The Worst Congress Ever
How our national legislature has become a stable of thieves and perverts -- in five easy steps

MATT TAIBBI for Rolling Stones

There is very little that sums up the record of the U.S. Congress in the Bush years better than a half-mad boy-addict put in charge of a federal commission on child exploitation. After all, if a hairy-necked, raincoat-clad freak like Rep. Mark Foley can get himself named co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, one can only wonder: What the hell else is going on in the corridors of Capitol Hill these days?

These past six years were more than just the most shameful, corrupt and incompetent period in the history of the American legislative branch. These were the years when the U.S. parliament became a historical punch line, a political obscenity on par with the court of Nero or Caligula -- a stable of thieves and perverts who committed crimes rolling out of bed in the morning and did their very best to turn the mighty American empire into a debt-laden, despotic backwater, a Burkina Faso with cable.

To be sure, Congress has always been a kind of muddy ideological cemetery, a place where good ideas go to die in a maelstrom of bureaucratic hedging and rank favor-trading. Its whole history is one long love letter to sleaze, idiocy and pigheaded, glacial conservatism. That Congress exists mainly to misspend our money and snore its way through even the direst political crises is something we Americans understand instinctively. "There is no native criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain said -- a joke that still provokes a laugh of recognition a hundred years later.

But the 109th Congress is no mild departure from the norm, no slight deviation in an already-underwhelming history. No, this is nothing less than a historic shift in how our democracy is run. The Republicans who control this Congress are revolutionaries, and they have brought their revolutionary vision for the House and Senate quite unpleasantly to fruition. In the past six years they have castrated the political minority, abdicated their oversight responsibilities mandated by the Constitution, enacted a conscious policy of massive borrowing and unrestrained spending, and installed a host of semipermanent mechanisms for transferring legislative power to commercial interests. They aimed far lower than any other Congress has ever aimed, and they nailed their target.

LINK to article

Canadians believe Bush is a threat to peace: Poll

Many fear U.S. will launch strikes on Iran, N. Korea
Bin Laden still perceived as greatest danger

Nov. 3, 2006. 01:00 AM

TIM HARPER

WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON—Canadians believe the world has become a more dangerous place since George W. Bush was elected U.S. president and a majority believe he will launch military strikes in Iran or North Korea before his term ends in 2008, according to a new Toronto Star poll.Canadians also consider Bush more dangerous to world peace than Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.The EKOS poll was done in Canada for the Star and Montreal's La Presse ahead of Tuesday's U.S. mid-term elections, expected to be decided on the issue of the Iraq war. The same questions were posed to respondents by pollsters in Britain, Israel and Mexico. Canadians — like Americans — have soured on the U.S. invasion of Iraq with 73 per cent now telling EKOS that Washington had no justification for it. When the same question was asked of Canadians in April 2003, right after the Bush invasion, EKOS found 53 per cent thought it unjustified.Also like Americans, Canadians are split on whether the U.S. should stay and finish the job or come home as soon as possible.Canadians told EKOS they believed Osama bin Laden posed the greatest danger to the world, followed by North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, then Bush, Ahmadinejad and Nasrallah.Mexicans ranked Bush the second-most dangerous of the five, behind Al Qaeda's bin Laden.Views in Israel were radically different, where only 9 per cent ranked Bush a "great danger," compared to 34 per cent of Canadians, 41 per cent of Britons and 58 per cent of Mexicans.
More at LINK

---

British believe Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il

· US allies think Washington threat to world peace
· Only Bin Laden feared more in United Kingdom

America is now seen as a threat to world peace by its closest neighbours and allies, according to an international survey of public opinion published today that reveals just how far the country's reputation has fallen among former supporters since the invasion of Iraq.

Carried out as US voters prepare to go to the polls next week in an election dominated by the war, the research also shows that British voters see George Bush as a greater danger to world peace than either the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, or the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Both countries were once cited by the US president as part of an "axis of evil", but it is Mr Bush who now alarms voters in countries with traditionally strong links to the US.

More at LINK

As Bechtel Goes

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission — to rebuild power, water and sewage plants — wasn’t accomplished: Baghdad received less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq’s population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel, having received $2.3 billion of taxpayers’ money and having lost the lives of 52 employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the mission, when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they’ve already cut and run. The $21 billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been spent, much of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there’s no more money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second, how was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn’t and didn’t? Finally, if we’ve given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying for?

There’s no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never had enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may have felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as well as U.S. taxpayers’ dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq’s new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called “the most essential civil security project in the country.” It was built at a cost of $75 million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion for Iraq reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if they do stand up, we’ll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that’s easy: major contractors believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from accountability. Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with President Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated backdoor efforts to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction already winding down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen’s jurisdiction. And now, finally, Congress has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive to do the job right, so they didn’t.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee chairmen with subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq money went.

But that’s all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree with. “You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered,” he declared. “You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on behalf of the Iraqi people.” But what those measures actually show is the absence of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were under Saddam.

And we’re not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction effort in Iraq is basically over. I don’t know whether the administration is afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to “State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Vermont poised to elect America's first socialist senator

Amid the furious debate over Iraq and the speculation that George Bush may be a lame duck after next Tuesday's mid-term elections, an extraordinary political milestone is approaching: a cantankerous 65-year-old called Bernie looks set to become the first socialist senator in US history.

Bernie Sanders is so far ahead in the contest for Vermont's vacant seat for the US Senate that it seems only sudden illness or accident could derail his rendezvous with destiny, after eight terms as the state's only congressman. His success flies in the face of all the conventional wisdom about American politics.

He is an unapologetic socialist and proud of it. Even his admirers admit that he lacks social skills, and he tends to speak in tirades. Yet that has not stopped him winning eight consecutive elections to the US House of Representatives.

"Twenty years ago when people here thought about socialism they were thinking about the Soviet Union, about Albania," Mr Sanders told the Guardian in a telephone interview from the campaign trail. "Now they think about Scandinavia. In Vermont people understand I'm talking about democratic socialism."

Democratic socialism, however, has hardly proved to be a vote-winning formula in a country where even the word "liberal" is generally treated as an insult. Until now the best showing in a Senate race by a socialist of any stripe was in 1930 by Emil Seidel, who won 6% of the vote.

John McLaughry, the head of a free-market Vermont thinktank, the Ethan Allen Institute, said Mr Sanders is a throwback to that era. "Bernie Sanders is an unreconstructed 1930s socialist and proud of it. He's a skilful demagogue who casts every issue in that framework, a master practitioner of class warfare."

When Mr Sanders, a penniless but eloquent import from New York, got himself elected mayor of Burlington in 1981, at the height of the cold war, it rang some alarm bells. "I had to persuade the air force base across the lake that Bernie's rise didn't mean there was a communist takeover of Burlington," recalled Garrison Nelson, a politics professor at the University of Vermont who has known him since the 1970s.

"He used to sleep on the couch of a friend of mine, walking about town with no work," Prof Nelson said. "Bernie really is a subject for political anthropology. He has no political party. He has never been called charming. He has no money, and none of the resources we normally associate with success. However, he learned how to speak to a significant part of the disaffected population of Vermont."

Click here to Link to Article:

Southern Iraq approaches the tipping point

By Thomas Harding

Last Updated: 9:03am GMT 02/11/2006

Audio: "We've just driven over a landmine." Thomas Harding on patrol in the Iraqi desert.

Sheltering under a table on the dining room floor of Basra Palace with 200 soldiers, seconds after a mortar round had been 10ft away from penetrating the roof and causing carnage, it would have been difficult to argue that the British Army was making progress in Iraq.

As I lay flat on the floor in my body armour, the infantry officer with whom I had been dining seconds earlier said he felt mightily sorry for the battalion that had just arrived to replace his unit.

From dawn till dusk we had been rocketed or mortared 15 times in Basra Palace — one of the two main British barracks in the southern Iraq capital. There was the usual fear and thrill of coming under enemy fire but that was just for 12 hours and by the evening the novelty was beginning to tire.

It was the start of a six- month tour for the Royal Green Jackets and even in the first week their faces were beginning to look strained.

But by the end of their tour next April it should become clear where Basra is going and whether the British investment of 120 lives and £4 billion has been worth it.

We are now approaching the tipping point in southern Iraq. The area will either sink into the grasp of insurgents and Iranian-sponsored militias or become a beacon of hope for the rest of the country.

The Iraqi soldiers, terrorists, politicians and population are all uncertain which way up the penny will fall.

But the 7,200 British troops are making a final effort to secure the area to allow for the multi-billion dollar investment that Basra desperately needs to fulfil its potential of becoming the next Dubai. All is being gambled on the success of Operation Sinbad.

At its conclusion next February or March the insurgents might be beaten and the local police purged of all rogue elements. The Iraqi army could evolve into a steady, well-armed force and the politicians could be more willing to shoulder problems they have neglected during three years of having everyone else to blame for them.

That scenario is the Army's ticket for its way out of Iraq and would justify the expenditure of blood and treasure.

Already Basra air station is being developed to accommodate most of the 3,500 soldiers who will be left behind to garrison the area as a potent reserve for the Iraqi security forces. They will be there until at least 2010, military sources have indicated.

But in the meantime they are coming under increasing attack and there appear to be two reasons why.

One is that Operation Sinbad has forced the insurgents on to the back foot. In response to losing their grip on the local population they have increased shelling on British barracks. They are reduced to this form of indirect attack because every time they have used RPGs, gunmen or fixed ambushes they have suffered numerous dead.

But the second answer to the increased violence is that the insurgents are in control. The co-ordinated attacks on British troops demonstrate this and if the Army leaves early next year the Iranian-backed insurgent stooges in the police and local government will take over.

Southern Iraq could then vote to secede from the rest of the country and use its massive oil wealth to become a major pro-Iranian Shia state in the Middle East. The Sunni minority in southern Iraq would become vulnerable to a bloody ethnic cleansing campaign.

But there are a number of obstacles that stand in the way of what would be a disastrous scenario for the coalition forces and Iraq's future.

The British-trained Iraqi army's 10th Division is finally about to receive the hardware that will make it a formidable force when its first Humvees and armoured personnel carriers arrive this month.

There is also a template for what might happen when the British leave.

In the volatile town of Amarah a few weeks after the last British soldier vacated the town eight of its police stations were attacked by Mahdi army militias loyal to the cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. But the Iraqi army stood firm and, with help from senior Iraqi politicians, was able to restore order.

The withdrawal of troops from Amarah also meant there was no target for insurgents, and their propaganda campaign against the "foreign invaders" lost its focus.

While the military is doing all it can to stabilise Basra there is considerable worry among commanders over the planning for the post Operation Sinbad phase. The British consulate has evacuated its well-protected premises down to a skeleton staff. The offices of its provincial reconstruction team are a sea of empty desks and blank computers. Without the funding and planning that needs to happen now, the three-year British struggle in southern Iraq will have been for nothing.

The Army will lose increasing numbers of troops unwilling to return for a fifth or sixth tour, it will struggle to find enough troops for Afghanistan and the mortar attacks will continue with the likelihood that one day a round will find its devastating mark.

Publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page should phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or e-mail syndication@telegraph.co.uk

Video: Olbermann 'special comment' on White House campaign tactics

Mike Sheehan and David Edwards
Published: Thursday November 2, 2006

Print This Email This

On MSNBC's Countdown, Keith Olbermann remarks in his trademark "Special Comment" on the absurdity of the Bush administration's attacks on Sen. John Kerry, under fire for remarks construed by Republicans as an insult to American troops.

Olbermann recalls the violent 1856 caning by Rep. Preston Brooks of South Carolina on the vociferous, anti-slavery Sen. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts which disabled the senator for three years and was one of the memorable events leading up to the Civil War. In support, Brooks' constituents sent him new canes; drawing a parallel, Olbermann remarks, "We almost wonder to whom President Bush will send the next 'new cane.'"

Click HERE to watch

Statement of John Kerry Responding to Republican Distortions, Pathetic Tony Snow Diversions and Distractions

Washington – Senator John Kerry issued the following statement in response to White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, assorted right wing nut-jobs, and right wing talk show hosts desperately distorting Kerry’s comments about President Bush to divert attention from their disastrous record:

“If anyone thinks a veteran would criticize the more than 140,000 heroes serving in Iraq and not the president who got us stuck there, they're crazy. This is the classic G.O.P. playbook. I’m sick and tired of these despicable Republican attacks that always seem to come from those who never can be found to serve in war, but love to attack those who did.

I’m not going to be lectured by a stuffed suit White House mouthpiece standing behind a podium, or doughy Rush Limbaugh, who no doubt today will take a break from belittling Michael J. Fox’s Parkinson’s disease to start lying about me just as they have lied about Iraq. It disgusts me that these Republican hacks, who have never worn the uniform of our country lie and distort so blatantly and carelessly about those who have.

The people who owe our troops an apology are George W. Bush and Dick Cheney who misled America into war and have given us a Katrina foreign policy that has betrayed our ideals, killed and maimed our soldiers, and widened the terrorist threat instead of defeating it. These Republicans are afraid to debate veterans who live and breathe the concerns of our troops, not the empty slogans of an Administration that sent our brave troops to war without body armor.

Bottom line, these Republicans want to debate straw men because they’re afraid to debate real men. And this time it won’t work because we’re going to stay in their face with the truth and deny them even a sliver of light for their distortions. No Democrat will be bullied by an administration that has a cut and run policy in Afghanistan and a stand still and lose strategy in Iraq.”

The Worst is Yet to Come
The Third and Final Act: Attacking Iran
By WILLIAM S. LIND
The third and final act in the national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon play itself out. The Okhrana reports increasing indications of "something big" happening between the election and Christmas. That could be the long-planned attack on Iran.
An attack on Iran will not be an invasion with ground troops. We don't have enough of those left to invade Ruritania. It will be a "package" of air and missile strikes, by U.S. forces or Israel. If Israel does it, there is a possibility of nuclear weapons being employed. But Israel would prefer the U.S. to do the dirty work, and what Israel wants, Israel usually gets, at least in Washington.
That this would constitute folly piled on top of folly is no deterrent to the Bush administration. Like the French Bourbons, it forgets nothing and it learns nothing. It takes pride in not adapting. Or did you somehow miss George W. Bush's declaration of Presidential Infallibility? It followed shortly after the visit to the aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" sign.
The Democrats taking either or both Houses of Congress, if it happens, will not make any difference. They would rather have the Republicans start and lose another war than prevent a national disaster. Politics comes first and the country second. Nor would they dare cross Israel.
Many of the consequences of a war with Iran are easy to imagine. Oil would soar to at least $200 per barrel if we could get it. Gas shortages would bring back the gas lines of 1973 and 1979. Our European alliances would be stretched to the breaking point if not beyond it. Most people outside the Bushbubble can see all this coming.
What I fear no one forsees is a substantial danger that we could lose the army now deployed in Iraq. I have mentioned this in previous columns, but I want to go into it here in more detail because the scenario may soon go live.
Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement. That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.
The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil products. Unlike Guderian's Panzer army on its way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local gas stations.
There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if we attack Iran. The first is by Shiite militias including the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shiite uprising and, of course, Iran's Revolutionary Guards (the same guys who trained Hezbollah so well).
The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll into Iraq, cut our supply lines and attempt to pocket us in and around Baghdad. Washington relies on American air power to prevent this, but bad weather can shut most of that air power down.
Unfortunately, no one in Washington and few people in the U.S. military will even consider this possibility. Why? Because we have fallen victim to our own propaganda. Over and over the U.S. military tells itself, "We're the greatest! We're number one! No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We're the greatest military in all of history!"
It's bull. The U.S. armed forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second Generation militaries. They are being fought and defeated by Fourth Generation opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third Generation enemies who can observe, orient, decide and act more quickly than can America's vast, process-ridden, Powerpoint-enslaved military headquarters. They can be defeated by strategy, by stratagem, by surprise and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships. They are unsinkable until someone or something sinks them.
If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq, to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both (the most likely event), the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover.
One of the few people who does see this danger is the doyenne of American foreign policy columnists, Georgie Anne Geyer. In her column of October 28 in The Washington Times, she wrote,
The worst has not, by any means, yet happened. When I think of abandoning a battleground, I think of the 1850s, when thousands of Brits were trying to leave Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass and all were killed by tribesmen except one man, left to tell the story.
Our men and women are in isolated compounds, not easy even to retreat from, were that decision made. Time is truly running out.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.

Bad News for Burns: Montana Paper Set to Publish Letter from Abramoff Pal
"A Republican media consultant and friend of indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff recently wrote a letter to a Montana newspaper saying Burns' staff ate so many free meals at Abramoff's restaurant, people joked they would have 'starved to death' without the lobbyist.

"'Frankly, it was widely viewed in D.C. that Mr. Abramoff effectively exerted implicit control over Mr. Burns whenever he and his team needed to get something accomplished,' reads the letter, which was sent to the Whitefish Pilot last week.

"The letter is expected to run in the Pilot's Thursday edition.

"The author, Monty Warner, a GOP media consultant, told the Gazette State Bureau last week that he came across an article in the Pilot recently in which Burns is quoted as saying he only got $5,000 from Abramoff. That, combined with Burns' other statements in which he says he hardly knew Abramoff and, at one point, he wished Abramoff had never been born, compelled him to write the letter, Warner said." (Billings (MT) Gazzette)

MOVIE ON FAR RIGHT
Over the past quarter century, an increasingly influential movement on the far right has waged a sustained war on the Constitution as we know it. Ultra-conservative politicians, judges, professors and activists would overturn decades of precedent to shred the fabric of popular laws protecting workers, consumers and public health, expand executive power at the expense of basic civil liberties, and impose a narrow social agenda on the rest of the body politic.

“If they succeed,” says University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, “we will, without really seeing it happen, end up with a very different country—one that’s both less free and less equal.”

Quiet Revolution traces the growth of the ultra-conservative movement, shines a light on its strategies, and breaks through its rhetoric to expose how it envisions reshaping American law and life.
LINK to Movie: http://www.afj.org/quietrevolution.html

Violence returns to Mexican city

Demonstrators and riot police have again clashed in the Mexican city of Oaxaca, the scene of five months of protests against the state governor.

Several thousand protesters converged on the main square, vowing to retake the city centre after police moved in at the weekend to restore order.

Striking teachers and leftist activists are demanding that Governor Ulises Ruiz be sacked for abuse of power.

Mexico's lawmakers have urged Mr Ruiz to quit, but he says he will stay on.

Senators unanimously approved a resolution calling on him to "consider resigning from office to help restore law and order" in Oaxaca.

The Senate's motion came hours after a similar measure was approved by the lower house of the congress.

Calls for Mr Ruiz's resignation have been at the heart of a drawn-out protest by Mexican teachers and left-wing activists, who accuse him of authoritarianism and corruption.

Over the weekend, some 4,000 riot police entered Oaxaca, removing demonstrators from the city centre. One man was reported to have died in the operation.

Mexican President Vicente Fox ordered the action on Saturday, a day after unidentified gunmen killed three people, including a US journalist.

BBC WORLD

Iraq: 'The Greatest Strategic Disaster in American History'

By Patrick Cockburn, AlterNet. Posted October 31, 2006.

The U.S. failure in Iraq has been even more damaging than Vietnam because the opponent was punier and the imperial ambitions even greater.

The following is an excerpt from Patrick Cockburn's new book, The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq (Verso, 2006).

It has been the strangest war. It had hardly begun in 2003 when President George W. Bush announced on May 1 that it was over: the American mission had been accomplished. Months passed before Washington and London realized that the conflict had not finished. In fact, the war was only just beginning. Three years after Bush had spoken the US military had suffered 20,000 dead and injured in Iraq, 95% of the casualties inflicted after the fall of Baghdad.

Almost without thinking, the US put to the test its claim to be the only superpower in the world. It spurned allies inside and outside Iraq; in invading Iraq Tony Blair was Bush's only significant supporter. The first President George Bush led a vast UN-backed coalition to complete victory in the Gulf War in 1991 largely because he fought a conservative war to return the Middle East to the way it was before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. It was a status quo with which the world was familiar, and restoring was therefore supported internationally -- and in the Middle East. The war launched by his son, George W. Bush, twelve years later in 2003 was a far more radical venture. It was nothing less than an attempt to alter the balance of power in the world. The US, acting almost alone, would seize control of a country with vast oil reserves. It would assume quasi-colonial control over a nation which fifteen years previously had been the greatest Arab power. Senior American officials openly threatened to change the governments of states neighboring Iraq.

The debate on why the US invaded Iraq has been over-sophisticated. The main motive for going to war was that the White House thought it could win such a conflict very easily and to its own great advantage. They were heady times in Washington in 2002, as the final decisions were being taken to invade Iraq. It was the high tide of imperial self-confidence. The US had just achieved a swift victory in Afghanistan. The Taliban forces had evaporated after a few weeks of bombing by B-52s and the withdrawal of Pakistani support. Their strongholds in Kabul and Kandahar fell with scarcely a shot fired. To Tony Blair, believing that the US was about to fight another short and victorious war, support for Bush must have looked like a safe bet.

There was no reason why Saddam Hussein should not be defeated with the same ease as the Taliban. His army was a rabble, his heavier weapons, such as tanks and artillery, obsolete and ill-maintained. Iraq was exhausted by its eight-year war with Iran between 1980 and 1988, the humiliating defeat in Kuwait three years later and the thirteen long years of UN sanctions. If Bush and Blair had truly believed the Iraqi leader possessed the military strength sufficient to pose a threat to the Middle East through weapons of mass destruction, they probably would not have attacked him.

They were right to suspect he could not put up much of a fight. A few years earlier I had watched a military parade in Baghdad from a distance. A well-disciplined column of elite infantry marched past Saddam, standing on a raised platform near the Triumphal Arch made of crossed swords that commemorated the victory over Iran. All the soldiers appeared to be wearing smart white gloves. Only when I got closer did I realize that the Iraqi army was short of gloves, as it was of so many other types of equipment, and that the soldiers were wearing white sports socks on their hands.

More from the book at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43412/

Sadr City Bombing on Monday Kills 29, wounds 60
At Least 83 Killed Sunday
In Basra, Bombers target Police

Sunni Arab guerrillas killed a US Marine on Sunday, bringing to 100 the death toll for US troops in Iraq during the month of October. It is one of the deadliest months since the war began.

An enormous bomb blasted a city square in Sadr City, the Shiite slum of northeast Baghdad on Monday morning, killing 29 and wounding 60. The victims were poor day laborers lining up in search of work.

On Sunday, hundreds (some reports say thousands) of angry residents had demonstrated against the US military siege of Sadr City, threatening to close down the ministries if it is not lifted. Iraqi members of parliament from the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance joined them. They complained that as a result of the US operations, ordinary people cannot circulate and it is difficult to get patients to the hospitals. The situation was therefore already at the boiling point before the bombing, which will have made things worse.

The inhabitants of Sadr City, with a population of perhaps 3 million, maintain that they do not have the captured US soldier, and say they are upset at the 5-day long siege of their district by the US military, which is alleged to have closed off most routes from Sadr City into Baghdad and to have been engaged in invading offices of clerics associated with the Mahdi Army of Muqtada al-Sadr. Apparently they believe that a unit of the Mahdi Army kidnapped a GI, for whom they are conducting a manhunt. The US is seeking rogue guerrilla commander Abu Deraa, who has broken with Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.

Baghdad government officials announced Sunday that they had discovered 25 dead bodies in the capital over the previous 24 hours.

Guerrillas kiled 5 policemen in Baquba.

US troops killed 17 guerrillas near Balad on Sunday. The US military said that the guerrillas were planning to attack a US convoy.

Altogether guerrillas killed 33 policemen on Sunday. In Basra, armed men pulled 17 police trainees and 2 translators out of a van and their dead bodies were later found around the city. In Basra, such actions are frequently taken by Shiite militias or Marsh Arab tribsemen, though there have been allegations that Sunni Arab death squads operate there, funded by fundamentalist Sunnis in the Gulf.

Iraq's Sunni Arab vice president is threatening to resign if Prime Minister al-Maliki does not confront head on the problem of dissolving the Badr Corps and the Mahdi Army, Shiite militias. Such a move by Tariq al-Hashimi could well signal the end of the Maliki "national unity" government.

Constant mortar attacks have forced the British to abandon their consulate in downtown Basra.

The US military has lost track of hundreds of thousands of weapons the US purchased for the Iraqi military and security forces. The only good news in the article is that many of the weapons are useless to Iraqis because of lack of spare parts or difficulty of upkeep. At least those won't do the guerrillas any good if they fall into their hands.

Trudy Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer asks some good questions about how the Bush administration squandered most of the $18 billion that Congress ear-marked for Iraq reconstruction and whether there will be any accountability.

posted by Juan @ 10/30/2006 09:24:00 AM

October 30, 2006

Op-Ed Columnist

The System’s Broken

By BOB HERBERT

Greencastle, Ind.

The middle-aged woman filling her gas tank on a day of endless rain laughed when a reporter asked her about the coming elections. “Politics,” she said, “are for silly people. Those ads come on television and I reach for the remote.”

I asked if she was planning to vote on Nov. 7.

“No,” she said. “That stuff really turns me off.”

If you pay close attention to the news and then go out and talk to ordinary people, it’s hard not to come away with the feeling that the system of politics and government in the U.S. is broken. I spent the past week talking to residents in Chicago, southern Michigan and Indiana. No one was happy about the direction the country has taken, but not even the most faithful voters were confident that their ballot would make any substantial difference.

“I vote,” said Angela Buehl, who lives in a suburb of Indianapolis, “but I don’t think anybody in Washington is listening to me.” She mimicked talking into a telephone: “Hello ... Hello ...?”

The politicians, special interests and the media are in a state of high excitement over next week’s midterm elections. They are addicted to the blood sport of politics, and this is a championship encounter. But that excitement contrasts with what seems to be an increasing sense of disenchantment and unease that ordinary Americans are feeling when it comes to national politics and government. For far too many of them, the government in Washington is remote, unresponsive and ineffective.

Voters and nonvoters alike expressed frustration with the fact that we are stuck in a war in Iraq that hardly anyone still supports but no one in government knows how to end.

Several people mentioned that their families were struggling financially at a time when the stock market had soared to all-time highs and the Bush administration was crowing about how well the economy was doing.

Nearly all said they were repelled by the relentless barrage of tasteless and idiotic campaign commercials. “Talk to me,” said a woman in Mishawaka, Ind. “Don’t assume I’m an imbecile.”

A pair of front-page articles in The Times last week showed the stark contrast in the way that insiders and outsiders view the off-year elections. Corporations, reacting to the possibility that the Republicans might lose control of one or both houses of Congress, are hedging their bets by pumping up campaign donations to Democratic candidates. One way or another, they will be in the loop. That story ran on Saturday.

A day earlier, The Times reported on Democratic concerns that black voters, disillusioned by voter suppression efforts and a pervasive belief that their votes will not be properly counted, may not turn out in the numbers that the party was hoping for.

The system is broken. Most politicians would rather sacrifice their first born than tell voters the honest truth about tough issues. Big money and gerrymandering have placed government out of the reach of most Americans. While some changes in the House are expected this year, the Brookings Institution and the Cato Institute tell us (in a joint report) that since 1998, House incumbents have won more than 98 percent of their re-election races.

Millions of thoughtful Americans have become so estranged from the political process that they’ve tuned out entirely. Voters hungry for a serious discussion of complex issues are fed a steady diet of ideological talking heads hurling insults in one- or two-minute television segments.

DePauw University held a two-day conference last week on issues confronting the U.S. I was struck by the extent to which the people who attended the forums were interested in seeking out practical, nonpartisan, nonideological solutions to the wide range of problems discussed.

The frustration with the current state of government and politics was palpable. One man, Ned Lamkin, asked me if it wouldn’t be a good idea to create some sort of national forum for a serious extended discussion of ways to fix, or at least improve, the system. He’s on to something. Among other things, I’d love to see a nonpartisan series of high-profile, nationally televised town hall meetings that would explore ways of making government and politics fairer, more open and more responsive to the will of the people.

American-style democracy needs to be energized, revitalized. The people currently in charge are not up to the task. It’s time to bring the intelligence, creativity and energy of the broader population into the quest for constructive change.

• Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Why I Am Not a Liberal... (Leiter)

...at least if this embarrassing moral waffling counts as liberalism. I am sorry that people I rather like, and some of whom I know would have written a far better statement, signed on to this feeble statement of "principles" [sic] by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin. How they got past the first substantive paragraph, I really do not know:

We have all opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and destructive of America's moral standing. This war fueled, and continues to fuel, jihadis whose commitment to horrific, unjustifiable violence was amply demonstrated by the September 11 attacks as well as the massacres in Spain, Indonesia, Tunisia, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Rather than making us safer, the Iraq war has endangered the common security of Americans and our allies.

So this is liberalism: to oppose criminal wars of aggression against defenseless nations when they aren't in America's interests?

That's a principle?

How else, after all, to interpret Ackerman's and Gitlin's opposition to the war on the grounds that it is "unwise" and "destructive of America's moral standing" as anything other than saying it isn't in America's interests? (And must liberals really be committed to silliness about America having "moral standing"? Can't liberals be realistic enough to observe that America has pursued the strategic interests of ruling elites like every other nation in human history, with the more-or-less predictable consequences for peoples and countries that fell afoul of those interests?)

About the closest these tepid "liberals" come to articulating a real, principled objection to the war of aggression against Iraq is to call it "illegal": but even that is far too weak, given that lots of illegal actions are morally correct, and lots of legal actions morally reprehensible. Why not "criminal"? Why not "illegal and unjust"? Why not "morally craven and indefensible"? Those are words that evoke, in my mind at least, principled opposition to what will be recalled as one of the great international crimes at the dawn of the 21st century, as opposed to evoking opposition that is based on merely strategic and prudential considerations.

If the first waffling and unprincipled paragraph about the war of aggression against Iraq left any doubts about the actual point of this exercise--namely, like John Kerry's Presidential bid in 2004, to show that Democrats are tough guys too, capable of pandering to the self-interest of the middle classes and ruling elites--then we need only skip past the next (oddly placed) paragraph on Israel to come to the following declaration:

Make no mistake: We believe that the use of force can, at times, be justified. We supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. But war must remain a last resort. The Bush administration's emphatic reliance on military intervention is illegitimate and counterproductive. It creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers, and ignores the imperative necessity of building an international order that peacefully addresses the aspirations of rising powers in Asia and Latin America.

It is a pathetic "principled" objection to a war of aggression that, almost immediately, must be conjoined with an affirmation of the propriety of military force! That qualification is all the more damning because, once again, the objection to slaughter and destruction is couched purely in prudential terms--it "creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers" and so on. That doesn't look at all like a rejection of military force except as a "last resort;" it looks like a rejection of military force whenever there might be imprudent consequences, otherwise not. On this rendering of the debate, the dispute between "liberals" and Bush is not over principles at all, but simple strategic calculations.

Ackerman and Gitlin then turn to a series of perfectly fine domestic policy talking points (they are well-summarized on the numbered list here), and even manage to articulate one actual principle ("every citizen is entitled by right to the elementary means to a good life," a principle to which I'm more confident Marxists, than liberals, are committed, but never mind), but they are soon back to revealing the moral bankruptcy of their liberalism:

We insist that America be defended vigorously against its real enemies -- the radical Islamists who organize to attack us. But security does not require torture or the rejection of basic guarantees of due process. To the contrary, this administration's lawless conduct and its violations of the Geneva Conventions only damage our moral standing and our ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues.

In the first sentence, they immediately signal their acquiescence to the basic Bush fear-mongering central to the fake war on terror, only to offer, yet again, a series of tepid strategic objections to torture and adherence to the Geneva Conventions. Why the hesitation to simply say that it is the height of moral depravity and craven villainy to defend torture and undermine the Geneva Conventions? Why not say plainly that the U.S. is now run by war criminals, who, if there were an actual international legal system, would be facing an international tribunal at the Hague, like their soulmates in other nations who ran less powerful criminal enterprises and so could be brought to "justice"? Why, in short, must any weight, at all, be given to "moral standing" and the "ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues"?

If this is liberalism, then it deserves to die.

Someone interested in liberalism and in principles, as opposed to political pandering, would do far better to look over this list of ten liberal principles by Geoffrey Stone from the University of Chicago Law School. Among other things, Professor Stone actually states some principles which have something to do with the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition, rather than a series of policy wonk talking points that might have been put out by the Democratic National Committee.

I hope some of my friends who signed Ackerman's and Gitlin's ironic confirmation of aspects of Tony Judt's critique (especially his observation that "America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end...[and] who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection") will rethink the value of signing on to such displays and have their names removed.

Posted by Brian Leiter on October 29, 2006 at 09:27 AM in Of Cultural Interest | Permalink

Chomsky On "Terrorism"

By Saad Sayeed

10/26/06 "Excalibur" -- -- Known in academic circles for his contribution to the field of linguistics, MIT professor Noam Chomsky is widely recognized as one of the most influential political dissidents of our time. In this interview, Chomsky talks about the roots of terrorism and the role of the intellectual in society.

"The problem lies in the unwillingness to recognise that your own terrorism is terrorism"

Excalibur (Ex): How important is an understanding of the role of states such as the U.S. and the U.K. when examining the question of terrorism?

Chomsky (Ch): It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power ( . . . ) We should look at all forms of terrorism.

I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.

But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the U.S. government's official definition of terrorism from the official U.S. code of laws. If you use that definition, it follows very quickly that the U.S. is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable, it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognize that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it's true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases, it's terrorism and we have to get over that if we're serious about the question.

Ex: In 1979, Russia invades Afghanistan. The U.S. uses the Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan to fund the rise of militancy. This gives Zia a green light to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. Now we allegedly have some of those elements setting off bombs in Mumbai. Clearly, these groups are no longer controlled by any government.

Ch: The jihadi movements in their modern form go back before Afghanistan. They were formed primarily in Egypt in the 1970s. Those are the roots of the jihadi movement, the intellectual roots and the activist roots and the terrorism too.

But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Regan administration saw it as an opportunity to pursue their Cold War aims. So they did with the intense cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others ( . . . ) so the Reagan administration organized the most radical Islamic extremists it could find anywhere in the world and brought them to Afghanistan to train them, arm them.

Meanwhile, the U.S. supported Ziaul Haq as he was turning Pakistan into a country full of madrassahs and fundamentalists. The Reagan administration even ( . . . ) kept certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons, which of course they were, so that U.S. aid to Pakistan could continue. The end result of these U.S. programs was to seriously harm Pakistan and also to create the international jihadi movement, of which Osama bin Laden is a product. The jihadi movement then spread ( . . . ) they may not like it much but they created it. And now, as you say, it's in Kashmir.

Kashmir, though, is a much more complex story. There are plenty of problems in Kashmir and they go way back, but the major current conflicts come from the 1980s. In 1986, when India blocked the election, it actually stole the election, and that led to an uprising and terrorist violence and atrocities, including atrocities committed by the Indian army.

Ex: The colonial legacy is generally dismissed by the media. What role does this legacy play in the emergence of home-grown terrorists in countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and Canada as well as to the creation of terrorism as a whole? Ch: It's not brought up in the West because it's inconvenient to think about your own crimes. Just look at the major conflicts going on around the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, most of them are residues of colonial systems.

Colonial systems imposed and created artificial states that had nothing to do with the needs and concerns and relations of the populations involved. They were created in the interests of colonial powers and as old fashioned colonialism turned into modern neo-colonialism, a lot of these conflicts erupted into violence and those are a lot of the atrocities happening in the world today.

How can anyone say colonialism isn't relevant? Of course it is and it's even more directly relevant.

Take the London bombing in 2005. Blair tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with Britain's participation in the invasion of Iraq. That's completely ridiculous. The British intelligence and the reports of the people connected in the bombing, they said that the British participation in the invasion and resulting horrors in Iraq inflamed them and they wanted to do something in reaction.

Ex: What is the role of the intellectual when dealing with imperialism and are the intellectuals doing they job?

Ch: Unfortunately, intellectuals are doing their historic job. The historic role of intellectuals if you look, unfortunately, as far back as you go has been to support power systems and to justify their atrocities. So the article you read in the National Post for the production of vulgar Stalinist connoisseurs, that's what intellectuals usually do as far back as you go.

If you go back to the Bible, there's a category of people who were called prophets, a translation of an obscure word, they were intellectuals, they were what we would call dissident intellectuals; criticising the evil king, giving geopolitical analysis, calling for the moral treatment of orphans, decent behaviour. They were dissident intellectuals. Were they treated well? They were prisoned and driven into the dessert and so on, they were the fringe. The people who were treated well were the ones who centuries later, like in the gospel, were called false prophets. So it goes through history. The actual role of the intellectual has been supportive of power.

Should they do that? Of course not; they should be searching for truth, they should be honest, they should be supporting freedom and justice and there are some who do it. There is a fringe who do it, but they're not treated well. They are performing the task that intellectuals ought to perform.

Ex: And what keeps you motivated?

Ch: I'll just tell you a brief story. I was in Beirut a couple of months ago giving talks at the American university in the city. After a talk, people come up and they want to talk privately or have books signed.

Here I was giving a talk in a downtown theatre, a large group of people were around and a young woman came up to me, in her mid-'20s, and just said this sentence: "I am Kinda" and practically collapsed. You wouldn't know who Kinda is but that's because we live in societies where the truth is kept hidden. I knew who she was. She had a book of mine open to a page on which I had quoted a letter of hers that she wrote when she was seven years old.

It was right after the U.S. bombing of Libya, her family was then living in Libya, and she wrote a letter which was found by a journalist friend of mine who tried to get it published in the United States but couldn't because no one would publish it. He then gave it to me, I published it. The letter said something like this:

"Dear Mr Reagan, I am seven years old. I want to know why you killed my little sister and my friend and my rag doll. Is it because we are Palestinians? Kinda". That's one of the most moving letters I have ever seen and when she walked up to me and said I am Kinda, and, like I say, actually fell over, not only because of the event but because of what it means.

Here's the United States with no pretext at all, bombing another country, killing and destroying, and nobody wants to know what a little seven-year-old girl wrote about the atrocities. That's the kind of thing that keeps me motivated and ought to keep everybody motivated. And you can multiply that by 10,000. -This interview previously appeared in the News of Pakistan.

COPYRIGHT © EXCALIBUR 2006

Oliver North, back in Nicaragua, takes on Ortega again

Revived leftwing election prospects prompt US cold war warrior's 'private visit'

Rory Carroll, Latin America correspondent
Wednesday October 25, 2006
The Guardian

Almost a pensioner now, he was in town for a brief visit to catch up with old buddies and maybe see some sights, just like any other tourist from the US. Over breakfast at his hotel his hosts filled him in on their news, which was not especially good, and afterwards he strolled through the war monument at Plaza de la Paz, soaking up sunshine and history.

More than once he said he was a private citizen on a private visit. But when your name is Oliver North and you are in Nicaragua on the eve of an election, there might, not for the first time, be a credibility problem.

The cold war warrior and former White House aide returned to the country with which he is indelibly linked last Sunday to do what he does best: champion a "fight for freedom" and warn of a leftwing menace to the US.

"It's good to be back," said Mr North, 62, crinklier and greyer than his 1980s heyday but still a fit former marine lieutenant-colonel. A round of media interviews and political statements ended the pretence that it was a private visit.

To supporters it was indeed good to welcome a hero who risked his career to funnel dollars to Contra rebels during their war against the Sandinista government, a covert part of Ronald Reagan's cold war strategy which morphed into the Iran-Contra scandal. To critics, it was like witnessing a criminal return to the scene of the crime: a conflict which cost 30,000 Nicaraguan lives, destroyed the economy and left the country polarised.

"You wouldn't think that someone who had been forgotten by history 20 years ago would show up at this point," said Jaime Morales, a former Contra spokesman who now says he was used by Washington.

Like one of the volcanoes which circle Managua, Mr North has erupted back on to the scene out of fear that the small central American nation will once again slide into the enemy camp.

Daniel Ortega, the Sandinista leader, has a strong chance of returning to power in next month's presidential election. Opinion polls give him around 33% support which, in a splintered field of candidates, could be enough to win in the first round on November 5.

Finish the Article at:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1930780,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

Britain to Restrict Workers From Bulgaria and Romania

By SARAH LYALL

LONDON, Oct. 24 — Britain plans to severely restrict the ability of people from Bulgaria and Romania to work here after those two countries join the European Union in January, the government said Tuesday.

The new policy represents an enormous change for Britain, which has been one of Europe’s main champions of expansion and openness in the European job market. In 2004, Britain, Ireland and Sweden were the only three European countries that granted unfettered access to their job markets to immigrants from the eight Eastern European countries, as well as Cyprus and Malta, that joined the European Union that year.

Ireland made a similar announcement on Tuesday, saying that it, too, would offer only limited jobs to Bulgarians and Romanians.

After the new members were admitted to the European Union in 2004, Britain was shocked by the number of people from Eastern European countries, particularly Poland, who poured across the borders, looking for jobs.

The government had predicted that no more than 13,000 arrivals would come each year, but in the past two years, about 500,000 Eastern Europeans have registered as workers here, the government said. Migration experts say that tens of thousands more found off-the-books jobs, or remained unemployed.

Employers and the government say the new arrivals have benefited the British economy, mostly by filling the need for lower-skilled workers. But immigrants are viewed with suspicion by many Britons, and the populist newspapers dwell on stories about how the new arrivals have strained resources at hospitals and schools.

“This is essentially a political decision, because there’s massive public hostility to immigration in the U.K.,” said Nick Pearce, director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank. “If it came down to diplomatic considerations, the result would have been different.”

Mr. Pearce said during an interview that it was unlikely that immigrants from Romania and Bulgaria, which have far lower unemployment rates than, for example, Poland, would rush to Britain once their countries joined the European Union.

Under the new system, Romanian and Bulgarian immigrants will be allowed to work in Britain only if they meet strict criteria, the home secretary, John Reid, told Parliament. Some unskilled laborers will be able to take seasonal agricultural jobs or work in the food-processing industry under a plan that allows 19,750 such jobs to be filled by foreigners a year. Starting next year, Mr. Reid said, that program will be open only to Romanians and Bulgarians.

In addition, highly skilled workers from the two countries will be allowed to take jobs here, as will workers who obtain permits after their employers demonstrate that their jobs cannot be filled by British citizens. Under European regulations, self-employed immigrants will be allowed to work in Britain, provided they prove that they are supporting themselves and not secretly working for someone else.

Students from Bulgaria and Romania will be able to work part time if they are enrolled in college.

“We look forward to welcoming Romanian and Bulgarian workers here, provided that they comply with our rules and obey the law,” Mr. Reid said.

The British government has long argued for openness in the European job market, and has said that the economy can benefit only if workers are willing to take lower-paying jobs, as many of the Eastern European immigrants have.

Mr. Reid said studies of the new workers showed that they had had a positive impact on the economy. But, he said, the influx of people has put a strain on housing and schools in some communities where many immigrants, particularly Poles, had settled.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of Migrationwatch, a group that argues that Britain is already overcrowded and should limit new arrivals, said in an interview that the government’s announcement was “a step in the right direction.” He added, “This is the first time that the government has made even a half-serious effort to reduce immigration.”

But Sir Andrew said the policy was rife with loopholes and criticized the government for not doing enough to enforce regulations. Under the new plan, employees working illegally and employers who hire illegal workers will be subject to on-the-spot fines.

At the same time, Keith Vaz, a former minister for Europe under Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labor government, criticized the new policy as a step backward for European openness.

“These restrictions will be unworkable, undesirable and unnecessary, and of lasting damage to the reputation of the U.K. as a champion of the enlargement,” he told the Press Association, the domestic news agency.

The government of Niger has ordered around 150,000 Arabs who live in the east of the country to leave.

Most of the Arabs, known as Mahamid, are nomads who have fled conflict in Chad. A BBC correspondent says many have lived in Niger for decades.

The governor of Diffa State, where most of the Mahamid live, told them it was "high time" to pack and return to Chad.

No reason for the order has been given, but government officials are meeting local elders in the capital, Niamey.

The BBC Idy Baraou in Niamey says many Mahamid are citizens of Niger and hold senior positions in the army, government and business.

Others look after camels and donkeys around Lake Chad.

But other communities in Niger often accuse the Mahamid of theft and rape.

Our correspondent says police have rounded up several hundred Mahamid at Kabalewa village, 75 km east of Diffa.

$6300 a Second

by Meteor Blades

Tue Oct 24, 2006 at 03:02:53 AM PDT

I'm only a sometimes fan of Nicholas Kristof, and today's number, like many of his columns, is only a partial winner. It's behind the NYT firewall:

Iraq and Your Wallet

For every additional second we stay in Iraq, we taxpayers will end up paying an additional $6,300.

So aside from the rising body counts and all the other good reasons to adopt a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq, here's another: We are spending vast sums there that would be better spent rescuing the American health care system, developing alternative forms of energy and making a serious effort to reduce global poverty.

In the run-up to the Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld estimated that the overall cost would be under $50 billion. Paul Wolfowitz argued that Iraq could use its oil to "finance its own reconstruction."

But now several careful studies have attempted to tote up various costs, and they suggest that the tab will be more than $1 trillion -- perhaps more than $2 trillion. The higher sum would amount to $6,600 per American man, woman and child.

{snip}

Just to put that $2 trillion in perspective, it is four times the additional cost needed to provide health insurance for all uninsured Americans for the next decade. It is 1,600 times Mr. Bush's financing for his vaunted hydrogen energy project. ....

Kristof notes that there are other hidden costs not included in that per capita figure:

* $600,000 to $5 million over the lifetime of the 3,000 U.S. Iraq War veterans (so far) with severe head injuries
* Disability payments for the next 50 years for an unknown - but large - number of Iraq War veterans
* Re-enlistment bonuses, some as high as $150,000
* Replacing armor, aircraft, et cetera
* Interest costs of the war being paid for by borrowing from China, et al., estimated at $264 billion to $308 billion
* Higher oil costs, possibly a half-trillion-dollar drag on the economy

The bottom line is that not only have we squandered 2,800 American lives and considerable American prestige in Iraq, but we're also paying $18,000 per household to do so. ...

We're spending $380,000 for every extra minute we stay in Iraq, and we can find better ways to spend that money.

Unsurprisingly, not every agrees with all the underlying assumptions that go into those numbers. You can read The Economic Costs of the Iraq War, the oft-cited study put together 10 months ago by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, which Kristof references. And you can adjust the assumptions on your own (up to a point) at this site.

Looking at the cost of this concocted war solely in terms dollars and American blood, as Kristof does, misses one obvious factor: the cost to Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of whom have been displaced, maimed and killed, and had their economy crunched for probably two decades into the future.

As George McGovern and William R. Polk cogently argue in the October issue of Harper's (subscription only), a withdrawal of troops (to be completed at the end of 2007) would not only save American lives but tens of billions of dollars. A hefty chunk of that savings, they say, should be spent on compensating those Iraqis who were tortured or lost family in the war, rebuilding the public health system, de-mining and cleaning up depleted uranium from artillery shells, and rebuilding pieces of the infrastructure using Iraqi contractors. They suggest this might be done for $17.25 billion. That sounds a tad light. I'd call it double that. But what they propose is the right thing to do. Which is something the Bush Regime hasn't managed in Iraq since it dropped the first bomb 43 months ago.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Guerrillas Kill 5 GIs
Bombings, Attacks, Kill 44 Iraqis
UN: Nearly 1 Million Displaced since US Invasion

5 US GIs were killed or announced killed on Sunday in Iraq and guerrillas killed some 44 persons in political violence.

83 US military personnel have been killed by guerrillas in Iraq since October 1.

AP's intrepid Hamza Hendawi reports on how the violence has ruined the Festival of the Breaking of the Fast (Id al-Fitr) for most Iraqi Muslims.

*Guerrillas near Baquba northeast of Baghdad ambushed a bus full of police recruits, killing 15 and wounding 25.

*Several bombers targeted Shurjah Market in Baghdad, killing 9 persons and injuring dozens. It was crowded with shoppers picking up gifts and food for the holy day.

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports [Ar.] in southeast Baghdad, clashes broke out between a Shiite clan and a Sunni Arab clan that left 9 persons dead.

AP adds:

' Sunday's killings raised to at least 950 the number of Iraqis who have died in war-related violence this month, an average of more than 40 a day. The toll is on course to make October the deadliest month for Iraqis since April 2005, when the AP began tracking the deaths. Until this month, the daily average had been about 27. The AP count includes civilians, government officials and police and security forces, and is considered a minimum based on AP reporting. The actual number is likely higher, as many killings go unreported. '

Al-Sharq al-Awsat reports that [Ar.] Salih al-Maliki, and adviser to the Ministry of Defense, has laid the blame for the failure of the current Battle of Baghdad on fifth columnists inside the Iraqi security forces.

He seems to be arguing that guerrillas and militiamen are getting tipped off when the sweep will come to their neighborhood. Also, he said, the security forces are still very badly equipped.

CBS news is reporting that corrupt arms deals cost Iraq $800 million. Nearly a billion dollars worth of embezzlement is a lot of fraud. Hat tip to The Democratic Underground.

The United Nations High Commission on Refugees estimates that 3 million Iraqis have been displaced from their homes during the past 36 years.

About 1 million have been displaced since the US invasion a little over 3 years ago.

*1.5 million have been internally displaced to other parts of Iraq. About half of these have been forced from their homes since the US invasion in 2003.

*1.6 million have been displaced abroad, mainly to Jordan and Syria. Of these:

*About 800,000 are in Syria
*About 700,000 are in Jordan (over 10% of the population!)
*100,000 are elsewhere in the region.

Some of those forced abroad have been there for years.

But the proportion of recent arrivals is rising quickly. Another 40,000 Iraqis arrive in Syria every month! That is half a million a year.

Syria only has 19 million people, so 800,000 is nearly 5 percent! Jordan, with 700,000, is over 10 percent Iraqi now. Iraqis are to Jordan as the Latino wave of immigration has been to the US. One problem: The US is an advanced economy and is growing. Jordan and Syria are both economically messes and there is no way they can absorb such a big influx economically without help. But the budget of the UNHCR for Iraqi refugees has actually been falling rapidly in the past 2 years.

AP reports on the Iraqis in Syria.

John Amato at "Crooks and Liars" points out that Bush actually peddled to George Stephanopolous the line that "we've never been 'stay the course'"!

posted by Juan

Spend 8-min to watch this video on Iraq by a photographer from the UK. Pretty depressing, to me I can not see an end in site without withdrawl of the troops.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/video/page/0,,1927660,00.html

Eastern Europe in Political Disarray

Email this Story

Oct 22, 12:58 PM (ET)

By VANESSA GERA

WARSAW, Poland (AP) - Anti-government rallies rock the Hungarian capital. Political intrigue in Poland holds up new roads and housing. Populists take power in Slovakia, vowing to undo economic reforms. And the Czech Republic goes without a functioning government for months.

Political life has fallen into disarray in Eastern Europe, and many are asking what has gone wrong in the 2 1/2 years since these former communist countries joined the European Union, expecting to reap the fruits of democracy and open markets.

Many experts say people are simply exhausted after years of economic sacrifices made to join the EU and NATO. They now lack the clear goals that drove them toward the West after the fall of communism in 1989.

And their discontent is mounting as the instant riches many believed would come from EU membership have failed to materialize.

"The common phenomenon in all these countries is transition fatigue," said Gergely Hudecz, a political analyst with the DZ Bank in Budapest. "The electorate has had enough of reforms."

Gone is the strong external pressure that pushed governments in Warsaw, Budapest, Prague and Bratislava to shutter unproductive factories and sell off state companies, in the face of opposition from newly unemployed workers hurt by rising costs.

All four countries have replaced the leaders who took them into the bloc, and some have opted for parties pledging to restore the welfare benefits that were slashed to qualify for membership.

The greatest disruption has been in Hungary, where Socialist Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany outraged the country by saying in a recording leaked last month that the government had "lied morning, evening and night" about the economy. That sparked weeks of daily anti-government protests, including two nights of riots.

To the north in Poland, twin brothers with prickly nationalist views - President Lech Kaczynski and Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski - lead a country bogged down in frequent Cabinet reshuffles and convoluted political maneuverings.

The bickering has slowed down construction to ease a housing shortage, and modernization of the dilapidated road system.

In the latest twist, the prime minister brought back into his Cabinet Andrzej Lepper, a fiery populist known for organizing anti-EU protests, less than a month after booting him out for demanding more spending.

In Prague, politics have been stalemated since a June election delivered a lower house of parliament divided evenly between left and right.

And in neighboring Slovakia, Prime Minister Robert Fico took power this summer on pledges to undo many of the economic reforms that have made his nation the darling of foreign investors.

More at: http://rawstory.com/showoutarticle.php?src=http%3A%2F%2Fapnews.myway.com%2Farticle%2F20061022%2FD8KTQ6K00.html

Iraq Is Coming Apart at the Seams

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet. Posted October 21, 2006.

As Iraq falls apart, rumors are flying that there will be a Bush-backed coup, an open three-sided civil war and a host of other nightmarish outcomes.

Iraq is splintering along a dozen fault lines, and the prospects for a political solution are slim. Experts in conflict negotiation -- veterans of civil strife in places like Northern Ireland and Cambodia -- talk about the need for a clash to "ripen," to come to a point when combatants are exhausted with the violence and see that whatever they might gain from continued fighting is outweighed by the costs. Before they get to that place, a political settlement is all but impossible.

Iraq's armed factions, sadly, aren't close to that point. The stakes are too high -- Shiites are fighting for the majority rule that has long eluded them, Sunnis are fighting to hang on to some political influence and retain a piece of the country's oil wealth and the Kurds are fighting for some degree of independence. Iraqis are fighting against occupation by foreign troops, and they're fighting to keep their country together. Neither government troops nor coalition forces have been able to protect civilians; they're being cut down by death squads and plagued by rampant criminality. Iraqis are battling for their homes and for their lives.

This week saw the first signs of open civil war, as Shiite and Sunni militias battled it out in Balad, a city north of Baghdad, as well as a sharp spike in violence in the Iraqi capital. In the south, Shiites battled Shiites in Amarah, while Sunni militias held military parades in Haqlaniyah and Haditha. There are at least 23 independent militias operating in Baghdad alone.

It's hard to imagine what policy makers here or in Iraq can do to change the risk-benefit calculations to a degree that would lead dozens of armed factions to lay down their weapons and trust their futures to a political process. In Washington, those tasked with trying to come up with the right policy are hobbled by a stunning degree of ignorance about the region -- essentially viewing the Middle East as roiled in a conflict between "good" and "bad" Arabs. The New York Times' Jeff Stein found that most policy makers overseeing the U.S. effort don't even know which countries in the region -- or which armed groups in Iraq -- have Shiite or Sunni majorities.

Today the government elected last December is hanging by a thread. Iraqi lawmakers reached by phone earlier this week reported that Baghdad is awash in rumors of an impending coup. There's widespread anticipation that a "government of national salvation" -- a junta -- will seize power and dissolve Iraq's Parliament at any time. Those rumors are being echoed in Washington.

More at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/43278/

Google's New PAC Skews Republican

San Jose Mercury News | Posted Saturday October 21, 2006 at 08:40 PM

Looks like Google's been watching Fox News — its new Google NetPAC, launched last month, made contributions to three Republicans congressional candidates, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The Merc's Frank Davies reports $1,000 contributions to each of Reps. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, Deborah Pryce of Ohio, and James Sensenbrenner, head of the House Judiciary Committee and sometime gavel-wielding control freak. At least two of the candidates, Wilson and Sensenbrenner, have porfolios that implicate the use and regulation of the Internet.

Three of Google's new lobbyists were drawn from Republican rankss: Jamie Brown, former legislative liaison in the Bush administration, and former GOP senators Connie Mack and Dan Coats (Davies does not mention what proportion of Google's lobbying staff that comprises). According to Davies, in the past Google executives have donated "overwhelmingly to Democrats and liberal groups" (he also notes that Google employees skew Democratic). Google lobbyist Alan Davidson says PAC donations are intended for the building of "long-term relationships with policy-makers" supported "across party lines." To that end, Google also donated $1,000 each to two Democrats candidates, Rep. Anna Eshoo* of Palo Alto (where Google HQ is located) and Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. More here.