Folks,

Not only was the election of 2000 a charade; not only is our current election process fatally flawed; not only has the Help America Vote Act actually worsened the prospects of a free and fair election; not only have all sorts of Republican shenanigans come to light over the last few months, such as immigrant voter registration forms pre-checked with Republican party affiliation, voter intimidation, and voter roll manipulations in key states, not to mention gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere; but now we have so-called “debates” that are little more than carefully controlled news conferences.

I have to echo Michael Moore: “Dude, Where’s My Country?” Read on.

–C

Connie Rice: Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates

NPR Commentary: Connie Rice

The Tavis Smiley Show, September 29, 2004

The Tavis Smiley Show, September 29, 2004 · After weeks of political wrangling, Sen. John Kerry and President Bush will square off for the first of three key presidential debates. Both camps have agreed to an elaborate, 32-page contract that spells out everything from the size of the dressing rooms to permitted camera angles.

But the controversy over the debates threatens to overshadow the events themselves. Some citizen groups complain that the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) isn’t as non-partisan as it should be, and that Kerry and Bush won’t be pressed on urban issues. Commentator Connie Rice says that’s just the tip of the iceberg, and she’s got another Top 10 list — this time: Top 10 Secrets They Don’t Want You to Know About the Debates.

(10.) They aren’t debates!

“A debate is a head-to-head, spontaneous, structured argument over the merits of an issue,” Rice says. “Under the ridiculous 32-page contract that reads like the rules for the Miss America Pageant, there will be no candidate-to-candidate questions, no rebuttal to your opponent’s points, no cross questions or cross answers, no rebuttals, no follow-up questions — that’s not a debate, that’s a news conference.”

(9.) The debates were hijacked from the truly independent League of Women Voters in 1986.

“The League of Women Voters ran these debates with an iron hand as open, transparent, non-partisan events from 1976 to 1984,” Rice says. “The men running the major campaigns ended their control when the League defiantly included John Anderson and Ross Perot, and used tough moderators and formats the parties didn’t like. The parties snatched the debates from the League and formed the Commission on Presidential Debates — the CPD — in 1986.”

(8.) The “independent and non-partisan” Commission on Presidential Debates is neither independent nor non-partisan.

“CPD should stand for ‘Cloaking-device for Party Deceptions’ — it is not an independent commission on anything. The CPD is under the total control of the Republican and Democratic parties and by definition bipartisan, not non-partisan. Walter Cronkite called CPD-sponsored debates an ‘unconscionable fraud.’”

(7.) The secretly negotiated debate contract bars Kerry and Bush from any and all other debates for the entire campaign.

“Under what I call the Debate Suppression and Monopolization Clause of the contract, it is illegal for the candidates to debate each other anywhere else during the campaign,” Rice says. “We need a new criminal law for reckless endangerment of democracy.”

(6.) The debate contract effectively excludes all other serious presidential candidates from participating in the debates.

“This is what I call the Obstruction of Democratic Debate Rule, which sets an impossibly high threshold for third-party candidates… Where are we, Russia? Isn’t Vladimir Putin wiping out democracy in Russia by excluding all opposing candidates from the airwaves during his re-election campaigns? Most new ideas come from third parties — they should be in the debates.”

(5.) All members of the studio audience must be certified as “soft” supporters of Bush and Kerry, under selection procedures they approve.

“It’s not enough to rig the debate — they have to rig the audience, too? The contract reads: ‘The debate will take place before a live audience of between 100 and 150 persons who… describe themselves as likely voters who are soft Bush supporters or soft Kerry supporters.’ We should crash this charade and jump up in the middle to declare ourselves hard opponents of this Kabuki dance.”

(4.) These “soft” audience members must “observe in silence.”

“Soft and silent… In what I’m calling the Silence of the Lambs Clause of this absurd contract, the audience may not move, speak, gesture, cough or otherwise show that they are alive and thinking.”

(3.) The “extended discussion” portion of the debate cannot exceed 30 seconds.

“Other than the stupidity of the debate contract, what topic do you know that can be extendedly discussed in 30 seconds?”

(2.) Important issues are locked out by the CPD debate rules and party control.

“Really important but sticky or tough issues get axed, because the parties control the questions and topics,” Rice says. “For example, in 2000, Gore and Bush mentioned the following issues zero times: Child poverty, the drug war, homelessness, working-class families, NAFTA, prisons, corporate crime and corporate welfare.”

(1.) Fortune 100 corporations are the main funders of the CPD-sponsored debates, and the CPD’s co-chairs are corporate lobbyists.

The CPD is run by Frank Fahrenkopf, a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist, and Paul Kirk, a top gambling lobbyist,” Rice says. “And the biggest muliti-national corporations write the checks that fund the CPD — Phillip Morris, Anheuser-Busch and dozens more. The audience may have to be silent and motionless, but the corporate sponsors can have banners, beer tents, Budweiser girls handing out pamphlets protesting beer taxes — a corporate-sponsored circus to go along with the Kabuki Debates. Could we get a more fitting description of our democracy?”

Folks,

As the price of crude oil crossed the historic threshold of $50/barrel today, it seems appropriate to return to the subject of oil.

I hope that some of you caught the excellent three-part series by PBS called “Extreme Oil.” It was very good journalism about the worldwide oil situation, including where it comes from, the economics, the businesses who benefit, the environmental and health costs, and a look at the future. You can learn more about the series and find a list of further reading on the PBS web site: Extreme Oil. You can also buy the series in VHS format from the producer’s web site: Thirteen/WNET New York

Last night they broadcast Part Three in my area, which was about oil production and exploration in Canada and Alaska. It offered a fascinating look at the real environmental cost, and the politics, of producing oil from these remote and ecologically sensitive areas. Actually seeing thousands of tons of oil sands strip mined every day in Alberta, and converted into oil for shipment to the U.S., gives one a whole different idea of what exploiting this abundant resource really means. The environmental damage, and the energy cost of producing oil this way, is astounding.

Unfortunately for Canada, they have no choice. Written into NAFTA is a provision that Canada must export oil to the U.S., whether they want to or not:

The U.S. report points out that that, under NAFTA, Canada is not allowed to reduce its exports of oil (or other energy) to the U.S. in order to redirect them to Canadian consumers. Redirecting Canadian oil to Canadians isn’t permitted — regardless of how great the Canadian need may be. Some outside observers, like Colin Campbell over in Ireland, find the situation striking. “You poor Canadians are going to be left freezing in the dark while they’re running hair dryers in the U.S.,” says Campbell.

In the PBS special, one Canadian expert estimated that this little tidbit of information is probably only known to one in 10,000 Canadians. She glumly noted that her country is basically just a big sponge, waiting for the U.S. to squeeze it, while the U.S. is under no compunction to reduce its consumption. Where does an 8,000 pound gorilla sit?

An interesting article on the same topic crossed my desk this week, from an alert Canadian reader. Check it out, this is good reading.

–C

Crude Dudes

US Oil Companies Just Happened to Have Billions of Dollars They Wanted to Invest
in Undeveloped Oil Reserves

By Linda McQuaig

Toronto Star

September 20, 2004

From his corner office in the heart of New York’s financial district, Fadel Gheit keeps close tabs on what goes on inside the boardrooms of the big oil companies. An oil analyst at the prestigious Wall Street firm Oppenheimer & Co., the fit, distinguished-looking Gheit has been watching the oil industry closely for more than 25 years.
Selling the modern world’s most indispensable commodity has never been a bad business to be in ? particularly for the small group of companies that straddle the top of this privileged world. But never more so than now.
“Profit-wise, things could not have been better,” says Gheit, “In the last three years, they died and went to heaven …. They are all sitting on the largest piles of cash in their history.”

But to stay rich they have to keep finding new reserves, and that’s getting tougher. Increasingly it means cutting through permafrost or drilling deep underwater, at tremendous cost. “The cheap oil has already been found and developed and produced and consumed,” says Gheit. “The low-hanging fruit has already been picked.”
Well, not all the low-hanging fruit has been picked.
Nestled into the heart of the area of heaviest oil concentration in the world is Iraq, overflowing with low-hanging fruit. No permafrost, no deep water. Just giant pools of oil, right beneath the warm ground. This is fruit sagging so low, as it were, that it practically touches the ground under the weight of its ripeness.

Not only does Iraq have vast quantities of easily accessible oil, but its oil is almost untouched. “Think of Iraq as virgin territory …. This is bigger than anything Exxon is involved in currently …. It is the superstar of the future,” says Gheit, “That’s why Iraq becomes the most sought-after real estate on the face of the earth.”
Gheit just smiles at the notion that oil wasn’t a factor in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He compares Iraq to Russia, which also has large undeveloped oil reserves. But Russia has nuclear weapons. “We can’t just go over and … occupy (Russian) oil fields,” says Gheit. “It’s a different ballgame.” Iraq, however, was defenceless, utterly lacking, ironically, in weapons of mass destruction. And its location, nestled in between Saudi Arabia and Iran, made it an ideal place for an ongoing military presence, from which the U.S. would be able to control the entire Gulf region. Gheit smiles again: “Think of Iraq as a military base with a very large oil reserve underneath …. You can’t ask for better than that.”

There’s something almost obscene about a map that was studied by senior Bush administration officials and a select group of oil company executives meeting in secret in the spring of 2001. It doesn’t show the kind of detail normally shown on maps ? cities, towns, regions. Rather its detail is all about Iraq’s oil.
The southwest is neatly divided, for instance, into nine “Exploration Blocks.” Stripped of political trappings, this map shows a naked Iraq, with only its ample natural assets in view. It’s like a supermarket meat chart, which identifies the various parts of a slab of beef so customers can see the most desirable cuts …. Block 1 might be the striploin, Block 2 and Block 3 are perhaps some juicy tenderloin, but Block 8 ? ahh, that could be the filet mignon.

The map might seem crass, but it was never meant for public consumption. It was one of the documents studied by the ultra-secretive task force on energy, headed by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, and it was only released under court order after a long legal battle waged by the public interest group Judicial Watch.
Another interesting task force document, also released under court order over the opposition of the Bush administration, was a two-page chart titled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfields.” It identifies 63 oil companies from 30 countries and specifies which Iraqi oil fields each company is interested in and the status of the company’s negotiations with Saddam Hussein’s regime. Among the companies are Royal Dutch/Shell of the Netherlands, Russia’s Lukoil and France’s Total Elf Aquitaine, which was identified as being interested in the fabulous, 25-billion-barrrel Majnoon oil field. Baghdad had “agreed in principle” to the French company’s plans to develop this succulent slab of Iraq. There goes the filet mignon into the mouths of the French!

The documents have attracted surprisingly little attention, despite their possible relevance to the question of Washington’s motives for its invasion of Iraq ? in many ways the defining event of the post-9/11 world but one whose purpose remains shrouded in mystery. Even after the supposed motives for the invasion ? weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda ? have been thoroughly discredited, talk of oil as a motive is still greeted with derision. Certainly any suggestion that private oil interests were in any way involved is hooted down with charges of conspiracy theory.
Yet the documents suggest that those who took part in the Cheney task force ? including senior oil company executives ? were very interested in Iraq’s oil and specifically in the danger of it falling into the hands of eager foreign oil companies, rather than into the rightful hands of eager U.S. oil companies.

As the documents show, prior to the U.S. invasion, foreign oil companies were nicely positioned for future involvement in Iraq, while the major U.S. oil companies, after years of U.S.-Iraqi hostilities, were largely out of the picture. Indeed, the U.S. majors would have been the big losers if U.N. sanctions against Iraq had simply been lifted. “The U.S. majors stand to lose if Saddam makes a deal with the U.N. (on lifting sanctions),” noted a report by Germany’s Deutsche Bank in October 2002.
The disadvantaged position of U.S. oil companies in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would have presumably been on the minds of senior oil company executives when they met secretly with Cheney and his task force in early 2001. The administration refuses to divulge exactly who met with the task force, and continues to fight legal challenges to force disclosure. However a 2003 report by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the task force relied on advice from the oil industry, whose close ties to the Bush administration are legendary. (George W. Bush received more money from the oil and gas industry in 1999 and 2000 than any other U.S. federal candidate received over the previous decade.)

The Cheney task force has been widely criticized for recommending bigger subsidies for the energy industry, but there’s been little focus on its possible role as a venue for consultations between Big Oil and the administration about Iraq. One intriguing piece of evidence pointing in this direction was a National Security Council directive, dated February 2001, instructing NSC staff to co-operate fully with the task force. The NSC document, reported in The New Yorker magazine, noted that the task force would be considering the “melding” of two policy areas: “the review of operational policies towards rogue states” and “actions regarding the capture of new and existing oil and gas fields.” This certainly implies that the Cheney task force was considering geopolitical questions about actions related to the capture of oil and gas reserves in “rogue” states, including presumably Iraq.
It seems likely then that Big Oil, through the Cheney task force, was involved in discussions with the administration about getting control of oil in Iraq. Since Big Oil has sought to distance itself from the administration’s decision to invade Iraq, this apparent involvement helps explain the otherwise baffling level of secrecy surrounding the task force.

It’s interesting to note that the Cheney task force deliberations took place in the first few months after the Bush administration came to office ? the same time period during which the new administration was secretly formulating plans for toppling Saddam. Those early plans were not publicly disclosed, but we know about them now due to the publication of several insider accounts, including that of former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill. So, months before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush White House was already considering toppling Saddam, and at the same time it was also keenly studying Iraq’s oil fields and assessing how far along foreign companies were in their negotiations with Saddam for a piece of Iraq’s oil.
It’s also noteworthy that one person ? Dick Cheney ? was pivotal both in advancing the administration’s plans for regime change in Iraq and in formulating U.S. energy policy.

As CEO of oil services giant Halliburton Company, Cheney had been alert to the problem of securing new sources of oil. Speaking to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999, while still heading Halliburton, Cheney had focused on the difficulty of finding the 50 million extra barrels of oil per day that he said the world would need by 2010. “Where is it going to come from?” he asked, and then noted that “the Middle East with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies.”
Cheney’s focus on the Middle East and its oil continued after he became Bush’s powerful vice-president. Within weeks of the new administration taking office, Cheney was pushing forward plans for regime change in Iraq and also devising a new energy policy which included getting control of oil reserves in rogue states. His central role in these two apparently urgent initiatives is certainly suggestive of a possible connection between the U.S. invasion of Iraq and a desire for the country’s ample oil reserves ? the very thing that is vehemently denied.

One reason that regime change in Iraq was seen as offering significant benefits for Big Oil was that it promised to open up a treasure chest which had long been sealed ? private ownership of Middle Eastern oil. A small group of major international oil companies once privately owned the oil industries of the Middle East. But that changed in the 1970s when most Middle Eastern countries (and some elsewhere) nationalized their oil industries. Today, state-owned companies control the vast majority of the world’s oil resources. The major international oil companies control a mere 4 per cent.
The majors have clearly prospered in the new era, as developers rather than owners, but there’s little doubt that they’d prefer to regain ownership of the oil world’s Garden of Eden. “(O)ne of the goals of the oil companies and the Western powers is to weaken and/or privatize the world’s state oil companies,” observes New York-based economist Michael Tanzer, who advises Third World governments on energy issues.
The possibility of Iraq’s oil being reopened to private ownership ? with the promise of astonishing profits ? attracted considerable interest in the run-up to the U.S. invasion. In February 2003, as U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell held the world’s attention with his dramatic efforts to make the case that Saddam posed an imminent threat to international peace, other parts of the U.S. government were secretly developing plans to privatize Iraq’s oil (among other assets). A confidential 100-page contracting document, drawn up by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the U.S. Treasury Department, laid out a wide-ranging plan for a “Mass Privatization Program … especially in the oil and supporting industries.”

The Pentagon was also working on plans to open up Iraq’s oil sector. In the fall of 2002, months before the invasion, the Pentagon retained Philip Carroll, a former CEO of Shell Oil Co. in Texas, to draft a strategy for developing Iraqi oil. Carroll’s plans apparently became the basis of a proposed scheme, which became public shortly after the war, to redesign Iraq’s oil industry along the lines of a U.S. corporation, with a chairman, chief executive and a 15-member board of international advisers. Carroll was chosen by Washington to serve as chairman, but the plans were shelved after they encountered stiff opposition inside Iraq.

Still, the prospect of privatizing Iraq’s oil remained of great interest to U.S. oil companies, according to Robert Ebel, from the influential Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Ebel, former vice-president of a Dallas-based oil exploration company, retains close ties to the industry. In an interview in his Washington office, Ebel said it was up to Iraq to make its own decisions, but he made clear that U.S. oil companies would prefer Iraq abandon its nationalization. “We’d rather not work with national oil companies,” Ebel said bluntly, noting that the major oil companies are prepared to invest the $35 to $40 billion to develop Iraq’s reserves in the coming years. “We’re looking for places to invest around the world. You know, along comes Iraq, and I think a lot of oil companies would be disappointed if Iraq were to say `we’re going to do it ourselves’ ”
Along comes Iraq?
How fortuitous. U.S. oil companies just happened to have billions of dollars that they wanted to invest in undeveloped oil reserves when Iraq presented itself, ready for invasion.
Along comes Iraq, indeed.
In the past 14 decades, we’ve used up roughly half of all the oil that the planet has to offer. No, we’re not about to run out of oil. But long before the oil runs out, it reaches its production peak. After that, extracting the remaining oil becomes considerably more difficult and expensive.

This notion that oil production has a “peak” was first conceived in 1956 by geophysicist M. King Hubbert. He predicted that U.S. oil production would peak about 1970 ? a notion that was scoffed at at the time. As it turned out, Hubbert was dead on; U.S. oil production peaked in 1970, and has been declining ever since. Hubbert’s once-radical notion is now generally accepted.
For the world as a whole, the peak is fast approaching. Colin Campbell, one of the world’s leading geologists, estimates the world’s peak will come as soon as 2005 ? next year. “There is only so much crude oil in the world,” Campbell said in a telephone interview from his home in Ireland, “and the industry has found about 90 per cent of it.”
All this would be less serious if the world’s appetite for oil were declining in tandem. But even as the discovery of new oil fields slows down, the world’s consumption speeds up ? a dilemma Cheney highlighted in his speech to the London Petroleum Institute in 1999. For every new barrel of oil we find, we are consuming four already-discovered barrels, according to Campbell. The arithmetic is not on our side.

Particularly worrisome is the arithmetic as it applies to the U.S. With its oil production already long past peak, and yet its oil consumption rising, the U.S. will inevitably become more reliant on foreign oil. This is significant not just for Americans, but for the world, since the U.S. has long characterized its access to energy as a matter of “national security.” With its unrivalled military power, the U.S. will insist on meeting its own voracious energy needs ? and it will be up to the rest of the world to co-operate with this quest. Period.

Canada plays a greater role in this “keep-the-U.S.-energy-beast-fed” scenario than many Canadians may realize. A three-volume report prepared by a bipartisan Congressional team and CSIS, the Washington think tank, highlights how important Canada is in the U.S. energy picture of the future. The report, The Geopolitics of Energy into the 21st Century, notes that Canada is “the single largest provider of energy to the United States,” and that “Canada is poised to expand sharply its exports of oil to the United States in the coming years.”
Fine ? as long as Canada doesn’t want to change its mind about this. Well, in fact, Canada can’t change its mind about this ? a point celebrated in the report. When Canada signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993, we gave up our right to cut back the amount of oil we export to the U.S. (unless we cut our own consumption the same amount). Interestingly, Mexico, also a party to NAFTA, refused to agree to this section, and was granted an exemption.
The U.S. report points out that that, under NAFTA, Canada is not allowed to reduce its exports of oil (or other energy) to the U.S. in order to redirect them to Canadian consumers. Redirecting Canadian oil to Canadians isn’t permitted ? regardless of how great the Canadian need may be. Some outside observers, like Colin Campbell over in Ireland, find the situation striking. “You poor Canadians are going to be left freezing in the dark while they’re running hair dryers in the U.S.,” says Campbell. It’s a situation that comforts the U.S. senators, congressmen and think-tank analysts who wrote the report. With obvious satisfaction, they conclude: “There can be no more secure supplier to the United States than Canada.”

Alas, for the U.S., not every part of the world is as pliant as Canada. Most of the world’s oil is in the Middle East. And while different oil regions will reach their production peaks at different times, the Middle East will peak last, underlying Cheney’s point that the region is where “the prize ultimately lies.” Whoever controls the big oil reserves of the Middle East will then be positioned to, pretty much, control the world.

But we’re supposed to believe that, as the Bush administration assessed its options just before invading Iraq in the spring of 2003, the advantages of securing vast, untapped oil fields ? in order to guarantee U.S. energy security in a world of dwindling reserves and to enable U.S. oil companies to reap untold riches ? were far from mind. What really mattered to those in the White House, we’re told, was liberating the people of Iraq.

Adapted from It’s The Crude, Dude: War Big Oil, And The Fight For The Planet, by Linda McQuaig, 2004. Published by Doubleday Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

“With a keen eye and grim wit, McQuaiq’s perceptive inquiry into the world’s energy system strips away layer after layer of deceit, cynicism, racism, sordid manipulation, violence and aggression, in the dedicated effort to extract every possible ounce of profit and power in a race to the edge of disaster, perhaps beyond. It is an urgent wake-up call that should — that must — be read and acted upon, without delay.”
—Noam Chomsky

About the Author: Toronto-based political commentator Linda McQuaig is a past winner of a National Newspaper Award and an Atkinson Fellowship for journalism in public policy. Her column appears Sundays on the Star’s op-ed page.

Folks,

Today I’m featuring a small selection of the many recent articles about the growing chasm between Bush’s claims about our progress in Iraq and the War on Terror, and the reality.

First, ya gotta love it when one of your heroes appropriates your theme! In his new article, “Let’s Get Real,” Krugman takes on Bush for his happy talk. (As Jon Stewart cleverly pointed out last night, perhaps Bush’s appearance with Iraqi Prime Minister Allawi to promote their successes in Iraq was held in the Rose Garden in order to match the color of Bush’s glasses.)

Next, the Guardian’s Sidney Blumenthal pursues the same theme in “The Hollow World of George Bush.”

Then, from the Los Angeles Times, we have “Violence Belies Positive Picture.”

And finally, from the New York Times, “Kerry Attacks Bush’s Handling of Campaign Against Terror” covers John Kerry’s plans on what to do about it when he’s president. Kerry deserves special recognition for his comments, making it clear that he intends to do something about our deadly embrace with the Saudi royal family. Despite their absymal record as a ruling force, allowing none of the democratic freedoms we take for granted, and despite the fact that most of the 9-11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and despite the fact that much of al Qaeda’s funding comes indirectly from the Saudi royal family, Bush sees no reason to stop being such cozy bedfellows with them (while simultaneously decrying the “dictators” he has chosen to oppose…wouldn’t you love to hear him explain the logic of splitting that hair?). John Kerry intends to wrestle that bear, and more power to him.

Yes, let’s get real, shall we? Can we dispense now with the hollow claims about Iraq’s success as a democracy? Can we admit to our lack of a winning strategy, let alone an exit strategy? Or are we going to deny right up it to breaking point, like we did in Vietnam? Can we put down our savage pride and start grappling with reality here?

[OK, one more: for a good rundown on the differences between claim and reality in Iraq, try this one: Bush at the U.N.: Sugarcoating Failure]

–C

Let’s Get Real

By PAUL KRUGMAN

The New York Times

September 24, 2004

Never mind the inevitable claims that John Kerry is soft on terrorism. What he must address is the question of how his policy in Iraq would differ from President Bush’s. And his answer should be that unlike Mr. Bush, whose decisions have been dictated at every stage by grandiose visions and wishful thinking, he will get real - focusing on what is really possible in Iraq, and what needs to be done to protect American security.

Mr. Bush claims that Mr. Kerry’s plan to secure and rebuild Iraq is “exactly what we’re currently doing.” No, it isn’t. It’s only what Mr. Bush is currently saying. And we have 18 months of his administration’s deeds to contrast with his words.

The actual record is one of officials who have refused to admit that their fantasies about how the war would go were wrong, and who have continued to push us ever deeper into the quagmire because of their insistence that everything is going according to plan.

There has been a lot of press coverage of the administration’s failure to do anything serious about rebuilding Iraq. Less attention has been given to its parallel failure to take the security problem seriously until much of Iraq had already been lost.

Long after it was obvious to everyone else that we were engaged in an escalating guerrilla war, Bush appointees clung to the belief that they were fighting a handful of dead-enders and foreign terrorists.

As a result, they casually swelled the ranks of our foes - remember, Moktada al-Sadr was never going to be our friend, but he didn’t have to be our enemy. They even treated Iraqi security forces with contempt, not bothering to provide them with adequate training or equipment.

In an analysis titled “Inexcusable Failure,” Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies details how the U.S. “failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counterinsurgency effort.” U.S. officials, he declares, are “guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure.”

That failure continues. All the evidence suggests that Bush officials still think that one more military push - after the U.S. election, of course - will end the insurgency. They’re still not taking the task of fighting a sustained guerrilla war seriously.

“Three months into its new mission,” The New York Times reported, “the military command in charge of training and equipping Iraqi security forces has fewer than half of its permanent headquarters personnel in place.”

At the root of this folly is a continuing refusal to face uncomfortable facts. Confronted with a bleak C.I.A. assessment of the Iraq situation - one that matches the judgment of just about every independent expert - Mr. Bush’s response is that “they were just guessing.” “In many ways,” Mr. Cordesman writes, “the administration’s senior spokesmen still seem to live in a fantasyland.”

Fantasyland extended to the Rose Garden yesterday, where Mr. Bush said polls asking Iraqis whether their nation was on the right track were more positive than similar polls asking Americans about their outlook - and he seemed to consider that a good sign.

Where is Mr. Bush taking us? As the reality of Iraq gets worse, his explanations of our goals get ever vaguer. “The security of our world,” Mr. Bush told the U.N., “is found in the advancing rights of mankind.”

He doesn’t really believe that. After all, he continues to praise Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, even as Mr. Putin strangles democratic institutions. The subtext of Mr. Bush’s bombast is that because he can’t bring himself to admit a mistake, he refuses to give up on his effort to turn Iraq into a docile client state - an effort that is doomed unless he can figure out a way to come up with a few hundred thousand more troops.

We don’t have to go there. American policy shouldn’t be dictated by Mr. Bush’s infallibility complex; our first priority must be our own security. And in Iraq, that means setting realistic goals.

On “Meet The Press” back in April, Mr. Kerry wasn’t as forthright about Iraq as he has now, at long last, become, but he did return several times to a point that shows that he is on the right track. “What is critical,” he said, “is a stable Iraq.” Not an Iraq in our image, but a country that isn’t a “failed state” that poses a threat to American security.

The Bush administration has made such a mess of Iraq that even achieving that goal will be very hard. But unlike Mr. Bush’s fantasies, it’s still in the realm of the possible.

E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com

---

The Hollow World of George Bush

By Sidney Blumenthal

The Guardian

Thursday 23 September 2004

The power of positive thinking is the president’s shield from reality.

The news is grim, but the president is “optimistic”. The intelligence is sobering, but he tosses aside “pessimistic predictions”. His opponent says he has “no credibility”, but the president replies that it is his rival who is “twisting in the wind”. The UN secretary general speaks of the “rule of law”, but he talks before a mute general assembly of “a new definition of security”. Between the rhetoric and the reality lies the campaign.

  In Iraq, US commanders have plans for this week and the next, but there is “no overarching strategy”, I was told by a reliable source who has just returned after assessing the facts on the ground for US intelligence services. The New York Times reports that an offensive is in the works to capture the insurgent stronghold of Falluja - after the election. In the meantime, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other terrorists linked to al-Qaida operate from there at will, as they have for more than a year. The president speaks of new Iraqi security forces, but not even half the US personnel have been assigned to the headquarters of the Multinational Security Transition Command.

George Bush’s vision of the liberation of Iraq has melted before harsh facts. But reality cannot be allowed to obscure the image. The liberation is “succeeding”, he insists, and only pessimists cannot see it.

In July, the CIA delivered to the president a new national intelligence estimate that detailed three gloomy scenarios for Iraq’s future, ranging up to civil war. Perhaps it was his reading of the estimate that prompted Bush to remark in August that the war on terrorism could not be won, a judgment he swiftly reversed. And at the UN, Bush held a press conference where he rebuffed the latest intelligence.

Bush explained that, for him, intelligence is not to inform decision-making, but to be used or rejected to advance an ideological and political agenda. His dismissal is an affirmation of the politicisation and corruption of intelligence that rationalised the war.

In his stump speech, which he repeats word for word across the country, Bush explains that he invaded Iraq because of “the lesson of September the 11th”. WMD goes unmentioned; the only reason Bush offers is Saddam Hussein as an agent of terrorism. “He was a sworn enemy of the United States of America; he had ties to terrorist networks. Do you remember Abu Nidal? He’s the guy that killed Leon Klinghoffer. Leon Klinghoffer was murdered because of his religion. Abu Nidal was in Baghdad, as was his organisation.”

The period of Leon Klinghoffer’s murder in 1985 on the liner Achille Lauro (by Abu Abbas, in fact) coincided with the US courtship of Saddam, marked by the celebrated visits of then Middle East envoy Donald Rumsfeld. The US collaborated in intelligence exchanges and materially supported Saddam in his war with Iran, authorising the sale of biological agents for Saddam’s laboratories, a diversification of his WMD capability.

The reason was not born of idealism, but necessity: the threat of an expansive Iran-controlled Shia fundamentalism to the entire Gulf.

The policy of courting Saddam continued until he invaded Kuwait. But realpolitik prevailed when US forces held back from capturing Baghdad for larger, geostrategic reasons. The first Bush grasped that in wars to come, the US would need ad hoc coalitions to share the military burden and financial cost. Taking Baghdad would have violated the UN resolution that gave legitimacy to the first Gulf war, as well as creating a nightmare of “Lebanonisation”, as secretary of state James Baker called it. Realism prevailed; Saddam’s power was subdued and drastically reduced. It was the greatest accomplishment of the first President Bush.

When he honoured the UN resolution, the credibility of the US in the region was enormously enhanced, enabling serious movement on the Middle East peace process. Now this President Bush has undone the foundation of his father’s work, which was built upon by President Clinton.

Bush’s campaign depends on the containment of any contrary perception of reality. He must evade, deny and suppress it. His true opponent is not his Democratic foe - called unpatriotic and the candidate of al-Qaida by the vice-president - but events. Bush’s latest vision is his shield against them. He invokes the power of positive thinking, as taught by Emile Coue, guru of autosuggestion in the giddy 1920s, who urged mental improvement through constant repetition: “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”

It was during this era of illusion that TS Eliot wrote The Hollow Men: Between the idea/ And the reality/ Between the motion/ And the act/ Falls the Shadow.”

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Violence Belies Positive Picture

By Patrick J. McDonnell

The Los Angeles Times

Friday 24 September 2004

Baghdad - Large swaths of Iraq remain outside the control of the interim government, major highways are fraught with attackers, and interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi - along with the U.S. Embassy and much of the international community - must conduct business in fortified compounds guarded by tanks, blast walls and barbed wire.

In Washington, Allawi gave Congress an upbeat assessment Thursday, but the situation in Iraq is more complicated.

Allawi said the Iraqi people were making steady progress in taking control of the nation’s affairs. His interim government had assumed sovereignty from the U.S.-led occupation. It had reopened schools and hospitals damaged in the war. Despite attacks, hundreds of Iraqis were still volunteering to join the police and army. And he pledged that the country would hold elections in January.

Widespread anxiety engulfed much of Iraq this month as a wave of car bombings, kidnappings and gun battles killed scores of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians and hostages.

The continuing violence has overshadowed signs of progress and put a damper on the prospect of democratic elections.

“How can we hold elections when they will bomb every polling booth?” asked Husham Mahdi, a 29-year-old communications engineer in Baghdad, echoing a common sentiment.

In a question and answer session after his speech to Congress, Allawi described Baghdad as “very good and safe.”

In the city of Samarra, Allawi noted, a new police chief had been appointed and Iraqi forces were patrolling the city “in close coordination” with the U.S.-led coalition. But U.S. commanders say the insurgent stronghold, which the Army recently entered for the first time in months, remains far from pacified.

“Samarra is not over with,” said Lt. Col. James Stockmoe, intelligence officer with the 1st Infantry Division, which patrols Samarra.

The police chief appointed this month, at least the 12th since Saddam Hussein’s ouster, resigned within a few days after receiving death threats.

Some U.S. military officials fear that the city’s police force is largely in cahoots with insurgents, giving them access to weapons and vehicles. In July, a suicide bomber used a police vehicle to plow into the Army base outside Samarra, killing five U.S. soldiers and injuring 18.

Allawi blamed the American media for failing to report some of the positive steps his government had taken with the help of the U.S.-led coalition. He cited social programs such as polio vaccinations and other efforts. He said thousands of Iraqis had gotten jobs, salaries had increased dramatically and the economy “has finally started to flourish.”

Allawi praised efforts to train more soldiers and police and said the performance of the new Iraqi security forces was “improving every day.”

U.S. commanders credit Iraqi forces for helping to rid Najaf of fighters loyal to radical cleric Muqtada Sadr. But it remains questionable whether they can take on insurgents without U.S. help. Shortages of equipment and personnel continue to plague the forces.

On a recent visit to Baqubah, where police have often been targeted, Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus - who is overseeing the training of Iraqi forces - listened as local police and national guard officers said they desperately needed more trained officers and equipment. His visit came a few days after 11 provincial police officers were killed in a drive-by attack.

“We’ve got to create a training academy here,” said Petraeus, who also offered to ship new armored vehicles, body armor and other gear from Baghdad.

The continued inability of Iraqi forces to secure areas after U.S. offensives has been a major reason such operations have been put on hold in places like Samarra and Fallouja.

“We have got the tactical ability to do just about anything, but what I don’t want to do is create a vacuum,” Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz, operational chief for U.S.-led multinational forces, said in a recent interview.

Allawi said that in the city of Tall Afar, in northwestern Iraq, the interim government had “reversed” an attempted insurgent takeover.

Reports from the city indicate that masked rebels no longer control the town. But the city’s Turkmen majority, regarded a U.S. ally, is resentful after what it views as excessive American force and bombing, which was approved by Allawi’s government.

Allawi also cited “success” in Najaf and Kufa, where residents celebrated the ouster of Sadr, the militant cleric.

Although the militia was routed in both cities, many fighters appear to have moved to Baghdad’s Sadr City neighborhood. Daily firefights and roadside bombs have plagued the U.S. there.

Allawi said it was “a fact” that elections could be held in 15 of Iraq’s 18 provinces “tomorrow.” But few experts would agree. The consensus among poll-watchers is that holding nationwide elections by January, as scheduled, will be difficult.

Apart from the widespread violence, the provinces lack electoral infrastructure - which some view as a greater challenge than security.

And critics say it is hard to argue that security is a problem in only three provinces of a nation where suicide bombers have struck from Basra in the south to Irbil in the north.

Allawi cited the renovation of schools and clinics and the restoration of many services as signs of progress. But many Iraqis note that the schools were open before Hussein’s ouster, and power blackouts and gasoline shortages remain major irritants.

Allawi’s upbeat assessment did not mention a core problem - the disenfranchisement of the Sunni Muslim minority.

Sunni Muslims, who lost their preferred status after Hussein’s defeat, launched the insurgency that has managed to hold off the world’s most powerful military.

“They are the key to the population here,” said Col. John C. Coleman, chief of staff of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, which patrols the Sunni heartland to the west and north of Baghdad. “Many of them look to the central government not as their advocateÅ . There are many who would just like a seat at the table and don’t quite understand how to get there just yet. They are frustrated by the process.”

Allawi’s overtures to the residents of Samarra, Fallouja and Ramadi - Sunni-dominated cities still far from government control - have yielded no lasting breakthroughs.

In his speech Thursday, the interim prime minister did not highlight Fallouja, which has become a sanctuary for insurgents and the target of intense U.S. bombings supported by his government. City leaders who have met with representatives of the interim government say it has lost credibility because of close U.S. ties.

“There were some promises made,” said Ahmad Hardan, a physician from Fallouja who has been in talks with Allawi’s envoys. “But we started to realize that whenever our delegation would go back to Baghdad, the city of Fallouja would be bombed. And we would start asking, ‘Why is this happening? Where are the promises?’ ”

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Kerry Attacks Bush’s Handling of Campaign Against Terror

By MARIA NEWMAN

The New York Times

September 24, 2004

Senator John Kerry assailed President Bush today for going after Saddam Hussein when he should have been focused on hunting down Osama Bin Laden, and said that the Bush administration was “in confusion” about how to combat the growth of terrorism.

The senator also said that the West must reach out to Islamic youth around the world and convince those inclined to militancy that “there is more to life than salvation through martyrdom.”

Mr. Kerry, continuing to hammer, as he has all week, at the president’s policies on Iraq and terrorism, said that “we have to refocus our energies on the war on terror.”

“The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy, Al Qaeda,” Mr. Kerry said in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia. “There’s just no question about it. The president’s misjudgment, miscalculation and mismanagement of the war in Iraq all make the war on terror harder to win.”

Mr. Kerry said that because Mr. Bush had focused the military’s might and money on fighting Mr. Hussein’s regime, “Iraq is now what it was not before the war — a haven for terrorists.”

The Democratic presidential candidate offered up a detailed strategy to contain terrorism, and called for more attention to the politics, culture and economics of the broad Islamic world, and more cooperation with allies to fight the growth of terrorism within some Islamic factions and communities.

“We have to win the war of ideas,” he said, pointing out that more than 50 percent of the population in the Arab and Muslim world is under age 25.

“If all they get to do is go to radical Islamic madrassas and learn how to hate and learn how to strap themselves with explosives, we have a problem for years to come, my friends,” he said. “New generations have to believe that there is more to life than salvation through martyrdom.”

“The war on terror is the monumental struggle of our time, it is as monumental a struggle as the cold war,” Mr. Kerry said. “Its outcome will determine whether we and our children will live in freedom or in fear. It is not, as some people think, a clash of civilizations. Radical Islamic fundamentalism is not the true face of Islam.”

With many polls showing that voters have more confidence in Mr. Bush’s approach to the war in Iraq and terrorism, Mr. Kerry has tried all week to convince them that an exaggerated focus on Iraq has led the president to ignore the broader issue of growing terrorism around the world.

Senator Kerry said that the president was “living in a fantasy world of spin” even as some senior advisers and fellow Republicans, privately and publicly, express concern over the growing violence in Iraq and elsewhere.

“We hear the president, the commander in chief, proclaiming one day that this war can’t be won, and then saying something different the next day,” Mr. Kerry said. “And we hear the secretary of defense himself wondering whether the radicals are recruiting, training, and deploying more terrorists than we are capturing or killing.”

Senator Kerry’s remarks came a day after the interim Iraqi prime minister, Ayad Allawi, paid Washington a visit, which served to reinforce the starkly differing views of the Bush and Kerry campaigns on the situation in Iraq.

On Thursday, President Bush said, “You can understand it’s tough and still be optimistic,” and Mr. Allawi vowed that elections would be held in January even though “they may not be perfect” because of the rising violence in parts of Iraq.

Senator Kerry responded by saying that the prime minister was contradicting himself, alternately saying that terrorists were pouring into the country and that they were on the defensive.

Today, the president, who was in Wisconsin to talk about education, veered from his message of the day to say that Mr. Kerry should not be criticizing Mr. Allawi.

“You can’t lead this country if your ally in Iraq feels like you question his credibility,” the president said.

And while he continued to sound optimimistic about the war in Iraq, he also acknowledged some of the recent violence, including the beheading of two American engineers this week.

“You know, we weep when we see a person be beheaded on our TV screens,” he said, adding, “We value human dignity in our society.”

“That’s why it’s very important for us to not send mixed signals to the world, not embolden these people,” he added.

Today, Mr. Kerry set forth a detailed seven-point proposal for how he would fight terrorism, a plan that includes going after those who finance terrorist operations, including those in Saudi Arabia.

“I will do what President Bush has not: I will hold the Saudis accountable,” Mr. Kerry said, in a discussion that drew a standing ovation and his loudest applause.

He said that since 9/11, there had been no prosecutions of terrorist financial backers in Saudi Arabia, and only a few in other places. Mr. Kerry vowed to work with American allies, with the World Bank and international financial institutions “to shut down the financial pipeline that keeps terrorism alive.”

“And I will pursue a plan to make this nation energy independent of Mideast oil,” he said. “I want an America that relies on our own innovation and ingenuity, not the Saudi Royal Family.”

Mr. Kerry also said he would increase by 40,000 the number of troops “not for Iraq, but so that we have more soldiers to actually fight and find the terrorists in the places that they are.” He would also strengthen intelligence systems and shut down the supply route of deadly weapons to the terrorists from other countries.

He further said he would beef up domestic security, including better protection at the nation’s ports and more security in vulnerable areas like subways “so that what happened in Madrid doesn’t happen here in the United States of America.”

Mr. Kerry also said that any plan to fight terrorism had to go beyond just sending in American troops. He said his plan included initiatives to keep terrorists from increasing their ranks and to promote the development of free and democratic societies in the Islamic world.

In order to keep the ranks of terrorists from growing, he said, Americans must become smarter about countering the efforts of Al Qaeda to win “the heart and soul of the Muslim world.”

“We will win this war only if the terrorists lose that struggle,” he said. “We will win when ordinary people from Nigeria to Egypt, to Pakistan, to Indonesia know that they have more to live for than to die for.”

He said that many of the terrorists’ recruits were coming from poor Muslim communities. Under his plan, the United States could use its economic power to help poor Muslim countries in exchange for “them living up to goals of social and economic progress.”

Lastly, Mr. Kerry said that the United States would have to work harder to win allies in its struggle against terrorism. “We will not succeed in destroying freedom’s adversaries if we are divided from freedom’s friends,” he said.

“The terrorists certainly understand that,” he said. “They’re making a special effort to set off bombs in Turkey, Morocco and Indonesia. They want to keep other countries from standing with us in the war on terror. They know what the Bush administration has been so reluctant to admit — that we are weaker when we fight almost alone.”

He said that the Bush administration had said that the United States must act alone because the Europeans “won’t help us, no matter what.”

“I have news for President Bush,” Mr. Kerry said. “Just because you can’t do it, doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

“I believe we can win the war on terror,” he said.

Folks,

In keeping with my current focus on strong statements from the Left, today’s message from Michael Moore is just what the doctor ordered. Buck up, folks. Get out there and DO something.

–C

Put Away Your Hankies…a message from Michael Moore

September 21, 2004

Dear Friends,

Enough of the handwringing! Enough of the doomsaying! Do I have to come there and personally calm you down? Stop with all the defeatism, OK? Bush IS a goner — IF we all just quit our whining and bellyaching and stop shaking like a bunch of nervous ninnies. Geez, this is embarrassing! The Republicans are laughing at us. Do you ever see them cry, “Oh, it’s all over! We are finished! Bush can’t win! Waaaaaa!”

Hell no. It’s never over for them until the last ballot is shredded. They are never finished — they just keeping moving forward like sharks that never sleep, always pushing, pulling, kicking, blocking, lying.

They are relentless and that is why we secretly admire them — they just simply never, ever give up. Only 30% of the country calls itself “Republican,” yet the Republicans own it all — the White House, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the majority of the governorships. How do you think they’ve been able to pull that off considering they are a minority? It’s because they eat you and me and every other liberal for breakfast and then spend the rest of the day wreaking havoc on the planet.

Look at us — what a bunch of crybabies. Bush gets a bounce after his convention and you would have thought the Germans had run through Poland again. The Bushies are coming, the Bushies are coming! Yes, they caught Kerry asleep on the Swift Boat thing. Yes, they found the frequency in Dan Rather and ran with it. Suddenly it’s like, “THE END IS NEAR! THE SKY IS FALLING!”

No, it is not. If I hear one more person tell me how lousy a candidate Kerry is and how he can’t win… Dammit, of COURSE he’s a lousy candidate — he’s a Democrat, for heavens sake! That party is so pathetic, they even lose the elections they win! What were you expecting, Bruce Springsteen heading up the ticket? Bruce would make a helluva president, but guys like him don’t run — and neither do you or I. People like Kerry run.

Yes, OF COURSE any of us would have run a better, smarter, kick-ass campaign. Of course we would have smacked each and every one of those phony swifty boaty bastards down. But WE are not running for president — Kerry is. So quit complaining and work with what we have. Oprah just gave 300 women a… Pontiac! Did you see any of them frowning and moaning and screaming, “Oh God, NOT a friggin’ Pontiac!” Of course not, they were happy. The Pontiacs all had four wheels, an engine and a gas pedal. You want more than that, well, I can’t help you. I had a Pontiac once and it lasted a good year. And it was a VERY good year.

My friends, it is time for a reality check.

1. The polls are wrong. They are all over the map like diarrhea. On Friday, one poll had Bush 13 points ahead — and another poll had them both tied. There are three reasons why the polls are b.s.: One, they are polling “likely voters.” “Likely” means those who have consistently voted in the past few elections. So that cuts out young people who are voting for the first time and a ton of non-voters who are definitely going to vote in THIS election. Second, they are not polling people who use their cell phone as their primary phone. Again, that means they are not talking to young people. Finally, most of the polls are weighted with too many Republicans, as pollster John Zogby revealed last week. You are being snookered if you believe any of these polls.

2. Kerry has brought in the Clinton A-team. Instead of shunning Clinton (as Gore did), Kerry has decided to not make that mistake.

3. Traveling around the country, as I’ve been doing, I gotta tell ya, there is a hell of a lot of unrest out there. Much of it is not being captured by the mainstream press. But it is simmering and it is real. Do not let those well-produced Bush rallies of angry white people scare you. Turn off the TV! (Except Jon Stewart and Bill Moyers — everything else is just a sugar-coated lie).

4. Conventional wisdom says if the election is decided on “9/11″ (the fear of terrorism), Bush wins. But if it is decided on the job we are doing in Iraq, then Bush loses. And folks, that “job,” you might have noticed, has descended into the third level of a hell we used to call Vietnam. There is no way out. It is a full-blown mess of a quagmire and the body bags will sadly only mount higher. Regardless of what Kerry meant by his original war vote, he ain’t the one who sent those kids to their deaths — and Mr. and Mrs. Middle America knows it. Had Bush bothered to show up when he was in the “service” he might have somewhat of a clue as to how to recognize an immoral war that cannot be “won.” All he has delivered to Iraq was that plasticized turkey last Thanksgiving. It is this failure of monumental proportions that is going to cook his goose come this November.

So, do not despair. All is not over. Far from it. The Bush people need you to believe that it is over. They need you to slump back into your easy chair and feel that sick pain in your gut as you contemplate another four years of George W. Bush. They need you to wish we had a candidate who didn’t windsurf and who was just as smart as we were when WE knew Bush was lying about WMD and Saddam planning 9/11. It’s like Karl Rove is hypnotizing you — “Kerry voted for the war…Kerry voted for the war…Kerrrrrryyy vooootted fooooor theeee warrrrrrrrrr…”

Yes…Yes…Yesssss…He did! HE DID! No sense in fighting now…what I need is sleep…sleeep…sleeeeeeppppp…

WAKE UP! The majority are with us! More than half of all Americans are pro-choice, want stronger environmental laws, are appalled that assault weapons are back on the street — and 54% now believe the war is wrong. YOU DON’T EVEN HAVE TO CONVINCE THEM OF ANY OF THIS — YOU JUST HAVE TO GIVE THEM A RAY OF HOPE AND A RIDE TO THE POLLS. CAN YOU DO THAT? WILL YOU DO THAT?

Just for me, please? Buck up. The country is almost back in our hands. Not another negative word until Nov. 3rd! Then you can bitch all you want about how you wish Kerry was still that long-haired kid who once had the courage to stand up for something. Personally, I think that kid is still inside him. Instead of the wailing and gnashing of your teeth, why not hold out a hand to him and help the inner soldier/protester come out and defeat the forces of evil we now so desperately face. Do we have any other choice?

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com
mmflint@aol.com

Folks,

This essay by Ron Reagan may be the best argument yet about why we cannot afford to give Dubya another term. It’s a month old now, so maybe you’ve seen it already, but I thought it definitely worth recirculating. It’s eloquent, accurate, and balanced enough for any Republican (or son of a Republican president) to see the peril that this administration has gotten us into. Read it. Ask yourself if it’s not true. And especially, forward it to any non-voters you know, for it is likely in their hands that the outcome of the next election rests.

Dubya’s record is long with lies, and we the people must put a stop to it. They have never admitted a single one of them, even when faced with incontrovertible facts. Instead, they have focused all of their energy on tearing apart John Kerry, as if their four years of failed policy could just be forgotten.
John Kerry may not be the perfect candidate that we’d all like to have, but at least he’s honest, and offers a strong set of realistic policies that can help to turn this country around. With one of the longest and strongest records of anyone in Congress on protecting the environment and the rights and basic needs of our citizens, we know that we can can trust him. Dubya has lied to us about so many things, there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that he cannot be trusted, and cannot be believed.

Enough with the lies. Enough with the spin. It’s time for the presidency to get real, and join the rest of us.

–C

The Case Against George W. Bush

By Ron Reagan

Esquire

September 2004, Volume 142, Issue 3
It may have been the guy in the hood teetering on the stool, electrodes clamped to his genitals. Or smirking Lynndie England and her leash. Maybe it was the smarmy memos tapped out by soft-fingered lawyers itching to justify such barbarism. The grudging, lunatic retreat of the neocons from their long-standing assertion that Saddam was in cahoots with Osama didn’t hurt. Even the Enron audiotapes and their celebration of craven sociopathy likely played a part. As a result of all these displays and countless smaller ones, you could feel, a couple of months back, as summer spread across the country, the ground shifting beneath your feet. Not unlike that scene in The Day After Tomorrow, then in theaters, in which the giant ice shelf splits asunder, this was more a paradigm shift than anything strictly tectonic. No cataclysmic ice age, admittedly, yet something was in the air, and people were inhaling deeply. I began to get calls from friends whose parents had always voted Republican, “but not this time.” There was the staid Zbigniew Brzezinski on the staid NewsHour with Jim Lehrer sneering at the “Orwellian language” flowing out of the Pentagon. Word spread through the usual channels that old hands from the days of Bush the Elder were quietly (but not too quietly) appalled by his son’s misadventure in Iraq. Suddenly, everywhere you went, a surprising number of folks seemed to have had just about enough of what the Bush administration was dishing out. A fresh age appeared on the horizon, accompanied by the sound of scales falling from people’s eyes. It felt something like a demonstration of that highest of American prerogatives and the most deeply cherished American freedom: dissent.

Oddly, even my father’s funeral contributed. Throughout that long, stately, overtelevised week in early June, items would appear in the newspaper discussing the Republicans’ eagerness to capitalize (subtly, tastefully) on the outpouring of affection for my father and turn it to Bush’s advantage for the fall election. The familiar “Heir to Reagan” puffballs were reinflated and loosed over the proceedings like (subtle, tasteful) Mylar balloons. Predictably, this backfired. People were treated to a side-by-side comparison—Ronald W. Reagan versus George W. Bush—and it’s no surprise who suffered for it. Misty-eyed with nostalgia, people set aside old political gripes for a few days and remembered what friend and foe always conceded to Ronald Reagan: He was damned impressive in the role of leader of the free world. A sign in the crowd, spotted during the slow roll to the Capitol rotunda, seemed to sum up the mood—a portrait of my father and the words NOW THERE WAS A PRESIDENT.

The comparison underscored something important. And the guy on the stool, Lynndie, and her grinning cohorts, they brought the word: The Bush administration can’t be trusted. The parade of Bush officials before various commissions and committees—Paul Wolfowitz, who couldn’t quite remember how many young Americans had been sacrificed on the altar of his ideology; John Ashcroft, lip quivering as, for a delicious, fleeting moment, it looked as if Senator Joe Biden might just come over the table at him—these were a continuing reminder. The Enron creeps, too—a reminder of how certain environments and particular habits of mind can erode common decency. People noticed. A tipping point had been reached. The issue of credibility was back on the table. The L-word was in circulation. Not the tired old bromide liberal. That’s so 1988. No, this time something much more potent: liar.

Politicians will stretch the truth. They’ll exaggerate their accomplishments, paper over their gaffes. Spin has long been the lingua franca of the political realm. But George W. Bush and his administration have taken “normal” mendacity to a startling new level far beyond lies of convenience. On top of the usual massaging of public perception, they traffic in big lies, indulge in any number of symptomatic small lies, and, ultimately, have come to embody dishonesty itself. They are a lie. And people, finally, have started catching on.

None of this, needless to say, guarantees Bush a one-term presidency. The far-right wing of the country—nearly one third of us by some estimates—continues to regard all who refuse to drink the Kool-Aid (liberals, rationalists, Europeans, et cetera) as agents of Satan. Bush could show up on video canoodling with Paris Hilton and still bank their vote. Right-wing talking heads continue painting anyone who fails to genuflect deeply enough as a “hater,” and therefore a nut job, probably a crypto-Islamist car bomber. But these protestations have taken on a hysterical, almost comically desperate tone. It’s one thing to get trashed by Michael Moore. But when Nobel laureates, a vast majority of the scientific community, and a host of current and former diplomats, intelligence operatives, and military officials line up against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to characterize the opposition as fringe wackos.

Does anyone really favor an administration that so shamelessly lies? One that so tenaciously clings to secrecy, not to protect the American people, but to protect itself? That so willfully misrepresents its true aims and so knowingly misleads the people from whom it derives its power? I simply cannot think so. And to come to the same conclusion does not make you guilty of swallowing some liberal critique of the Bush presidency, because that’s not what this is. This is the critique of a person who thinks that lying at the top levels of his government is abhorrent. Call it the honest guy’s critique of George W. Bush.

THE MOST EGREGIOUS EXAMPLES OF distortion and misdirection—which the administration even now cannot bring itself to repudiate—involve our putative “War on Terror” and our subsequent foray into Iraq.

During his campaign for the presidency, Mr. Bush pledged a more “humble” foreign policy. “I would take the use of force very seriously,” he said. “I would be guarded in my approach.” Other countries would resent us “if we’re an arrogant nation.” He sniffed at the notion of “nation building.” “Our military is meant to fight and win wars. . . . And when it gets overextended, morale drops.” International cooperation and consensus building would be the cornerstone of a Bush administration’s approach to the larger world. Given candidate Bush’s remarks, it was hard to imagine him, as president, flipping a stiff middle finger at the world and charging off adventuring in the Middle East.

But didn’t 9/11 reshuffle the deck, changing everything? Didn’t Mr. Bush, on September 12, 2001, awaken to the fresh realization that bad guys in charge of Islamic nations constitute an entirely new and grave threat to us and have to be ruthlessly confronted lest they threaten the American homeland again? Wasn’t Saddam Hussein rushed to the front of the line because he was complicit with the hijackers and in some measure responsible for the atrocities in Washington, D. C., and at the tip of Manhattan?

Well, no.

As Bush’s former Treasury secretary, Paul O’Neill, and his onetime “terror czar,” Richard A. Clarke, have made clear, the president, with the enthusiastic encouragement of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, was contemplating action against Iraq from day one. “From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out,” O’Neill said. All they needed was an excuse. Clarke got the same impression from within the White House. Afghanistan had to be dealt with first; that’s where the actual perpetrators were, after all. But the Taliban was a mere appetizer; Saddam was the entrée. (Or who knows? The soup course?) It was simply a matter of convincing the American public (and our representatives) that war was justified.

The real—but elusive—prime mover behind the 9/11 attacks, Osama bin Laden, was quickly relegated to a back burner (a staff member at Fox News—the cable-TV outlet of the Bush White House—told me a year ago that mere mention of bin Laden’s name was forbidden within the company, lest we be reminded that the actual bad guy remained at large) while Saddam’s Iraq became International Enemy Number One. Just like that, a country whose economy had been reduced to shambles by international sanctions, whose military was less than half the size it had been when the U. S. Army rolled over it during the first Gulf war, that had extensive no-flight zones imposed on it in the north and south as well as constant aerial and satellite surveillance, and whose lethal weapons and capacity to produce such weapons had been destroyed or seriously degraded by UN inspection teams became, in Mr. Bush’s words, “a threat of unique urgency” to the most powerful nation on earth.

Fanciful but terrifying scenarios were introduced: Unmanned aircraft, drones, had been built for missions targeting the U. S., Bush told the nation. “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice deadpanned to CNN. And, Bush maintained, “Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists.” We “know” Iraq possesses such weapons, Rumsfeld and Vice-President Cheney assured us. We even “know” where they are hidden. After several months of this mumbo jumbo, 70 percent of Americans had embraced the fantasy that Saddam destroyed the World Trade Center.

ALL THESE ASSERTIONS have proved to be baseless and, we’ve since discovered, were regarded with skepticism by experts at the time they were made. But contrary opinions were derided, ignored, or covered up in the rush to war. Even as of this writing, Dick Cheney clings to his mad assertion that Saddam was somehow at the nexus of a worldwide terror network.

And then there was Abu Ghraib. Our “war president” may have been justified in his assumption that Americans are a warrior people. He pushed the envelope in thinking we’d be content as an occupying power, but he was sadly mistaken if he thought that ordinary Americans would tolerate an image of themselves as torturers. To be fair, the torture was meant to be secret. So were the memos justifying such treatment that had floated around the White House, Pentagon, and Justice Department for more than a year before the first photos came to light. The neocons no doubt appreciate that few of us have the stones to practice the New Warfare. Could you slip a pair of women’s panties over the head of a naked, cowering stranger while forcing him to masturbate? What would you say while sodomizing him with a toilet plunger? Is keeping someone awake till he hallucinates inhumane treatment or merely “sleep management”?

Most of us know the answers to these questions, so it was incumbent upon the administration to pretend that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, not policy. Investigations, we were assured, were already under way; relevant bureaucracies would offer unstinting cooperation; the handful of miscreants would be sternly disciplined. After all, they didn’t “represent the best of what America’s all about.” As anyone who’d watched the proceedings of the 9/11 Commission could have predicted, what followed was the usual administration strategy of stonewalling, obstruction, and obfuscation. The appointment of investigators was stalled; documents were withheld, including the full report by Major General Antonio Taguba, who headed the Army’s primary investigation into the abuses at Abu Ghraib. A favorite moment for many featured John McCain growing apoplectic as Donald Rumsfeld and an entire tableful of army brass proved unable to answer the simple question Who was in charge at Abu Ghraib?

The Bush administration no doubt had its real reasons for invading and occupying Iraq. They’ve simply chosen not to share them with the American public. They sought justification for ignoring the Geneva Convention and other statutes prohibiting torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners but were loath to acknowledge as much. They may have ideas worth discussing, but they don’t welcome the rest of us in the conversation. They don’t trust us because they don’t dare expose their true agendas to the light of day. There is a surreal quality to all this: Occupation is liberation; Iraq is sovereign, but we’re in control; Saddam is in Iraqi custody, but we’ve got him; we’ll get out as soon as an elected Iraqi government asks us, but we’ll be there for years to come. Which is what we counted on in the first place, only with rose petals and easy coochie.

This Möbius reality finds its domestic analogue in the perversely cynical “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” sloganeering at Bush’s EPA and in the administration’s irresponsible tax cutting and other fiscal shenanigans. But the Bush administration has always worn strangely tinted shades, and you wonder to what extent Mr. Bush himself lives in a world of his own imagining.

And chances are your America and George W. Bush’s America are not the same place. If you are dead center on the earning scale in real-world twenty-first-century America, you make a bit less than $32,000 a year, and $32,000 is not a sum that Mr. Bush has ever associated with getting by in his world. Bush, who has always managed to fail upwards in his various careers, has never had a job the way you have a job—where not showing up one morning gets you fired, costing you your health benefits. He may find it difficult to relate personally to any of the nearly two million citizens who’ve lost their jobs under his administration, the first administration since Herbert Hoover’s to post a net loss of jobs. Mr. Bush has never had to worry that he couldn’t afford the best available health care for his children. For him, forty-three million people without health insurance may be no more than a politically inconvenient abstraction. When Mr. Bush talks about the economy, he is not talking about your economy. His economy is filled with pals called Kenny-boy who fly around in their own airplanes. In Bush’s economy, his world, friends relocate offshore to avoid paying taxes. Taxes are for chumps like you. You are not a friend. You’re the help. When the party Mr. Bush is hosting in his world ends, you’ll be left picking shrimp toast out of the carpet.

ALL ADMINISTRATIONS WILL DISSEMBLE, distort, or outright lie when their backs are against the wall, when honesty begins to look like political suicide. But this administration seems to lie reflexively, as if it were simply the easiest option for busy folks with a lot on their minds. While the big lies are more damning and of immeasurably greater import to the nation, it is the small, unnecessary prevarications that may be diagnostic. Who lies when they don’t have to? When the simple truth, though perhaps embarrassing in the short run, is nevertheless in one’s long-term self-interest? Why would a president whose calling card is his alleged rock-solid integrity waste his chief asset for penny-ante stakes? Habit, perhaps. Or an inability to admit even small mistakes.

Mr. Bush’s tendency to meander beyond the bounds of truth was evident during the 2000 campaign but was largely ignored by the mainstream media. His untruths simply didn’t fit the agreed-upon narrative. While generally acknowledged to be lacking in experience, depth, and other qualifications typically considered useful in a leader of the free world, Bush was portrayed as a decent fellow nonetheless, one whose straightforwardness was a given. None of that “what the meaning of is is” business for him. And, God knows, no furtive, taxpayer-funded fellatio sessions with the interns. Al Gore, on the other hand, was depicted as a dubious self-reinventor, stained like a certain blue dress by Bill Clinton’s prurient transgressions. He would spend valuable weeks explaining away statements—”I invented the Internet”—that he never made in the first place. All this left the coast pretty clear for Bush.

Scenario typical of the 2000 campaign: While debating Al Gore, Bush tells two obvious—if not exactly earth-shattering—lies and is not challenged. First, he claims to have supported a patient’s bill of rights while governor of Texas. This is untrue. He, in fact, vigorously resisted such a measure, only reluctantly bowing to political reality and allowing it to become law without his signature. Second, he announces that Gore has outspent him during the campaign. The opposite is true: Bush has outspent Gore. These misstatements are briefly acknowledged in major press outlets, which then quickly return to the more germane issues of Gore’s pancake makeup and whether a certain feminist author has counseled him to be more of an “alpha male.”

Having gotten away with such witless falsities, perhaps Mr. Bush and his team felt somehow above day-to-day truth. In any case, once ensconced in the White House, they picked up where they left off.

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH and confusion of 9/11, Bush, who on that day was in Sarasota, Florida, conducting an emergency reading of “The Pet Goat,” was whisked off to Nebraska aboard Air Force One. While this may have been entirely sensible under the chaotic circumstances—for all anyone knew at the time, Washington might still have been under attack—the appearance was, shall we say, less than gallant. So a story was concocted: There had been a threat to Air Force One that necessitated the evasive maneuver. Bush’s chief political advisor, Karl Rove, cited “specific” and “credible” evidence to that effect. The story quickly unraveled. In truth, there was no such threat.

Then there was Bush’s now infamous photo-op landing aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and his subsequent speech in front of a large banner emblazoned MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. The banner, which loomed in the background as Bush addressed the crew, became problematic as it grew clear that the mission in Iraq—whatever that may have been—was far from accomplished. “Major combat operations,” as Bush put it, may have technically ended, but young Americans were still dying almost daily. So the White House dealt with the questionable banner in a manner befitting a president pledged to “responsibility and accountability”: It blamed the sailors. No surprise, a bit of digging by journalists revealed the banner and its premature triumphalism to be the work of the White House communications office.

More serious by an order of magnitude was the administration’s dishonesty concerning pre-9/11 terror warnings. As questions first arose about the country’s lack of preparedness in the face of terrorist assault, Condoleezza Rice was dispatched to the pundit arenas to assure the nation that “no one could have imagined terrorists using aircraft as weapons.” In fact, terrorism experts had warned repeatedly of just such a calamity. In June 2001, CIA director George Tenet sent Rice an intelligence report warning that “it is highly likely that a significant Al Qaeda attack is in the near future, within several weeks.” Two intelligence briefings given to Bush in the summer of 2001 specifically connected Al Qaeda to the imminent danger of hijacked planes being used as weapons. According to The New York Times, after the second of these briefings, titled “Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside United States,” was delivered to the president at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, in August, Bush “broke off from work early and spent most of the day fishing.” This was the briefing Dr. Rice dismissed as “historical” in her testimony before the 9/11 Commission.

What’s odd is that none of these lies were worth the breath expended in the telling. If only for self-serving political reasons, honesty was the way to go. The flight of Air Force One could easily have been explained in terms of security precautions taken in the confusion of momentous events. As for the carrier landing, someone should have fallen on his or her sword at the first hint of trouble: We told the president he needed to do it; he likes that stuff and was gung-ho; we figured, What the hell?; it was a mistake. The banner? We thought the sailors would appreciate it. In retrospect, also a mistake. Yup, we sure feel dumb now. Owning up to the 9/11 warnings would have entailed more than simple embarrassment. But done forthrightly and immediately, an honest reckoning would have earned the Bush team some respect once the dust settled. Instead, by needlessly tap-dancing, Bush’s White House squandered vital credibility, turning even relatively minor gaffes into telling examples of its tendency to distort and evade the truth.

But image is everything in this White House, and the image of George Bush as a noble and infallible warrior in the service of his nation must be fanatically maintained, because behind the image lies . . . nothing? As Jonathan Alter of Newsweek has pointed out, Bush has “never fully inhabited” the presidency. Bush apologists can smilingly excuse his malopropisms and vagueness as the plainspokenness of a man of action, but watching Bush flounder when attempting to communicate extemporaneously, one is left with the impression that he is ineloquent not because he can’t speak but because he doesn’t bother to think.

GEORGE W. BUSH PROMISED to “change the tone in Washington” and ran for office as a moderate, a “compassionate conservative,” in the focus-group-tested sloganeering of his campaign. Yet he has governed from the right wing of his already conservative party, assiduously tending a “base” that includes, along with the expected Fortune 500 fat cats, fiscal evangelicals who talk openly of doing away with Social Security and Medicare, of shrinking government to the size where they can, in tax radical Grover Norquist’s phrase, “drown it in the bathtub.” That base also encompasses a healthy share of anti-choice zealots, homophobic bigots, and assorted purveyors of junk science. Bush has tossed bones to all of them—”partial birth” abortion legislation, the promise of a constitutional amendment banning marriage between homosexuals, federal roadblocks to embryonic-stem-cell research, even comments suggesting presidential doubts about Darwinian evolution. It’s not that Mr. Bush necessarily shares their worldview; indeed, it’s unclear whether he embraces any coherent philosophy. But this president, who vowed to eschew politics in favor of sound policy, panders nonetheless in the interest of political gain. As John DiIulio, Bush’s former head of the Office of Community and Faith-Based Initiatives, once told this magazine, “What you’ve got is everything—and I mean everything—being run by the political arm.”

This was not what the American electorate opted for when, in 2000, by a slim but decisive margin of more than half a million votes, they chose . . . the other guy. Bush has never had a mandate. Surveys indicate broad public dissatisfaction with his domestic priorities. How many people would have voted for Mr. Bush in the first place had they understood his eagerness to pass on crushing debt to our children or seen his true colors regarding global warming and the environment? Even after 9/11, were people really looking to be dragged into an optional war under false pretenses?

If ever there was a time for uniting and not dividing, this is it. Instead, Mr. Bush governs as if by divine right, seeming to actually believe that a wise God wants him in the White House and that by constantly evoking the horrible memory of September 11, 2001, he can keep public anxiety stirred up enough to carry him to another term.

UNDERSTANDABLY, SOME SUPPORTERS of Mr. Bush’s will believe I harbor a personal vendetta against the man, some seething resentment. One conservative commentator, based on earlier remarks I’ve made, has already discerned “jealousy” on my part; after all, Bush, the son of a former president, now occupies that office himself, while I, most assuredly, will not. Truth be told, I have no personal feelings for Bush at all. I hardly know him, having met him only twice, briefly and uneventfully—once during my father’s presidency and once during my father’s funeral. I’ll acknowledge occasional annoyance at the pretense that he’s somehow a clone of my father, but far from threatening, I see this more as silly and pathetic. My father, acting roles excepted, never pretended to be anyone but himself. His Republican party, furthermore, seems a far cry from the current model, with its cringing obeisance to the religious Right and its kill-anything-that-moves attack instincts. Believe it or not, I don’t look in the mirror every morning and see my father looming over my shoulder. I write and speak as nothing more or less than an American citizen, one who is plenty angry about the direction our country is being dragged by the current administration. We have reached a critical juncture in our nation’s history, one ripe with both danger and possibility. We need leadership with the wisdom to prudently confront those dangers and the imagination to boldly grasp the possibilities. Beyond issues of fiscal irresponsibility and ill-advised militarism, there is a question of trust. George W. Bush and his allies don’t trust you and me. Why on earth, then, should we trust them?

Fortunately, we still live in a democratic republic. The Bush team cannot expect a cabal of right-wing justices to once again deliver the White House. Come November 2, we will have a choice: We can embrace a lie, or we can restore a measure of integrity to our government. We can choose, as a bumper sticker I spotted in Seattle put it, SOMEONE ELSE FOR PRESIDENT.

Folks,

I thought it appropriate to commemorate this 500th GRL entry by reposting an excellent speech by Bill Moyers. I have to agree with him 100%. This is the fight of our lives. We simply cannot afford to let this country be driven any further into the ground.

We have seven weeks left until the election. You can make a difference, especially by talking to friends and family in swing states. If you want some suggestions on other things you can do, from hosting house parties to volunteering to help get out the vote, Moveon.org has a host of suggestions and materials you can use. In particular, you might want to forward around some of the ads that MoveOn has created for the final 10 week push to the election. View them here.

Get out there and make a difference.

–C

This is the Fight of Our Lives

by Bill Moyers

Keynote speech

Inequality Matters Forum

New York University

June 3, 2004

Originally published on Wednesday, June 16, 2004 by Inequality.org

“The middle class and working poor are told that what’s happening to them is the consequence of Adam Smith’s ‘Invisible Hand.’ This is a lie. What’s happening to them is the direct consequence of corporate activism, intellectual propaganda, the rise of a religious orthodoxy that in its hunger for government subsidies has made an idol of power, and a string of political decisions favoring the powerful and the privileged who bought the political system right out from under us.”
– Bill Moyers, Keynote speech, June 3, 2004

It is important from time to time to remember that some things are worth getting mad about.

Here’s one: On March 10 of this year, on page B8, with a headline that stretched across all six columns, The New York Times reported that tuition in the city’s elite private schools would hit $26,000 for the coming school year — for kindergarten as well as high school. On the same page, under a two-column headline, Michael Wineraub wrote about a school in nearby Mount Vernon, the first stop out of the Bronx, with a student body that is 97 percent black. It is the poorest school in the town: nine out of ten children qualify for free lunches; one out of 10 lives in a homeless shelter. During black history month this past February, a sixth grader wanted to write a report on Langston Hughes. There were no books on Langston Hughes in the library — no books about the great poet, nor any of his poems. There is only one book in the library on Frederick Douglass. None on Rosa Parks, Josephine Baker, Leontyne Price, or other giants like them in the modern era. In fact, except for a few Newberry Award books the librarian bought with her own money, the library is mostly old books — largely from the 1950s and 60s when the school was all white. A 1960 child’s primer on work begins with a youngster learning how to be a telegraph delivery boy. All the workers in the book — the dry cleaner, the deliveryman, the cleaning lady — are white. There’s a 1967 book about telephones which says: “when you phone you usually dial the number. But on some new phones you can push buttons.” The newest encyclopedia dates from l991, with two volumes — “b” and “r” — missing. There is no card catalog in the library — no index cards or computer.

Something to get mad about.

Here’s something else: Caroline Payne’s face and gums are distorted because her Medicaid-financed dentures don’t fit. Because they don’t fit, she is continuously turned down for jobs on account of her appearance. Caroline Payne is one of the people in David Shipler’s new book,’ The Working Poor: Invisible in America’. She was born poor, and in spite of having once owned her own home and having earned a two-year college degree, Caroline Payne has bounced from one poverty-wage job to another all her life, equipped with the will to move up, but not the resources to deal with unexpected and overlapping problems like a mentally handicapped daughter, a broken marriage, a sudden layoff crisis that forced her to sell her few assets, pull up roots and move on. “In the house of the poor,” Shipler writes “…the walls are thin and fragile and troubles seep into one another.”

Here’s something else to get mad about. Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives, the body of Congress owned and operated by the corporate, political, and religious right, approved new tax credits for children. Not for poor children, mind you. But for families earning as much as $309,000 a year — families that already enjoy significant benefits from earlier tax cuts. The editorial page of The Washington Post called this “bad social policy, bad tax policy, and bad fiscal policy. You’d think they’d be embarrassed,” said the Post, “but they’re not.”

And this, too, is something to get mad about. Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington today. Not the fact that more children are growing up in poverty in America than in any other industrial nation; not the fact that millions of workers are actually making less money today in real dollars than they did twenty years ago; not the fact that working people are putting in longer and longer hours and still falling behind; not the fact that while we have the most advanced medical care in the world, nearly 44 million Americans — eight out of ten of them in working families — are uninsured and cannot get the basic care they need.

Astonishing as it seems, no one in official Washington seems embarrassed by the fact that the gap between rich and poor is greater than it’s been in 50 years — the worst inequality among all western nations. Or that we are experiencing a shift in poverty. For years it was said those people down there at the bottom were single, jobless mothers. For years they were told work, education, and marriage is how they move up the economic ladder. But poverty is showing up where we didn’t expect it — among families that include two parents, a worker, and a head of the household with more than a high school education. These are the newly poor. Our political, financial and business class expects them to climb out of poverty on an escalator moving downward.

Let me tell you about the Stanleys and the Neumanns. During the last decade, I produced a series of documentaries for PBS called “Surviving the Good Times.” The title refers to the boom time of the ’90s when the country achieved the longest period of economic growth in its entire history. Some good things happened then, but not everyone shared equally in the benefits. To the contrary. The decade began with a sustained period of downsizing by corporations moving jobs out of America and many of those people never recovered what was taken from them. We decided early on to tell the stories of two families in Milwaukee — one black, one white — whose breadwinners were laid off in the first wave of layoffs in 1991. We reported on how they were coping with the wrenching changes in their lives, and we stayed with them over the next ten years as they tried to find a place in the new global economy. They’re the kind of Americans my mother would have called “the salt of the earth.” They love their kids, care about their communities, go to church every Sunday, and work hard all week — both mothers have had to take full-time jobs.

During our time with them, the fathers in both families became seriously ill. One had to stay in the hospital two months, putting his family $30,000 in debt because they didn’t have adequate health insurance. We were there with our camera when the bank started to foreclose on the modest home of the other family because they couldn’t meet the mortgage payments after dad lost his good-paying manufacturing job. Like millions of Americans, the Stanleys and the Neumanns were playing by the rules and still getting stiffed. By the end of the decade they were running harder but slipping behind, and the gap between them and prosperous America was widening.

What turns their personal tragedy into a political travesty is that they are patriotic. They love this country. But they no longer believe they matter to the people who run the country. When our film opens, both families are watching the inauguration of Bill Clinton on television in 1992. By the end of the decade they were no longer paying attention to politics. They don’t see it connecting to their lives. They don’t think their concerns will ever be addressed by the political, corporate, and media elites who make up our dominant class. They are not cynical, because they are deeply religious people with no capacity for cynicism, but they know the system is rigged against them. They know this, and we know this. For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering an extreme concentration of wealth and income while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented levels of economic and political power over daily life. In 1960, the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Four decades later it is more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionately. But that’s not the case. As the economist Jeff Madrick reminds us, the pressures of inequality on middle and working class Americans are now quite severe. “The strain on working people and on family life, as spouses have gone to work in dramatic numbers, has become significant. VCRs and television sets are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes. And life has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means.” You can find many sources to support this conclusion. I like the language of a small outfit here in New York called the Commonwealth Foundation/Center for the Renewal of American Democracy. They conclude that working families and the poor “are losing ground under economic pressures that deeply affect household stability, family dynamics, social mobility, political participation, and civic life.”

Household economics is not the only area where inequality is growing in America. Equality doesn’t mean equal incomes, but a fair and decent society where money is not the sole arbiter of status or comfort. In a fair and just society, the commonwealth will be valued even as individual wealth is encouraged.

Let me make something clear here. I wasn’t born yesterday. I’m old enough to know that the tension between haves and have-nots are built into human psychology, it is a constant in human history, and it has been a factor in every society. But I also know America was going to be different. I know that because I read Mr. Jefferson’s writings, Mr. Lincoln’s speeches and other documents in the growing American creed. I presumptuously disagreed with Thomas Jefferson about human equality being self-evident. Where I lived, neither talent, nor opportunity, nor outcomes were equal. Life is rarely fair and never equal. So what could he possibly have meant by that ringing but ambiguous declaration: “All men are created equal”? Two things, possibly. One, although none of us are good, all of us are sacred (Glenn Tinder), that’s the basis for thinking we are by nature kin.

Second, he may have come to see the meaning of those words through the experience of the slave who was his mistress. As is now widely acknowledged, the hands that wrote “all men are created equal” also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a black woman named Sally Hennings. She bore him six children whom he never acknowledged as his own, but who were the only slaves freed by his will when he died — the one request we think Sally Hennings made of her master. Thomas Jefferson could not have been insensitive to the flesh-and-blood woman in his arms. He had to know she was his equal in her desire for life, her longing for liberty, her passion for happiness.

In his book on the Declaration, my late friend Mortimer Adler said Jefferson realized that whatever things are really good for any human being are really good for all other human beings. The happy or good life is essentially the same for all: a satisfaction of the same needs inherent in human nature. A just society is grounded in that recognition. So Jefferson kept as a slave a woman whose nature he knew was equal to his. All Sally Hennings got from her long sufferance — perhaps it was all she sought from what may have grown into a secret and unacknowledged love — was that he let her children go. “Let my children go” — one of the oldest of all petitions. It has long been the promise of America — a broken promise, to be sure. But the idea took hold that we could fix what was broken so that our children would live a bountiful life. We could prevent the polarization between the very rich and the very poor that poisoned other societies. We could provide that each and every citizen would enjoy the basic necessities of life, a voice in the system of self-government, and a better chance for their children. We could preclude the vast divides that produced the turmoil and tyranny of the very countries from which so many of our families had fled.

We were going to do these things because we understood our dark side — none of us is good — but we also understood the other side — all of us are sacred. From Jefferson forward we have grappled with these two notions in our collective head — that we are worthy of the creator but that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Believing the one and knowing the other, we created a country where the winners didn’t take all. Through a system of checks and balances we were going to maintain a safe, if shifting, equilibrium between wealth and commonwealth. We believed equitable access to public resources is the lifeblood of any democracy. So early on [in Jeff Madrick's description,] primary schooling was made free to all. States changed laws to protect debtors, often the relatively poor, against their rich creditors. Charters to establish corporations were open to most, if not all, white comers, rather than held for the elite. The government encouraged Americans to own their own piece of land, and even supported squatters’ rights. The court challenged monopoly — all in the name of we the people.

In my time we went to public schools. My brother made it to college on the GI bill. When I bought my first car for $450 I drove to a subsidized university on free public highways and stopped to rest in state-maintained public parks. This is what I mean by the commonwealth. Rudely recognized in its formative years, always subject to struggle, constantly vulnerable to reactionary counterattacks, the notion of America as a shared project has been the central engine of our national experience.

Until now. I don’t have to tell you that a profound transformation is occurring in America: the balance between wealth and the commonwealth is being upended. By design. Deliberately. We have been subjected to what the Commonwealth Foundation calls “a fanatical drive to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have shaped public responsibility for social harms arising from the excesses of private power.&