By: Pedro Nicolaci da Costa  

Jobless claims jumped to 442,000 in the week to April 12, well above forecasts of 411,000 and erasing all of the previous week's sharp fall to 412,000. It was the ninth straight week claims held above the 400,000 level, which implies job growth is not nearly enough to help lower the unemployment rate. Worse yet, the four-week moving average climbed to an 11-month peak of 425,500 and this in the week when the survey for the April payrolls report is taken.

Thursday's claims data is even worse than that during last month's payroll-survey week. In other words, this week's data could well translate into a dismal April jobs report.

The labor market has proved a sore spot for the economy in recent months, with payrolls collapsing by 465,000 in just February and March alone.

By: Carol Norris  

Please don't talk to me of "precision bombing" and "liberation". Don't talk of "minimal loss of life" and cheering Iraqis. Don't come with your "I told you so" and your "See, the war wasn't that bad".

Because I know better. I know there was little that was precise and liberating about this war. I know while many Iraqis are thrilled to be done with Saddam; they are equally appalled at how this war has played out.

And what of your "I told you so"?

You said the reason we must go to war and flout international law and the U.N. is because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and must be stopped. I see none, despite the attempts of the Bush administration to concoct them.

By: Eleanor Clift  

More than 60% of Americans say large tax cuts now are not needed, yet President Bush is making support for tax cuts a test of party loyalty and patriotism.

He is melding the war in Iraq with the war to win tax relief on stock dividends. It is a shameless exploitation of a military victory with the goal of intimidating Republican holdouts on Capitol Hill. Just as Bush crushed Democrats in last year's congressional elections with appeals to patriotism, he is now turning the big guns on his own party.

The President's claim that the dividend tax cut would benefit most taxpayers goes largely unchallenged. 70% of taxpayers would receive no benefit at all according to the IRS. By contrast, the three top executives at each of the Fortune 100 companies would gain an average of $400,000 a year. Bush trades on the trust he enjoys with voters, which makes him a formidable campaigner. He gets credit for being plainspoken and a truth teller even when he falsely portrays his dividend tax cut as a jobs program.

By: Joe Vecchio  

The easy victory has also marginalized any opposition in the United States, an opposition that may have been more patient, that may have sought a more international solution to the problems of terrorism, or that might have even found a way to overcome the religious and social differences that separate the East and the West, but there's little hope for that now. Westerners are endangered in Arab countries, Arabs are endangered here, and as long as this "patriotic fervor" continues, the gulf between us will grow. This gives the hardliners on both sides a ready-made political excuse to do anything they want in the name of survival. In the West, endless wars will cover up the corruption of corporate oligarchies and the slow, systematic destruction of American freedoms. It will provide cover for the removal of the economic safety nets that helped make this country the economic and military powerhouse it is today. It will give a blank check to the policies of a warmongering President, giving him all the money he needs to battle every new Saddan Hussein, which will bleed the U.S. dry. In the East, anger and resentment will force moderate Islamic regimes to take harder and harder stances against their ow people. And the lessening scope of international law will alienate one country from another and see to it that peaceful solutions are less and less considered, as nations pursue their own versions of the Bush Doctrine.

"We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it."

- Edward R. Murrow

By: Maureen Dowd  

We obviously have some things to learn from the British. When they carted off the treasures of the nations they conquered to the British Museum, they at least preserved them for future generations to fight over who should own them.

The coalition forces were guarding the Iraqi Oil Ministry building while hundreds of Iraqis ransacked and ran off with precious heirlooms and artifacts from a 7,000-year-old civilization. Rummy blew off the repeated requests of scholars and archaeologists that the soldiers must protect Iraqi history in the museum as zealously as they protected Iraqi wealth in the oil wells.

The Secretary of Defense made it clear yesterday that he was not too worried about a few old pots in the big scheme of things. He said it was "a stretch" to attribute the looting of the museum to "a defect" in the war plan.

By: Howard Zinn  

You ask how I manage to stay involved and remain seemingly happy and adjusted to this awful world where the efforts of caring people pale in comparison to those who have power?

It's easy.

By: Jay Walljasper  

Let me get to my point right away: We must do everything we can to unseat George W. Bush and his congressional supporters in next year's election. The fate of America depends on it. I mean this literally. The Bush administration's actions on Iraq, terrorism, the environment, the economy, civil liberties, and the judicial system pose a serious threat to our future. A nation solely dedicated to exercising military might and expanding corporate power will not stand tall for long.

We should be open to a rebellion in Republican ranks, in which someone arises from obscurity to challenge the madness that's overtaken the party of Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. We should also invite the Green Party to come forward with a plan showing how they can sew up 270 electoral votes in the next 18 months. But until then, we're left with the Democrats.

Now, before you sigh and throw up your hands, please recall what a different country this was three years ago. Al Gore, whatever his shortcomings as a progressive and dynamic leader, would not be searching the world for new opportunities to wage war and scheming to eliminate taxes on millionaires...

"Bush is now trying to find common ground between Turks and Kurds. Since he's a turd, he may just be the perfect man for the job!"

- Barry Crimmins, CrimQuips

By: Paul Krugman  

We can safely dismiss the idea that the right has carefully weighed the scientific evidence and concluded that the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is wrong. We can also dismiss the idea that conservatives have carefully examined the economics of emission controls and concluded that they are too expensive.

So was it just politics as usual? Opposition to a global warming policy partly reflects a general aversion to government regulation. Don't forget that Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is a former exterminator who entered politics because he was angry about controls on pesticide use.

But the ferocity with which the right opposes any policy to limit greenhouse gases, even the nearly empty Bush plan, goes beyond general anti-environmentalism. What's different about global warming, I think, is that unlike local pollution, dealing with it requires concerted action by governments around the world. And that's what the right really can't stand.

By: Greg Palast  

Some of the loot for the Republican effort in the 1997-2000 election cycles came from an outfit called Barrick Corporation. The sum, while over $100,000, is comparatively small change for the GOP, yet it seemed quite a gesture for a corporation based in Canada. Technically, the funds came from those associated with the Canadian's U.S. unit, Barrick Gold Strike.

They could well afford it. In the final days of the Bush (Senior) administration, the Interior Department made an extraordinary but little noticed change in procedures under the 1872 Mining Law, the gold rush-era act that permitted those whiskered small-time prospectors with their tin pans and mules to stake claims on their tiny plots. The department initiated an expedited procedure for mining companies that allowed Barrick to swiftly lay claim to the largest gold find in America. In the terminology of the law, Barrick could "perfect its patent" on the estimated $10 billion in ore - for which Barrick paid the U.S. Treasury a little under $10,000. Eureka!

The Stage-Managed Events in Baghdad's Firdos Square: Image-Making, Lies, and the "Liberation" of Iraq

By: Patrick Martin  

Several photographs publicized by an antiwar website shed light on the way the American media is manipulating images of the war in Iraq to give the false impression that the vast majority of the Iraqi people are joyfully welcoming the invasion and occupation of their country by U.S. and British troops.

These photographs, available on the website of Information Clearing House show that the toppling of a statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, given massive publicity in the U.S. and international media April 9-10, was a stage-managed affair.

The first photograph on the Information Clearing House site is a wide-angle shot encompassing the entire expanse of Firdos Square, rather than the narrowly focused, closely cropped framing used in the mass media. It shows that the "crowd" surrounding the statue of Saddam Hussein is anything but massive, and that the square itself has been surrounded by U.S. Abrams tanks, cutting it off from the rest of the city.

Report from:  

The Democratic former President, who preceded George W. Bush at the White House, said that sooner or later the United States had to find a way to cooperate with the world at large.

"We can't run", Clinton pointed out. "If you got an interdependent world, and you cannot kill, jail, or occupy all your adversaries, sooner or later you have to make a deal."

He said he believed Washington overreacted to German and French opposition to U.S. plans for military action against Iraq and suggested that the current administration had trouble juggling foreign and domestic issues.

By: Liam McDougall  

Fears that Iraq's heritage will face widespread looting at the end of the Gulf war have been heightened after a group of wealthy art dealers secured a high-level meeting with the US administration.

It has emerged that a coalition of antiquities collectors and arts lawyers, calling itself the American Council for Cultural Policy (ACCP), met with US defence and state department officials prior to the start of military action to offer its assistance in preserving the country's invaluable archaeological collections.

The group is known to consist of a number of influential dealers who favour a relaxation of Iraq's tight restrictions on the ownership and export of antiquities. Its treasurer, William Pearlstein, has described Iraq's laws as 'retentionist' and has said he would support a post-war government that would make it easier to have antiquities dispersed to the US.

By: Elizabeth Becker  

The Pentagon contract given without competition to a Halliburton subsidiary to fight oil well fires in Iraq is worth as much as $7 billion over two years, according to a letter from the Army Corps of Engineers that was released today.

The contract also allows Kellogg Brown & Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, to earn as much as 7% profit. That could amount to $490 million.

By: Maureen Dowd  

Polls and interviews show that in their goal of making Americans less rattled by battle, Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cheney have succeeded: most Americans are showing a stoic attitude about the dead and the wounded so far.

(Perhaps the American tolerance for pain is owed to the fact that much of the pain is not shown on television, embeddedness notwithstanding.)

Wolfowitz of Arabia and the other administration hawks are thrilled with U.S. hawkishness. When Mr. Wolfowitz was on Meet the Press on Sunday, his aides sat in the green room watching the monitor and high-fiving their boss's performance.

"[W]hy should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it's going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Oh, I mean, it's, not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

- Barbara Bush on an ABC-TV morning show, after she was asked if she and her husband, the former President, watch television

By: George McGovern  

Thanks to the most crudely partisan decision in the history of the Supreme Court, the nation has been given a President of painfully limited wisdom and compassion and lacking any sense of the nation's true greatness. Appearing to enjoy his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces above all other functions of his office, and unchecked by a seemingly timid Congress, a compliant Supreme Court, a largely subservient press and a corrupt corporate plutocracy, George W. Bush has set the nation on a course for one-man rule.

He treads carelessly on the Bill of Rights, the United Nations, and international law while creating a costly but largely useless new federal bureaucracy loosely called "Homeland Security". Meanwhile, such fundamental building blocks of national security as full employment and a strong labor movement are of no concern.

The nearly $1.5 trillion tax giveaway, largely for the further enrichment of those already rich, will have to be made up by cutting government services and shifting a larger share of the tax burden to workers and the elderly...

Editorial from:  

Around this time each year, the State Department produces a remarkable document detailing the human rights practices and problems of almost every country in the world. Dispensing with the niceties of diplomatic language, the report looks at friend and foe alike with candid scrutiny.

Among the nations that come in for criticism are a number of members of President Bush's Coalition of the Willing for the invasion of Iraq - embarrassing company in a campaign whose aims include liberating the Iraqi people from dictatorship. Uzbekistan routinely tortures detainees and some have died in custody. Eritrea has ended freedom of the press and restricts religious freedom. Azerbaijan arbitrarily detains dissidents and rigs elections. Significant violations are noted in such other coalition members as Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Macedonia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Ethiopia. In all seven, the overall human rights situation was rated as poor.

By: Saul Friedman  

Consider the House (Republican) budget resolution, which passed on a narrow, party-line vote on March 21 and was based on the President's proposed tax cuts of $726 billion over the next decade. To help pay for those cuts and the war, the resolution orders $265 billion in spending cuts over those 10 years, most of it - $159 billion - from basic domestic entitlement programs.

According to Washington's nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, the cuts would eliminate $92 billion in Medicaid, the basic federal-state health insurance program for the very poor, mostly children, and the elderly and the disabled; $19 billion in Supplemental Security Income; $14 billion in veterans benefits; $14 billion in the earned income tax credit for the working poor who don't make enough to pay taxes; $13 billion in food stamps; $8 billion in temporary assistance to needy families; $7 billion in farmer assistance; $6 billion for child nutrition and school lunches; and $2 billion in the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which Republicans had hailed for providing health coverage for children whose parents have none.

Editorial from:  

Republicans in Congress love talking about their "growth package", and it certainly does sound better than a tax-breaks-for-the-wealthy package. But if they cared to listen, an excellent and objective analysis of its real effects can be found right in the Capitol. Far from the economic growth and deficit reductions predicted by the White House, the tax cuts would mean more than $1 trillion in deficits in the next five years alone, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The CBO is the lawmakers' nonpartisan in-house source for estimating the actual bottom-line numbers of blue-sky proposals.

The conclusion is particularly relevant because the estimates were done by the "dynamic scoring" method long demanded by supply-side conservatives who find traditional static techniques less liberal, to use a word, in assuming that bounty follows tax cuts...

"People who know Bush well say the strain of war is palpable. He rarely jokes with staffers these days and occasionally startles them with sarcastic putdowns. He's being hard on himself; he gave up sweets just before the war began."

- Judy Keen, from an article in USA Today

By: Tom Pain  

Okay. So you want me to shut up and support the troops. I read the polls. I know that some ungodly huge percentage of Americans feel duty bound to support the war because they deeply feel the need to support the troops. Apparently we, as a people, have yet to understand that we can support the troops and oppose the war at the same time.

The simple fact is: this war is an act of pure aggression on our part. The last nations to launch a major "preemptive" attack against another nation that posed no immediate threat were Germany and Japan. Few would deny that it was German aggression that caused World War II, at least in the European theater. What will the end result of our aggression against Iraq be? No one knows.

Don't we all want to be able to be proud of what it means to be an American? Don't we want our country to support and abide by international law? Don't we want our country to engage in international diplomacy to further the cause of democracy? Do we really want our government to be concerned only about conquest and furthering American business interests, without regard to what happens to the people of the countries where our business interests are located, and without regard to how it affects our position in the international community?

By: Meg Laughlin  

In this dry desert world near Najaf, where the Army V Corps combat support system sprawls across miles of scabrous dust, there's an oasis of sorts: a 500-gallon pool of pristine, cool water.

It belongs to Army chaplain Josh Llano of Houston, who sees the water shortage, which has kept thousands of filthy soldiers from bathing for weeks, as an opportunity.

"It's simple. They want water. I have it, as long as they agree to get baptized", he said.

By: Gregory Sinaisky  

How to tell genuine reporting from an article manufactured to produce the desired propaganda effect? The war in Iraq provides us plenty of interesting samples for a study of disinformation techniques.

Take the article "Basra Shiites Stage Revolt, Attack Government Troops", published on March 26 in the Wall Street Journal Europe. Using its example, we will try to arm readers with basic principles of disinformation analysis that hopefully will allow them in the future to detect deception.

The title of the article sounds quite definitive. The article starts, however, with the much less certain "Military officials said the Shiite population of Basra... appeared to be rising". "Military officials" and "appeared to be" should immediately raise a red flag for a reader, especially given a mismatch with such a definitive title...

By: James Ridgeway  

When it comes to making war in the Bush administration, the rich call the shots, while the working class and the poor dodge the bullets or get killed. As Paul Atwood, a former Vietnam vet and researcher at the University of Massachusetts, said this morning, the men who are running this war have long been referred to as "chicken hawks".

"Overwhelmingly these are people who can't afford college, who may want to go to college and see the military as a way to pay for it, who don't have the skills to get admitted because of their educational background - people who want to escape their neighborhoods, and some who want the adventure", said Atwood, now a research associate at William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts.

"The same people who 35 years ago supported the war in Vietnam support this war in the Gulf and are prepared to send the children of less privileged people to do their dirty work", he said. "I can assure you there's a lot of anger and opposition to this war on the part of Vietnam veterans, because of the illegality and immorality of it but also deriving from the fact that these chicken hawks are sponsoring it."

Site content © 2001-2003 J. Mekus - - except wherein noted.
All rights reserved.