Having intially believed that power surges in the underground power grid had caused explosions in power circuits, the British government quickly announced that this was a terrorist attack, and identified four ' home-grown Islamic suicide bombers' from CC camera footage of them allegedly entering Luton train station on the morning of July 7th.
Who Dunnit?
Later on the same day, a claim of responsibility was made by a 'previously unknown group' calling itself 'The Secret Cell of al-Qaida of Jihad in Europe' and posted on an Islamic website. On teh same day, a letter dated June 20th allegedly from Osama bin Laden, was released wherein the al-Qaida leader said that the London bombings were part of a wider al-Qaida summer offensive: A translation of the letter stated:
"Rejoice for it is time to take revenge against the British Zionist Crusader government in retaliation for the massacres Britain is committing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern, and western quarters. We have repeatedly warned the British Government and people. We have fulfilled our promise and carried out our blessed military raid in Britain after our mujahideen exerted strenuous efforts over a long period of time to ensure the success of the raid." etc. etc.
|
| Puppet on a String - 'al-Zawahiri' |
Later in September 2005, alleged 'al-Qaeda' deputy leader 'Ayman al-Zawahri', in a videotaped message aired on Arab television station al-Jazeera, stated for the first time that 'al-Qaeda' carried out the 7 July suicide bombings. Interestingly, in the tape, the Mr Magoo of Islamic terrorism stated that the plans to toughen the UK's anti-terror laws in the aftermath of the bombings showed "the dreadful colonial face of Britain". As we have noted in the past, it seems that 'al-qaeda' seems quite content to provide the British government with the justification to institute draconian anti-terror laws while at the same time criticising the British government for introducing those laws.
As mentioned, the claim of responsibility made by the previously unknown 'Secret Cell of al-Qaida of Jihad in Europe' was posted on an Islamic website. A little research turns up the following report from the UK Guardian which states:
"The claim of responsibility for the London attacks was first posted on one of the dozens of Islamic websites that are routinely monitored by western intelligence services.
The statement, under the name of the Secret Organisation of the al-Qaida Jihad in Europe, said: "The heroic mujahideen have carried out a blessed raid in London. Britain is now burning with fear, terror and panic in its northern, southern, eastern and western quarters."
It was posted on an Arabic website, al-qal3ah.com, which is registered by Qalaah Qalaah in Abu Dhabi and hosted by a server in Houston
The Houston company that owns the server has intriguing connections. Everyone’s Internet was founded by brothers Robert and Roy Marsh in 1998 and by 2002 had an income of more than $30m (now about £17m).
Renowned for his charitable work, Roy Marsh counts among his friends President George Bush’s former sister-in-law, Sharon Bush, and the president’s navy secretary"
Despite these admissions of guilt by Islamic groups and 'al-Qaeda', in April 2006, the Observer newspaper published leaked details of the first draft of a forthcoming Home Office report on the bombings, compiled for the then Home Secretary Charles Clarke by a senior civil servant. On May 11th 2005, the Blair government ruled out a full public inquiry into the attacks and instead released a final "narrative" report. The report stated that the attack was planned with a budget of just a few hundred pounds by four men using information from the Internet. While they had visited Pakistan, it was declared that, despire the claims of Osama and al-Zawahiri, there was no direct support or planning by al-Qaeda and that meetings in Pakistan were "ideological, rather than practical."
Sadly, the Balir government's final report failed to address many pertinent details that pose serious questions about the accuracy of the official conclusions about the perpetrators and the nature of the bombings:
High Street Chemist Or High Explosive?
The Blair government claimed that the bombs were crude home-made acetone peroxide-based devices cobbled together on a 'shoestring' budget. However, on July 12th 2005, the Times of London ran a report stating that "a lone bomb-maker using high-grade military explosives is believed to be responsible for building the four devices." The paper also reported that similar components from the explosive devices have been found at all four bombing sites, leading detectives to believe that each of the bombs was the work of one man using materials that "were not home made but sophisticated military explosives, possibly smuggled into Britain from the Balkans." The paper quotes Superintendent Christophe Chaboud, the chief of the French anti-terrorist police, who is in London to help Scotland Yard as saying "The nature of the explosives appears to be military, which is very worrying."
Further confirming that the explosives used were not "home made" by four teenagers, a report in July 2005 from German newspaper Bild am Sonntag as quoted by Israeli daily 'Ynet News' stated:
The terror attack in London last week may be tied to a suicide bombing on Tel Aviv’s beachfront in April 2003, German newspaper Bild am Sonntag reported Monday.
According to the paper, Mossad officials informed British security authorities that the explosive material used in the Tel Aviv attack on Mike’s Place pub was apparently also utilized to stage the series of bombings in London on Thursday.After analyzing the explosive material used in the Mike’s Place attack, the Mossad concluded it was produced in China and later smuggled into Britain, the paper reports. The explosives were apparently stashed by terrorists connected to al-Qaeda who were able to evade raids by British security forces.
According to the newspaper, Mossad Chief Meir Dagan said the explosive in question is very powerful, and “much more lethal than plastic explosives and can be smuggled undetected due to its composition.
The Mossad was also able to determine the substance was developed and produced at the Chinese ZDF arms factory, located about 65 kilometers (about 40 miles) from Beijing, the paper reports.
As a general rule, two-bit terrorist organisations and British teenagers would find it difficult to procure high-grade military explosives from Chinese arms factories that generally confine their business to the world of international arms deals between governments. It is certainly interesting that explosives used in alleged "islamic terror attacks" in London and Israel are being traced to arms factories in China, especially since the UK and Israel both have long-standing arms deals with China, which include such high-grade military explosives.
These facts were ignored by the final British government report on the London bombings, which maintains that the explosives used were manufactured from materials "found in high-street chemists".
Amazing Coincidence?
Amazingly, on the morning of July 7th 2005,a UK-based crisis management firm, Visor Consultants, was running terror drills that simulated bomb attacks at the very same train stations as the actual bombings.
The managing director of Visor Consultants, Peter Power, an ex-Scotland Yard anti-terror branch man, stated on ITN news on July 7th 2005:
POWER: At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.
HOST: To get this quite straight, you were running an exercise to see how you would cope with this and it happened while you were running the exercise?
POWER: Precisely, and it was about half past nine this morning, we planned this for a company and for obvious reasons I don't want to reveal their name but they're listening and they'll know it. And we had a room full of crisis managers for the first time they'd met and so within five minutes we made a pretty rapid decision that this is the real one and so we went through the correct drills of activating crisis management procedures to jump from slow time to quick time thinking and so on.
Mr. Power refused to name the company that had employed his services to stage the mock terror attack on London underground trains, however, the Visor website states "our clients include one of the top seven companies in the USA and key Departments of the UK Government."
Can it really be a mere coincidence that a crisis management company was running a terror drill that simulated terrorist bombings on the very same London underground trains and stations at the very same time as duplicate real bombings were occurring? Should the fact that the very same coincidence occurred on the morning of September 11th 2001 when FEMA was conducting a simulated bioterrorism attack in New York raise any eyebrows?
What about the fact that on the morning of September 11h 2001, officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had planned and was running an exercise in which an errant aircraft crashed into one of its buildings?
The US government called this a "bizarre coincidence". What would you call it? At what point does 'coincidence' become evidence of criminal activity?
On the morning of 9/11, with FEMA, oh so conviniently already on the ground as the attacks occurred, a Mr. Richard Sheirer, in his capacity as Director of the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management, was heavily involved in overseeing the City’s rescue and recovery operations. On departing the office of the Mayor of New York, Giuliani established Giuliani and Partners,a company "dedicated to helping leaders solve critical strategic issues, accelerate growth, and enhance the reputation and brand of their organizations in the context of strongly held values", and other nonsensical business-speak. The important point is that, as a close confidant, Giuliani took Mr Sheirer with him, with Sheirer currently enjoying life as Vice President at Gilliani and Partners. The 'bizarre coincidence' that I want to point out here is that Sheirer, and the abovementioned Visor Consulting director Peter Power, are quite well acquainted with each other and, as of Jan 2005, both were serving on the advisory board of the Canadian Centre for Emergency Preparedness and both Guiliani and Partners and Visor Consulting specialise in security preparedness and mock terror drills.
Coincidences on top of coincidences! But it gets better.
Giuliani and Netanyahu On The Scene
Guess where Rudolf Giuliani just happened to be on the morning of July 7th 2005? Rudy was lounging at the Great Eastern hotel just a few yards from Liverpool street station where one of the bombs went off. In the same Great Eastern hotel where Giuliani was staying, the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange just happened to be hosting its economic conference. Guess who the keynote speaker was? Israel's then Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The same guy who, when asked by a news reporter on the afternoon of September 11th 2001 what he thought of the 9/11 attacks, responded:
"It's very good... well, it's not good, but it will generate immediate sympathy for Israel"
As it turned out, Netanyahu never arrived at the Great Eastern Hotel because, as news reports in the days after July 7th informed us, Netanyahu had in fact received a warning from the Israeli embassy, (by way of the British Metropolitan police) that bombings were to occur and that he should stay in his hotel in Mayfair. Again, the official British government report makes no attempt to address how British police knew at least 6 minutes (probably longer) in advance that the bombings were to occur when, 'officially', British authorities were not even aware that they were dealing with bombs, believing that the explosions were the result of a power surge, until the bus bombing one hour after the first train explosion.
CC TV - Close Circuit Or Complete Codswollop?
According to the official government report, the bombers were identified by CC TV images of them arriving at Luton railway station at 07:21 a.m. on 7 July (below)
However, a Sunday Mail report from July 2005 recounted the eyewitness testimony of a survivor of the bus bombing who claimed to have seen Hasib Hussain the alleged bomber:
BUS blast survivor Richard Jones yesterday revealed how he came face-to-face with one of the London bombers. The Scots IT expert got off the doomed double-decker just seconds before it was torn apart in an explosion that killed 13 passengers.
"This young guy kept diving into this bag or whatever he had in front of his feet," he told The Associated Press.
He said the bomber was around 6ft tall, in his mid-twenties, clean-shaven and smartly dressed. The man was wearing hipster-style fawn checked trousers, with exposed designer underwear, and a matching jersey-style top. 'The pants looked very expensive, they were white with a red band on top... He was standing with his back to me downstairs at the driver's side, which is exactly where the explosion was.
Hasib Hussain is seen on the extreme left in the above image as he entered Luton railway station on July 7th, allegedly on his way to carry out the bus bombing.
Below, he is seen inside the train station:
Compare his clothing with the claims of the eyewitness who said he saw him on the bus.
To date, these are the only images that the British police have released, and they refuse to release further CCTV footage which they claim shows the four 'bombers' emerging on to the concourse at King's Cross where, according to the home office narrative report, they are seen hugging and appear "euphoric".
Indescrutible ID
In an amazing turn of luck, British police claimed that they were able to salvage credit cards and documents from the scenes of the bombings enabling them to quickly identify the bombers. Amid the carnage of twisted metal and bloody body parts, it was claimed that credit cards and other ID were recovered. Two weeks after the bombings, the Pakistani government, for some reason, released a copy of a passport that they claimed belonged to Hasib Hussain and which proved, British authorities claimed, that Hussain (and his fellow bombers) had visited Karachi in Pakistan on 15 July 2004, and that this constituted 'evidence' that they had undergone 'ideological training in Jihad'. However, as reported by the BBC, the passport actually belonged to a very much alive teenage boy living in High Wycombe, north-west of London, also called Hasib Hussain. As the BBC report stated: "evidence showing that all three of the London bombers of Pakistani descent visited Pakistan last year has been thrown into doubt."
These claims of miraculous discoveries of identification of terrorists are strangely similar to the events of 9/11 and the incredible (literally) recovery in the rubble of the WTC towers of a passport belonging to one of the alleged 9/11 hijackers. We are also reminded of the BBC report that, at least four of the alleged 9/11 hijackers were still alive.
Impossible Journeys?
The British government and Metropolitan police claim that the bombers boarded the 7.40am Luton train for Kings Cross (from where it is claimed that they boarded their respective 'bomb trains') The three 'bomb trains' left King's cross station at 08:35, 08:42 and at 08:48.
However, as can be seen from the following
official timetable,
the 7.40 from Luton was cancelled, as was the 7.46, leaving the bombers with
no option but to take the 7.48, which arrived at King's Cross at 8.42, meaning
that two of the bombers would not have had enough time to board the trains
on which they allegedly detonated their bombs. Of course, the bombers, having
arrived at Luton at 7.21am could have taken the 7.24am or the 7.30am trains
to King's Cross, but the official Home Office Narrative Report insists that
they took the 7.40am. Again, no explanation for this problem has ever been
given by British authorities.
| Official Timetable | Actual 7 July Timetable | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Depart Luton | Arrive Kings Cross | Platform | Departure Time | Arrive Kings Cross |
| 7.04 | 7.40 | 7.04 (On Time) | 7.40 (on time) | |
| 7.08 | 7.56 | 7.08 (On Time) | 8.26 (30 mins late) | |
| 7.16 | 7.48 | 7.21 (5 minutes late) | 8.19 (31 mins late) | |
| 7.20 | 8.08 | 7.20 (On Time) | 8.15 (7 mins late) | |
| 7.24 | 8.00 | 7.25 | 8.23 (23 mins late) | |
| 7.30 | 8.04 | 7.42 (12 minutes late) | 8.39 (35 mins late) | |
| 7.40 | 8.16 | Cancelled | Cancelled | |
| 7.46 | 8.28 | Cancelled | Cancelled | |
| 7.48 | 8.20 | 7.56 (8 mins late) | 8.42 (22 mins late) | |
| 7.56 | 8.32 | Cancelled | Cancelled | |
Bombs That Suck?
Equally absent from the official British government narrative report on the London bombings is any reference to a very disturbing eyewitness report from the Cambridge Evening News from July 2005. Dancer Bruce Lait had just boarded the train at Liverpool Street station on his way to the South Bank for a rehearsal when an explosion occurred:
"We'd been on there for a minute at most and then something happened. It was like a huge electricity surge which knocked us out and burst our eardrums. [...] We were right in the carriage where the bomb was. I was knocked out. I did not know what was going on."
He and Crystal (his dance partner) were helped out of the carriage. As they made their way out, a policeman pointed out where the bomb had been.
"The policeman said 'mind that hole, that's where the bomb was'. The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train. They seem to think the bomb was left in a bag, but I don't remember anybody being where the bomb was, or any bag."
If someone would kindly explain to me how a bomb in a rucksack on the floor of a train can cause the floor of the train to be blasted inwards, I would truly appreciate it.
For The Love Of Terror
I have written in the past about the counter-insurgency strategy currently being employed by US and British military intelligence agencies in Iraq, where covert attacks on the civilian population of Iraq are being carried out in order to confuse and demoralise the Iraqi population, and the real insurgency that they support, in an attempt to consolidate US government control over the future of the Iraqi nation. It is my opinion that in the 9/11 attacks, and the Madrid and London train bombings, we are witness to the very similar counter-insurgency tactics, only this time they are being used against the American, British, Spanish and wider European and world civilian population.
There is a very clear link between the American and Israeli war in Iraq, Palestine and soon the wider Middle East, and the need for the population of Europe and America to believe in the reality of the 'war on Islamic terror'. The invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq by American and British forces is, after all, being pursued under the aegis of the very same 'war on Islamic terror'. It is essential therefore for the populations of America and Western Europe to continue to believe in the 'reality' of ' Islamic terrorism' in order for the US, British and Israeli governments to continue to expand their war of aggression in the Middle East and beyond. Given the absence of any real worldwide Islamic terror threat, it has long been understood by these governments that such a threat must be manufactured. In the 9/11, London, Madrid and other alleged Islamic terror attacks, we have evidence of just such a campaign of manufactured Islamic terrorism, and the glaring holes in the official accounts of how and why those attacks occurred provides more than enough evidence to support this thesis.
Forest Gate - Psychological Terror Op
On June 2nd 2006, 250 heavily armed British police descended on a house in East London where, it was alleged, 'Muslim terrorists' were manufacturing chemical weapons to unleash on innocent Londoners. During the raid, which has become know as the 'Forest Gate Raid', one of two brothers living in the house was shot and both were arrested. At a press conference after their release, the brothers (aged 23 and 20) described their ordeal.
When Kahar heard the front door being smashed down, he assumed it was a burglary and left his bedroom to come down stairs, where, at a distance of “two or three feet”, a policeman opened fire without issuing a warning or identifying himself. “We had eye contact and he shot me straight away,” recalled Kahar. The bullet entered his chest and exited through his shoulder, sparing his life by inches. “I was begging him, 'Please, please, I can’t breathe,' and he just kicked me in my face. He kept on saying, 'Shut the fuck up'.... one of the officers slapped me on the face ... I thought that they’re going to either shoot me again, or they’re going to start shooting my brother.”
Koyair, the brother, was also sworn at and beaten. Their elderly mother was dragged out in handcuffs. Their sister, Humeya Kalam, told the BBC, “I heard doors being smashed, windows being broken. I woke up, opened my door and saw a person dressed all in black, gun pointing towards me." Meanwhile, the police raided the house next door, where the residents received similar rough treatment.
In what has become standard policy, the police attempted to smear the two victims by claiming first that Kahar had been shot after he had struggled with officers, then that he had actually been shot by his brother during a scuffle, and then that a police officer had “accidentally” discharged his gun as a result of wearing thick gloves. It was also stated that the brothers had attended militant Islamist demonstrations and that Kahar's wound was superficial. Not surprisingly, all of these were outright lies, and the two brothers were entirely innocent, but even more shocking was the subsequent revelation that the police informant who provided the information that led to the raid, was an "utter incompetent" with an IQ of 69.
Mohammed Abu Bakr Mansha (22) is a friend of the two brothers and had been imprisoned in January for possessing an old address of a decorated British soldier. This was an operation that involved 250 heavily-armed and bio-suited officers in a pre-dawn raid on a London home. Such operations are not sanctioned without meticulous planning, including, in theory, rigorous checking to make sure that the 'target' is a genuine, or likely to be genuine 'terrorist'. Are we to assume that the British 'securocrats' that sanctioned this operation were unaware that, given that the informant was a 22 year old incompetent idiot, any information he might offer should have been treated with serious suspicion, especially if he was being offered early release in exchange for any information on 'terrorists' he could provide, meaning that there was a distinct possibility that the information he provided was bogus, as indeed it turned out to be?
The obvious conclusion here is that the Forest Gate raid was given the green light, not because any faith was placed in the 'tip off' from the incompetent idiot, but rather because it would help to create the 'reality', in the minds of the British population, that Islamic terrorism is a real threat to the world and that the Blair government is justified in introducing further draconian anti-terror laws. After all, if 250 heavily-armed police are kicking in doors and shooting people, then there simply must be a good and justifiable reason for it, right? Well, yes, there is a justifiable reason for it, but it's not any justice that you or I would readily ascribe to, unless of course we were deceived into doing so.
Candy From A Baby
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| Incompetent half-wits - the FBI wants You For Islamic Terror Opportunities! |
We are also reminded of the recent 'Miami Seven' affair in the US, where an undercover FBI agent, posing as an 'al-Qaeda' operative, approached a group of apparently incompetent half-wits living in a warehouse in Florida. The group's name is "the Sea of David' and far from having anything to do with 'Islamic terrorism' they all claimed to be Christians who "trained through the bible". In a perfect example of how agents of the US government are actively attempting to manufacture Islamic terrorism, the undercover FBI agent:
approached the group and asked them if they wanted to join 'al-Qaeda'
'swore one of them in' as an 'al-Qaeda' member
offered them $50,000
provided them with army boots and a video camera
suggested that they might want to blow up some government buildings
suggested that they wanted to blow up the Sears tower
suggested to them that they wanted to wage "full ground war against the United States."
identified that one of them knew what the Sears tower was and had actually been to Chicago - once
All of this was trumpeted in the mainstream press as evidence of an "Islamic terror cell" working out of Florida and planning attacks against the American people. I kid you not, and not once was the most appropriate word used - entrapment
Jihad From Jail
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| Manfactured Terrorist - 'al-Muhajir' |
Arch ex-bogeyman and 'al-Qaeda in Iraq' leader al-Zarqawi was killed in a June 2006 bombing of his safe-house in Iraq. Despite having two 500lb bombs dropped on his head, a picture of his only slightly-blemished face was spread around the world as proof that, not only is the 'war on terror' real, but the US is actively fighting it. Immediately after al-Zarqawi's demise, a successor was needed, so out popped 'Abu Hamza al-Muhajir' who, courtesy of one of Osama's dubious tapes, was lauded as al-Zarqawi's successor and the man to lead the jihad against the occupiers of Iraq. However, the US government hardly had time to slap a $5 million bounty on his head before this newest bubble of fake Islamic terror was unceremoniously popped by an Egyptian lawyer who declared that he had just recently visited 'al-Muhajir' in the Egyptian prison, where he has been languishing for the past seven years.
Now, answer me a couple of questions: Don't you think that 'Osama', if he is all that the US government says he is, would have known that there was slight problem with the new leader of his Jihadi forces in Iraq in prison in the form of him being locked up in an Egyptian cell? Why then would he have announced to the world, via one of his infamous and very suspicious tapes, that an Egyptian jail bird was to spearhead Islamic terror in Iraq and around the world?
All of it stinks folks, but we are dealing with a very particular odour here - I'm getting Langley, Virginia, Thames House, London, and Herzliya, Israel
Stating The Obvious
The facts are clear: there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism in terms of there being a world wide network of terrorists who want to "hurt civilised people everywhere". Any such suggestions should be seen for the clear Nazi party-style government propaganda that they are.
All of this may sound like a joke, albeit a rather sick one, that the US, British and Israeli governments are perpetrating against the global population, but make no mistake, from their point of view, this is no joke - the 200,000 Iraqi civilians and the growing number of Palestinian civilians that have been butchered in the name of the 'war on Islamic terror' is a stark testimony to that fact.
It's time (again) to wake up and stop blithely swallowing government lies
and manipulations. Unnecessary and brutal war is being waged in your name and,
until now, with your support. How long the killing continues is entirely - 100% - up to you.
Comment on this Editorial
"I found myself in a shadowed forest for I had lost the path. That shadowed forest, dense and difficult-death is hardly more severe!"
~ Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto I
The First Circle of Economic Hell is the Ephemeral. It is populated with the froth of financial effluvia-the eternally roiling river of numbers concerning all things economic. Inflation. NASDAQ. Interest rates. Unemployment. Exports. Imports. Industrial production. Capacity utilization. Consumer spending. Money supply. Taxes. Commercial vacancies. Blah, blah, blah, ad infinitum.
The Ephemera are always with us, numbing us with their leaden, empirical embrace. Like the box scores in the sports section, they are the white noise that betokens Meaning in a civilization obsessed with quantification. Their message: things can be measured and, therefore, Reality holds.
But the Ephemera are not trending well for the Bush administration. Gasoline prices have soared. Median incomes are flat. Employment growth has stalled. Interest rates are up. Housing starts are down. Deficits are growing. Bankruptcies are rising. Savings have turned negative. The steady drumbeat of negative news has cast an irksome pall on an administration already hobbled by so many other substantive palls.
Still, any economic priest worthy of the mantle can dispatch Ephemera with a few Delphic incantations of "cyclical breathers" and "letting the market work out its hesitations." It is surely not to a man of Paulson's gravitas that we need turn to deal with such flighty matters. Indeed, heavier burdens await him, verily, beckon him, in the Second Circle.
The Second Circle of Economic Hell
"He placed his hand upon my own to comfort me and drew me into the secret sanctum. Such a commotion of groans and wails of woe, I wept myself from sheer bewilderment."
~ Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto III
The Second Circle of Economic Hell is the Circle of Monetary Effects. It is concerned with prices and interest rates-the "veil of money" as it was once called. It is on top of this Second Circle that the First Circle of Ephemera rests.
The Monetary Effects were positive influences for the first four years of the Bush administration. Inflation was dormant and interest rates were the lowest in fifty years. These Effects produced a housing boom that turned American homes into clapboard-sided ATM machines. Workers re-financed their homes to carry out a consumption binge far beyond what their faltering incomes could actually support.
But as with the Ephemera of Circle One, the Monetary Effects have recently turned negative. Oil costs more than twice what it did when Bush took office and the effects are coursing through the economy, pushing up the price of everything from trucked-in vegetables to Handi-Wrap. To combat the inflation, the Federal Reserve has raised interest rates seventeen times since the summer of 2004. The combination of higher prices and higher interest rates are killing off the weak recovery that had been one of the few Bush administration bright spots.
Paulson' torment in the Second Circle is to pretend he can do something about it when, in fact, he controls neither prices nor interest rates. The Fed's Ben Bernanke, who does at least control short-term rates, has betrayed an artless determination to raise them in order to constrain inflation. He doesn't say so, but he also has to raise rates to continue to attract foreign buyers for the government's record debt-more of which, in deeper Circles, below.
None of this can be considered Providential for Paulson. The last thing he needs is the stigma of stagflation haunting his nascent tenure. Unfortunately, however, one can't choose one's punishment in Hell, whether Divine or Economic. Bound to his Fate, Paulson must lumber on.
The Third Circle of Economic Hell
"Of strange new torments must my verses tell, so I gazed unflinchingly into the pit, which was awash with anguished tears aplenty."
~ Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XX
The Third Circle of Economic Hell is hotter than the Second. It is the Circle of Fiscal Effects, concerned with transgressions involving taxes, spending, and government debt. On the Fiscal Effects of Circle Three rest the Monetary Effects of Circle Two. It is here that we start to glimpse the true inner workings of Economic Hell.
The problem for Henry Paulson is that the Bush administration has premised the whole of its economic policy on debt-massive debt. Bush inherited a $136 billion budgetary surplus from Bill Clinton but turned it into a $152 billion deficit his first year. He's never looked back. The national debt-the cumulation of all deficits since the founding of the republic-was $5.6 trillion when Bush took office but now approaches $9 trillion, up a breathtaking 50% in only five years.
The causes of this explosion of debt are easy to divine. Bush has relentlessly cut taxes on the rich while expanding federal spending at a rate surpassing even Lyndon Johnson's prodigious profligacy. It has allowed him to play Santa Claus but only by conscripting our children into the economic bondage of the greatest debts in history.
This tsunami of government debt has flooded the world with dollars, debauching the currency and sending the price of oil, gold, and other commodities through the roof. But the inflationary blowback has come to haunt the Bush economy, forcing the Fed to raise interest rates to throttle back economic growth, all noted in the Circle of Monetary Effects, above.
More disquieting, Bush's debts have made the U.S. economy perilously dependent on lending from abroad. Bush has borrowed more money from foreigners than all prior presidents COMBINED. To fund his own record debts, Bush goes, hat in hand, to borrow more than $2 billion a day from the rest of the world. Only the pathologically Republican fail to understand how such indebtedness undermines America's future growth while compromising its control of its own national affairs.
Even more problematic is that foreigners have begun to have their fill of dollar-denominated debt. They are having a harder and harder time understanding how-with the debt growing far faster than the economy itself-the U.S. will ever pay the money back. They can only be induced to continue lending by higher and higher rates of return, i.e., higher interest rates. This cycles us back, yet again, to Circle Two, above, and the steady strangulation of the economy caused by rising prices and rising interest rates. Which delivers us to the Gates of the Fourth Circle.
The Fourth Circle of Economic Hell
"I said: "My master, who has set this anguished gust in motion? And he to me: "You shall soon be where your own eye will answer that."
~ Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XXXIII
It is in the Fourth Circle of Economic Hell that Paulson's Saga becomes the Ordeal that it truly is. This is the Circle of the Real Economy on which the Third Circle of Fiscal Effects must inevitably rest. With all the glamour lavished on financial manipulation, we sometimes forget that, eventually, real things have to be made. Before money can be sold, subordinated, factored, futured, arbitraged, discounted, traded, and so on, real people have to produce and consume real products. It is here that Paulson and Bush cower in such hopeless despair.
More than 100% of the growth in Gross Domestic Product over the past five years is attributable to the expansion of debt. GDP is up $2.8 trillion since 2001. But government debt alone is up over $3 trillion for the same period. Add in the explosion of home mortgage debt at over $5 trillion, and a cumulative $3.5 trillion in trade deficit, and you get a Real Economy that is literally going backwards. The illusion of affluence is only sustained by selling off the family china. Working Americans know this all too well and the reason is not hard to see: the American consumer simply doesn't have enough money to pay his bills.
Real average hourly earnings are 14% below their 1973 post-War high. Real median household incomes are still 4% below where they were in 1999. The economy has lost almost 3 million manufacturing jobs since 2001-twenty per cent of its total. Delphi Automotive, the largest automobile parts manufacturer in the world is in bankruptcy. It is demanding 60% pay cuts of its work force. Ford and GM are closing 19 plants between them and have just announced severances for 45,000 workers.
Employment in the communications equipment industry is down 43% since 2000. Semiconductor employment is off 30%. Electrical equipment has shed one quarter of its industry's jobs. Textiles, off 40%. These are the high-wage jobs on which the American middle class-the American standard of living-once rested. Replacing them with jobs for waitresses and bartenders, home health care workers, fast food servers, and greeters at Wal-Mart doesn't begin to sustain consumer purchasing power.
But that is the overwhelming nature the employment picture under the Bush administration. The economy has needed seven million new jobs just to keep pace with population growth since 2000. It has added just over three million, virtually all of them in low-paid domestic service sectors. This evisceration of labor and labor-based income comes at a time when corporate profits are at their highest level as a percent of national income since 1947 while labor's share is at its lowest level since 1946. The rich are getting richer and everyone else is getting dramatically poorer.
These reversals are not accidents. They are the intended outcomes of two and a half decades of government policy designed to increase the returns to capital while reducing the bargaining power of labor. The policy began with Reagan's Supply Side Economics, which cut the marginal tax rate on the highest incomes from 75% to 38%. It is bookended by Bush's unending tax cuts for the wealthiest, from income taxes, to taxes on interest, dividends, capital gains, and, if he gets his way, the estates of multi-millionaires. All these cuts favor the very wealthiest of Americans at the expense of everybody else.
In this environment, with median incomes falling for decades, the only way to maintain the American family lifestyle is to borrow against the house. And when that is still not enough to keep the economy afloat, the government must step in and borrow against Americans' future earnings. But rising interest rates are already killing off the tenuous housing-based recovery. And as prices rise with them, consumers are left with even less money to spend. The imperative for more and still more government borrowing becomes overwhelming.
This is Paulson's inescapable dilemma. If he wants to continue the Republicans' policy of shifting the nation's wealth to those who are already the most wealthy, AND sustain the illusion of broad-based prosperity, he has no choice but to increase deficit spending (and therefore borrowing) at a greater and ever-greater rate. To be sure, the higher interest rates that result are an unquestioned boon to Paulson's coupon-clipping friends. But they are a death sentence for the Real economy.
The Fifth Circle of Economic Hell
"He made me stop and said: 'This is the place where you will have to arm yourself with fortitude.' Oh reader, do not ask me how I grew faint and frozen then-all words fall short of the horror it actually was."
~ Dante, Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto XXXIV
We have reached, then, the Fifth and Final Circle of Economic Hell. It is this Circle upon which all other Circles-the Real Economy, Fiscal Effects, Monetary Effects, and Ephemera-ultimately rest. It is the Circle of Structural Decline.
As onerous as they are, the deficits described in Circle Three, above, constitute only a small fraction of the total indebtedness of the U.S. economy. The official "national debt" is approaching $9 trillion, as noted, a substantial figure, to be sure. But the government's "unfunded liabilities"-obligations it has committed to pay but for which there is no known source-are estimated at an incomprehensible $58 trillion. Add in revolving consumer debt, mortgage debt, and corporate debt, and the nation's total obligations exceed $90 trillion, more than seven times GDP. At the time of the 1929 stock market crash, total debt stood at two times GDP. These obligations will never be paid.
The reason is that the job drain from the U.S., while it looks like a torrent now, is still only a trickle. Though the U.S. won the Cold War, it is rapidly losing the Cold Peace, which began when China ended its communist isolation and joined the world market. The average wage in China is $.57 per hour. China has more than half a billion workers meaning the drain of good jobs from the U.S. to China can go on indefinitely-and will. Alan Blinder, a Princeton economist and former Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, has estimated that as many as 56 million U.S. jobs are susceptible to outsourcing of the sort that has already dealt such damage to U.S. incomes.
But this is exactly what Bush and Paulson and their fellow "conservatives" intend. This is the magic of "globalization" that the Heraldic voices of Thomas Friedman and others eulogize as inevitable. Globalization means liberating capital from all obligations to national well being, freeing it to pursue only the highest returns it can find, no matter where they may lie. That means seeking out the lowest paid labor and shifting all possible jobs there. That is China. Or India.
The U.S. worker and the U.S. economy will be left to their own devices. All social safety net systems must be dismantled for, given the colossal debt, they can no longer be afforded. These include welfare, unemployment and disability insurance, pensions, health care, Medicare, Social Security, job retraining, and eventually, education. The U.S. is a high cost economy in a world where, when capital is perfectly mobile, low cost wins. If capital is to be honored, then the U.S. must be ballasted, abandoned, in the way the British economy was in the aftermath of World War II. It will be milked of its remaining assets-that is what the huge run-up in debt is intended to do-and then thrown away.
The only government programs of substance that will be maintained will be police and military systems. The Patriot Act, with its massive recissions of civil liberties, is not so much directed at foreign terrorists as it is at future domestic dissidents, citizens who dare confront these putative inevitabilities with demands for democratic (as opposed to capitalist) recourses. The military, of course, is needed to carry out the nakedly colonial expropriations such as Iraq that remain the last hope of America to compete in the world: by controlling the oil, the substance without which no industrial civilization can operate.
Paulson's job, then, is to arrange the write down of debt that must accompany the effective bankruptcy of the U.S. He will have to promise an IMF-like fiscal austerity to foreign lenders to keep the funding flowing until there is nothing left to take. This will mean draconian cuts in social spending, no tariffs, and the removal of all remaining controls on the mobility of, and returns to, capital. The dollar will be precipitously devalued with the consequence of massive inflation and stratospheric interest rates. These will only accelerate the decline. A new international reserve currency, based on a basket of currencies including the Euro, the Yen, the Chinese Yuan, and the dollar, will be devised.
None of this will come as a surprise to Henry Paulson. It is Paulson, perhaps more than any other private individual, who has so successfully, happily, and ever-so profitably laundered the huge bubble of U.S. debt to his rich clients throughout the world. It is Paulson and his coterie of wealthy capitalists who have so diligently used the U.S. government to increase returns to, while removing democratic constraints on, private capital. Indeed, it is these same wealthy owners of capital who are Paulson's-and Bush's-true clientele.
The question for Paulson, therefore, as he looks into the Abyss of this final Circle of Economic Hell, is this: "Whose interests will he be serving as Secretary of the Treasury? Those of the American people or those of his investor class?" It is truly a question of Dantean proportions for the Second Ring of the Ninth Circle of Dante's Inferno is peopled by those who betray their class.
Ominously, however, the Fourth Ring of the Ninth Circle-the Innermost Ring of Hell-is reserved for those who betray their masters, their employers. Paulson's employer is now the people of the United States. Who will Paulson be compelled to betray? It is an interesting angel-counting exercise, a diversion worthy of its Medieval origins. But do we really need to ask?
Robert Freeman writes about economics, history, and education. Email to: robertfreeman10@yahoo.com.
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Severe budget woes hit Army posts nationwide
By LIZ AUSTIN
Associated Press
July 7, 2006
FORT SAM HOUSTON, Texas - A diversion of dollars to help fight the war in Iraq has helped create a $530 million shortfall for Army posts at home and abroad, leaving some unable to pay utility bills or even cut the grass.
In San Antonio, Fort Sam Houston hasn't been able to pay its $1.4 million monthly utility bill since March, prompting workers in many of the post's administrative buildings to get automated disconnection notices.
Fort Bragg in North Carolina can't afford to buy pens, paper or other office supplies until the new fiscal year starts in October.
And in Kentucky, Fort Knox had to close one of its eight dining halls for a month and lay off 133 contract workers.
"Every time something goes away it impacts a person ... a soldier or their family or one of our civilians," said Col. Wendy Martinson, garrison commander at Fort Sam Houston, which has 27,300 military and civilian workers. "I'm charged with taking care of them, not taking things away from them."
Garrisons function as the city halls of Army installations, providing services such as garbage removal, mail delivery and firefighting. The Army's Installation Management Agency is $530 million short of what it needs through Oct. 1 to fund garrisons at the 117 installations it oversees in the United States, Europe and Asia, agency spokesman Stephen Oertwig said.
The skyrocketing cost of fuel is partly to blame, and it also is costing more to pay civilians in Asia and Europe, Oertwig said. Another major factor is the practice of funding the war through spending bills outside the annual budget.
As Congress spent months debating the supplemental spending bill, the Army had to divert money from the Installation Management Agency's budget to cover the cost of the war, Oertwig said.
The Army often diverts operations money for other programs, in times of war and peace, said Jeremiah Gertler, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The supplemental spending bill usually replenishes those funds.
This year, though, most of the defense money in the $94.5 billion bill was earmarked for the war, leaving little to pay back operations accounts, Gertler said.
Military officials could have asked for more money to ease the garrison budget crunch, but they knew a bigger request would have created a bigger fight in Congress, he said.
"The Pentagon is reluctant to ask for any more than they need for the war because it all looks like it's going to the war and becomes a very controversial bill," Gertler said.
But military analyst Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution said money management seems to be the larger problem. The Defense Department spends about as much on maintenance and operations as it does on weapons and personnel combined, he said, so there should be more than enough for the bills.
"It makes me worry if the Pentagon can't do its accounting well enough to find money for its electric bills," he said. "It just boggles my mind a little bit."
The legislation Congress approved June 15 included $722 million for the Installation Management Agency, to be split among its installations.
Martinson still doesn't know how much Fort Sam Houston will get, but she expects it will be enough to pay the electric tab. A spokesman for CPS Energy says the company understands the problem and won't turn off the lights any time soon.
However, it won't save the jobs of about 100 contract workers Martinson had to let go.
And it won't make it easier for her to scrounge up the dollars to buy chlorine for the pool where soldiers' kids take swimming lessons or feed for the horses that carry soldiers' caskets to their graves at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.
The new funds also won't change the orders the Installation Management Agency issued in early June to freeze civilian hiring and fire temporary employees, reduce cell phone, pager and government vehicle use and reduce, cancel or defer contracts.
Staff Sgt. Mark Barclay, 35, a small group leader with the Army Medical Department Noncommissioned Officer Academy at Fort Sam Houston, said he hasn't really noticed the cuts but is ready to adapt to them.
"All that happens is you just make do with what you have and try to get the best training for the soldiers," Barclay said.
Oertwig expects the austerity to last for at least another year and a half.
"Every day we're looking at what are those services that are required to keep the Army going and where can we get efficiencies," Oertwig said. "We're looking to get a dollar's worth of service out of 90 cents or less in some cases."
That alarms U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a Republican whose district includes Fort Sam Houston.
In a letter to Army Secretary Francis Harvey, Smith said he worries the budget crisis will affect Fort Sam Houston's ability to accommodate the 11,000 additional personnel being sent there starting next year by the Base Closure and Realignment Commission.
"That Fort Sam cannot even pay for basic post operations is, frankly, Mr. Secretary, a disgrace," he said.
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US war veterans have tough time finding jobs: survey
AFP
Thu Jul 6, 2006
WASHINGTON - Young US war veterans, the majority of them from
Iraq, have a tougher time finding jobs upon returning home than average job seekers, according to a recent CareerBuilder.com survey.
The survey cited data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showing nearly one in five veterans aged 20 to 24 were unemployed, three times the national average.
The CareerBuilder.com survey questioned 1,000 hiring managers and 150 US veterans, a majority of them who had served in Iraq, between June 9 and 16. One in five veterans said it took six months or longer to find a job.
One in 10 reported taking longer than a year to locate employment.
Some veterans said they believed their former service was often detrimental to finding new employment, with 11 percent saying that they do not put it on resumes, and 17 percent saying they do so selectively.
The survey said veterans believed their primary challenges were: a lack of openings in their place of residence (29 percent); employers failing to understand how skills acquired in the military apply to civilian life (16 percent); and a lack of a college degree (12 percent).
CareerBuilder.com is one of the most popular employment Internet sites in the United States.
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Oil Prices Set For New Records Beyond 80 Dollars
by Perrine Faye
AFP
July 06, 2006
London - The price of crude oil, fresh from striking a new record above 75 dollars in New York on rising tensions over North Korea and Iran, is likely to hurtle beyond 80 dollars per barrel before the end of 2006, according to one London analyst.
World crude prices -- which have doubled in value over the past two years -- could even strike 100 dollars before the end of the year, said Investec analyst Bruce Evers.
New York's main contract, light sweet crude for delivery in August, hit a record 75.40 dollars on Wednesday owing to concerns over the North Korea missile crisis, the Iranian nuclear energy stand-off and the latest US energy report, dealers said.
In London, Brent North Sea crude for August delivery touched 74.22 on both Wednesday and Thursday -- not far from the record 74.97 dollars hit in May.
Brent North Sea crude is the price reference for two-thirds of the world's traded oil according to the IntercontinentalExchange which operates the trading of Brent.
"I am sure we'll see over 80 this year," Evers said.
Crude prices could hit 100 dollars per barrel "if Iran refuses to cooperate with the States and there is a major hurricane over the producing area of the Gulf of Mexico", he added.
At the start of 2005, crude oil stood at around 40 dollars per barrel -- and was just 20 dollars per barrel at the beginning of 2002.
Traders are fearful that this year's Atlantic hurricane season, which began on June 1 and lasts until the end of November, could be another fierce one.
Last year, hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated oil installations there and sent crude prices surging to then-record levels.
"Potentially we can see a very nasty spike in the oil price," said Evers.
"We're coming into the main hurricane season, you've got Iran being difficult, you've got North Korea refusing to behave itself."
With no shortage of geopolitical hot-spots across the world -- ranging from North Korea and Iran to ongoing instability in oil producers Nigeria and Iraq -- analysts contend that prices could head higher.
According to Barclays Capital Kevin Norrish, strong global oil demand and tight supplies have resulted in recent runaway prices.
"If you are looking for explanation for, and justification of, the latest move up in prices, we do not believe that you have to look much further than these tightening balances," Norrish said.
Participants are focusing on stockpiles of motor fuel in the United States -- the world's biggest energy consumer -- amid the country's ongoing peak-demand driving season.
Crude prices leapt on Wednesday following news that North Korea had fired at least seven test missiles, and after major crude producer Iran postponed crucial talks in Brussels over its nuclear energy crisis.
Although North Korea is not an oil producer, the geopolitical news convinced investment fund managers to plough into the market to seek gains.
"They saw the geopolitical situation develops and they all jumped in," Evers added.
Adjusted for inflation, current oil prices remain below levels reached after the 1979 Iranian revolution.
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Iran oil bourse at the end of September
Persian Journal
July 6, 2006
Iran will start the initial phase of its planned Iranian oil bourse at the end of September. An oil ministry official told that his ministry had already presented the relevant documents to the economic and finance ministry and the bourse organisation.
The building that will house the oil bourse has reportedly already been purchased in the southern Iranian island of Kish in Persian Gulf.
Petrochemical and oil-related products will be made available to customers in the first phase but the volume of the shares to be traded is not yet clear, the official told.
Economics and Finance Minister Davoud Danesh-Jafari said last April that the issue had already been agreed upon and that the oil ministry had given the go-ahead for the opening of the bourse.
The exchange will have a positive impact on oil sales, not only in Iran but in the wider Persian Gulf region and is slated to replace the current dollar-based oil exchange with one based on the euro, he said.
The International Petroleum Exchange in London and the New York Mercantile Exchange, on which oil is currently traded, both use the dollar.
Iran argues that as long as 60% of global oil and 25% of natural gas needs are met by Persian Gulf states, oil dealing in either New York or London made no sense.
Iran also wants to circumvent dollar-based oil exchanges to avoid being impacted by the United States economy.
The plan to open the exchange in Kish was raised by the administration of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad last year.
It was due to be opened before the beginning of the Persian New Year on March 21 but has been postponed several times.
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Trade row looms with China over duty on bags
By Philip Thornton, Economics Correspondent
The Independent
07 July 2006
Europe looks set for a fresh trade war with China over plans by Brussels to impose a duty on imported plastic bags. Under a proposal which is likely to be agreed by member states this month, a duty of 10 per cent would be imposed on bags from China and Thailand.
News of the plans, which will overshadow a meeting between the EU trade commissioner, Peter Mandelson, and China's commerce minister today, offset a partial victory for retailers over Brussels' regime of tariffs on shoes.
Retailers said that the duty would cut profit margins and increase the pressure for rises in shelf prices or job cuts.
Alisdair Gray, European director of the British Retail Consortium, said: "It is a direct tax on retailers. In the end, whether the bags are paid for or given away, they will have to pass the cost on to customers." He said that it would cost the big four supermarkets, which import 10 billion bags a year, Ł55m.
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Big win for tobacco in $145 bln Florida case
By Jim Loney and Jane Sutton
Reuters
Thu July 6, 2006
MIAMI - In a huge victory for the tobacco industry, the Florida Supreme Court on Thursday refused to reinstate a $145 billion punitive damages award against major cigarette makers found liable for selling a dangerous product.
The long-awaited decision lifted one of the biggest financial clouds over tobacco companies and sent their stocks up sharply. It upheld the key part of a Florida appeals court ruling three years ago that overturned the punitive damages, one of the largest awards in a U.S. product liability case.
The high court said the award was "clearly excessive" and would "result in an unlawful crippling of the defendant companies."
The ruling cleared one of the hurdles for Altria Group Inc.'s plan to spin off Kraft Foods Inc.
But the Supreme Court also upheld key findings of the Miami trial court in the 12-year-old case known as Engle versus Liggett -- among them, that cigarette smoking causes cancer, heart disease and other ailments, and that tobacco companies marketed "defective and unreasonably dangerous" products.
The high court reinstated individual damage awards to two cancer patients -- $2.9 million to Mary Farnan and $4 million to the estate of Angie Della Vecchia, who died in 1999. But it upheld decertification of the class of plaintiffs, meaning smokers would have to sue individually, not as a group.
"As numerous trial and appellate courts have held, tobacco cases cannot be treated as class actions because liability must ultimately be decided on a case by case basis," William Ohlemeyer, vice president for Philip Morris USA, said in a statement.
Individual lawsuits against tobacco companies are seen as far less likely to succeed than class actions.
Joe Martyak, an official with the anti-smoking group American Legacy Foundation, said the ruling could prove a death knell for class actions against cigarette makers.
"I think it's bad news for public health and it's even worse news for smokers," he said. "The ruling underscores that Big Tobacco will literally be able to litigate to death a smoker's claim for justice."
Tobacco stocks helped boost the overall U.S. share market. Shares of Altria rose as high as $79.00. Shares of Reynolds American Inc. hit a new high of $120.50. Carolina Group, the tracking stock for Loews Corp.'s Lorillard Tobacco Co., jumped to an all-time high of $55.26. Shares of Vector Group went as high as $17.11.
A Miami jury ruled in 2000 that the tobacco companies deceived smokers about the dangers of cigarettes and ordered the companies to pay $145 billion to ailing Florida smokers, estimated to number 300,000 to 700,000.
The case, filed by Miami Beach pediatrician Howard Engle in 1994, was the first smokers' lawsuit to be certified as a class action.
Florida's Third District Court of Appeal overturned the verdict in 2003 and said Florida's settlement with the tobacco companies in a multistate lawsuit barred the awarding of punitive damages. It also decertified the class action.
The Supreme Court ruled that Florida's participation in the multistate settlement did not prevent ailing smokers from suing individually, and gave former members of the class action one year to file those claims.
Engle, who is now 87 and suffers from emphysema and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said he was disappointed.
"Not so much for me. I'm dying anyhow. I know that. But there are people who need a little money to take care of things," he said. "I have some insurance and a little money and wonderful family, so I'm OK."
The high court ruling eliminates the largest class-action liability hanging over the tobacco industry, said Charles Norton, co-portfolio manager of Mutuals Advisors Inc.'s Vice Fund, which owns shares in most of the tobacco companies.
"With this out of the way, I believe it relieves a lot of legal risk from the group," Norton said, who expects Altria to now spin off Kraft by the first half of 2007, if not sooner.
Matthew Myers, president of Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, said the ruling was not a clear-cut victory for the industry because it upheld a finding of wrongdoing by the companies.
Smokers who sue could benefit from the high court's approval of trial court decisions that smoking causes diseases and that cigarette companies sold defective products and concealed the truth about the dangers.
"With these findings, they're 90 percent on the way to winning these cases," said Stanley Rosenblatt, the Miami lawyer who sued the giant tobacco companies.
Rosenblatt said he had not decided whether to appeal to federal courts.
Defendants in the case included Altria's Philip Morris USA unit; the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. and Brown & Williamson units of Reynolds American Inc.; the Lorillard Tobacco Co. unit of Loews Corp, and Vector Group's Liggett.
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Bush vs. The People
George W. Bush Is Dead To Me
By Mark Morford
SF Gate Columnist
Friday, July 7, 2006
Nation cringes as the worst president ever continues long, painful slog to the end
It is like some sort of virus. It is like some sort of weird and painful rash on your face that makes you embarrassed to walk out the door and so you sit there day after day, waiting for it to go away, slathering on ointment and Bactine and scotch. And yet still it lingers.
Some days the pain is so searing and hot you want to cut off your own head with a nail file. Other days it is numb and pain-free and seemingly OK, to the point where you think it might finally be all gone and you allow yourself a hint of a whisper of a positive feeling, right up until you look in the mirror, and scream.
George W. Bush is just like that.
Everyone I know has had enough. Everyone I know is just about done. There is this threshold of happy deadened disgust, this point where the body simply resigns itself to the pain, a point where the disease, the poison has seeped so deeply into the bones that you just have to laugh and shrug it all off and go for a drink. Or 10.
I was having cocktails recently with a group of people, among whom were two lifetime Republicans, each in his 60s, corporate businessmen, one admittedly slightly more moderate than the other (to the point where, after once hearing a senator read off a long list of Bush's hideous environmental atrocities, actually let his conscience lead his choice and ended up voting for Kerry) but nevertheless both devoted members of the party.
Bush came up, as a topic, as a cancer, as a fetid miasma in the air. They were both shaking their heads. They were sighing heavily. They were both, in a word, disgusted. The more staunchly conservative of the two even went so far as to say he was so embarrassed and humiliated by this president, by this administration, so appalled at all the war atrocities and the wiretapping and the misuse of law, the fiscal irresponsibility and the abuse of the lower classes and the outright arrogance, that if the Dems could somehow produce a decent moderate candidate with a brain, he'd have zero problem switching allegiances and voting for him. Or her.
It may not sound like much. It may not seem like a major shift. But it is, in its way, sort of massive. For thoughtful Repubs with a conscience (they actually exist, I have seen them), there is little left to defend. There is little this administration has done among all categories of ostensible GOP values that they can look to with any sort of pride. Medicare? Shrinking the budget? Smaller government? Less intervention in our lives? Reduced spending? Increased respect in the international community? Responsible international citizen? Ha. Name your topic, BushCo has failed. Spectacularly. Intentionally.
Indeed, countless Dems were disappointed with Clinton's behavior during Monicagate. Many were ashamed that he would cheapen the office so badly by such trashy moral behavior.
But that was just a cheap little affair (our allies never understood all the fuss anyway). This was never the attitude toward Clinton's politics, his capacity to understand complex issues, his astounding political savvy. No one anywhere doubted he made the country richer, more environmentally conscious, more stable, more respected and admired. Clinton was globally adored not only for his charisma but for his contributions to world peace. Plus he could actually point to Afghanistan on a map.
What a difference a handful of years makes. Now, overseas, we are a joke. A threat. A toxin. We are considered reckless and arrogant and ignorant, dangerous not just to the rest of the world but to the overall health of the planet. No one anywhere understands how a man like Bush can be the leader of the Free World, stolen election or no.
Sure, smarter Europeans know full well that the United States is deeply divided between the pseudo-religious right-wing warmongers who control a tiny cadre of the powerful elite, and, well, everyone else. It does not matter. America's reputation as a powerful and respected diplomatic peacekeeper, as the nation that sets the standards for human rights and economic freedom and choice, is hobbled. Crippled. Is very nearly dead. How quickly can we recover? How much damage has been done? History will tell, and it will be ugly indeed.
Interesting feature interview with Al Gore in Rolling Stone recently. Gore mentions two amazing things: one is the discussion he's had with generals regarding Iraq, with one coming right out and admitting that Bush's disastrous Iraq war will go down as the worst invasion in American history, our greatest misstep, our most costly and debilitating mistake. Among top brass in the know, of this there is little question.
The other was about the discussions Gore's had with various major corporate CEOs about Gore's pet issue, global warming, and how obvious it is that 15 minutes after BushCo leaves office, we will have a radically new global warming policy. In other words, Bush won't do a thing about it in the next two years, despite how obvious it shall become that we are in crisis, simply because he can't risk finally coming out and admitting yet another enormous policy disaster. Not to mention how nearly six years of enviro policy abuse, from air quality to water to forestry to pollution deregulation on all his industrial pals, can't be undone with a smirk and a prayer.
Which is just another way of saying we are currently stuck. We are swirling around the bottom of the drain, clinging on to anything that might hold us from going under for just a little while longer. We have to let the neocon disease run its course, and just pray that at the end of it all the scarring and the pain and damage will not be so permanent, and so hideous, that we can't be seen in public for a decade.
This is where it stands: Bush can in no way risk alienating the ultra-right-wing bonk-job contingent that put him in office (they are, considering Bush's 32-percent approval rating, the only ones left even remotely supporting him -- even though, according to many estimates, they're starting to abandon him, too), and hence all policy and all agenda items from here on out will be even more vicious and desperate in an attempt to shore up the base. Hence trying to mutilate the Constitution to ban gay marriage. Hence attacking the New York Times and claiming newspapers are endangering American lives.
In other words, Bush's latest nasty, Rove-designed salvos and upcoming attacks to save a sliver of power and pride and sneering GOP control are just the beginning.
However -- praise Jesus and pass the scotch -- they are the beginning of the end.
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Not in Our Name: The Voters' Pledge
By Daniel Ellsberg
Information Clearing House
07/06/06
According to recent opinion polls, most Iraqis don't believe that we're making things better or safer in their country. What does that say about the legitimacy of prolonged occupation, much less permanent American bases in Iraq? What does it mean for continued American armored patrols such as the one last November in Haditha, which, we now learn, led to the deaths of a Marine and 24 unarmed civilians?
Questions very much like these nagged at my conscience at the height of the Vietnam War, and led, eventually, to the publication of the first of the Pentagon Papers in June of 1971, 35 years ago.
As a former Marine Commander and defense analyst in 1970, I had exclusive access to highly classified defense documents for research purposes. They came to be known as the Pentagon Papers and constituted a 47-volume, top-secret Defense Department history of American involvement in Vietnam titled, "U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68." The Pentagon Papers made it very clear that I, like the rest of the American public, had been misled about the origins and purposes of the war I had participated in - just as are the 85% of the troops in Iraq today who still believe that Saddam Hussein was responsible for 9/11 and that he was allied with Al Qaeda.
That period had several similarities to this one. Congress was debating the withdrawal of U.S. armed forces from Indochina while President Nixon was making secret plans to expand, rather than exit from, the ongoing war in Southeast Asia - including a major air offensive against North Vietnam, possibly using nuclear weapons. Today, the Bush administration's threats to wage war against Iran are explicit, with officials reiterating regularly that the nuclear "option" is "on the table." Americans saw the color photographs of the My Lai massacre; now we are seeing photographs eerily similar to those from Haditha: women, children, old men and babies, all shot at short range.
What was it that prompted me to begin copying 7,000 pages of highly classified documents - an act that I fully expected would send me to prison for life? I came to the conclusion that the system I had been part of, giving my unquestioning loyalty to for 15 years, as a Marine, a Pentagon official and a State Department officer in Vietnam, was a system that lies reflexively, at every level, from sergeant to commander in chief, about murder. And I had the evidence to prove it.
The papers showed very clearly how we had become engaged in a reckless war of choice in someone else's country - a country that had not attacked us - for our own domestic and external purposes. It became clear to me that the justifications that had been given for our involvement were false. And if the war itself was unjust, then all the victims of our firepower were being killed without justification.
That's murder.
Today, there must be, at the very least, hundreds of civilian and military officials in the Pentagon, CIA, State Department, National Security Agency and White House who have in their safes and computers comparable documentation of intense internal debates - so far carefully concealed from Congress and the public - about prospective or actual war crimes, reckless policies and domestic crimes: the Pentagon Papers of Iraq, Iran or the ongoing war on U.S. liberties. Some of those officials, I hope, will choose to accept the personal risks of revealing the truth - earlier than I did - before more lives are lost or a new war is launched.
Haditha holds a mirror up not just to American troops in the field, but to our whole society. Not just to the liars in government but to those who believe them too easily. And to all of us in the public, in the administration, in Congress and the media who dissent so far ineffectively or who stand by as murder is being done and do nothing to stop it or expose it.
Americans must summon the civil courage to face what is being done in their name and to refuse to be accomplices. The Voters' Pledge is one way to do this. The Voters' Pledge is a project comprising many of the major organizations in the antiwar movement, United for Peace and Justice, Peace Action, Gold Star Families for Peace, Code Pink, and Democracy Rising, as well as groups with broader agendas like the National Organization for Women, Progressive Democrats of America, AfterDowningStreet.com, and magazines including the American Conservative and The Nation. The goal of this coalition is to build a base of antiwar voters that cannot be ignored by anyone running for office in the United States. We want millions of voters to sign the pledge and say no to pro-war candidates.
You can help right now by visiting www.VotersForPeace.US and immediately signing the Voters' Pledge.
Daniel Ellsberg is a former American military analyst who helped bring about an end to the Vietnam War when he released the Pentagon Papers, the US military's account of its scandalous activities during that war.
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Bush seeks to build standing with public
By JENNIFER LOVEN
Associated Press
July 7, 2006
CHICAGO - The president who loves to get home to his own bed is planning more nights on the road.
It's part of a public-relations effort aimed at boosting
President Bush's low standing in polls and bolstering the chances of the Republican Party he leads in this fall's midterm elections. The idea is to place Bush in more freewheeling settings where he comes across best and before local media that tend to give softer coverage.
"I'm doing a lot of campaigning," Bush told CNN's Larry King during an interview aired Thursday night. "We're going to do just fine in '06."
Throughout his presidency, Bush has been known for extensive travels outside Washington that most often feature quick fly-in, drive-by stops.
But in recent months that has begun to change with more overnight trips. He spent several days traveling California and Nevada in April, went to Florida for three days in May and hopped through New Mexico, Texas and Nebraska over a couple of days last month.
Thursday and Friday were finding Bush in and around Chicago - even spending the evening of his 60th birthday away from home. The visit began after a day of telephone diplomacy to try to build consensus among other countries over a response to North Korea's missile tests.
Bush expressed support for a draft U.N. Security Council resolution, offered by Japan, to impose sanctions on North Korea for its seven missile tests Tuesday, which included a long-range Taepodong-2 believed capable of reaching U.S. soil. China, the North's closest ally, and Russia, which has been trying to re-establish Soviet-era ties with Pyongyang, are pushing for diplomacy alone to resolve the dispute.
During an interview broadcast Thursday night on CNN's "Larry King Live," Bush was asked whether he had been prepared to shoot down the long-range missile. The president replied, "If it headed to the United States we've got a missile defense system that will defend our country."
Pentagon officials said Thursday that the very brief flight of the Taepodong-2 missile made it difficult to collect useful technical data, such as its intended target, its payload and even whether it was a two-stage or three-stage missile. At this point, U.S. officials are leaning toward the theory that it was configured as a space launch to deliver a satellite into orbit, rather than as a flight test of a ballistic missile.
Trips like the one to Chicago were being planned for Bush throughout the summer, White House counselor Dan Bartlett said, with the president spending more time in communities to "really sink his teeth into the local market."
"Oftentimes when you fly into a community, you're in and out within 55 minutes and you talk about one subject," Bartlett said. "This gives him an opportunity to cover a broader range of subjects in the local community."
The highlight of Bush's Illinois journey is a unique heartland news conference, which will find the president standing for an hour of questioning at Chicago's stately Museum of Science and Industry, from not only the national media but their local counterparts as well.
"We're going to mix it up," said White House press secretary Tony Snow.
The packed schedule of events in Illinois began with dinner Thursday night with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and seven heavy-hitters from the local business community. Over a private breakfast Friday, he was to listen to the concerns of local business leaders again.
After the news conference, Bush was raising campaign cash for Republican gubernatorial candidate Judy Baar Topinka, the state treasurer who is running to unseat Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich, and touting his plan to boost America's global competitiveness during a tour and speech in the district of House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill.
The president was talking up his so-called American Competitiveness Initiative at Cabot Microelectronics Corp., a supplier of chip-manufacturing materials and products used in making semiconductors headquartered in Aurora, Ill., in Chicago's exurbs.
The initiative proposes to double government funding for basic research in the physical sciences, train thousands of new science and math teachers and extend a popular tax credit businesses can receive for investing in research and development.
The president's approval numbers have been slowly rebounding from an all-time low this spring, but White House aides don't want to leave anything to chance. If Democrats win control of either the House or Senate this November, a lame-duck Bush would face even more resistance to his agenda during his last two years in office.
In addition to spending more time in local communities, Bush has been making more impromptu stops along his travel route in hopes of benefiting from public exposure to his folksier side.
Last week in Ohio, for instance, the president's motorcade pulled over at a lemonade stand across the street from a Republican fundraiser where he helped bring in $1.3 million. He's also stopped unannounced to shake hands with people waving to his limousine outside an elementary school in Laredo, Texas, and then popped into a nearby Mexican barbecue restaurant.
Comment: Gosh, it almost looks like Bush is worried...
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Busted for wearing a peace T-shirt; has this country gone completely insane?
Mike Ferner
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 5, 2006
Friday afternoon, drinking a cup of coffee while sitting in the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center on Chicago's south side, a Veterans Administration cop walked up to me and said, "Okay, you've had your 15 minutes, it's time to go."
"Huh?" I asked intelligently, not quite sure what he was talking about.
"You can't be in here protesting," Officer Adkins said, pointing to my Veterans For Peace shirt.
"Well, I'm not protesting, I'm having a cup of coffee," I returned, thinking that logic would convince Adkins to go back to his earlier duties of guarding against serious terrorists.
Flipping his badge open, he said, "No, not with that shirt. You're protesting and you have to go."
Beginning to get his drift, I said firmly, "Not before I finish my coffee."
He insisted that I leave, but still not quite believing my ears, I tried one more approach to reason.
"Hey, listen. I'm a veteran. This is a V.A. facility. I'm sitting here not talking to anybody, having a cup of coffee. I'm not protesting and you can't kick me out."
"You'll either go or we'll arrest you," Adkins threatened.
"Well, you'll just have to arrest me," I said, wondering what strange land I was now living in.
You know the rest. Handcuffed, led away to the facility's security office, past people with surprised looks on their faces, read my rights, searched, and written up.
The officer who did the formalities, Eric Ousley, was professional in his duties. When I asked him if he was a vet, it turned out he had been a hospital corpsman in the Navy. We exchanged a couple sea stories. He uncuffed me early. And he allowed as to how he would only charge me with disorderly conduct, letting me go on charges of criminal trespass and weapons possession -- a pocket knife -- which he said would have to be destroyed (something I rather doubt since it was a nifty Swiss Army knife with not only a bottle opener, but a tweezers and a toothpick).
After informing me I could either pay the $275 fine on the citation or appear in court, Ousley escorted me off the premises, warning me if I returned with "that shirt" on, I'd be arrested and booked into jail.
I'm sure I could go back to officers Adkins' and Ousleys' fiefdom with a shirt that said, "Nuke all the hajis," or "Show us your tits," or any number of truly obscene things and no one would care. Just so it's not "that shirt" again.
And just for the record? I'm not paying the fine. I'll see Adkins and Ousley and Dubya's Director of the Dept. of Veterans Affairs, if he wants to show up, in United States District Court on the appointed date. And if there's a Chicago area attorney who'd like to take the case, I'd really like to sue them -- from Dubya on down. I have to believe that this whole country has not yet gone insane, just the government. This kind of behavior can't be tolerated. It must be challenged.
I was at the Jesse Brown V.A. Medical Center because I'm participating in the Voices for Creative Nonviolence's 30-day, 320-mile "Walk for Justice," from Springfield to North Chicago, Illinois, to reclaim funding for the common good and away from war.
Mike Ferner served as a Navy corpsman during Vietnam War and is obviously a member of Veterans For Peace. He can be reached at: mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net.
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UW Instructor who says U.S. planned Sept. 11 attacks to provoke war causes outrage
By MEGAN TWOHEY
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
June 29, 2006
Madison, WI - The University of Wisconsin-Madison announced Thursday that it would launch a review of an instructor who argues that the U.S. government orchestrated the Sept. 11 attacks for its own benefit.
The instructor, Kevin Barrett, is co-founder of an organization called the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance, which claims the Bush administration planned the attacks to create a war between Muslims and Christians. He argues that members of the faiths must work together to overcome the belief that terrorists were to blame.
"The 9/11 lie was designed to sow hatred between the faiths," Barrett has written on the organization's Web site.
"Either we discuss the compelling evidence that 9/11 was an inside job, or there is precious little to talk about."
Barrett, who did not return calls Thursday and an e-mail seeking comment, has taught a class on cultural folklore and is scheduled to teach an introductory class on Islam this fall in Madison. He has said he discusses his views on Sept. 11 in the classroom.
In a written statement Thursday, Provost Patrick Farrell said the university would conduct a 10-day review of Barrett's plans for the fall course and his past teaching performance. He said Barrett's syllabus, reading list and past evaluations by supervisors and students would be examined.
"Mr. Barrett's statements regarding the events of Sept. 11 have raised some legitimate concerns about the content and quality of instruction in his planned fall course," Farrell said.
"Mr. Barrett is entitled to his own personal political views. But we also have an obligation to ensure that his course content is academically appropriate, of high quality, and that his personal views are not imposed on his students," the statement says.
Word spreads on the Web
The announcement came as word of Barrett's views spread through political Web sites. State Rep. Stephen Nass (R-Whitewater) was among a burst of critics calling for his dismissal.
Other Sept. 11 conspiracy theorists in academia include Steven Jones, a physicist from Brigham Young University who argues that the World Trade Center towers were brought down by controlled explosives, not just the impact of airplanes; James H. Fetzer, a retired philosophy professor from the University of Minnesota-Duluth who believes the U.S. military launched a missile into the Pentagon and shot down the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania; and David Ray Griffin, a retired professor from the Claremont School of Theology who sums up arguments for U.S. involvement in the attacks in two books, "The New Pearl Harbor" and "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions."
Barrett arranged for Griffin to speak at UW-Madison last year. Barrett also helped organize a conference in Chicago this month called "9/11: Revealing the Truth - Reclaiming Our Future." In July, he and Fetzer are scheduled to speak about the Sept. 11 theories at a forum at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
"We're catching on," said Fetzer, who co-chairs the group 9/11 Scholars for Truth, which includes more than 50 members from academia, including Barrett. "Kevin Barrett has been instrumental on many fronts."
Barrett has shared his views in letters to The Capital Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education and has discussed them on Wisconsin Public Radio.
But it wasn't until he spoke on a conservative talk show hosted by Jessica McBride on WTMJ-AM (620) Wednesday night that Barrett prompted a public outcry in Wisconsin. He talked openly about his Sept. 11 beliefs and said he discussed them in the classroom.
'Outlandish claims'
Nass released a statement calling on Chancellor John Wiley to fire Barrett immediately.
"The fact that Mr. Barrett uses his position at UW-Madison to add credibility to his outlandish claims is an unacceptable embarrassment to the people of Wisconsin and the UW System," Nass said. "Chancellor Wiley must act immediately to end any professional relationship between Barrett and the UW. He needs to be fired."
U.S. Rep. Mark Green (R-Wis.), who is running for governor, released a statement that said: "Not a dime of either taxpayer or tuition dollars should be going to Kevin Barrett so he can tell students that September 11 was a creation of the government, and that the most murdering terrorist organization in the world is a myth created by the CIA."
But not everyone was outraged.
Mir Babar Basir, a recent graduate of UW-Madison who served as president of the Muslim Students Association, said he knew Barrett and agreed with his take on the attacks. He said Griffin drew hundreds of supportive observers when he spoke at the university.
"This is not just Kevin Barrett's idea," Basir said. "It's legitimate to think that the U.S. government was involved."
"When David Ray Griffin spoke, it was packed," Basir added. "Madison is fairly liberal. It's not surprising that a lot of people agreed with him."
David Walsh, president of the UW System Board of Regents, said Barrett should be able to share his views in the classroom.
"Unless he's yelling fire in a crowded theater, we need to be careful to protect his academic freedom," Walsh said.
Comment: Ah, yes: Freedom of Speech. You can say anything you want, whenever you want - as long as it doesn't call into question the Official Version of events. If you do that, you can lose your job and be branded a "conspiracy theorist" or a looney or much worse - and all for just THINKING.
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Bush likely to voice democracy concerns to Putin
Reuters
July 6, 2006
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush is expected to voice concern about Russia's "backsliding on democracy" when he meets President Vladimir Putin before this month's G-8 summit, U.S. officials said on Thursday.
Such criticism has already been foreshadowed by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who have accused Putin of restricting freedoms and using Russia's vast energy resources to bully its neighbors.
Putin sought on Thursday to play down chilly relations with Washington before he hosts the Group of Eight summit of leading industrial nations in St. Petersburg. He said Bush remained a "decent" friend and the United States one of Russia's most important partners.
Senior administration officials briefing reporters in Washington said that while Russia had made significant democratic reforms since the fall of communism, Washington was worried about recent trends.
They said it was a "good bet" that "our concerns about backsliding on democracy" will be on the agenda when Bush meets Putin. The two will dine together on July 14 and hold bilateral talks the next day before the summit opens.
"Over the past couple of years, we have been concerned about the concentration of powers in the Kremlin, about the diminishing of space for public debate, the narrowing of the debate in the press," the official said. "We want to gain reassurance that Russia is indeed committed to democracy."
Another U.S. official said Russia's record on democracy was also likely to come up for discussion among G-8 leaders.
Differences over gas supplies to Europe, Russia's accession to the World Trade Organization and competition for allies in the former Soviet Union have strained relations recently.
Cheney chided Russia in May for its record on democracy and accused it of using energy supplies as a tool of "blackmail and intimidation," sparking an angry reaction from Moscow.
A U.S. official said the administration hoped the G-8's final statement on energy would "reflect our orientation about the importance of transparency, open and competitive markets, an open investment environment."
Comment: Putin should reply: "Um, have you looked at your own country lately?!"
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Media Matters
President Has a Smooth Ride on 'Larry King Live'
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times
July 7, 2006
Two kinds of celebrities go on "Larry King Live" on CNN: those with something to sell and those with something to hide.
Larry King, the CNN talk show host, interviewed President Bush and Laura Bush in the Blue Room of the White House on Thursday.
Al Gore and Brandon Routh, the young star of the newly released "Superman Returns," recently appeared on the show to promote their new movies. The second category includes guests like Star Jones Reynolds, Mary Kay Letourneau, and, right after his indictment in 2004, Kenneth L. Lay of Enron. "Larry King Live" is the first stop in any damage control operation - a chance to explain oneself to the least contentious journalist in the land.
And that is why President Bush invited the CNN talk show host to the White House on his 60th birthday. The standoff with North Korea over its missile tests, the war in Iraq and ever-sliding ratings in the polls have given the president little reason to celebrate. Mr. King gave the president a chance to defend his policies without risk of interruption or follow-up.
At times, Mr. King even provided the president with answers. "You've always had a lot of compassion for the Mexican people," the interviewer interjected in a discussion of the president's immigration bill. Mr. Bush seemed a little surprised, but grateful. "Yes, sir!" he replied.
The hourlong interview was taped Thursday in the Blue Room of the White House with Mr. King crouched in the foreground across a small round table from the president and Laura Bush, dressed in his trademark suspenders and cowboy boots.
After a brief, good-humored exchange about how the president felt about turning 60, Mr. King asked Mr. Bush about North Korea vaguely enough for the president to repeat what he said earlier in the day in an appearance with the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper, about the need for a united stand to bring the North Korean president to reason.
Other than the fact that Mr. Bush promised not to lecture President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia before the Group of Eight meeting next week in St. Petersburg, Mr. King did not elicit news or curveballs from the president.
Even when he ventured into areas like the war in Iraq, public opinion polls or the president's past friendship with Mr. Lay, Mr. King looked less like an interrogator than a hotel concierge gently removing lint from a customer's coat. Mr. King's questions rarely rile his guests; instead, his cozy, incurious style encourages them to expose themselves.
And just as Liza Minnelli seemed to come unglued all on her own in her appearance on the show last March, Mr. Bush at times seemed tense and defensive even without needling from his host. "I've been popular before, as president," Mr. Bush said tightly. "And I've been - people have accepted what I've been doing." He added: "Sometimes things go up and down. The best way to lead and the best way to solve problems is to focus on a set of principles. And do what you think is right."
The president appeared on Mr. King's show twice before, in 2000 and in 2004, but those were campaign interviews. On Thursday, the president was fighting to improve his battered image.
When he was at a loss for words, Mrs. Bush stepped in to speak on his behalf, sometimes with more dexterity than her husband. "Well, sure, you know, we worried about it, obviously," Mrs. Bush replied when asked whether she was rattled by the North Korean missile tests. "But what I spent the day doing actually was watching our shuttle take off from Florida."
Mrs. Bush even managed to politely set Mr. King straight when he somewhat puzzlingly described Mr. Putin as "very Western."
"Well, I don't know if I would say that," she said gently. "I think he's very Russian. But I like him a lot."
It wasn't live, but it was classic Larry King: a warm bath, not a hot seat.
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The thug and intimidation tactics of the Far Right go mainstream
Glenn Greenwald
July 06, 2006
As is true for many lawyers who have defended First Amendment free speech rights, I have represented several groups and individuals with extremist and even despicable viewpoints (in general, and for obvious reasons, it is only groups and individuals who espouse ideas considered repugnant by the majority which have their free speech rights threatened). Included among this group were several White Supremacist groups and their leaders, including one such group -- the World Church of the Creator -- whose individual members had periodically engaged in violence against those whom they considered to be the enemy (comprised of racial and religious minorities along with the "race traitors" who were perceived to defend them).
One of the favorite tactics used by such groups is to find the home address and telephone number of the latest enemy and then publish it on the Internet, accompanied by impassioned condemnations of that person as a Grave Enemy, a race traitor, someone who threatens all that is good in the world. A handful of the most extremist pro-life groups have used the same tactic. It has happened in the past that those who were the target of these sorts of demonization campaigns that included publication of their home address were attacked and even killed.
But these intimidation tactics work even when nothing happens.
Indeed, these groups often publish the enemy's home address along with some cursory caveat that they are not encouraging violence. The real objective is the same one shared by all terrorists -- to place the person in paralyzing fear. The goal is to force the individual, as they lay in bed at night, to be preoccupied with worry that there is some deranged individual who read one of the websites identifying them as the enemy and which provided their address and who believes that they can strike some blow for their Just Cause by visiting their home and harming or killing them. The fear that they are vulnerable in their own home lurks so prominently and relentlessly in a person's mind that it can be as effective as a physical attack in punishing someone or intimidating them.
This thuggish tactic of intimidation -- publicly railing against someone's grave crimes and then publishing their home address -- has been creeping out of the most extremist precincts on the Right and is becoming increasingly common among mainstream right-wing individuals and organizations.
This weekend, prominent neoconservative David Horowitz proclaimed that the United States is fighting a war and "the aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists." In particular, he cited the now infamous NYT Travel section article on Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's vacation homes as evidence that the employees of the NYT are among the enemies in this war, and he then linked to and recommended as a "proposal for action" this post from his associate, Front Page contributor Rocco DiPippo. The post which Horowitz recommended was entitled "Where Does Punch Sulzberger Live?" and this is what it said:
I issue a call to the blogosphere to begin finding and publicly listing the addresses of all New York Times reporters and editors. Posting pictures of their residences, along with details of any security measures in place to protect the properties and their owners (such as location of security cameras and on-site security details) should also be published.
DiPippo published the home address of NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, along with directions to his home, and linked to a post by right-wing blogger Dan Riehl which contained directions to Sulzberger's home along with photographers of it. In a now-deleted post, DiPippo also published the home address of Linda Spillers, the NYT photographer who took the photograph of Don Rumsfeld's vacation home (with Rumsfeld's express permission), and he urged everyone to go (presumably to the home address he provided) and confront Spillers about her actions.
That was not an isolated incident. This week, Bartholomew's Official Notes on Religion reported on the new "project" implemented by the group StopTheACLU.org. As that group describes it, the project is called "Expose the ACLU Plaintiffs," and promises to publish the home addresses of all individuals who are "using the ACLU" in any First Amendment lawsuit based on the Establishment clause which challenges the constitutionality of governmental promotion of Christianity. The first such enemy targeted for this treatment is a Jewish family in Delaware who sued their local school district over its alleged promotion of Christianity in the public schools. StopTheACLU published their home address and telephone number on its website, and the family -- due to all sorts of recriminations and fear of escalating attacks -- was forced to leave their home and move to another town, which was one of the apparent goals of StopTheACLU in publishing their home address.
Stop the ACLU is not some fringe, isolated group. To the contrary, the "official blog" of StopTheACLU.org is StopTheACLU.com (h/t Hunter), a very prominent player in the right-wing blogosphere. That blog is the 14th most-linked-to blog on the Internet, and is often promoted and approvingly cited to as a source by numerous right-wing bloggers such as Instapundit and Michelle Malkin. The blog Expose the Left (which aspires to be the C&L of the Right), yesterday condemned the "nutcases on the left side of the blososphere" who "are sending unfounded attacks" against StopTheACLU for this plainly despicable thug behavior.
These self-evidently dangerous tactics are merely a natural outgrowth of the hate-mongering bullying sessions which have become the staple of right-wing television shows such as Bill O'Reilly's and websites such as Michelle Malkin's (who, unsurprisingly, has become one of O'Reilly's favorite guests). One of the most constant features of these hate fests is the singling out of some unprotected, private individual -- a public school teacher here, a university administrator there -- who is dragged before hundreds of thousands of readers (or millions of viewers), accused of committing some grave cultural crime or identified as a subversive and an enemy, and then held out as the daily target of unbridled contempt, a symbol of all that is Evil.
Malkin frequently includes contact information for the identified Enemies, and O'Reilly often shows photographs or video of them on multiple programs. These bullying tactics of intimidation -- whereby people who are often just private individuals and who have no defenses (as opposed to, say, prominent politicians or media figures) are singled out for widespread public rituals of contempt -- have quite foreseeable consequences, chief among them placing those targets in fear of retribution. Publishing the home addresses of such individuals is not some wholly different approach, but is merely the next small and foreseeable step, an obvious outgrowth of the hate sessions on which many leading representatives of the Right now heavily rely.
And it is not only those who engage in the tactics themselves who bear responsibility for the consequences, but also those who offer coldly bureaucratic indifference towards these tactics, or even an implicit defense of them. While numerous right-wing bloggers commented this weekend on the truly inane attacks against the NYT Travel article, none (at least that I read) condemned Horowitz for promoting the campaign to publish the home addresses of editors and reporters of the Times. They had much to say about the Evil that is the NYT, but nothing to say about this extraordinary and despicable campaign perfected by extremist groups on the Right and now promoted by Horowitz and groups such as StopTheACLU, to intimidate and endanger journalists and private individuals by collecting and publishing their home addresses.
Beyond merely failing to condemn these tactics, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds yesterday deliberately defended them by arguing that they are no different than what the NYT did in its Travel article. Reynolds attacked a post written this weekend by Reason's Dave Weigel, in which Weigel condemned publication of the home address of the NYT photographer. Reynolds -- who pointedly avoided condemning Horowitz and publication of Spiller's home address -- quoted and then attacked Weigel's condemnation as "incoherent":
As so often happens with these things, angry bloggers have struck back and posted the addresses and phone numbers of the Times' photogs. (No link.)
No link? Why not? By Weigel's standards, a link wouldn't contribute to invasion of privacy. Anybody can find that stuff, right?
And if anybody can find that stuff, why's he so upset about publishing office phone numbers of public officials?
In order to avoid criticizing his comrades on the Right who are engaging in thug tactics, Reynolds actually equates discussion of the vacation homes of top government officials (who enjoy the most extensive and high-level security on the planet) with publication of the home addresses of private individuals and journalists (who have no security of any kind). By his reasoning, mentioning that the Vice President has a vacation home on the Eastern Shore of Maryland is no different than publishing the home address of private individuals who are publicly identified as traitors.
And, lo and behold, the Right's tactics of intimidation against private individuals are reduced by the conniving Reynolds into nothing more than a common and innocuous invasion of privacy of which the NYT and many others are also guilty. And with that corrupt equivalency established, Reynolds is able to posts on these matters without condemning the Right's thug tactics, and in fact, implicitly defends them by suggesting that they are rather innocuous and common and nothing to get excited about.
And revealingly, in choosing which villains to criticize from this weekend's treason accusations against the NYT and the thug tactics they inspired, Reynolds chooses Weigel for attack. But he has nothing to say about Horowitz and company for their newly announced campaign "to begin finding and publicly listing the addresses of all New York Times reporters and editors."
As people like Horowitz, Malkin and Reynolds well know -- and just as my most extremist former White Supremacist clients well knew -- if you throw burning matches at gasoline enough times, an explosion is inevitable. The rhetoric of treason -- accusing individuals and organizations of aiding and abetting our nation's enemies and even waging war on this country -- is a lit match. After all, the widely accepted penalty for traitors is execution, which is why it is such an inflammatory yet increasingly common accusation being hurled by the Right against their domestic "enemies" (for precisely the same reason, the favorite accusation of the World Church of the Creator was to label someone a "race traitor," since everyone knows what should be done with traitors).
Openly speculating about whether journalists and politicians are guilty of treason has become unbelievably common of late. And when those accusations are paired with publication of the traitor's home address, the intended result is both obvious and inevitable. Anyone who endorses those tactics in any way -- or who plays cute, coy games in finding ways to justify or minimize them -- knows exactly what they are doing.
As the Bush movement collapses, it is only to be expected that its more fevered adherents will resort to increasingly extremist rhetoric and tactics, out of frustration and anger, if for no other reason. The penetration of these thug tactics into increasingly mainstream venues on the Right is one of the more glaring, and more disturbing, developments of late.
UPDATE: In response to several comments here, let me be clear that I do not believe that the despicable statements referenced in this post can or should be grounds for criminal or civil liability. For reasons I set forth in comments here, here and here, the First Amendment should bar (and the Supreme Court has held it does bar) the imposition of liability based on the consequences flowing from the expression of protected political speech. The point is that these statements are despicable and dangerous, not illegal. The persons who engage in such tactics, or who defend them, bear the ethical and moral responsibilites -- but not legal liability -- for what they spawn.
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White Supremacist Tactics Adopted by "Mainstream" Right
by Hunter
DailyKOS
Thu Jul 06, 2006
Glenn Greenwald has an essential piece on the current movement of far-right and white supremacist tactics into the purported "mainstream" of conservative bloggers -- Front Page Magazine, Michelle Malkin, and others.
I'll quote some key points (all emphases are mine), but you need to go read the whole thing:
One of the favorite tactics used by [white supremacist] groups is to find the home address and telephone number of the latest enemy and then publish it on the Internet, accompanied by impassioned condemnations of that person as a Grave Enemy, a race traitor, someone who threatens all that is good in the world. A handful of the most extremist pro-life groups have used the same tactic. It has happened in the past that those who were the target of these sorts of demonization campaigns that included publication of their home address were attacked and even killed.
But these intimidation tactics work even when nothing happens. Indeed, these groups often publish the enemy's home address along with some cursory caveat that they are not encouraging violence. The real objective is the same one shared by all terrorists -- to place the person in paralyzing fear. [...]
This weekend, prominent neoconservative David Horowitz proclaimed that the United States is fighting a war and "the aggressors in this war are Democrats, liberals and leftists." In particular, he cited the now infamous NYT Travel section article on Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld's vacation homes as evidence that the employees of the NYT are among the enemies in this war, and he then linked to and recommended as a "proposal for action" this post from his associate, Front Page contributor Rocco DiPippo. [...]
DiPippo published the home address of NYT Publisher Arthur Sulzberger, along with directions to his home, and linked to a post by right-wing blogger Dan Riehl which contained directions to Sulzberger's home along with photographers of it. In a now-deleted post, DiPippo also published the home address of Linda Spillers, the NYT photographer who took the photograph of Don Rumsfeld's vacation home (with Rumsfeld's express permission), and he urged everyone to go (presumably to the home address he provided) and confront Spillers about her actions.
That was not an isolated incident. This week, Bartholomew's Official Notes on Religion reported on the new "project" implemented by the group StopTheACLU.org. As that group describes it, the project is called "Expose the ACLU Plaintiffs," and promises to publish the home addresses of all individuals who are "using the ACLU" in any First Amendment lawsuit based on the Establishment clause which challenges the constitutionality of governmental promotion of Christianity. The first such enemy targeted for this treatment is a Jewish family in Delaware who sued their local school district over its alleged promotion of Christianity in the public schools. [...]
Stop the ACLU is not some fringe, isolated group. To the contrary, the "official blog" of StopTheACLU.org is StopTheACLU.com (h/t Hunter), a very prominent player in the right-wing blogosphere. That blog is the 14th most-linked-to blog on the Internet, and is often promoted and approvingly cited to as a source by numerous right-wing bloggers such as Instapundit and Michelle Malkin. The blog Expose the Left (which aspires to be the C&L of the Right), yesterday condemned the "nutcases on the left side of the blososphere" who "are sending unfounded attacks" against StopTheACLU for this plainly despicable thug behavior.
These self-evidently dangerous tactics are merely a natural outgrowth of the hate-mongering bullying sessions which have become the staple of right-wing television shows such as Bill O'Reilly's and websites such as Michelle Malkin's (who, unsurprisingly, has become one of O'Reilly's favorite guests). One of the most constant features of these hate fests is the singling out of some unprotected, private individual -- a public school teacher here, a university administrator there -- who is dragged before hundreds of thousands of readers (or millions of viewers), accused of committing some grave cultural crime or identified as a subversive and an enemy, and then held out as the daily target of unbridled contempt, a symbol of all that is Evil.
Malkin frequently includes contact information for the identified Enemies, and O'Reilly often shows photographs or video of them on multiple programs. These bullying tactics of intimidation -- whereby people who are often just private individuals and who have no defenses (as opposed to, say, prominent politicians or media figures) are singled out for widespread public rituals of contempt -- have quite foreseeable consequences, chief among them placing those targets in fear of retribution. Publishing the home addresses of such individuals is not some wholly different approach, but is merely the next small and foreseeable step, an obvious outgrowth of the hate sessions on which many leading representatives of the Right now heavily rely.
These aren't isolated incidents. This is the face of right-wing extremism as it attempts to mainstream itself through figures like Horowitz, Malkin, and a variety of others. And the conservative blogosphere endorses it, promotes it, assists it, and applauds it when it happens.
Read Glenn's entire piece, and internalize it.
"We'll see what we can find on our own," said Kathie Kerr, the syndicate's director of communications, noting that Universal would use the information referenced in Sunday's New York Post article. . . .
The Universal spokeswoman said. . . she did hear from a sales-division person at the iParadigms company with which [John] Barrie is affiliated. Kerr said she was told that iParadigms wasn't sure if it "could provide the same information about Coulter as was given to the Post," but that the syndicate "could subscribe to the service that provided the information" to that newspaper.
"This tool is a service sold through subscription on LexisNexis," said Kerr. "We use the research tool on LexisNexis quite a bit. The plagiarism tool is called Copyguard and is about a year old. We'll want to set up a trial period and of course get pricing on this tool, but it sounds like something that would benefit us. I don't know how long it will take to get a trial period set up."
The two leaders may have felt they had to respond quickly to last month's U.S. military success in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq.Who really benefits from these videos? Bush needs Americans to remain terrified. Without fear, the masses may start thinking for themselves.