By: Jim Hightower  

From the start, Labor Day was a bottom-up holiday, our only national celebration to be put on the calendar by the working class. It started when feisty Matt McGuire of the Carpenters Union and dauntless William McCabe of the Typographers called for a massive march in New York City to show the strength of laboring people.

Defying bosses and risking their jobs and personal safety, thousands of workers of every trade left work on September 5, 1882, and marched with banners, bands, and bravado right up Fifth Avenue, right past the mansions of the Astors, Vanderbilts, and other Robber Barons.

It was not a parade, but a call to arms, the beginning of labor's fight for an eight-hour day at fair pay. The demonstration was so successful that it spread to other cities, and the idea of setting aside a specific day to affirm that laboring people have rights and are creators of wealth took hold. It was a demand for respect, finally achieved in 1894 when President Grover Cleveland signed the law creating Labor Day...

By: Bill King  

Not only do the American people have no clear idea of why we are in Iraq, neither do our soldiers. And in the midst of what's becoming a guerilla war, hawks like John McCain are now calling for more troops. Anyone hearing echoes of Vietnam? The hundreds of thousands we sent to Southeast Asia were never enough. And since it is true that "occupiers have to build, while resistance only has to destroy", it takes only one terrorist to wreak havoc on thousands.

As Bob Herbert of the New York Times said, how many lives are we willing to lose for "the payoff of a policy spun from fantasy and lies?" We're beginning to reap what we've sown. I sense some going around, coming around. We're setting ourselves up and sucking ourselves in. It's time for Americans to wake-up. One quagmire per generation is one quagmire too many. Enough of the idiotic "Bring 'em on". I say "Bring 'em home".

By: Russ Baker  

Viva Nihilism! It must be great working in the Bush White House. Zero accountability. It's All Spin, All the Time. Nothing matters but politics, hence no unfounded claim requires correction or apology. Unless, of course, they are pushed to the end of the plank, as they were recently with the tale about Niger and nuclear materials.

Take those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction. Despite the failure of the concentrated might of the U.S. military-intelligence complex to find anything that might qualify in the remotest possible way, the administration labels critics "revisionist historians" and imperturbedly moves on. The initial assertions and touted "discoveries" usually get more attention than does the sound of a balloon deflating. That's why polls find a sizable chunk of the American public still under the impression that WMD have been found.

Whatever Saddam's interest in WMD, the administration didn't know what he had and didn't have solid evidence to make the claims it did - much less to launch a war over them...

By: Chris Floyd  

Here's a headline you don't see every day: "War Criminals Hire War Criminals to Hunt Down War Criminals."

Perhaps that's not the precise wording used by the Washington Post this week, but it is the absolute essence of its story about the Bush Regime's new campaign to put Saddam's murderous security forces on America's payroll.

Yes, the sahibs in Bush's Iraqi Raj are now doling out U.S. tax dollars to hire the murderers of the infamous Mukhabarat and other agents of the Baathist Gestapo - perhaps hundreds of them. The logic, if that's the word, seems to be that these bloodstained "insiders" will lead their new imperial masters to other bloodstained "insiders" responsible for bombing the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad - and killing another dozen American soldiers while Little George was playing with his putts during his month-long Texas siesta.

By: Joe Conason  

During the election year to come, Bush and Rove will renew the "compassionate conservatism" theme to draw independent, female, and minority voters, balancing the appeal of a "wartime presidency" that is already beginning to lose its luster. The President recently returned to emphasizing buzzwords like "inclusive, positive, and hopeful" in a June speech to the Urban League.

Indeed, "compassion" is a featured topic on the new website put up by Bush-Cheney '04, where "news" about the President's agenda of compassion includes highlights like "President stresses importance of health and fitness". The need for such filler reflects how thin the administration's portfolio for the poor remains. The site's most noticeable feature is a "compassion photo album" consisting almost entirely of photos of the smiling Bush with smiling black children. This is almost identical to the public-relations material Bush and his advisers rolled out during the 2000 campaign (and the minstrel-show GOP convention in Philadelphia), repackaged to remind voters that he is, or purports to be, a "different kind of Republican".

Editorial from:  

Plainly, no matter how White House political guru Karl Rove spins it, the administration doesn't know what it is doing. It doesn't understand the Middle Eastern people or their history. It doesn't know how to pay for a war that will be much longer and more bloody than they projected in their arrogance. It doesn't know what to say to American soldiers stationed indefinitely as sitting ducks. Now that terrorists have answered the call of the President to "bring 'em on" it doesn't know how to stop them. It doesn't know what to say to its corporate friends assured easy pickings rebuilding a grateful, pacified country now encountering a war zone. It doesn't know how to swallow its pride and seek help from other nations under a United Nations umbrella. It doesn't know what to do about Iran - remember Iran? - which may indeed be developing the nuclear weapons Iraq was not developing.

It doesn't know much. That should worry us all.

"The country was far better off with a President whose deceptions were simply about sex."

- from an editorial in the Louisville Courier-Journal

By: Marie Cocco  

The thing you have to remember, when you see in black and white the hogwash the Bush White House forced the Environmental Protection Agency to tell the people of Lower Manhattan after their neighborhood was attacked by terrorists, is that the scandal did not begin with fibbing about whether the air was safe to breathe.

No. The cornerstone of the edifice of deception about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, was laid that morning aboard Air Force One. "No warnings", White House spokesman Ari Fleischer declared when asked if the President had been shown a sign that terrorists might strike with catastrophic fury.

We know now there were months of warnings, fearful cries rising up from the intelligence agencies that a horror could unfold. The FBI had provided the White House with analysis of "patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks", according to the joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures before 9/11.

By: E.J. Dionne Jr.  

This Labor Day is as good a time as any to begin rolling back the effects of roughly a quarter-century of propaganda that sought, quite successfully, to diminish the role of labor - which is to say real human beings living primarily on wages and salaries - in creating prosperity.

Beginning in the late 1970's, the promoters of supply-side economics tried to resell us on the economic ideas of the 1890's and obliterate the assumptions that had dominated thinking about the economy from the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 during the Great Depression.

The lesson of the Depression was that if ordinary workers lacked jobs and adequate incomes, the economy would crash because too few people could afford to buy what businesses hoped to sell. This was demand-side economics and it laid heavy stress on spreading incomes and job opportunities broadly.

By: Adam Liptak  

After seeing more than 130 prisoners freed by DNA testing in the last 15 years, prosecutors in Florida and across the country have mounted a vigorous challenge to similar new cases.

Prosecutors acknowledge that DNA testing is reliable, but they have grown increasingly skeptical of its power to prove innocence in cases where there was other evidence of guilt. Defense lawyers say these prosecutors, who often relied on the same biological evidence to convict the defendants before DNA testing was available, are more committed to winning than to justice.

The fight has become particularly heated in Florida, where prisoners will soon be barred from seeking DNA testing for old cases under a 2001 law that set an Oct. 1 deadline for such requests.

"Someday, when the grown-ups are back in charge, they'll have quite a mess to clean up."

- Paul Krugman, in a recent op-ed in the New York Times

By: Mark Weisbrot  

If ever there was a Labor Day for American workers to celebrate, this sure isn't the one. It's now 30 years since the end of the "golden era" for American labor, which by most accounting ended in 1973. Over the past 30 years the productivity of the people whose brain and muscle creates the wealth of the world's richest nation has grown by 66%. But the wage of the typical employee - the median wage - has grown by only 7%.

This one statistic says more than the volumes of hype and tripe that will fill the papers and the air waves on Labor Day. It encapsulates the most massive redistribution of income in American history, from the poor, from workers, from former middle classes - to the rich and the super-rich. As billionaire Warren Buffett said to ABC's Ted Koppel last month: "If it's class warfare, my class is winning."

Requires (free D/L)

By: Alan Bisbort  

...Bushido, adapted and bastardized by the United States in 2003 might more properly be called "Swaggering Bravado", aka: "Bushito".

Substitute the Office of Homeland Security for the Ministry of Home Affairs. Substitute Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Coulter, Novak, and, to some extent, all unquestioning conduits of mainstream American journalism, for the Thought Police. Also substitute John Ashcroft's Unchecked Power for the Thought Police. Substitute erroneous headlines like "Opinion Polls Showing Bush Has 'Soaring' Approval Rating" for Emperor Worship. Substitute "God Told Me To Kill Saddam" for "Our Emperor as a Living God". Substitute George W. "AWOL-during-Vietnam" Bush in his codpiece and helmet aboard the flight deck of an aircraft carrier for Emperor Hirohito in his silk robes and dainty slippers. Substitute "Bring 'em on!" for the Japan's suicidal "unshakeable confidence". Substitute "the unchecked anger of the Iraqi people" for the "rain of bullets". And so on.

It is time now that we, collectively as a nation, substitute "I will not willingly die for Bush" for "I willingly die for the Emperor". We must stop this bushido/bushito from spreading. We must, as a national cautionary tale, put it safely behind a glass display case in the National Archives or the U.S. Capitol rotunda, maybe next to the relocated files of George W. Bush's arrest, military, and financial records.

By: Edward O. Wilson  

The best way to avoid catastrophic fires is by trimming undergrowth and clearing debris, combined with natural burns of the kind that have sustained healthy forests in past millennia. Those procedures, guided by science and surgically precise forestry, can return forests to near their equilibrium condition, in which only minimal further intervention would be needed. The worst way to create healthy forests, on the other hand, is to thin trees via increased logging, as proposed by the Bush administration.

The health-by-logging approach arises primarily from an economic motivation in forest management, and reveals the wide separation between two opposing views concerning the best use of U.S. forests. The administration, seeing the forests as a source of extractive wealth, presses for more logging and road-building in wilderness areas. Its strategists appear determined to mute or override the provision of the 1976 National Forest Management Act requiring that forest plans "provide for the diversity of plant and animal communities".

The economic argument for increased road-building and logging is unfounded. It is contradicted by the U.S. Forest Service's own measure of forests' contributions to the nation's economy. Of the $35 billion yielded in 1999 (the last year for which a comprehensive accounting was published), 77.8% came from recreation, fish, and wildlife, only 13.7% from timber harvest, and the modest remainder from mining and ranching. Roughly the same disproportion existed in the percentages of the 822,000 jobs generated by national forests.

Stereotype holds that the GOP is the party of sober competence. But the opposite is true.

By: Michael Tomasky  

Republicans, at least since the 1980 election, have gotten lots of mileage out of billing themselves as the party of competence. They knew how to deal with the Russkies. They understood a budget. They knew how to crack down on the crooks and hoodlums. They understood the bottom line, and they knew what was right for America. The Democrats, meanwhile, were supposedly more interested in their dainty little social-engineering schemes than in success. Lots of people bought all of this, and of course there was a little bit of truth to it - then. But the labels stuck hard. Democrats still have to take dramatic steps to prove their competence while Republicans are presumed - by the mainstream media, anyway - to possess it until they demonstrate otherwise.

Well, guess what? They've demonstrated otherwise. No one - no one - can name a single front on which today's Republicans have shown even the simplest competence. They don't know how to manage an economy. They sure don't know how to balance a budget. They have no idea how to create jobs (though they do have a pretty strong sense of how to make them disappear). Their domestic-security measures have consisted of the usual emphasis on show over substance, first stealing a Democratic idea (the Department of Homeland Security) and then underfunding the result in some crucial respects - a mistake for which I pray we never pay a price.

Editorial from:  

President Bush's critics have watched with mounting frustration as his administration has compiled one of the worst environmental records in recent history without paying any real political price. One reason may be that the issues at stake are too regional, like forest fires or salmon recovery, or too remote, like global warming. But the administration itself may now have witlessly altered this dynamic with its reckless and insupportable decision to eviscerate a central provision of the Clean Air Act and allow power plants, refineries, and other industrial sites to spew millions of tons of unhealthy pollutants into the air.

The proposed changes in the act, formally announced yesterday, are so transparently a giveaway to Mr. Bush's corporate allies and so widely unpopular among the officials responsible for air quality in the individual states that they have already assumed a place in the nascent presidential race. Democratic candidates are competing to see who can express more outrage - John Kerry, for instance, calls the changes a "'get out of jail free' card" for polluters. Moderate Republicans are dismayed and embarrassed. The issue will acquire even greater momentum when the new rules are published as a fait accompli in the Federal Register, and a dozen or more states sue in federal court to have them stayed and then overturned.

"September 11^th was the biggest security failure in American history and it was George W. Bush who neglected the issue and was the President that failed. The right is trying to blame President Clinton and Democrats generally for the lapses of the Bush administration. Bush has spent his whole life ducking responsibility, having his father's friends cover up his escapades and advance his career and portfolio, and having a political machine blame others and make excuses for his incompetence while hailing him as a great leader. But it's Bush who bears the responsibility. The buck stops there."

- Sidney Blumenthal, in an interview with BuzzFlash

By: David Abel  

Three months ago, Vannessa Turner was in charge of a small unit, drove a 5-ton truck through ambushes, and wherever she went in Iraq, the Army sergeant held her M-16 at the ready.

The single mom's war ended in May, when she collapsed in 130-degree heat, fell into a coma, and nearly died of heart failure.

Now, after more than a month recovering in Germany and Washington, DC, the muscular Roxbury native spends her days riding city buses to ward off boredom, roaming area malls looking at things she can't afford, and brooding over how she and her 15-year-old daughter are suddenly homeless, sleeping on friends' couches, and considering moving into a shelter.

"I almost lost my life in Iraq - and I can't get a place to live?"...

Arnold Out of Planet Hollywood Orbit

By: Marcus Errico  

This time the Terminator won't be back.

Arnold Schwarzenegger announced Tuesday that he was ending his association with Planet Hollywood, the troubled theme-restaurant chain he helped launch nine years ago with A-list pals Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Sylvester Stallone.

"It was lots of fun and very challenging to come up with and develop the celebrity-restaurant concept on an international level", Schwarzenegger said in his statement.

"Of course, I am disappointed that the company did not continue with the success I had expected and hoped for. I wish Planet Hollywood well, but I want to focus my attention now on new U.S. and global business ventures - and on my movie career."

"...when we were putting the [Carlyle] board together, somebody came to me and said, look there is a guy who would like to be on the board. He's kind of down on his luck a bit. Needs a job. Needs a board position. Needs some board positions. Could you put him on the board? Pay him a salary and he'll be a good board member and be a loyal vote for the management and so forth. I said well we're not usually in that business. But okay, let me meet the guy. I met the guy. I said I don't think he adds that much value. We'll put him on the board because - you know - we'll do a favor for this guy; he's done a favor for us. We put him on the board and spent three years. Came to all the meetings. Told a lot of jokes. Not that many clean ones. And after a while I kind of said to him, after about three years - you know, I'm not sure this is really for you. Maybe you should do something else. Because I don't think you're adding that much value to the board. You don't know that much about the company. He said, well I think I'm getting out of this business anyway. And I don't really like it that much. So I'm probably going to resign from the board. And I said, thanks - didn't think I'd ever see him again. His name is George W. Bush."

- David Rubenstein, managing director of the Carlyle Group

By: E.J. Dionne Jr.  

A key House leader insisted that "the President does not have the divine right of a king". He accused the administration of providing the public with "the spin, the whole spin, and nothing but the spin".

An important Senator called the President "a jerk", and a House member said: "He still looks like a small man in a big office and an illegitimate President."

Terrible, terrible stuff. These politicians clearly don't know what the thoughtful conservative writer David Brooks knows: that politics should not take on a "lurid and emotional tone", and that it's self-defeating to indulge "the hypercharged tendency to believe the absolute worst about one's political opponents".

Brooks, writing in the Weekly Standard in June, was trashing Democrats for their intense dislike of President Bush. But every one of the comments I cited above was an attack by a Republican on Bill Clinton when he was President.

From:  

The federal government is heading toward a record $480 billion deficit in 2004 and will rack up red ink of almost $1.4 trillion over the next decade, according to the latest analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.

The nonpartisan budget office on Tuesday also confirmed earlier estimates that the federal deficit for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 will be $401 billion, well above the previous record of $290.4 billion set in 1992.

House Budget Committee Democrats said their analysis shows that the deficit will hit $495 billion in 2004, and will never go below $300 billion in the 2004-2013 period, reaching a total over the decade of $3.7 trillion.

If money from the Social Security surpluses now being used to pay for other federal programs is not factored in, the decade-long deficit will be $6.3 trillion, they said.

"I have a suggestion for a new slogan for Fox News, drawn from Judge Chin's decision: Wholly Without Merit."

- Joe Conason, from his interview on WBAI FM

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