorities driving them—are not based on a commitment to any high principles such as freedom, liberty, equality, justice, or opportunity, although such pieties are mouthed at the swivel of a camera. The administration’s policies instead are based on the very narrow personal prejudices and biases of a group of men who have been motivated by the acquisition of money and power. Bush and Cheney have constructed a hypothesis to fit a simple notion: “The plutocracy is good to me, so I’ll be good to the plutocracy.”

For the past two years I have listened carefully to the President, his chief advisors, and the neo-conservative right. All of it has reminded me of a passage in The Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad put it this way:

“Their talk was the talk of sordid buccaneers: it was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage; there was not an atom of foresight… in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware these things are wanted for the work of the world.”
Conrad’s words capture the radical frenzy in Washington; they reflect the mood and the moral nullity of the reactionary enterprise that seeks to tear apart the public good. The Bush administration just doesn’t get it. No country can sustain itself, much less grow, on a fare of smooth one-liners, rerun ideas, hot-house theories, paranoia, and official policy pronouncements borrowed from Orwell’s 1984; where recession is recovery, war is peace and a social policy based on aggressive hostility is compassion.  What do you think?

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Arthur I. Blaustein is a professor of economic and social policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was chair of the President’s National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity during the Carter Administration. His most recent books are Make a Difference and The American Promise: Justice and Opportunity.

homepage: http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2003/30/we_481_01.html

Thursday, August 14, 2003

Grand Old Party

- from Wired.com -
President Bush, in the middle of his African tour, visited a nature reserve in Botswana, where he was treated to the sight of two elephants mating. Bush had just finished petting one of the beasts and had hopped back on the truck when Jumbo mounted his mate. Bush was seen whispering something to first lady Laura Bush, who slapped him on the leg. What could he have said?
a.) “It’s a good thing Ashcroft isn’t here.”
b.) “Avert your eyes, honey.”
c.) “Elephants are good at screwing. That’s why they’re the symbol of our party.”