Government receipts also were up, rising 10.6 percent from a year ago, to $164.6 billion. That left a deficit for the month of $85.5 billion, a record imbalance for March.

Treasury Department officials said that half of the growth in outlays for March represented a $15 billion shift in payments for certain government benefit programs, including Medicare, into March rather than April. The benefit payments were made early because April 1 fell on a Saturday.

The March outlay record of $250 billion surpassed the old mark of $232 billion set in February.

Even though the deficit was a record for March, it was below the all-time monthly high of $119.2 billion, which was set in February.

So far through the first six months of this budget year, which began in October, the deficit totals $303 billion, an increase of 2.8 percent over the deficit in the first six months of the 2005 budget year.

The administration is forecasting that the deficit for this budget year, which will end Sept. 30, will hit a record $423 billion, surpassing the old mark in dollar terms of $413 billion set in 2004. The administration says the costs of the war in
Iraq and reconstruction spending from the Gulf Coast hurricanes will drive the deficit higher.

The
Congressional Budget Office is forecasting that the deficit will total $371 billion this year, and many private forecasters believe the red ink will be even lower, noting that the healthy economy has pushed revenues up sharply.

Through the first six months of this budget year, revenues have totaled $1.04 trillion, up 10.5 percent from the same period a year ago.

Spending during this six-month period totals $1.34 trillion, up 8.7 percent from the same period in 2005.

High gasoline (petrol) prices, which currently top three dollars a gallon in some critical US retail markets, have already cut into sales of Ford's gas-guzzling large SUVs.

Fields said the company had forecast prices to be in the 2.50 to three dollar range this year and as a result has focused on expanding sales of cars and smaller more fuel-efficient crossover sports utility vehicles.

Fields said the automaker is also on track to sell 900,000 of its F-series trucks this year.

"That's more than double the sales of the industry's best-selling car," he told analysts.

A shift away from highly profitable sports utility vehicles has played a large role in the massive financial losses Ford's North American automotive sector posted last year.

The company reacted with a plan to shutter 14 plants, lay off up to 30,000 workers and to change the way it does business.

Fields reiterated the company's commitment to returning its North American operations to profitability by 2008 and to stabilizing its declining US market share.

"We believe our plan is comprehensive and we are starting to make progress," Fields said. "We know there's still a lot of work to do."

Fields said the company's objective is "to first stop the rate of loss of share and ultimately grow it," but he would not comment on whether he anticipated Ford would be able to regain market share from Asian rivals or would have to battle it out with domestic automakers General Motors and Chrysler.

He said the company had done significant market share research and found that a large group of customers were committed to buying American brands if the automakers were able to deliver attractive products.

"There is a certain core of customers who buy imports and will only buy imports," he acknowledged.

When asked whether recent credit ratings downgrades have affected the company's ability to offer customers competitive financing options due to rising costs for financing the company's massive debt load, Fields said the company's financial branch "continues to have a very strong liquidity position and funding flexibility.

"I'm very confident we have the resources to support our business going forward but as you know that continues to play out."

What do I mean by revolutionary unionism? I mean unions that fight like hell for the rights of workers and take no prisoners. Unions that recognize most employers as the enemy of workers they are. I mean unions that strike fear into the hearts of the employers; unions that seek to overthrow capitalism and to remake society in the image of the worker rather than the ruling elite. I am talking about radical, militant in your face organizing on a global scale that unites working class people against Plutocratic rule.

How can we forget a history of class struggle that we have never known? The four men who were foremost in the fight for the eight hour work day, which included Albert Parsons and August Spies, were hung in the streets of Chicago in November of 1887. The eight hour work day did not become law in the U.S. until 1938 when it was enacted as part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Our government is killing millions of innocent civilians, people like us in every part of the planet, while laying waste to the world for the private gain of a few. The people should be up in arms. But there is hardly a whimper of protest. We can hardly pry the average citizen away from American Idol and Survivor; much less get them into the streets to demand an end to wage slavery and to fight for social justice. We should not occupy the shopping malls; we should be in the streets. What does this say about the conscience of the American people? Where is the courage? Where is the righteous indignation that is demanded by the times? Where is the solidarity that once characterized working class people? Why do we choose to live on our knees rather than stand on our feet and fight for what we know is right?

We are a disgrace to the legacy forged by the workers who came before us and sacrificed so much-to Joe Hill, Frank Little, Sid Hatfield, Albert Parson, August Spies, Mary Harris, Lucy Parsons, Big Bill Haywood, Daniel DeLeon and Eugene Debs.

Why do we tolerate the intolerable evil that manifests itself in the neocon cabal that is running the world and appears to be intent upon destroying all of us? Are our minds so numbed, our souls so empty that we cannot even lift a finger to resist? Are we so selfish as a people that we can think only of our own comfort while ignoring the suffering imposed upon others in our name? How can any just person allow their government to invade sovereign nations, to slaughter its people and to subject them to lives of terror and unimaginable indignities? How can we allow this to continue and call it liberation and democracy? The perversion of language is sickening. What in the hell is wrong with us? Do we enjoy licking the boots of men like George Bush and Adolph Hitler? Spit in their eye and blacken the other, I say!

We would behave differently if it was our country that was being bombed to rubble by a foreign power. But since it is not, we callously ignore the evil that is done in our name. We go on with our lives as if the lives of Muslims, whose names we do not know, whose faces we never see, do not matter. According to Gary Null, the U.S. is responsible for the death of 1.2 million Iraqis alone. And Iraq is only one of the one hundred and thirty-five nations occupied by the U.S. forces. How can we fail to fathom the incalculable pain and misery we are sowing around the world? Will we ever learn that might does not make right? Only justice makes right.

Millions of workers in France are filling the streets and committing acts of civil disobedience because they can be fired by their employers without reason. They have joined the ranks of at will employees. Have we regressed into a nation of obedient sheep, incapable of making trouble? American workers should be in the streets demonstrating solidarity with our French brethren. We should be in the streets with our Latino brothers and sisters razing hell. We should be there with Cindy Sheehan. Why does ninety-nine percent of the population consent to be ruled by the other one percent? Why are we so damned polite and servile? Were our backbones removed at birth? Were we born without conscience, without a sense of right and wrong? Do we exist only to consume goods; to serve as canon fodder in imperialism's wars?

Too many working people are ignorant of their own history and thus lack historical perspective and understanding. The struggles of working class people against the ruling elite, while often difficult to read because of the sense of rage it engenders, is also a history of hope. It shows us the way through organized struggle, direct action and civil disobedience. Little wonder, then, that the official keepers of history want to keep it secret. It might give people the idea that something can be done about oppression and injustice. It might even inspire them to take action and that is a very dangerous proposition to those in power. Peace, justice, and worker emancipation are born of struggle. They will not magically appear as a gift from our oppressors. Freedom is not given, it is won. Win or lose, we must fight the fight.

The genius of capitalism, if something so insidious may be called that, is that it provides just enough material comfort and hope for enough people to keep them from rebelling. If there is more than a small shift in the people's level of comfort and hope, things could quickly change. Open rebellion-revolution-might even be possible. Capitalism must keep the carrot, the promise of a better life; a more just and equitable way of living, just beyond the grasp of the working class people. Betterment must appear not only possible, but probable in order to keep the masses striving and thus under control. If the ruling class is to maintain the elite status proffered by capitalism, the working class must never realize that they are playing the game with a marked deck. The system allows only a few winners. Workers were never meant to have pie in the sky-that is only for the privileged elite.

Under the oppressive weight of capitalism, workers will never receive their fair share of the wealth they create for their employers. Eugene Debs once calculated that the average worker receives no more than seventeen percent of the wealth she/he creates. Capitalism is all about maximizing corporate profitability by exploiting the workers and the earth. It is capitalism that is waging war on working class people in every nation on earth. And now the parasites running the country are drawing up plans to bomb yet another sovereign nation that poses no threat to us, perhaps with nuclear munitions. How many more sons and daughters will have to die before we awaken from our stupor? Are we even capable of awakening? Where is the moral outrage that should be finding expression in the streets?

Why are we so afraid to acknowledge that U.S. aggression is interrelated with capitalism, class privilege, war profiteering and worker abuse in every part of the world? Are we just going to sit quietly in our living rooms before the television's tiny light while the world burns? It appears so.

Yesterday morning as I sat having breakfast with my wife, I looked out the window and noticed some birds hovering in the air. It quickly became apparent that there was some contention between them. At first a single crow was bravely diving at a Red-tailed Hawk that was apparently hunting in the vicinity of her nest. The crow was quickly joined by her mate; then another crow and yet another joined in the chase. In just a few minutes there were many crows involved, although their nests were not threatened, and the hawk was noisily driven off. We could learn something from those crows.

Charles Sullivan is a photographer, free lance writer and citizen activist residing somewhere in the hinterland of West Virginia. He may be reached at earthdog@highstream.net.

"On the surface, the outstanding WTO issues are purely economic - intellectual property rights, for instance, or keeping Russian markets open to American poultry exports, an issue that has recently arisen.But just beneath the surface, the politics surrounding Russia's quest to join the global trade organisation is clearly visible," the 'Moscow Times' daily said.

Russia has resolved trade disputes with many countries, but has yet to iron out its differences with Washington, a prerequisite for admission to the 149-member WTO.

US senator Bill Frist, the majority leader and one of a handful of Republicans likely to run for President in 2008, said here on Monday that the political chasm separating the US and Russia figured into the resolution of trade disputes.

Speaking at a news conference after meeting foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, frist said Russia's disregard for rule of law, human rights violations and other 'anti-democratic' tendencies 'colour the position of the United States'.

Frist added that ''our Congress plays a major role in whether Russia will ultimately be admitted to the WTO''.

A senior congressional aide, speaking to the daily on condition of anonymity said the US house of representatives would be a 'major stumbling block' for Russian ascendancy to the WTO. Amid reports of attempts by the US to delay Russia's accession to WTO, a top Russian lawmaker said that Moscow could defer its decision to join the global trade body. "Russia will only join the World Trade Organization on terms it considers favourable," said Boris Gryzlov, chairman of state Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament.

The White House, to give another example, declares that any state harboring terrorists is a terrorist state and is therefore subject to just invasion and attack by "the civilized world," led of course, by Washington. It is left to the lunatic fringe to point out that the leader of civilization would be justly bombed by this standard since the U.S. happens to host such known terrorists as Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles, who collaborated in blowing up a civilian Cuban airliner as part of a U.S. directed campaign against the Castro government.

It is left to the leftist denizens of the radical nuthouse to point out that U.S. foreign policy has long used [state-] terrorist methods to slaughter masses of innocent people in places like Vietnam (where American forces killed more than 2 million people between 1962 and 1975) and Iraq, where more than a million died from U.S-imposed economic sanctions during the 1990s. The current US-led invasion of Iraq has killed more than 100, 000 civilians.

Do the savage U.S. torture camps and brutal state-terrorist "interrogation" techniques maintained and conducted in Gunatanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram Air Force base, among other locations help the U.S. qualify as a fitting candidate for punitive attack by "the civilized world?"

How about the role that John Negroponte, current U.S. Director of National Intelligence, played as U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s? Negroponte ran interference for the Honduran security forces in the U.S. Congress, making sure that U.S. military assistance kept flowing to Honduras while those forces conducted a brutal campaign of torture and massacre against that nation's civilian populace. Negroponte's main job in Honduras, however, was to oversee the terrorist contra camps in Honduras, from which a C.I.A.-equipped mercenary force launched repeated murderous attacks that killed masses of Nicaraguan civilians.

These are relevant questions only for the aforementioned nutcases.

VENEZUELA'S "VERY EXTRAVAGANT FOREIGN POLICY"

Speaking of Negroponte, he takes the powerful pot-calling-the-not-so-powerful kettle-black game to a new level. A recent front-page New York Times article on Venezuela's foreign policy contains some very interesting reflections from the United States' blood-soaked uber-snoop. By Negroponte's observation, respectfully reported without properly stunned amazement or derision by the Times, Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez is "spending considerable sums involving himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere, this despite the very real economic development and social needs of his own country. It's clear," Negroponte told a Congressional hearing last month, "he is spending hundreds of millions, if note more, for his very extravagant foreign policy." Negroponte's tone of concern over Chavez's "extravagance" was loyally repeated in the Times' article, which bore the ominous title "CHAVEZ SEEKING FOREIGN ALLIES, SPENDING BILLIONS: Oil Used in Rivalry With U.S. for Influence in the Americas" (April 4, 1968).

Forget for a moment, as the Times dutifully did, that the Chavez government has been "using its oil revenues for the public good" by "doing what previous elite-dominated [Venezuelan] governments failed to do: providing for the basic political, social, and economic needs of the population. Oil revenue," Maria Peaez Victor recently noted, "is now used for universal health services, education at all levels, clean water, food security, micro credits, support for small and middle range industry, land distribution and deeds for de-facto owners, worker cooperatives, infrastructure, such as roads and railways and support for independent community radio," leading to significant ongoing improvements in the social health of Venezuela (Maria Paez Victor, "Mr. Danger and the Socialism for the New Millennium," Speech to the University of Toronto Walter Gordon/Massey Symposium, March 15, 2006 available online at www.venezuelanalysis.com).

And forget also that Chavez's supposedly "extravagant" and power mad (Donald Rumsfeld recently likened Chavez to Adolph Hitler) foreign policy appears to alleviate and counter economic and social problems and abroad and thus stands in sharp contrast to the regressive dictates and outcomes of U.S. foreign policy. Chavez, by the Times' own account, has "been subsidizing...eye surgery for poor Mexicans and even heating fuel for poor families from Maine to the Bronx to Philadelphia." He has helped Argentina overcome its foreign debt and given $3.8 million in foreign aid to four African nations. In the Bronx last winter, the Times reports, Venezuela's oil corporation Citgo "provided heating fuel at a 40 percent discount to some 8,000 low-income residents of 75 apartment buildings."


IMPERIAL HOMELAND PRIORITIES

Put all that aside and reflect upon the curious fact, naturally not mentioned by the Times, that the U.S. is a great perpetrator when it comes to the the crime of sacrificing domestic social and economic health and development to the pursuit of an "extravagant foreign policy" involving massive interferencve in the internal affairs of other natiuons.

The more than $500 billion each year on an imperial defense budget that maintains more than720 military bases located in nearly every country on the planet, including many in Central and Southern America.

But this is only one way in which Uncle Sam "involv[es] himself in the political and economic life of other countries in Latin America and elsewhere." Other forms of such involvement include the powerful and regressive neoliberal economic interventions of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary Fund and World Bank, the vast reach of American corporate media and consumer culture, the ubiquitous political pressure of U.S. "diplomacy," the placement of explicitly propagandistic "news" stories in foreign newspaper and television, and the flooding of Central American markets with highly subsidized U.S. agricultural exports.

The U.S. government has even been known to invade and occupy other, formerly sovereign states, smashing their existing nation-state and insisting that the occupied nations develop in accord with U.S. imposed politico-economic dictates.

How "extravagant" (and expensive) is all that?

All of this global extravagance transpires while:

* More than 37 million residents of the United States (which US Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson [R-Texas] calls "the beacon to the world of the way life should be") languish beneath the federal government's notoriously low poverty level ($15,219 for a family of three in 2004).

* More than 13 million or 18 percent of US children live below that sorry measure, and the US child poverty rate is substantially higher than that of other industrialized nations.

* 15.6 million Americans live at LESS THAN HALF the inadequate U.S. poverty level, comprising 42 percent of the nation's giant poverty population.

* More than one in three US children live in or near poverty and more than 8 million Americans live in homes that frequently skip meals or eat too little.

* More than 45 million Americans lack health coverage, making up 16 percent of the U.S. population. The U.S. is still the only modern industrialized state without a universal, socially inclusive health insurance plan.

* The top 1 percent owns more than 40 percent of the wealth in the U.S..

* The top 10 percent owns two-thirds of US wealth, leaving the rest of us - 90 percent of the population - to fight it out for one third of the nation's assets.

* The net worth (all assets minus all liabilities) of the typical black family in the U.S. is around $8000, roughly 7 percent of the typical white family's net worth - that's seven black cents on the white dollar.

* As the Times acknowledged in a front-page story last May, "Life at the Top Isn't Just Better, It's Longer" because "class is a potent force in health and longevity in the United States. The more education and income people have, the less likely they are to have and die of heart disease, strokes, diabetes and many types of cancer. Upper-middle-class Americans live longer and in better health than middle-class Americans, who live longer and better than those at the bottom. And the gaps are widening, say people who have researched social factors in health. As advances in medicine and disease prevention have increased life expectancy in the United States," Times reporter J. Scott elaborated, "the benefits have disproportionately gone to people with education, money, good jobs and connections. They are almost invariably in the best position to learn new information early, modify their behavior, take advantage of the latest treatments and have the cost covered by insurance" (Janny Scott, "Life At The Top," New York Times, 16 May 2005).

* Unequal health care contributes to more than 100,000 black Americans dying earlier than whites each year. Middle-aged black men die at nearly twice the rate as white men of a similar age.

I could go on and on. The list of the "very real" but all-too unmet "economic development and social needs" and savage racial and related class disparities in the imperial "homeland" is practically endless. It is also getting bigger with time. As the Times reported (along with the rest of "mainstream" media) earlier this year, the Bush II administration has seen the U.S. poverty rate rise during every single year of its existence. That terrible measure has never gone up each year for five straight years until now.

This remarkable record of worsening misery at the bottom of the United States' steep socioeconomic pyramid partly reflects the deliberate bankrupting of social programs through a militantly plutocratic program of massive tax-cutting that primarily benefits the already super-wealthy.

It also reflects the huge social and democratic opportunity cost of the imperial state's addiction to an extravagantly expensive militarism. The U.S. spends nearly as much on what it deceptively calls "defense" as the rest of the world. In 2002, the U.S. military budget was 30 times bigger than the combined spending of the seven official U.S. "rogue" states --- Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria (when will Venezuela be added to the list? )--- who together spent $14.4 billion. The seven "rogue" enemies plus Russia and (long-term Pentagon obsession) China together spent $116.2 billion, equal to just 27.6% of the U.S. military budget.


TAX DAY

Meanwhile, here's how the National Priorities Project (NPP) breaks down the tax bill American paid for 2005, by the end of which the invasion of Iraq had cost more than $270 billion. Let's say you paid Uncle Sam $1,000 last April. Your patriotic investment in the American public sector was used as follows:

* $285 went to the military, what the federal government likes to call "defense" and what would more accurately be called "empire."

* $200 went to "health care": all health spending by the federal government, including federal spending on Medicare and Medicaid.

* $180 went to pay interest on the debt (which costs the nation $317.3 billion each year), that is to pay off domestic and international bond holders/global finance capital.

* $60 went to "income security," including Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Supplementary Security Income, and various programs for families and kids.

* $40 went to education: all federal expenditures on elementary, secondary, higher education and federal research and general education assistance.

* $37 went to benefits for veterans (which some analysts would include under "military").

* $27 went to nutrition spending, including Food Stamps and all child nutrition programs.

* $20 went to housing: all federal housing assistance.

* $14 went to environmental protection.

* $ 3 went to job training.

"Defense" (empire) outweighed education by more than 7to 1; income security (for the poor) by more than 4 to 1; nutrition by more than 10 to 1; housing by 14 to 1; environmental protection by 20 to 1; and job training by 95 to 1. The military accounts for more than half of all discretionary - not previously obligated - federal spending.

And don't be fooled by the number two ranking for health care. Most of that $200 is a transfer payment to the corporate-medical-industrial complex, just as much of the "defense" budget is a transfer payment to such giant corporate masters of war as Raytheon, Lockheed-Martin, and Boeing. US governmental per-capita health expenditures are higher than those of some nations with national health insurance plans (including France and Germany) because of America's inordinately high doctor salaries, skyrocketing drug prices in the US (where consumers flex little countervailing bargaining power against the market-setting capacity of leading pharmaceutical corporations), and the flood of paper work and bureaucratic bloat in the private (corporate) "health" sector.

The NPP also breaks down the social costs of the Iraq occupation. As of April 6, 2006 at 5:30 PM, the NPP reported, Washington's imperial war of choice on Mesopotamia had cost more than $271 billion. With that same sum of money, the NPP calculated, the United States could have: enrolled 30, 923, 096 U.S. children in Head Start for one year; provided health insurance for one year to 162, 406, 756 children; built 2,442, 073 additional housing units; hired 4,700, 260 additional public school teachers for one year; and given 13,148,101 Americans a four-year college scholarship at a public university.


KING'S FORGOTTEN LEGACY: "THE TRIPLE EVILS THAT ARE INTERRELATED"

The day on which the New York Times story about Chavez's "extravagant foreign policy" (Negroponte) appeared - April fourth - happened to mark the 38th anniversary of the assassination (or perhaps state execution) of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. King, it is haunting to recall, was killed exactly one year after he delivered his famous "Time to Break the Silence" speech denouncing the Vietnam War at the Riverside Church in New York City.

By the time of that famous oration, King was regularly speaking and writing against what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated": militarism, poverty, and racism. "I [can] never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes," King said, "without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government." He was moved to speak out on Vietnam, he said, by "allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism." His Christian-humanist values meant that he could not watch passively as "as we poison" the Vietnamese peoples' "water, as we kill a million acres of their crops," and "send them into the hospitals, with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one 'Vietcong'-inflicted injury." The people of Indochina, King mused, must find Americans to be "strange liberators" as "we destroy...their... famil[ies], village[s],...land and...crops."

But focusing back on the imperial homeland, King also noted that many young black Americans and poor whites were in Vietnam because their poverty was so high and their job prospects so low that enlistment looked like a step up. He observed that the American government's resort to mass bloodshed in Southeast Asia was undermining his ability to argue effectively for nonviolent resistance to inequality and racism in American ghettoes. And he passionately decried the fact that the U.S. government's decision to pour tens of millions of dollars into the "crucifixion of Southeast Asia" (as Noam Chomsky once aptly described an American military assault that killed 3 million residents of that region) was undercutting its ability to deliver on the "promissory note" of social justice it had started to write with its briefly declared "War on Poverty." "With the resources accruing from the termination of the war, arms race, and excessive space races," King told the US Senate in 1966, "the elimination of all poverty could become an immediate national reality. At present," he bitterly observed, "the war on poverty is not even a battle, it is scarcely a skirmish." "Defense" expenditures in Vietnam, King knew, were strangling the anti-poverty "war" in its cradle.

Struggling against the toxic, interrelated logics of empire, inequality, and racism, King called for "a radical reordering of the nation's priorities." By 1967, he went public with his determination that that "reordering" required "restructuring the whole of American society." "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift," King warned, "is approaching spiritual death."

Nearly four decades after King's death, the U.S. government dishonors the now officially iconicized civil rights leader's officially forgotten anti-imperialist and social-justice legacy by prioritizing militarism over social provision and health like no time in memory. It is once again sacrificing domestic social and economic needs to the extravagant costs of waging an imperial war for "so-called freedom" (King on the Vietnam War) abroad.

Adding Orwellian insult to injury, the leading imperial terror manager Negroponte has the unmitigated gall to falsely accuse a relatively small and populist Latin American state of sacrificing its domestic social health to an expensive, expansionist, and "extravagant foreign policy." And the United States' leading "liberal" newspaper, which guards the leftmost boundary of the narrow moral-ideological spectrum in a spiritually dead "mainstream" media, naturally refuses to call the imperial functionary on his astonishing and odious hypocrisy.

Paul Louis Street is a writer, activist, teacher, and public speaker based in DeKalb, IL, and Iowa City, IA. His many publications include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (www/paradigmpublishers.com). He can be reached at pstreet@niu.edu.

In April 2003, a month after Corning's political action committee gave $10,000 to her re-election campaign, Mrs. Clinton announced legislation that would provide hundreds of millions in federal aid to reduce diesel pollution, using, among other things, technology pioneered by Corning. It was one of several Congressional initiatives Mrs. Clinton has pushed that benefit the company.

And in April 2004, Mrs. Clinton began a push to persuade the Chinese government to relax tariffs on Corning fiber optics products, inviting the Chinese ambassador to her office and personally asking President Bush for help in the matter. One month after the beginning of that ultimately successful effort, Corning's chairman, James Houghton, held a fund-raiser at his home that collected tens of thousands of dollars for her re-election campaign.

It is part of a senator's job description to help a major employer in his or her home state, and it is not unusual for that employer to encourage that help or to reciprocate with campaign contributions. In Mrs. Clinton's case, her alliance with Corning provides a window into how she has used her singular clout as a former first lady on behalf of new constituents in her adopted home state, and how those efforts in turn have helped her to bolster her already powerful fund-raising machine and win over previously skeptical New Yorkers.

Indeed, her work on behalf of Corning began even before company officials had made a single contribution to her as a senator.

"She's there when you need her," said Amo Houghton, a former Republican congressman and the brother of Corning's chairman.

Mrs. Clinton, who is running for re-election this year, has been cultivating leaders in upstate communities like Corning, in central New York, hoping to exceed her 2000 results, including those in Republican strongholds, to demonstrate that she has appeal beyond her traditional base, Democrats and her associates say.

Corning has proved doubly helpful on that front. The company and its employees contributed $137,000 from the time she was elected in 2000 through the end of 2005. Although it was a small portion of the $33 million the senator raised for her re-election during that time, it was the most from any single source other than MetLife - more even than politically active Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs. In addition, Corning twice paid for her to travel upstate to be briefed on issues important to the company and the region.

Beyond financial support, Corning has also defended Mrs. Clinton against upstate critics. When, for instance, The Buffalo News suggested in 2003 that she was failing to win over local leaders, Corning's vice chairman, James B. Flaws, sent a letter to the paper listing ways she had helped the company and its region.

"She has delivered and continues to deliver for us," Mr. Flaws wrote.

The Clinton-Corning alliance is so new and unexpected that John W. Loose, who retired as Corning's chief executive in 2002, after 38 years, reacted in disbelief when told of the company's contributions to her campaign after he left.

"No kidding?" said Mr. Loose, who raised money for Mrs. Clinton's Republican opponent, Rick Lazio, in 2000. "I'm really surprised to hear that. Very surprised. A lot of the executives there were Republicans. There were only a handful of Democrats."

Corning's support of Mrs. Clinton stands in contrast to its less enthusiastic backing of other Democrats, including New York's senior senator, Charles E. Schumer. While contributing $51,000 to Mrs. Clinton in 2004, Corning employees gave $5,000 to Mr. Schumer that year - even though he was running and she was not. And its political action committee gave $10,000 to Mrs. Clinton's Democratic predecessor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, during the 1990's.

Like her husband, Mrs. Clinton has been closely scrutinized for her aggressive fund-raising. Her spokesman said that she takes pride in helping a company that is a major employer upstate. "A relationship that began with glass is now a bond as strong as steel," said the spokesman, Philippe Reines, referring to Corning's origins as a glass maker.

"Corning, in upstate New York, whom I'm privileged to represent, has come through tough times and thrived," Mrs. Clinton said in remarks last summer at the Aspen Institute, discussing the challenges American manufacturers face.

Corning, a Fortune 500 company, has 26,000 employees worldwide, and its major presence upstate is one of the bright spots of an economically battered region. The company makes glassware and ceramics used in fiber optics, diesel emission controls and liquid crystal displays.

Its contributions to Mrs. Clinton often tracked her support for the company, records show. Their mutual support started small, but grew in significance, and dollars, over time.

In early 2002, at the company's urging, Mrs. Clinton helped secure $5 million for a program that would provide federal grants to help school districts overhaul diesel-powered school buses by using a kind of ceramic-filter technology that Corning was beginning to market.

During the 2000 Senate campaign, Corning's political action committee gave $3,000 to Mrs. Clinton, compared with $9,000 for Mr. Lazio, the Republican. But in March 2003, the company gave $10,000 to Mrs. Clinton. A month later, she announced a measure that would provide hundreds of millions of dollars in additional federal money to reduce school bus diesel emissions.

In another initiative, Mrs. Clinton played a key role in persuading Congress to provide millions to state and local governments to upgrade other kinds of diesel-powered vehicles, said Conrad Schneider, advocacy director for the Clean Air Task Force, a nonprofit environmental group that lobbied for the legislation along with Corning and other companies.

"She was really using shoe leather, making member contact, convening meetings and that sort of thing," Mr. Schneider said.

But it was Mrs. Clinton's work on the Chinese tariff dispute that helps explain why Corning might have sought her assistance to begin with. Though a junior senator, Mrs. Clinton apparently used her status as former first lady and high-profile senator not only to intercede with Chinese officials, but also to prod President Bush himself to help the company.

The dispute began in early 2004 when the Chinese Commerce Ministry announced a preliminary decision to impose a 16 percent duty on Corning fiber optics products, saying Corning had deliberately undercut Chinese manufacturers.

Corning appealed to Mrs. Clinton for help, and in April 2004 she reached out to the Chinese minister of trade when he visited Washington. In a strongly worded letter, Mrs. Clinton asserted that the issue was "of great importance to me," that she held Corning in "high esteem" and that she considered the accusations against the company "unfair," according to a copy of the letter.

That month and the next, Corning executives contributed $46,000 to her campaign committee, campaign finance records show.

Next, Mrs. Clinton invited the Chinese ambassador to her Capitol Hill office, where she again stressed the issue's significance to her, said a person with direct knowledge of the exchange, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the private nature of the conversation. The ambassador agreed to take that message to his superiors in Beijing, the person said.

Finally, in November, Mrs. Clinton pulled President Bush aside during the opening of her husband's presidential library in Arkansas to press Corning's case. "She explained the issue and she asked the president to be personally involved," the person said.

Mr. Bush told her he would look into the matter, aides to Mrs. Clinton said. The United States trade representative's office and the Department of Commerce also pressed the Chinese to lift the tariff. By December, the Chinese government had reversed its decision and lifted the duty. Corning officials credited Mrs. Clinton's work with making a difference.

"Her ability to reach out in Washington and outside Washington - I mean, she's the former first lady of the United States," said Timothy J. Regan, the senior vice president of worldwide government affairs at Corning. "No question that her involvement helped move things."

It is difficult to assess how much Mrs. Clinton influenced the Chinese. Corning took other steps to press its complaint, including hiring Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, an influential Washington lobbying firm, which assigned a former undersecretary of commerce to the case.

A lawyer in China who represented Corning before the Chinese Commerce Ministry, John Yong Ren, declined to comment.

Former President Bill Clinton has made several visits to China since leaving office, taking part in AIDS symposiums and giving paid speeches to Chinese businesses. But Senator Clinton's aides said her husband was not involved in the Corning matter.

What is indisputable is that China's decision to rescind the tariff came at a critical juncture for Corning, company officials said. The collapse of the telecommunications boom of the 1990's caused Corning's revenue to drop to $3 billion in 2003, from $6.9 billion in 2000, heightening its need for new markets for its pollution control technology and fiber optics products.

That explains why the company has become one of Mrs. Clinton's biggest supporters, Mr. Regan said.

"When you are down and somebody gives you a hand," he said, "you have to remember that."

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Now I grant you that the millionaires dont think so, but what about the rest of us?

I sense a growing unease in this country about this problem. The latest polls show that 70% of the people think this country is headed in the wrong direction. They cite a number of factors, but, I think, deep down, that they can feel the tilt which is creating a large pool of poverty. They are concerned that they are living on this slope which is slowly sliding them, and their children, into this enormous pool down below.

There are many labels fastened on those who abdicate a mandatory shift of wealth from the haves to the have-nots. The haves control the wealth, and the power derived from that wealth, and will do everything they can to stop such a shift from occuring. That's what drives the tax policies which have been enacted in recent years.

Some times you can be too greedy. If you dont believe me, read the history of the tsars and pre-revolutionary France. Lets hope the millionaires see the light before this country is torn apart.

Cloy

Cloy Richards maintains a Blog named "Daily Wisdom: Words from an Old Man" exclusively at TinasCornerCafe.com -- Serving Food For Our Democracy

In a meeting with the international press accredited here, Bolivian Planning Minister Carlos Villegas revealed the government started negotiations to recover state stock control of private enterprises and that the new Bolivian government has told governments and organizations cooperating with Bolivia that the nation will define where and how to invest resources

He said that this reverses a situation in which foreign corporations defined policies, strategies and priorities.

Asked about relations with IMF, Villegas said that before this administration, the IMF had a policy of excessive interference in Bolivian domestic affairs and the country had put all its efforts into the macro-economy, to the perceived detriment of individual Bolivians.

Villegas affirmed that Bolivia could take care of balancing its macro-economy and pointed out that the international economic situation is quite favorable to Bolivia due to relations with economies, such as China and India.

He stated there would be no conditions imposed by the IMF, and the government will keep "a fraternal relationship with this organization."

Of a trade agreement with the US, the minister said that, as proposed, such an agreement would affect local producers, and only benefit a small group of exporting countries.

He confirmed the government is looking for alternatives, giving as examples negotiations with Argentina and Brazil for commercial agreements.