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Posted by Harkavy at 12:08 PM, July 4, 2008
If we're lucky, he took some of his bitter bigotry with him.
Jesse Helms, an unrepentant supporter of unnatural causes throughout his life, died of natural causes this morning at the age of 86.
The only sign of moderation ever shown by the longtime North Carolina senator was his decision to stop saying the word "nigger" when he was likely to be quoted in public settings.
The death of Helms is just about the best birthday present the United States could wish for on July 4. Free at last — of Jesse Helms.
While the networks and most of the press will soft-pedal his virulent racism and reckless disregard for the First Amendment in his hounding of artists, foreigners and many others, Helms stayed his divisive course until the bitter end — at least until the end of his public career.
After building a reputation as a frankly speaking bigot, Helms ended his public life as a liar who whitewashed those previously bold stands.
In a 2005 review of a Helms autobiography and a Strom Thurmond biography, Michael Lind noted in the Washington Post:
Like Thurmond, Jesse Helms, a fellow Republican who served as a senator from North Carolina from 1973 until 2003, symbolized the white Southern backlash against racial integration and social liberalism.
Helms gained a political following in the 1960s as a commentator on Raleigh's WRAL-TV and the Tobacco Radio Network with his denunciations of the civil rights movement, liberalism and communism.
As a senator, he explained that he voted against Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton's nominee for a Housing and Urban Development position, "because she's a damn lesbian."
When Helms encountered protesters during a visit to Mexico in 1986, he remarked: "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."
In 1990, Helms stayed away in protest when Nelson Mandela addressed a joint session of Congress.
You would never know any of this from Helms's bland new memoir, which passes in silence over the Dixiecrats in 1948 and the civil rights revolution.
Even though America has undergone many changes since the days when the word "nigger" was freely used, it's vital for us to not ban the word. We need it, in context, to accurately record our history. Black man Randall Kennedy, author of the book Nigger, has argued that point recently in "A Note on the Word 'Nigger' ":
To paper over that term or to constantly obscure it by euphemism is to flinch from coming to grips with racial prejudice that continues to haunt the American social landscape.
Jesse Helms was such a radical that he was able to fan the embers of prejudice even when he spewed the milder N-word with malice aforethought.
In "Dr. Jim Crow," a 2003 article in the Journal of African American History about the post-World War II desegregation of Southern medical education in North Carolina, Karen Kruse Thomas noted:
During the 1950s and 1960s the [University of North Carolina's] controversial role in desegregating Southern higher education would be subject to radically differing interpretations.
To white progressives, UNC was leading the way toward harmonious race relations, while white segregationists generally subscribed to Jesse Helms's notion that UNC stood for "the University of Negroes and Communists."
Many black North Carolinians were convinced that the university would never overcome its 160-year history of excluding members of their race.
The death of Helms, particularly on Independence Day, helps.
And it's fitting that he should die during a presidential race that features young black man Barack Obama.
Whether or not Obama wins, the death of Helms and the ascendancy of people like Obama represent at least some sign of progress in America.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:30 AM, June 30, 2008
The press is oblivious to the real link between Alaska refuge drilling and corporate taxes.
The money pumped out of our staggering economy by tax breaks for the corporate rich during the Bush Era dwarfs the tax revenues we would wind up extracting from wrecking the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge.
And the amount of oil we could squeeze out from new drilling in Alaska is a stain on your driveway compared with world oil output.
An unpublicized Congressional Research Service (CRS) report reveals that the tax-revenue scheme at the heart of the mania for more drilling into Alaska is far from certain to work.
And it would produce small change compared with the corporate tax breaks that, even more than the high cost of fuel, are crippling the economy.
Further drilling in Alaska — already a major campaign issue separating John McCain and Barack Obama — would be mainly of propaganda value as a way of convincing the public that our gas-pump prices would drop.
But psychology is not money, and the U.S. doesn't control the world's oil output. OPEC does, and for every barrel of oil we pump out of Alaska, OPEC will withhold a barrel of its own, and we'll always be dependent on OPEC's oil anyway.
Just compare the estimated 10.3 billion barrels of oil under the ANWR with the U.S.'s grand total of oil reserves, which is 21 billion. That's nothing, compared with Saudi Arabia's 260 billion or Iran's 136 billion.
Yes, Iraq has 115 billion barrels, but we invaded the wrong country, because Canada has 179 billion barrels.
The idea that drilling into the ANWR would help make us less dependent on the rest of the world's oil is laughable.
As for the revenue angle of the proposed drilling, the June 23 CRS report, Possible Federal Revenue from Oil Development of ANWR and Nearby Areas, received zero coverage from the media, as far as I can tell.
It shies away from commenting on the overall policy dispute over whether to drill deeper into Alaska. Instead, it focuses on the scheme's impact on revenues. It explains, in dense but ultimately understandable language, just what would happen if the government were to take this new plunge into Alaska:
If producers were able to recover 10.3 billion barrels of oil over the life of the [refuge] area — there is an estimated 50-50 chance that the ANWR coastal plain contains at least this amount of oil — and if oil prices average $90/barrel over the production lifetime of the area, then the federal government is projected to collect nearly $138 billion in revenues over the production period, estimated to be at least 30 years once production commences. This would consist of nearly $95 billion in federal corporate income taxes, and nearly $43 billion in federal royalties.
And that's a big if. Legislation would have to be passed to drastically change the ratio of oil profits split between the Alaska state government and the federal government, the report notes. Also, the oil companies and their government pals would have to be stopped in their attempt to reduce their tax burden.
(Digression: Keep in mind that the CRS is carefully non-partisan because it's under the thumb of Congress. And there's an explanation for this report's receiving no coverage. As a routine matter, the CRS did not release this or many other reports in the public domain to the public, thanks to its Congressional bosses. The only reason it's freely and easily available is through the dedicated efforts of the non-government Open CRS, a project of the Center for Democracy & Technology, founded by the estimable former ACLU counsel and Electronic Frontier Foundation board member Jerry Berman.)
Now about those corporate tax breaks: Revenue from corporate taxes throughout all industry in the U.S. has fallen to historically low levels, and that's the real problem.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities noted in a May 9 report — Tax Cuts: Myths and Realities, which also got no play from Mr. Gray Lady or other mainstream news outlets — the hard facts. I'll quote it at length because you're unlikely to read or hear about this wonky but important stuff elsewhere:
Since 2001, the Administration and Congress have enacted a wide array of tax cuts, including reductions in individual income tax rates, repeal of the estate tax, and reductions in capital gains and dividend taxes. Nearly all of these tax cuts are scheduled to expire by the end of 2010. Making them permanent would cost about $4.4 trillion over the next decade (when the cost of additional interest on the federal debt is included). Let's see: That's $138 billion over the next 30 years from the Alaska-drilling scheme versus $4.4 trillion over the next 10 years.
More from the CBPP's Tax Cuts: Myths and Realities:
Because important decisions about these tax policies must be made in the next few years, it is essential to understand their effects on deficits, the economy, and the distribution of income. Supporters of the tax cuts have sometimes sought to bolster their case by understating the tax cuts’ costs, overstating their economic effects, or minimizing their regressivity. Here, we address some of the myths heard most frequently in recent tax-cut debates.
Congressional Budget Office data show that the tax cuts have been the single largest contributor to the reemergence of substantial budget deficits in recent years.
Legislation enacted since 2001 added about $3.0 trillion to deficits between 2001 and 2007, with nearly half of this deterioration in the budget due to the tax cuts (about a third was due to increases in security spending, and about a sixth to increases in domestic spending).
Yet the President and some Congressional leaders decline to acknowledge the tax cuts’ role in the nation’s budget problems, falling back instead on the discredited nostrum that tax cuts “pay for themselves.”
Here's the real sticker shock:
While the Administration has credited the tax cuts with the drop in the fiscal year 2007 deficit to “only” $162 billion, the 2007 budget would have been in surplus were it not for the tax cuts.
Based on Joint Committee on Taxation estimates, the total 2007 cost of tax cuts enacted since January 2001 was $300 billion (taking into account the increased interest costs on the debt that have resulted from the deficit financing of the tax cuts).
This means that even with the spending for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal budget would have been in surplus in 2007 if the tax cuts had not been enacted, or if their costs had been offset.
In other words, if we didn't have those nasty tax cuts, we'd have enough money for other wars.
Watch out, hosers.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:38 AM, June 27, 2008
Yee-haw! Led by Scalia, Supreme Court overturns gun ban.
That sound of gunfire you hear isn't coming from Iraq, for a change. It's from right here in the U.S. of A., celebrating the Supreme Court's monumental decision overturning a D.C. handgun ban.
Used to peppering our backsides with buckshot, Dick Cheney's hunting partner, Justice Antonin Scalia, aimed his pistol at us and issued this opinion:
"That dang ol' gun law is his-tor-ee, I tell you what. They cain't be tellin' us that we cain't shoot nothin'. Shee-it. We got our rights. These dogs will hunt. And nobody better come to my house to tell me I cain't.
"Hey, Bubba, gimme that bottle of Jack over there. Y'all, we'll finish this shit off, fire up the pickup, and go get us some duck. I bet them birds never seen a pistol before. Joe Bob, tell Cheney to get his ass out of the crapper. We need to git goin'!
"Damn it, Bubba, I tol' you to gimme that bottle of Jack! Give it here!"
His actual opinion on behalf of the majority went like this:
"We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns. . . .
"But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.
"Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.
Hey, somebody's knockin' at the door — Jimbo, throw me my pistol. I'll go see who it is.
Posted by Harkavy at 2:46 PM, June 24, 2008
Wall Street marches on Qatar. (Or is it the other way around?) Soon we'll all be one big unhappy family.
Planet Earth's economy has taken another major step toward globalization: NYSE Euronext — itself a conglomeration of the New York Stock Exchange and a big Paris-based one — has snatched up a 25 percent stake in the Doha Securities Exchange in Qatar.
Gives you that warm fuzzy feeling that everybody's coming together.
That's one way of looking at it.
Another way is that the operators of the London Stock Exchange are hopping mad.
Another, more important, way of seeing this move is that global big-money has taken another step in uniting against the rest of us.
And yet another way is to view this step into the Arab marketplace as a dangerous one to people's physical health.
There's no question that the 9/11 hijackers targeted the World Trade Center because it was at the heart of Wall Street and was a hubristic monument to Western capitalism.
This isn't the first instance of Wall Street's move toward conglomming with the world's other marketplaces. With this move, however, even more big money will pour into places like Qatar and the neighboring United Arab Emirates (new HQ of Dick Cheney's Halliburton), and the big-money people are erecting ever more ostentatious structures in Dubai that celebrate their moneychanging and lifestyles.
What better target for terrorists than, say, the UAE?
And in fact, the U.K. recently warned its expatriates of a high terror threat in the UAE. A BBC story notes:
Many observers are surprised that Dubai, with its high concentration of westerners and relaxed dress code, has not yet been struck by al-Qaeda-inspired Islamist militants.
It's that kind of talk that could even hurt the global economy, say market analysts quoted in Zawya. Not to mention those really tall monuments to 21st capitalism that are being erected in Dubai.
Meanwhile, with every new step that big money takes into places like China or the UAE or Qatar, average Americans' clout, wishes, desires, and needs become less important.
It will be China's middle class that global bidness types will be focusing on, instead of us. We'll no longer be the most important country on the planet, except when it comes to arms-dealing and country-invading.
We're already the victims of our own propaganda that the U.S. is the most wonderful place in the world. Yes, it's great in many, many ways, but one truth is that people die younger in Harlem than they do in Bangladesh, as I noted in a December 2004 story "The Numbers Beyond the Bling."
As far as the global economy goes, it will take some time for this realization of our decreasing importance to take effect. We may no longer be the most important country, but we're still the most self-important one.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:39 AM, June 23, 2008
How many TV news orgs will say the seven words?
George Carlin is dead, but his words live on. Especially his big seven from his monologue "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television" on the 1972 album Class Clown:
Shit
Piss
Fuck
Cunt
Cocksucker
Motherfucker
Tits
Courtesy of Justin R. Erenkrantz, here's a transcription of that complete routine:
"I love words. I thank you for hearing my words. I want to tell you something about words that I uh, I think is important. I love..as I say, they're my work, they're my play, they're my passion. Words are all we have really.
"We have thoughts, but thoughts are fluid. You know, [humming]. And, then we assign a word to a thought, [clicks tongue]. And we're stuck with that word for that thought. So be careful with words. I like to think, yeah, the same words that hurt can heal. It's a matter of how you pick them.
"There are some people that aren't into all the words. There are some people who would have you not use certain words. Yeah, there are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven of them that you can't say on television. What a ratio that is. 399,993 to seven. They must really be bad. They'd have to be outrageous, to be separated from a group that large. All of you over here, you seven. Bad words. That's what they told us they were, remember? 'That's a bad word.' 'Awwww.' There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad Intentions.
"And words, you know the seven don't you? Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, huh? Those are the heavy seven. Those are the ones that will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war.
Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off . But I mean that word does not belong on the list.
"Actually, none of the words belong on the list, but you can understand why some of them are there. I am not completely insensitive to people's feelings. You know, I can dig why some of those words got on the list...like cocksucker and motherfucker. Those are...those are heavy-weight words. There's a lot going on there, man. Besides the literal translation and the emotional feeling. They're just busy words. There's a lot of syllables to contend with. And those K's. Those are aggressive sounds, they jump out at you. CocksuckerMotherfuckerCocksucker. It's like an assault, on you. So I can dig that.
"And we mentioned shit earlier, of course. Two of the other 4-letter Anglo-Saxon words are Piss and Cunt, which go together of course. But forget about that. A little accidental humor there. Piss and Cunt. The reason Piss and Cunt are on the list is that a long time ago certain ladies said 'Those are the two I am not going to say. I don't mind Fuck and Shit, but P and C are out. P and C are out.' Which led to such stupid sentences as 'OK, you fuckers, I am going to tinkle now.'
"And of course the word Fuck. The word Fuck, I don't really...well, this is some more accidental humor, but I don't really want to get into that now. Because I think it takes too long. But I do mean that. I mean, I think the word fuck is an important word. It's the beginning of life, and, yet it's a word we use to hurt one other, quite often. And uh, people much wiser than I have said, I'd rather have my son watch a film with two people making love than two people trying to kill one other. And I of course agree. I wish I know who said it first, and I agree with that. But I would like to take it a step further. I would like to substitute the word fuck, for the word kill in all those movie cliches we grew up with. 'Okay Sheriff, we're gonna fuck ya now. But we're gonna fuck ya slow.' So maybe next year I'll have a whole fuckin' rap on that word. I hope so.
"Uh, there are two-way words, but those are the seven you can never say on television. Under any circumstances you just can not say them ever, ever ever, not even clinically. You can not weave them in the panel with Doc and Ed and Johnny, I mean it's just impossible, forget those seven, they're out.
"But, there are some two-way words. There are double-meaning words. Remember the ones your giggled at in sixth grade? 'And the cock crowed three times.''Hey, the cock the cock crowed three times. It's in the bible.' There are some Two-way words, like it's okay for Curt Gowdy [mis-spelled in original transcription. -ed.] to say 'Roberto Clemente has two balls on him.' But he can't say, 'I think he hurt his balls on that play Tony, don't you? He's holding them. He must have hurt them by God.' And the other two-way word that goes with that one is prick. It's okay if it happens to your finger. Yes, you can prick your finger, but don't finger your prick. No, no."
Posted by Harkavy at 8:04 AM, June 23, 2008
He's connected to the momentous fight over Islamist threat to Turkey's secular society.
Right-wing religious nuts infiltrate a secular Western government and try to transform their social-conservative views into national policies.
Solid gains over the years in, say, women's rights and religious tolerance are quietly but gravely threatened by rollbacks.
The faith-based Bush regime? No.
This battle is going on in Turkey, and here's the crucial difference: The faith-based regime of Prime Minister Recep Tayyit Erdogan is scheduled to go on trial July 1 on charges of sabotaging the country's secularist democracy.
If you can't have an impeachment trial of the Bush-Cheney regime, this may be the next most fascinating constitutional drama.
And adding to the fascination is that a major figure in this momentous court battle in Turkey has just been judged by a survey the planet's No. 1 thinker. He's Fetullah Gulen, spiritual leader of the stealth religious movement that increasingly threatens the planet's most modernized and secular Muslim society.
Gulen's followers stuffed the ballot boxes (see this morning's Guardian story) to make him No. 1, but if he's no Kant, there's no denying that he can: Gulen is for sure one of the most powerful Muslim theorists in the world.
However, Gulen will be at the trial in Ankara only in spirit.
The world's No. 1 thinker lives in exile in suburban Philadelphia, surrounded by a coterie of men — like a Turkish version of ex-famous Promise Keepers nutcase Bill McCartney (see my 1998 story).
Meanwhile, good luck reading about this Turkish court battle in the U.S. press, except on the op-ed pages of the New York Times, where Roger Cohen lays it out this morning in a well-written piece — aside from the sort of hackneyed pun lede that someone like me would use:
Let’s talk Turkey. A war is on for the country’s soul and everyone should be watching because the little matter of Islam and democracy depends in large measure on its outcome.
Turkey was not made for Bushworld. The polarizing labels of his Manichean global struggle — us-or-them, good-or evil, for-us-or-against-us — do not work for a nation of nuances, Muslim but not Islamist, religious in culture but secular in construct, of the Occident and the Orient, bordering the West’s cradle in Greece and its crucible in Iraq.
Here, in this bridging country, a NATO member long served the diet of mild bigotry that has held it not quite European enough for the European Union, a struggle has been engaged. It pits proud secularists against pious Muslims in a battle to establish the contours of state and mosque.
Gulen has gotten mostly good press in U.S. media outlets as a religious figure who doesn't seek to subvert secular regimes. He was one of the early Muslim leaders to condemn the 9/11 attacks — he called Osama bin Laden a "monster." A May 4 puff piece by the Times's Sabrina Tavernise portrayed Gulen as a moderate.
But be careful: Gulen leads a prominent Muslim movement with a stealth right-wing agenda. Take a look at this 2007 backgrounder on the ties between Gulen and Erdogan's ruling AKP by the Eurasia Daily Monitor's Gareth Jenkins:
Although Gulen has actively encouraged interfaith dialogue and been vigorous in his condemnation of the use of violence, there is also no doubt that his followers have an ideological agenda. The Gulen movement is socially very conservative and almost completely dominated by men. Two of the main items on the program of [an October 2007 conference] were opposing evolution and publicizing the case for creationism.
Thinking of Gulen as one of them there pro-Western Muslim leaders could make monkeys out of all of us.
Posted by Harkavy at 6:29 AM, June 20, 2008
Iraq, Afghanistan now tied for second place.
Always in partial meltdown, Pakistan is oozing more bad news right now than Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
Take one day's worth of news from Dawn, the biggest English-language newspaper in the planet's sixth most populous country.
You thought that things couldn't get worse, what with 4,000 U.S. soldiers dead in Iraq. Now the drumbeat in recent days is that Afghanistan is a sorer sore spot than Iraq, what with the Taliban regaining control over more and more of Afghanistan from Hamid Karzai, who couldn't survive without U.S. backing.
It's already apparent that Afghanistan is becoming even more of a quagmire than Iraq, and even Barry Obama is saying so. This from Agence France Presse:
With Taliban rebels launching mass jail breaks, threatening a major city and killing more foreign troops than ever, Afghanistan is replacing Iraq as the focus of the "war on terror", analysts say.
The Islamist movement has dealt a series of stunning blows to President Hamid Karzai's fragile government in the past week, causing jitters among Western nations who together have around 70,000 troops in the country.
Hundreds of insurgents escaped from a prison in Kandahar on Friday and within days rebels had massed in villages outside the southern city, forcing 1,000 Afghan and NATO troops to launch a major offensive to drive them out.
Democratic US presidential candidate Barack Obama spelt out his priorities if elected by saying on Monday that the real front of the "war on terror" was now Afghanistan and that the US mission in Iraq had been a disaster.
Further underscoring the instability is the fact that Afghanistan was deadlier for foreign forces than Iraq during the month of May for the first time since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Sorry — make that very sorry — Pakistan has overtaken both. Iraq and Afghanistan each has about 25 million people; Pakistan's population is 166 million, and it has nuclear weapons. And it has numerous fighter jets, eagerly brokered by the Bush regime. And it has an assassinated opposition pol (Benazir Bhutto) and a dictator (Pervez Musharraf).
The only hopeful note is that, in Pakistan, lawyers are prone to kill other lawyers.
Anyway, here are just a few headlines from Karachi-based Dawn's front page today:
Four soldiers killed in ambush along LoC
Four Pakistani soldiers were killed in an encounter with ‘unknown miscreants’ in the Hajira sector, close to the Line of Control, on Thursday, Inter Services Public Relations said.
Heavy fighting in Kurram after convoy attack: Four drivers, three militants killed
Security forces, backed by helicopter gunships, killed three militants and injured 30 others after armed men attacked a food convoy, killing four drivers in the Kurram Agency’s Sadda town on Thursday.
Assistant political agent Atta-ur-Rehman said four trucks loaded with food items had been set on fire by the militants after an attack on the convoy going to Parachinar, the regional headquarters of the Kurram region....
NWFP allowed to strike deal with Taliban
Islamabad has authorised the NWFP [North-West Frontier Province] government to enter into deals with the Taliban for ensuring peace in the province and called for respecting such agreements.
“The federal government will support the provincial government in its efforts to eliminate extremism and improve security in troubled areas,” Rehman Malik, the prime minister’s adviser on interior, told a high-level meeting of officials of the federal and provincial governments at the chief minister’s secretariat on Thursday.....
Oilseed shortage in store
After wheat and sugar, the country’s agriculture sector is in the grip of oilseeds crisis amid a constant surge in prices of edible oil in the local market.
The price of cooking oil has doubled over the past six months touching Rs150 per kg this month and growers, responding to the rising market demand, produced about 11 million tons of oilseeds, almost double than last year’s output of six million tons, and were expecting higher rates for their crop....
Policeman killed in Khuzdar
A police official was killed by unidentified armed men in Khuzdar town on Thursday evening.
Sub-Inspector Ghulam Mustafa Rao was passing through the Hospital road when the assailants riding a motorcycle opened fire on him. He died on the spot....
Pakistan high on US policy agenda: Rice
Pakistan enjoys a prominent place in the US policy for Asia but it also is a place where America’s worst nightmare of a nexus of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction could materialise, warns US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
For once, Rice is telling the truth.
But other Bush regime officials are trying to keep a stiff upper lip. Here's another headline from this morning's Dawn:
Pakistan, Afghanistan conflict ruled out
A senior US official has ruled out the possibility of an armed conflict between Pakistan and Afghanistan over their differences in the fight against terrorism.
"I don’t think so," said US Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Donald Camp when asked if President Karzai’s threat to cross into the tribal areas in pursuit of the Taliban could lead to a war between the two countries. He also assured Pakistan that US troops had never targeted Pakistani soldiers deployed along the Afghan border....
Well, we should know about Pakistan's intentions. After all, on the morning of 9/11, Porter Goss, then the chair of the House Intelligence Committee and later Bush's CIA director, was having breakfast in view of the Pentagon with a Pakistan intelligence official who turned out to be hijacker Mohammed Atta's bagman.
And then Osama bin Laden went into hiding in Pakistan and then we scaled back our search for him to invade Iraq and then — the rest is hysteria.
Posted by Harkavy at 8:56 AM, June 18, 2008
Desperately needed funds for new levees in U.S. Midwest have been diverted to flood control in Iraq.
How many more floods of Biblical proportions will it take for Americans to realize what the government is not doing?
The Bush regime and Congress have refused to spend money on upgrading levees in the U.S. while spending hundreds of millions of dollars on levees and dams in Iraq.
The first disaster was Hurricane Katrina. Now we have the Iowa floods, which will have even more impact worldwide because of their impact on food prices.
I thought Bush was a big Bible reader. So why is he ignoring prophecy about floods? The AP's Jim Salter reported on May 12 that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers didn't even know how many levees there were in the country, let alone the sad shape of them. Salter wrote:
"We have to get our arms around this issue and understand how many levees there are in the country, who's watching over them, what populations and properties are behind them," Eric Halpin, the corps' special assistant for dam and levee safety, said in an interview last month. "What is the risk posed to the public?"
Asked and answered when it comes to Iraq. The Bush regime diverted flood-control money from New Orleans to try to win the propaganda war in Iraq. (Go to this 2007 Bush Beat item for facts and links.)
Same situation in the Midwest. While the waters were still ominously rising last month, the AP's Salter wrote:
Corps levees in Missouri and Illinois that are supposed to protect against a 500-year flood fall short of even 100-year protection, said Col. Lewis Setliff III, commander of the corps district in St. Louis. Getting those nine levees up to standard would cost an estimated $200 million.
Last year, Congress passed the National Levee Safety Act, which for the first time directed the corps to inventory all private levees. But so far, Congress hasn't provided funding and won't likely do so until 2009 at the earliest.
$200 million would pay off your mortgage, but it's really not that much money in the big picture. As I wrote in September 2005:
While the corpses of elderly people were floating and bloating in New Orleans in September '05, the Defense Department
was also bragging on its "Defend America" website about spending money on Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, to keep floodwaters from potentially — potentially — flooding Baghdad:
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 9, 2005 — Stabilization of the Mosul Dam continues with an additional $20 million in Iraq Reconstruction and Relief Funds allocated this week for that purpose. The Iraq Ministry of Water Resources and the Ministry of Electricity have made the dam a top priority for the region.
Not that the Mosul Dam project worked out well, mind you. Two years after the DOD crowed about its work on the dam, Stuart Bowen, the courageous special inspector general in the Iraq Debacle, pointed to the facts, as NPR noted in October 2007:
Stuart Bowen, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, reports on 21 contracts totaling $27 million that the government awarded to repair the Mosul Dam in northern Iraq.
The crumbling structure threatens to flood Iraq's two largest cities, and Bowen calls grouting work on the dam unsatisfactory and U.S. oversight of the contracts weak.
For more, read this Washington Post story, which says in part:
A U.S. reconstruction project to help shore up the dam in northern Iraq has been marred by incompetence and mismanagement, according to Iraqi officials and a report by a U.S. oversight agency to be released Tuesday. The reconstruction project, worth at least $27 million, was not intended to be a permanent solution to the dam's deficiencies.
Rather that a corrupt flood-control project be undertaken in this country instead of Iraq. At least it would have partially helped defend America.
.
Posted by Harkavy at 3:37 PM, June 17, 2008
Leave it to our president to again throw religion into it.
Speaking from Paris in reaction to the flooding in Iowa, George W. Bush issued this statement:
Laura and I had the joy of worshiping here in Paris. My thoughts and prayers go out to those who are suffering from the floods in our country; I know there's a lot of people hurting right now and I hope they're able to find some strength in knowing that there is love from a higher being.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with any individual's embrace of faith, but does everything with this goniff Bush, who is clearly holier than thou, have to couched in terms of religion? That's what the religious zealots do in such hardline states as Iran, Iraq, and Israel — God gave me this land, God wants me to wipe you out, God wants me to convert you, God wants you women to be under the thumb of men.
It wouldn't offend me if he were to even say that he would pray for the flood victims. That way, at least, he would be talking about himself and his own faith.
Naturally, it's also galling that this spreading-the-love-like-Al-Green rhetoric comes from a president who was the hangingest governor in U.S. history, a president who fought hard against habeas corpus, who led a regime that unjustifiably invaded Iraq.
It's bad enough to be patronized by a schlemiel — as an evangelical Christian, he's witnessing to those of us who are still not born again by his saying this in just those words.
Will somebody please make him stop intervening with his God on our behalf? He hopes that others know that "there is love from a higher being"?
Who would have thought that Dick Cheney felt that way about us?
Posted by Harkavy at 2:07 PM, June 17, 2008
Money in the bank for corn speculators.
In the wake of the drowning of several Midwestern towns, corn is as high as an elephant's eye.
It is if you think of the elephant as the enduring symbol of the enduring GOP.
Already flushed with wealth over the ethanol craze (a typically American non-green response to the high price of gas), corn speculators are in hog heaven.
"The market is being driven by water," grain merchant Glenn Hollander said yesterday on the floor of the Chicago Board of Trade, according to Reuters. No doubt the flooded-out farmers in Iowa will give him three cheers for such clever wordplay.
More from the Reuters story:
U.S. corn prices soared above $8 a bushel on Monday for the first time as concerns about flood-related crop losses in the U.S. Corn Belt swamped grain markets and caused knock-on effects through the food chain.
Corn, the main U.S. row crop and the feedstock for the burgeoning ethanol sector, livestock feed and dozens of other food and industrial products, set an all-time high for the eighth straight trading session.
And corn farmers in Minnesota will harvest some green, too, as the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported this morning:
The heavy rains and storms that have devastated much of the Midwest may have one unlikely beneficiary: Minnesota corn farmers.
In pockets of Iowa, Indiana and Illinois, monsoon-like rains have washed out newly planted fields and delayed the planting of millions of acres. But the devastation has also pushed corn to its highest price ever — and that's been unmitigated good news for farmers in Minnesota, which has thus far largely escaped the crop damage to the south.
The floods arrived just in time to rescue the noble profession of speculators, which tragically suffered yesterday in the oil market. As the AP reports:
Oil prices eased Tuesday — following a wild, record-setting session the previous day — as investors weighed expectations of higher output against the market's ability to quench soaring global demand.
Mr. Fix-It, George W. Bush, has scheduled a visit to waterlogged Iowa for Thursday, saying:
And I, unfortunately, have been to too many disasters as President. But one thing I've always learned is that the American citizen can overcome these disasters. And life, while it may seem dim at this point in time, can always be better because of the resiliency and care of our citizens.
Speak for yourself, Mr. President, about seeming dim. And as for the resiliency of the citizenry, the Constitution still at least guarantees that for us by denying you a third term.
However, it should be interesting to track Bush's visit to Iowa, if only to see one walking disaster walk into another disaster.
At least this time, Mike Brown won't be going with.
Posted by Harkavy at 7:40 AM, June 16, 2008
New report on talk video spells doom for talk radio's influence.
Video's killing the rock-ribbed-conservative stars, if a new survey on the Internet and politics is true.
YouTube, in other words, is sending Rush Limbaugh down the tubes.
Right-wingers dominated the air waves for decades and were the early users of the Internet, compared with lefties, as I noted nearly a decade ago in the Voice in "Left Behind".
Now the left has overtaken the right. Also endangered are the establishment's talking-head TV shows, like the one Tim Russert hosted.
Talking head is a lot funnier than talking heads. (See the footage by TomSongs of a White House protest — this scene didn't make the network news, as far as I know.)
His "Impeach" music video argues that it's "time to clean the White House out" because the Bush regime's crimes are "so much bigger than the stain on an intern's dress."
Might as well scrub Limbaugh and other cretins. The new survey doesn't even talk about the eventual demise of talk radio's influence, but that's the implication.
Click on this Wired story, "Record Percentage Of Americans Use Internet For Politics, Survey Finds" for details:
The survey found that the internet is becoming an increasing part of the norm of political participation — people are using it to read the news, share their views, or to participate in some other process to get others to take political action.
"In this season, just the twelfth year of presidential politics online, there is no disputing the fact that the internet has moved from the periphery to the center of national politics," write Aaron Smith, a research specialist and Lee Rainie, the Pew project's director in the new survey.
The results of this latest report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project will ultimately be a fatal blow to the geezer-based right-wing talk radio troops, not to mention those dinosaur newspapers that are slow in hopping aboard the Internet.
And speaking of the presidential election:
In a head-to-head matchup with internet users who support Republican McCain, Obama's backers are more likely to get political news and information online (65% vs. 56%).
More from the survey:
• Led by young voters, Democrats and Obama supporters have taken the lead in their use of online tools for political engagement.
• 74% of wired Obama supporters have gotten political news and information online, compared with 57% of online Clinton supporters.
• In a head-to-head matchup with internet users who support Republican McCain, Obama's backers are more likely to get political news and information online (65% vs. 56%).
• Obama supporters outpace both Clinton and McCain supporters in their usage of online video, social networking sites and other online campaign activities.
A tiny percentage of people are actually posting campaign videos, but the flood of primary-source politically related material now available online (amid the flood of bullshit) also spells danger for — gulp! — newspaper reporters:
The survey also finds that Americans are eager to view source materials for themselves — almost 40 percent of internet users and a third of all adults have gone online to read or watch unfiltered campaign material, such as archived debates, speeches and announcements and position papers.
It's probably the same with reports from other sources, many of which are no longer being filtered by traditional journalism organizations but are freely available from the ACLU and the Heritage Foundation and all the organizations in between.
That's what I always hungered for as a reporter, and now it's a dream come true. The Abu Ghraib documents, campaign-finance records — all kinds of wonderful material — is online. Who needs CNN or the network news? I don't. And neither do you.
Read the report, if you don't believe me. And that's the point: You can read the report yourself.
Take the long view — read between the lines of the Pew report — and you'll realize that the days of influence are over for such nattering-nabob self-parodies as Limbaugh. Unless he contributes his own fart videos to YouTube.
Posted by Harkavy at 6:19 PM, June 13, 2008
. . . as one who at a crucial time in '02 lobbed softballs to Dick Cheney.
It's tragic that Tim Russert unexpectedly died, leaving behind family and friends who loved him.
That said, let's try to keep this in perspective — and not the perspective offered up this afternoon by the Washington Post, which called him "the Democratic operative turned NBC commentator who revolutionized Sunday morning television and infused journalism with his passion for politics."
He did not revolutionize anything. He was a news reader, a media celebrity, not a soldier dying in a futile war.
As our body count in Iraq keeps right on climbing, I'll recall Russert's classic '02 interview of Dick Cheney on Meet the Press as a true exemplar of recent American journalism.
I don't mean that in a nice way.
The exact date was September 8, 2002, as Cheney and his frontman, George W. Bush, were lobbying Americans and members of Congress on the urgent necessity of invading Iraq. This was before the key Senate vote.
We now know they were lying, but many of us were thinking that back in '02. Drowning out the dissenters were most of the U.S. media outlets — not all, but most.
And media celebs such as Russert were playing their roles as wing men for schnooks such as Cheney.
In June 2005, I parsed Russert's '02 interview with Cheney in an item called "Shuck and Awe." So I'm just going to plagiarize myself and re-run that item here. See for yourself:
Shuck and Awe
Originally posted June 6, 2005
Before the "shock and awe" of March '03, there was shuck and jive. But the Downing Street Memo and other British government documents revealing Blair-Bush skullduggery in 2002 are not old news.
In fact, the recently released documents offer fresh clues not only about (1) the contempt the Bush and Blair regimes had for the intelligence of the American public and press but also about (2) why the occupation of Iraq has turned into such a horror show.
On March 14, 2002, Tony Blair's foreign policy adviser, David Manning, reported to his boss after meetings with Condi Rice and a National Security Council "team" in D.C., according to a memo leaked three years later:
We spent a long time at dinner on IRAQ. It is clear that Bush is grateful for your support and has registered that you are getting flak. I said that you would not budge in your support for regime change but you had to manage a press, a Parliament and a public opinion that was very different than anything in the States.
What do you suppose he meant by "different"? Well, the U.S. press, for one thing, is much more easily gulled—in general, that is.
Only three days before Manning sent that memo to Blair, Dick Cheney (on his way to the Middle East) was in Great Britain meeting with the prime minister. The two regimes' CEOs stood still for a press conference in London, where the reporters aren't afraid to ask tough questions, and the Bush regime can't put on its own dog-and-pony show. Here's an example from the March 11, 2002, press conference, courtesy of a White House transcript:
QUESTION: Mr. Vice President, if the inspectors are allowed into Iraq, will that negate the need to take military action against Baghdad? If you do have to take military action against Baghdad, what will be the legal basis of that action? And if you can't build a coalition that many support, will [you] go ahead anyway?
Cheney's reply? This is how he started it:
They do the same thing here they do in the States, that's ask these long complex questions.
 Yeah, that was really complex. But I guess compared with the "grilling" he gets from people like Tim Russert (left), it's complex. On September 8, 2002, Russert hosted Cheney on Meet the Press and played slow-pitch with him—open-ended questions, perfect for spinning. Here's one:
RUSSERT: Let me turn to the issue of Iraq. You have said that it poses a mortal threat to the United States. How? Define mortal threat.
Yes, ask the vice president to define a buzz phrase that he and his handlers have spent a lot of time honing. Here's another softball:
RUSSERT: There seems to be a real debate in the country as to [Saddam's] capability. This is how the New York Times reported comments by Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican, who said, “The Central Intelligence Agency had 'absolutely no evidence' that Iraq possesses or will soon possess nuclear weapons.” Is that accurate?
Gee, what do you think Cheney will say when you let him off the hook with a stupid-ass "Is that accurate?" appended to an otherwise-promising line of questioning? Here's how Cheney belted that blooper pitch:
CHENEY: I disagree. I think the accurate thing to say is we don't know when he might actually complete that process. All of the experience we have points in the direction that, in the past, we've underestimated the extent of his program.
Keep in mind, now, that Cheney was making up this shit. The Bush and Blair regimes were "fixing" the intelligence, as the Downing Street Memo, revealed three years too late, put it.
A little later in the Russert interview, Cheney said:
We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that [Saddam] is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.
Which provoked this question:
RUSSERT: Why haven't our allies, who presumably would know the same information, come to the same conclusion?
Big problem with this question, Tim. You're asking a question that Cheney cannot answer. He can't speak for others' actions. Instead of pinning him down, you're leaving him room to roam.
Russert could have asked this instead: "Our allies haven't come to that conclusion, and they would have no reason to cover for Saddam. You say 'we know.' Give me a specific example of what 'we know,' and how that is at odds with what our allies' intelligence tells them."
But Russert didn't ask that. Instead, he asked Cheney why our allies hadn't "come to the same conclusion." How in the world could Cheney know "why"? (Except for the fact that he and Blair were making up shit and the allies weren't—but he couldn't very well admit that.) This one was easy for Cheney to hit out of the park:
CHENEY: I don't think they know the same information. I think the fact is that, in terms of the quality of our intelligence operation, I think we're better than anybody else, generally, in this area.
Oh, so our intelligence was good, eh?
Cheney was just giving himself a pat on the back, because the Bush regime was making it up as it went along, so it could justify an unjustified invasion of Iraq.
So, do you see a difference in the kinds of questions British and American politicians have to face? Democracy is more raucous in Great Britain, and the press—with exceptions—is more docile in America.
Now for the other part of the equation: the disastrous occupation that has followed the unjustified invasion. Go directly to the Downing Street memo itself for that. The memo from Matthew Rycroft to Manning of Manning's meeting with Blair on July 23, 2002, summarized MI6 chief Richard Dearlove's recent visit to D.C. (Dearlove is referred to as "C.") Here's a passage from the memo:
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
"Little discussion" of the "aftermath," huh? We'd better make sure there's plenty of discussion about that.
Posted by Harkavy at 3:12 PM, June 13, 2008
U.S. banks may be in trouble, but they're not too busy bailing red ink out of their yachts to stop foreclosing on your home — and yours and yours and yours and yours . . .
Hot off the server, Bob Ivry of Bloomberg News reports:
Banks repossessed twice as many homes in May and foreclosure filings rose 48 percent from a year ago as falling house prices trapped borrowers in mortgages they couldn't afford, RealtyTrac Inc. said in a report today.
One in every 483 U.S. households either lost the home to foreclosure, received a default notice or was warned of a pending auction, RealtyTrac said. That was the highest rate since the Irvine, California-based company began reporting in January 2005 and the 29th consecutive month of year-over-year increases. Nevada, California and Arizona posted the highest rates in the U.S. and New Jersey entered the top 10.
Get ready for another sales boom, but you won't like the sound it'll make. Here's the twisted scenario that's already starting to happen:
Foreclosures add to inventory and crowd out regular sales, Michelle Meyer and Ethan Harris, economists at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in New York, wrote in a report yesterday. Foreclosures will account for 30 percent of national home sales this year as 1.2 million foreclosed single-family homes will eventually enter the market, they said. They estimate foreclosed properties, which typically sell for about 20 percent less than other homes, will depress home prices nationally by 6 percent.
Oh, boy! There'll be lots of homes on the market. Of course, some of them will the ones you just got kicked out of.
Hmm, maybe a war would help juice up the economy. Shit, we've already got one.
Posted by Harkavy at 12:01 PM, June 13, 2008
Good news!
The U.S. Army has run out of money and won't be able to run the Vietraq War past mid-June.
Bad news!
It's just a piece of budget trickery by the DOD. Taxpayer.net calls it "the Pentagon's latest sob story," explaining:
The Pentagon’s latest sob story about having to borrow from its main budget in order to pay for the Iraq war may sound dramatic. But this Chicken Little approach to war budgeting is less about congressional gridlock than it is about an archaic Pentagon accounting system in dire need of reform.
The Defense Department (DOD) wants Congress to approve $10 billion in transfers from the Navy, Air Force, and other accounts, to the Army, or else, officials claim, the Army won’t be able to run war operations past mid-June. The extra money will allow operations to continue until July, by which time Congress should have passed the next $165 billion installment to pay for our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. That bill is currently awaiting action by the House of Representatives, but has been tied up in a fight over unemployment benefits and other domestic spending add-ons.
These budgetary maneuvers further obscure how much of DOD’s budget goes toward war spending.
Good news!
The Southern Baptist Convention has refused to officially condemn a California law that clamps down on gay-bashing by public school teachers. Frustrated extremists in the nation's largest single denomination (and the country's lowest common denominator) vow to pull their kids out of California's public schools.
Bad news!
They haven't pulled their kids out yet.
Good news!
The days are numbered for the Bush-Cheney regime's unconstitutional Guantanamo Bay prison. Especially after the Supreme Court ruled that its inmates actually have habeas corpus rights.
Bad news!
We're building a new Gitmo in Afghanistan.
From the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Hafizullah Gardesh and Jean MacKenzie in Kabul:
In mid-May, the Pentagon announced plans to build a 40-acre, 60 million US dollar detention centre to replace the deteriorating facility at Bagram airfield, a base originally built and used by the Soviet Union during its war in Afghanistan in 1979-89.
Just an upgrade, huh? The IWPR report continues:
The news has made many Afghans uneasy. For many, Bagram conjures up images of arrest, torture and humiliation.
In 2002, two men died in US custody at Bagram. One of them, who went by the name Dilawar, became the subject of a widely acclaimed documentary called Taxi to the Dark Side.
Arrested on a tip-off from a man later proved to be a Taliban supporter, he was repeatedly beaten and died after two days in detention.
Since then, dozens, if not hundreds, of prisoners have passed through Bagram on their way to Guantanamo Bay. According to many of them, Bagram is worse than the prison in Cuba.
A researcher who has conducted numerous interviews with prisoners released from Bagram told IWPR that they claimed to have been humiliated, beaten, stripped naked, and thrown down stairs during initial interrogations.
“The guards told the prisoners, ‘Now you are no longer in Afghanistan. We can do anything we want,’” said the researcher.
None of the detainees interviewed were ever charged with any criminal activity.
Good news!
The average U.S. worker made just over $29,000 last year, while ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson made $50,000, according to SEC records. That seems like a reasonable gap.
Bad news!
Tillerson's pay was actually $50,000 a day.
Posted by Harkavy at 9:13 AM, June 11, 2008
The new fuss over Barry Obama's choice as chair of his veep-selection committee shows that the U.S. media have already dropped Dick Cheney into the memory hole.
Sure, many people want to forget the two terms of our de facto president, but even the best reporters are ignoring history.
How can anyone forget Cheney? He has run the presidency — into the ground. Using 9/11 as an excuse, he has encased us in Iraq the way various mastodons got trapped in the La Brea tar pits. He has hastened the dismantling of New Deal protections for the common folk.
Cheney achieved this by his appointment eight years ago as the chair of George W. Bush's veep-selection committee. Who did Cheney, the ultimate D.C. insider, pick? Himself.
Yet the banner headlines this morning, especially in the Washington Post, are that Obama's choice of James A. Johnson as chair of his veep-selection committee is controversial because of insider status and his lucrative consulting deals.
Wasn't Cheney the CEO of Halliburton before he was vice president? Didn't Vice President Cheney wind up making billions for Halliburton — which continued to pay him after he moved into the White House? (See my October 2005 post "Over a Barrel.")
This morning's Washington Post story "Obama's Choice of Insider Draws Fire:
Republicans Assail Head of VP Vetting" doesn't even mention Cheney. One sentence would have been enough to at least jog people's memories and put this relative non-fuss over Johnson into context.
But normally excellent reporter Jonathan Weisman's story (co-authored with David S. Hilzenrath) blew it.
They had space to quote a GOP flack but they didn't even mention how Cheney came to rule the White House?
Of course, to even mention Cheney would have made today's A1 splash a relatively non-story, because Johnson is a piker compared with pre-veep Cheney, the classic insider.
The Post's first four paragraphs this morning:
Last month, Sen. Barack Obama turned to James A. Johnson, a former Fannie Mae chief executive and Washington insider since the Carter administration, to lead the vetting of potential running mates for the Democratic Party's presumptive presidential nominee.
But four years earlier, as Johnson was angling for a job if Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) was elected president, Fannie Mae did some vetting of its own. Company executives had grown so worried about the lucrative consulting deal they had cut with their former CEO that they considered enlisting an outside investigator to comb through the deal "in light of issues that could come up during Senate confirmation . . . or White House review of the consulting contract," according to company documents unearthed by federal regulators.
For Republicans seeking to tarnish Obama's image as a squeaky-clean outsider hoping to clean up Washington -- not to mention divert attention from questions about lobbyists working in Sen. John McCain's campaign -- Obama's embrace of Johnson has been a gift.
"He's tagged himself as a different kind of politician," said Republican strategist Mark Corallo. "He's supposed to transcend party, transcend politics. He's exploited that more than anyone in recent memory, and it becomes demoralizing to all the starry-eyed Obamaphiles who are saying, 'I thought he was different.' "
Obama has proven that he's different. Bush has been eminently quotable as a malaprop waiting to happen. Obama is quotable in a far different way. For example, the Post notes:
[T]he questions surrounding Johnson's past suggest the difficulties Obama will face as his campaign expands from an underdog insurgency to a general-election operation. He has little choice but to pick up experienced political insiders -- and the baggage they bring with them.
"This is a game that can be played," Obama told reporters in St. Louis. "Everybody who is tangentially related to our campaign, I think, is going to have a whole host of relationships. I would have to hire the vetter to vet the vetters."
Juicy, eloquent, witty quote. John McCain, a skilled schmoozer with reporters, is the same way.
No matter who wins the presidency, he'll be a good quote, though not in the way Bush has been.
In the meantime, though, don't forget Cheney. He was a terrible quote most of the time because access to him was severely limited to staged events and he was too clever to accidentally put his foot in his mouth.
In his unguarded moments, however, Cheney was eminently quotable. Cheney's "fuck yourself" to Pat Leahy is particularly memorable — the Post itself wrote an unexpurgated story about that episode in June 2004:
A brief argument between Vice President Cheney and a senior Democratic senator led Cheney to utter a big-time obscenity on the Senate floor this week.
On [June 22, 2004], Cheney, serving in his role as president of the Senate, appeared in the chamber for a photo session. A chance meeting with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, became an argument about Cheney's ties to Halliburton Co., an international energy services corporation, and President Bush's judicial nominees. The exchange ended when Cheney offered some crass advice.
"Fuck yourself," said the man who is a heartbeat from the presidency.
Leahy's spokesman, David Carle, yesterday confirmed the brief but fierce exchange. "The vice president seemed to be taking personally the criticism that Senator Leahy and others have leveled against Halliburton's sole-source contracts in Iraq," Carle said.
More important — and more obscured by the passage of time — is Cheney's 1998 speech to a bunch of Amarillo oilmen. As I noted in August 2004:
Set the Wayback Machine to June 13, 1998, in Amarillo, Texas. As the CEO of Halliburton, Cheney spoke at the annual meeting of an influential group of oilmen, the Panhandle Producers and Royalty Owners Association.
Greg Rohloff, a business writer for the Amarillo Globe-News, covered the speech and wrote at the time that "the current hot spots for the major oil companies are the oil reserves in the Caspian Sea region." Rohloff's story continued:
The potential for this region turning as volatile as the Persian Gulf does not concern Cheney.
"You've got to go where the oil is," he said. "I don't worry about it a lot."
Almost exactly 10 years later, Cheney's attempt to grab the Caspian oil has failed miserably, and he has piled up 4,000 bodies in a futile grab for Iraq's oil.
The job of "worrying about it" has fallen to others.
Posted by Harkavy at 3:36 PM, June 10, 2008
"Fill it up" still refers to oil companies' coffers.
Even if you have to walk to the store because you can't afford gas, buy some of those dangerous tomatoes.
Don't eat them — throw them at the Republican senators who today stymied a windfall profits tax aimed at oil companies.
Here's the story, from David Ivanovich of the Houston Chronicle, deep in the heart of oil-bidness country:
Senate Republicans today successfully blocked a vote on a Democratic-written energy package intended to slap the major oil companies with a new windfall profits tax and roll back other tax breaks the industry now enjoys.
While motorists may be clamoring for relief from gasoline prices now topping $4 a gallon nationwide, Senate Democrats were unable to muster enough votes to move forward with debate on an energy package that contained a number of provisions that already have received veto threats from President Bush.
With the White House threatening a veto of the bill, the Senate voted 51-43 to close debate, well shy of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster.
You're probably wondering how Barack Obama and John McCain voted:
They didn't. From this afternoon's New York Times story:
Senate Democratic leaders were reportedly resigned to defeat on the oil-tax bill and did not ask Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, who just completed their monthslong competition for the presidential nomination, to show up for the vote. The other four absentees were John McCain of Arizona, the presumptive Republican nominee for president; Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, Democrats who have been ill.
And which Republicans were bold enough to buck their party line?
Six Republicans voted “yes” on the oil-tax bill. They were Norm Coleman of Minnesota, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, John W. Warner of Virginia, Gordon Smith of Oregon and Susan M. Collins and Olympia J. Snowe, both of Maine. Only two Democrats voted “no,” Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Harry Reid of Nevada. Mr. Reid, the majority leader, may have voted “no” in a parliamentary move to preserve his right to bring up the proposal again.
We know where the presumptive prexy candidates stand, however. Obama has pledged support of taxing the oil industry's windfall profits. From today's Brisbane Times in Australia comes this background:
Meanwhile, the Democratic presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama, lost no time in beginning his campaign with a focus on economic issues. He told supporters in the hard-hit state of North Carolina that it was time for a different economic prescription.
"We did not arrive at the doorstep of our current economic crisis by some accident of history," he said. "This was not an inevitable part of the business cycle that was beyond our power to avoid. It was the logical conclusion of a tired and misguided philosophy that has dominated Washington for far too long."
He accused his rival, the Republican nominee John McCain, of having an economic plan that amounts to "a full-throated endorsement of George Bush's policies".
Senator Obama pledged to seek a windfall profits tax on US oil companies if elected.
Senator McCain responded by accusing Senator Obama of embracing the usual Democratic agenda of taxing and spending to solve the nation's problems.
The current futile Senate bill was just the latest of many attempts to rein in the historically pampered oil industry.
I know about the sense of entitlement that's standard in the oil bidness, having been raised in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, when it was the headquarters of both Phillips 66 (now Conoco-Phillips in Houston) and Citgo (now owned by Venezuela and controlled by Hugo Chavez).
In general, Okies consider unbridled oil profits as a birthright (along with hickory-smoked BBQ, cousin-snugglin', and meaningful relationships with barnyard animals).
That aside, this particular bill had some far-reaching provisions for Americans struggling with gas at $4 a gallon while oil execs and speculators make out like bandits. Here's more on it from the Chronicle:
Calling for "oil company accountability" and "energy price relief," Democrats wanted to hit the five largest oil companies with a new 25 percent windfall profits tax. The oil companies would only be able to lower that tax burden by hiking investments in renewable energy, refining capacity and production capability.
The Democratic plan would hit the oil companies further by gutting $17 billion worth of tax breaks they received back in 2004 and 2005.
The bill also would have tried to rein in speculation in the oil markets by preventing traders from routing transactions through offshore markets and requiring oil traders to put down more money to trade in futures contracts.
The legislation also would have made price gouging a federal crime and branded as illegal efforts by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to control world oil prices.
Yeah, good luck with that plan to rein in not only the U.S. oil companies but also OPEC.
Posted by Harkavy at 4:41 PM, June 9, 2008
The fuss continues over the big German daily Taz's front-page headline last week: "Onkel Baracks Hütte," splashed above a photo of the White House. (See my June 5 item "Crying Onkel Tom.")
Der Spiegel shpritzed the photo, headline, and fuss around the globe, and the next day, the Taz ran a point/counterpoint from two staffers on this question: "Is 'Uncle Barack's Cabin' racist?" As the lefty daily noted in its intro to this debate of sorts:
Not only in US-Blogs, but also at the Taz newspaper itself the issue is heavily discussed: Is using the reference to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" when discussing Obama's nomination offensive?
Dominic Johnson says "yes," aptly giving a little history of what "Uncle Tom" has come to mean and concluding, in part:
Using "Uncle Barack" to describe Obama's politics is nonsense. And as he is not even descended from slaves but from black Kenyans and white Americans, the literary reference "Uncle Tom" is not even remotely applicable to him — except if one regards it as sufficient that he is also (half) black. In which case the only common point is the colour of his skin and the only common framework a racist stereotype.
"Uncle Barack" is then the equivalent of the neo-conservative slogan "Obama=Osama", meaning Bin Laden and referring to Barack Obama's time in Muslim Indonesia and his second name Hussein. "Hussein's Cave" might have been an apt headline from this angle. Oh, you can't do that? How interesting. It requires remarkable brainlessness to think of "Uncle Tom" first when looking at the success of a black politician in the United States.
Immediately following is Bernd Pickert's "no," which concludes:
Reducing the political supertalent Barack Obama to being black would indeed be racist. But we would be painting the world too rosy if we pretended that the colour of his skin doesn't matter in these elections.
After all: What was all the trouble about his former pastor Jeremiah Wright about? The headline combined with the majestic picture of the White House are our way to express that Uncle Tom's cabin belongs to the past — in the time of uncle Barack everything is different. It is a pity that this could be misunderstood.
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