"...Rumsfeld is in Iraq. It's awful to see him strutting all over the place. I hate the hard, smug look that seems plastered on his face... some people just have cruel features. The reaction to seeing him on tv differs from the reaction to seeing Bremer or one of the puppets. The latter are greeted with jeers and scorn. Seeing Rumsfeld is something else - there's resentment and disgust. It feels like he's here to add insult to injury... you know, just in case anyone forgets we're an occupied country. And now he's going to go back to America and give a speech about how he doesn't know what anyone is talking about when they say 'chaos' (he was safe in the middle of all his bodyguards)... how electricity and water are functioning (after all, his air-conditioner was working fine)... how the people are gloriously happy and traffic is frequently at a stand-still because the Iraqis are dancing in the streets... how the 'armed forces' are cheerful and grateful to be on this heroic, historical mission... how kids wave at him, troops cheer him, dogs wag their tails in welcome, and doves hover above his head... To hell with him."

- 'riverbend', a "Girl Blog from Iraq", Baghdad Burning

Editorial from:  

The lies about "protecting Americans" began from the moment of impact on September 11 and haven't ever stopped.

Take for instance, one of the most recent in a long and unrelenting series of Bush administration betrayals of the American people through premeditated deception. This one was revealed toward the end of the dog days of August, just before Labor Day, when fewer Americans were following the news. (It's part of Bush Cartel standard operating procedure to release news that discredits them on Fridays, holidays, and other times when most Americans are tuned out from the media. If you want to find out about negative stories about the Bush administration - ones that they can't keep secret - the most important day to read your newspaper is Saturday.)

You see, the inspector general for the Environmental Protection Agency wrote a devastating report about how the Bush administration told the EPA to lie to residents of New York about the air quality around Ground Zero in the days and weeks after 9/11. Faced with concerns by residents of the Big Apple that the layers of dust and particles in South Manhattan - inches thick in some areas - might be full of toxins (including asbestos), the Bush administration ordered the EPA to assure New Yorkers that the air was safe even though the EPA knew that this was likely not the case.

"This President is a miserable failure."

- Rep. Dick Gephardt (D-MO), finally showing some courage

By: J. Hoberman  

In the end 9-11 turned out to be a made-for-TV movie, or rather, the basis for one - a shameless propaganda vehicle for our superstar President George W. Bush.

The upcoming Showtime feature DC 9/11: Time of Crisis is a single advance in the instant, ongoing fictionalization of American history, complete with the President fulminating most presidentially against "tinhorn terrorists", decisively employing the word problematic in a complete sentence, selling a rationale for preemptive war, and presciently laying out American foreign policy for the next 18 months. "We start with bin Laden", Bush (played by Timothy Bottoms) tells his cabinet. "That's what the American people expect... So let's build a coalition for that job. Later, we can shape different coalitions for different tasks."

By: Alan Bisbort  

Ah, for the innocent days of last September! You will recall it was one year ago that White House chief of staff Andrew Card said: "From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." Card was not referring to some innocuous national - or empire-wide - book circle presided over by Laura Bush or a pretzel-eating contest/fund-raiser hosted by the Commander-in-Chief.

No, Card was talking about the sales campaign that began last September for the war we are currently enjoying in Iraq and may soon be seeing in Iran and Syria. You will recall it was then - with the willing participation of our nation's media, most notably Judith Miller of the New York Times - that we began to be hammered, from all sides, about Saddam's nuclear capability, about his weapons of mass destruction, about his alleged ties to the Sept. 11 attacks, and so forth. All very ominous, all accompanied by multi-hued terror alerts.

It was, like most product rollout campaigns, predicated on exaggerations and outright lies. And since then, we've ended up with more blood on our national hands than we've had since the Vietnam War...

By: P.M. Carpenter  

All told, declared the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in 10 years the public debt will stand at $9.1 trillion. In 2013 we'll be forced to lay out $480 billion in interest alone. Just before W. took office - and many mean that literally - the CBO was projecting net interest payments of about $0 over the next 10 years. (2001 CBO estimate cited by the CBPP.)

If that doesn't rock your world, this will. The Center went on to ask how the administration could possibly balance the budget by the final year of a second term, presupposing no tax increases as well as stable spending on Social Security, Medicare, defense, and homeland security. The answer? All other government programs would have to be cut by a staggering 41% - and we're talking spending reductions on matters that hit home for all Americans. In the Center's estimation, we're talking about draconian cuts in "education, veterans programs, law enforcement, transportation and infrastructure, environmental protection... biomedical research... unemployment compensation, Medicaid, the Children's Health Insurance Program, child care, the school lunch and food stamp programs, and Supplemental Security Income for the elderly and disabled poor".

By: Genaro C. Armas  

About 12.4% of the population, or nearly 34.8 million people, lived in poverty in 2002, according to the survey being released today. That was up from 12.1%, or 33.4 million, in 2001.

Roughly 17.2% of children, or 12.2 million, lived in poverty in 2002, up from 16.4%, or 11.5 million, in 2001.

Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said welfare reform helped keep more single mothers in the labor force - and therefore out of poverty - than in previous economic downturns.

"So now coming out of the recession, in terms of child poverty, it's a very optimistic picture", Rector said. "In terms of the population overall, it looks like an ordinary recession."

By: Charles Aldinger  

A "brutally honest" report prepared for the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff blames post-war unrest in Iraq on hurried, inadequate planning before the invasion, defense officials said on Wednesday.

The classified report on lessons learned in the war says U.S. commanders were so busy preparing to defeat Iraq's military and directing the fight that they were given too little time to properly prepare for "Phase IV" peace, according to the officials.

It also flays planning for so-far fruitless efforts to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The threat from such chemical and biological weapons was cited by President Bush and the Pentagon as a major reason for the invasion.

By: Bernie Sanders  

One of the manifestations of the collapse of the middle class is the increased number of hours that Americans are now forced to work in order to pay the bills. Today, the average American employee works, by far, the longest hours of any worker in the industrialized world. And the situation is getting worse. According to statistics from the International Labor Organization the average American last year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990 - an increase of almost a week of work. We are now putting more hours into our work than at any time since the 1920's. Sixty-five years after the formal establishment of the 40-hour work week under the Fair Labor Standards Act, almost 40% of Americans now work more than 50 hours a week.

And if the middle class is having it tough, what about the 33 million people in our society who are living in poverty, up 1.3 million in the past two years? What about the 11 million trying to make it on a pathetic minimum wage of $5.15 an hour? What about the 42 million who lack any health insurance? What about the 3.5 million people who will experience homelessness in this year, 1.3 million of them children? What about the elderly who can't afford the outrageously high cost of the prescription drugs they need? What about the veterans who are on VA waiting lists for their health care?

By: John Stanton  

The United States was chastised recently by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for its reckless tax cutting program which has contributed greatly to the increased the size of the U.S. federal deficit. The IMF expects the U.S. budget deficit to exceed $550 billion over the coming years, a staggering five percent of America's yearly economic output. According to Kenneth Rogoff, IMF Economic Counselor, the United States is on the "biggest external borrowing rampage in the history of the world with current account deficits projected at five percent for as far as the eye can see".

With the USA sucking up cash from domestic and world markets and savings accounts to feed its perpetual war programs, little room remains for private investors to borrow at reasonable interest rates. Productivity is set to decline since American businesses have fired all the employees they can and, subsequently, have outsourced millions of jobs to foreign countries. To alleviate the coming disaster, the IMF recommends that the U.S. reenact the Budget Enforcement Act which would bring back some sort of fiscal reality to the regime in Washington, DC.

By: Helen Thomas  

The Bush administration is evoking "national security" as a powerful weapon to accomplish its twin goals of privatizing thousands of federal jobs and taking a whack at government unions.

The administration's sales pitch is to raise the specter of terrorism and 9-11 - a surefire way to scare Congress into backing plans to gut the Civil Service system.

Congress passed the Civil Service Act in 1883 to end the spoils system, which based federal employment on nepotism and cronyism.

The bad old days may be returning...

By: Seth Ackerman  

On July 24, Congress' joint intelligence panel finally released a declassified version of its inquiry into the 9/11 attacks. Described variously in the next day's press reports as "scathing", "damning", "harshly critical", and an "indictment" of White House secrecy, the report detailed a stunning series of failures by the CIA and FBI that led to the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

No one in the early post-9/11 months, when the panel was born, could have predicted how damaging its findings would eventually prove. Although the committee was established in defiance of the White House - President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney each personally asked Tom Daschle to limit any investigation to the regular intelligence committees - its work got off to an uninspiring start. Its first staff director, Britt Snider, resigned in April 2002 as committee members squabbled over the scope of the investigation. Expectations for the probe were low.

"The key thing, in terms of the state of the world right now, is that the United States has gone mad."

- Paul Krugman, from an interview with Liberal Oasis

By: Perri Green  

All summer, Bush and his enablers have been repeating the mantra: "The economy is recovering." Recovering from what?

From Bush's own disastrous, reckless, and uncompassionate economic "plan". Also known as looting the treasury to support his friends' Unlimited Greed Disorder (UGD), and illegally bomb, invade, and occupy Iraq.

It's like getting shot and then learning your surgeon is also the guy who shot you. "You'll survive," he says, "so stop worrying." Of course, you'll be paralyzed (and in medical bill debt) for the rest of your life, but that's not his problem - he's got to go out and shoot himself another patient he can then help recover.

Action Alert

"I don't think any of us ever expected to find out... that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe, outdoors and indoors. They knew and they didn't tell us the truth, and the White House told them not to tell us the truth. On Friday, through a report released by the Inspector General of the EPA, we learned that the EPA chose to reassure the public about the safety of the air outside the perimeter of Ground Zero without the data and evidence to justify those assurances and despite contrary evidence - as well as personal experience, for those of us who were down there breathing it, feeling it, seeing it - that there were deadly contaminants in the debris."

- Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY)

By: Bob Herbert  

There was an interesting lead paragraph in an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal last Thursday: "The blackout of 2003 offers a simple but powerful lesson: Markets are a great way to organize economic activity, but they need adult supervision."

Gee. They've finally figured that out. The nuns I had in grammar school were onto this adult supervision notion decades ago. It seems to be just dawning on the power brokers of the 21^st Century. Maybe soon the voters will catch on. You need adults in charge.

We barreled into Iraq with no real thought given to the consequences, and now we've got a tragic mess on our hands...

"Now was - did we - was it possible to anticipate that the battles would take place south of Baghdad and that then there would be a collapse up north, and there would be very little killing and capturing of those folks, because they blended into the countryside and they're still fighting their war?..."

"The dilemma that the country is facing right now, Afghanistan, is what should they do about their security situation. They have got Taliban and al Qaeda milling around, that have blended into the countryside, into the villages, across the borders and are ready to come back in in the event they feel they have the opportunity..."

By: Robert Jensen and Rahul Mahajan  

The brutality of Hussein's regime had long been known, not least to U.S. planners during the decade the United States supported him through the worst of his atrocities.

But liberation rhetoric is designed to divert people from questioning U.S. intentions. For the sake of discussion, however, let's take Bush's claim at face value and ask, How serious is the United States about establishing a meaningful democracy in Iraq? How liberated are Iraqis?

Rebuilding a country devastated by three wars (the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, the 1991 Gulf War, and this year's invasion) and 13 years of punishing economic sanctions is no small task. But, as Wolfowitz has admitted, U.S. planners gave little thought to those problems. The United States is spending $3.9 billion a month on military operations but has allocated only $2.5 billion over two years for reconstruction.

Liberation, most would assume, also means allowing people to decide their own fate. Yet the crucial decision to privatize as much of the Iraqi economy as possible has been effectively made by American officials to be ratified by a handpicked Iraqi council.

"The President's economic strategy of tax cuts to the wealthiest 1% combined with an aggressive foreign policy will make it impossible for our economy to recover and will lead to continued cuts in important domestic needs. Of all days to use Ohio as a political backdrop, the President - no friend of working people - has chosen Labor Day. I hope his tour of the state will include the empty factories and bankrupt corporations."

- Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH)

Editorial from:  

At least 132 Americans have been exonerated by DNA testing, but for many of them, getting it was a struggle. About 30 states have laws giving convicted people access to DNA testing, but that access varies considerably. Some states pay for testing whenever there is a reasonable claim of innocence. Others will test only when prosecutors favor it, or give people only a short window of time to show that testing could exonerate them. In Florida, the deadline for old cases is Oct. 1.

As a result of these obstacles, many convicted people who ought to have access to DNA testing can't get it. Even in states where they have a right to the tests, making the case that there is relevant material to be tested, and that a negative result would point to innocence, can take years. In several states, DNA access laws have already expired, after being in force for just a year or two.

By: Paul Krugman  

Most independent experts now believe that during 2000-2001, price manipulation by energy companies, mainly taking the form of "economic withholding" - keeping capacity offline to drive up prices - added billions of dollars to California's electricity bills. A March FERC report concluded that there had been extensive manipulation of prices in both the natural gas and electricity markets.

Using methods widely accepted among economists, the California Independent System Operator - which operates the power grid - estimated that withholding by electricity companies had cost the state $8.9 billion. This estimate doesn't include the continuing cost of long-term contracts the state signed, at inflated prices, to keep the lights on during the crisis.

Yet the charges energy companies agreed to added up to only a bit more than $1 million. That is, the average Californian was bilked of more than $250, but the state will receive compensation of about 3¢.

Was the fix in? Given the Bush administration's record of catering to energy companies, FERC isn't entitled to any presumption of innocence...

From:  

This week's edition of the Top Ten Conservative Idiots is dedicated to Sally Baron, anti-Bush heroine and coiner of our favorite new Dubya nickname: "Whistle-Ass". So here we go: the Whistle-Ass Administration takes the number one spot this week, since they're now apparently suggesting that Saddam's ex-spies are providing better intelligence than the CIA and MI6 combined. The Republican Party (2) are demonstrating their true patriotism. Brit Hume (3) tells lies. And Marc Racicot (4) has just gone, well, nuts. Meanwhile Arnold Schwarzenegger (6) has an enormous penis, Fox News (7) likes the sound of that, and The White House Press Corps (9) has just lost any shred of credibility they may have had left. Enjoy.

A Small Group of Dedicated People Might Actually Do Something

By: Doris "Granny D" Haddock  

You know, there are two kinds of politics in the world: the politics of love and the politics of fear. Love is about cooperation, sharing, and inclusion. It is about the elevation of each individual to a life neither supressed nor exploited, but instead nourished to rise to its full potential - a life for its own sake and so that we may all benefit by the gift of that life. Fear and the politics of fear is about narrow ideologies that separate us, militarize us, imprison us, exploit us, control us, overcharge us, demean us, bury us alive in debt and anxiety and then bury us dead in cancers and wars. The politics of love and the politics of fear are now pitted against each other in a naked struggle that will define not only the 21^st Century but centuries to come.

This struggle is real. A very close friend of mine, a college student, spent this summer in Guatemala to help small communities prosper in ways that support their local environments. Those villagers and their environments are under siege by international big business, using a captured U.S. government to push through damaging treaties such as the proposed Central America Free Trade Agreement and the hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas. The villagers of Guatemala want global fair trade, but the corporations and their captive governments want free trade. If fair trade wins, a global middle class will rise, as farmers and craftsmen are paid fairly for their work, and as they gain a voice in their governance and their environments are protected for their future generations. If free trade wins, it is colonial exploitation, torture, and murder written in blood across another century.

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