Hip Heterodoxy

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES

[from the June 11, 2007 issue]

It's a Friday night in January, and I am searching for a free drink among 9,000 economists. Every year a sizable portion of the nation's economists descend on some lucky city for the Allied Social Science Associations Annual Meeting, the economics field's largest gathering, a kind of carnival of suits and supply curves. Most academic disciplines have a similar annual convention, but no other can boast the same influence on American politics and policy--after all, Presidents don't appoint a council of anthropological advisers. It doesn't take long for mainstream academic thinking to become the foundation for the government's macroeconomic policy. In 1968 Milton Friedman, then president of the American Economics Association (AEA), devoted his presidential address to arguing against Keynesian meddling in the economy and for a monetary policy focused on restraining inflation. A decade later, his prescriptions would be largely adopted. In 2005 onetime Reagan adviser Martin Feldstein called for Social Security privatization just as Republicans in Washington were mobilizing (unsuccessfully) toward the same end.

This year's conference attendees are packed into the mammoth glass-and-brick Chicago Hyatt. On the second evening, I come across two receptions facing off across a basement hallway. If you wanted to get a sense of the status hierarchies of the profession, this was a perfect tableau. On one side, a reception in honor of the impending rebroadcast of the late Milton Friedman's famed miniseries Free to Choose, a wildly successful bit of laissez-faire propaganda now set to reach a new generation of unsuspecting blue-state audiences. The room is packed and festive, with several Nobel laureates milling about, chicken satay skewers available for noshing and an open bar. (A man behind me in line complains of the free drinks that "Milton wouldn't approve! Because we're not getting the true price of the drinks.") Across the hall, a reception hosted by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-liberal Washington think tank that advocates policies--higher minimum wage, easier paths to unionization, social insurance--that are in almost every detail the opposite of everything that Friedman stood for. In that room, perhaps thirty people gather, picking at the cheese cubes and shelling out $6 a drink at the cash bar. The EPI's Max Sawicky, an imposing presence with a long gray ponytail and growling voice, tells me the turnout is better than usual.

Bush's emission plan 'a delaying tactic'

Peter Walker and agencies
Friday June 1, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

Environmental groups today condemned George Bush's proposed global plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, labelling it a stalling tactic lacking concrete details.

The US president's proposals, outlined in a speech yesterday, appeared to cast severe doubt on international efforts for a UN-brokered successor to the Kyoto protocol on climate change, which ends in 2012.

Small-scale agricultural changes may help eradicate widespread disease

Small changes in agricultural and sanitation practices may eliminate the spread of a disease that affects some 200 million people living in developing nations around the world. Researchers working in remote farming villages in western China report that providing medicine to infected people and animals, along with modifying irrigation and waste treatment practices could reduce, or even eliminate, the long-term transmission of schistosomiasis.

The Scales Of Justice

By Murray Waas, National Journal
© National Journal Group Inc.
Thursday, May 31, 2007

In the closing weeks of Missouri's tight 2006 U.S. Senate race, the U.S. attorney in Little Rock, Ark., took the unusual step of revealing that his office's investigation into possible state government contracting abuses in Missouri had found no evidence of wrongdoing by Republican Gov. Matt Blunt.

Separately, less than a week before Election Day, the interim U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo., brought voting-fraud charges against four employees of the activist group ACORN, which registers low-income people who typically vote for Democratic candidates. Justice Department guidelines discourage prosecutors from bringing criminal charges so close to an election.

Turning Tar into Oil: An Economic and Environmental Disaster Looms

By Naomi Klein, The Nation
Posted on June 1, 2007, Printed on June 1, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52745/

The Iraq War has set off one of the largest oil booms in history -- and the race to mine the tar sands of Alberta will result in environmental disaster.

The invasion of Iraq has set off what could be the largest oil boom in history. All the signs are there: multinationals free to gobble up national firms at will, ship unlimited profits home, enjoy leisurely "tax holidays" and pay a laughable 1 percent in royalties to the government.

This isn't the boom in Iraq sparked by the proposed new oil law -- that will come later. This boom is already in full swing, and it is happening about as far away from the carnage in Baghdad as you can get, in the wilds of northern Alberta.

Don't We Have a Constitution, Not a King?

By Marjorie Cohn, AlterNet. Posted June 1, 2007.

Bush has issued a directive that would place all governmental powers in his hands in the case of a catastrophic emergency. If a terrorist attack happens before the 2008 election, could Bush and Cheney use this to avoid relinquishing power to a successor administration?

As the nation focused on whether Congress would exercise its constitutional duty to cut funding for the war, Bush quietly issued an unconstitutional bombshell that went virtually unnoticed by the corporate media.

The National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive, signed on May 9, 2007, would place all governmental power in the hands of the President and effectively abolish the checks and balances in the Constitution.

Ted Rall: Mission Accomplished

Funding Battle Highlights American Embrace of Moronitude

ORLANDO--I'm against the war. Who isn't? (Maybe the two percent who tell The New York Times/CBS poll that Iraq is going "very well.") But this column isn't about the war. It's about logic.

In his new book Al Gore argues that Americans are losing the ability to, well, argue. "Reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions," claims the President-in-Internal-Exile. Never mind left versus right; irrationality has become so prevalent that outlandish jingoism and sentimental lunacy have displaced reason as the framework of our national dialogue. What passed for debate on the latest funding bill for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan makes a convincing case for Gore's thesis.

The Specter Haunting Your Office

By James Lardner

The Disposable American: Layoffs and Their Consequences
by Louis Uchitelle
Vintage, 287 pp., $14.95 (paper)

The Great American Jobs Scam
by Greg LeRoy
Berrett-Koehler, 290 pp., $24.95

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
by John C. Bogle
Yale University Press,260 pp., $16.00 (paper)

1.

Donald Davis was not concerned about imports in the late 1960s, when he started out as CEO of the Stanley Works, the country's leading manufacturer of hand tools. By the early 1980s, the challenge of competing against inexpensive tools made in Taiwan, Korea, and China had swept most of Davis's other concerns aside. His first response was a plan to streamline management, reducing the company's white-collar ranks through attrition. An old-school CEO who had been with Stanley most of his adult life, Davis considered layoffs a last resort. But by the time he stepped down as CEO in 1987, hundreds of factory workers had lost their jobs on his orders.

His successor, Richard Ayers, had the advantage of knowing what he was in for. An industrial engineer by training, Ayers mapped out a long-term strategy that called for layoffs, plant closings, and outsourcing: sledgehammer and crowbar production was moved to Mexico; socket wrench production to Taiwan. But the company also invested in making its domestic operations more efficient, and Ayers took special care to preserve jobs and facilities in New Britain, Connecticut, where Stanley had been a major employer for more than a century. By the mid-1990s, revenues had stabilized, profits were up, and Ayers could reasonably tell himself that his "evolutionary" approach had worked.

Bush's Amazing Achievement

By Jonathan Freedland

Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
by Chalmers Johnson
Metropolitan, 354 pp., $26.00

Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower
by Zbigniew Brzezinski
Basic, 234 pp., $26.95

Statecraft and How to Restore America's Standing in the World
by Dennis Ross
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 384 pp., $25.00

1.

One of the few foreign policy achievements of the Bush administration has been the creation of a near consensus among those who study international affairs, a shared view that stretches, however improbably, from Noam Chomsky to Brent Scowcroft, from the antiwar protesters on the streets of San Francisco to the well-upholstered office of former secretary of state James Baker. This new consensus holds that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a calamity, that the presidency of George W. Bush has reduced America's standing in the world and made the United States less, not more, secure, leaving its enemies emboldened and its friends alienated. Paid-up members of the nation's foreign policy establishment, those who have held some of the most senior offices in the land, speak in a language once confined to the T-shirts of placard-wielding demonstrators. They rail against deception and dishonesty, imperialism and corruption. The only dispute between them is over the size and depth of the hole into which Bush has led the country he pledged to serve.

U.S. Company Used Melamine in Feed

Humans Unlikely to Be Harmed

By Rick Weiss

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 31, 2007; Page A03

An Ohio company has long been adding the industrial toxin melamine to animal feed ingredients, and those feeds have been eaten by livestock and fish meant for human consumption, officials with the Food and Drug Administration announced yesterday.

The company used the chemical as a binding agent to hold feed granules in pellet form, in contrast to the recent pet food scandal, which involved imported ingredients that were spiked with melamine to provide a false measure of protein content, officials said.

U.S. Food System Deeply At Risk

Jim Harkness

May 31, 2007

Jim Harkness is the president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy , a Minneapolis-based policy research center committed to creating environmentally and economically sustainable rural communities and regions through sound agriculture and trade policy. This article was distributed by www.MinutemanMedia.org.

The recent discovery of an industrial chemical in animal feed and pet food imported from China has added to the mounting criticism of U.S. food safety agencies. But this case represents much more than simply governmental incompetence. It exposes the inherent weaknesses of an industrial global food system designed to benefit multinational agribusiness companies at the expense of public health.

Last year, the United States imported about $10 billion more in food, feed and beverages than it exported. Imports came from 175 different countries and represented a 60 percent jump over the last decade. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) inspectors were simply overwhelmed. They were only able to examine physically 1.3 percent of food imports last year, about three-quarters of the already minute portion examined in 2003.

Another Wolf For The World Bank

Sarah Anderson

May 31, 2007

Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and was a staff member of the Congressionally appointed International Financial Institutions Advisory Commission (the Meltzer Commission).

Nine days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, I opened up The Washington Post and stared right into the flinty mind of one Robert B. Zoellick, the Bush administration’s pick for new World Bank president.

While the rest of the country was still in a haze of horror and confusion, Zoellick had seized the moment to advance his agenda as U.S. trade representative. In a commentary titled “Fighting Terror with Trade,” he argued that Congress needed to pass fast-track trade negotiating authority as part of their support for the “War on Terror.”

Mercury's Link to Heart Disease Begins in Blood Vessel Walls

Posted 5/30/2007

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Heavy metals and other toxins have been linked to many human diseases, but determining exactly how they damage the body remains a mystery in many cases. New research focusing on a relatively obscure, misunderstood protein suggests mercury’s link to heart disease can be traced to activation of this enzyme, which triggers a process leading to plaque buildup in blood vessel walls.

The study examined three forms of mercury, matching its characteristics in the environment. Each form of mercury caused changes in the behavior of cells that line the blood vessel walls and that can lead to cardiovascular diseases.

Dobbs Admits Error In Reporting, Calls NYT Article "Scurrilous Personal Attack"

This doesn't happen often: Lou Dobbs presented "an answer to my critics" in the middle of his hour-long show Wednesday.

He admitted the show made a mistake in using a controversial source. He spent most of the time going through yesterday's NYT story and responding point by point.

CEOs vs. Slaves

By Barbara Ehrenreich, AlterNet. Posted May 31, 2007.

Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. The new "top" involves pay in the hundreds of millions, a private jet and a few acres of Nantucket. The new bottom is slavery.

Recent findings shed new light on the increasingly unequal terrain of American society. Starting at the top executive level: You may have thought, as I did, that the guys in the C-suites operated as a team -- or, depending on your point of view, a pack or gang -- each getting his fair share of the take. But no, the rising tide in executive pay does not lift all yachts equally. The latest pay gap to worry about is the one between the CEO and his -- or very rarely her -- third in command.

According to a just-reported study by Carola Frydman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Raven E. Saks at the Federal Reserve, 30-40 years ago, the CEO's of major companies earned 80 percent more, on average, than the third-highest-paid executives. By the early part of the 21st century, however, the gap CEO and the third in command had ballooned up to 260 percent.

How Bush Risks an Islamist Bomb

By Ivan Eland
May 30, 2007

Editor's Note: Among the many catastrophes surrounding George W. Bush's Middle East wars is possibly the bitterest irony of all -- that he is laying the groundwork for radical Islamists to get an atomic bomb via the collapse of Pakistan's pro-U.S. dictator Pervez Musharraf.

In this guest essay, the Independent Institute's Ivan Eland looks at how Bush's bungled policies in Afghanistan and Iraq are leading inexorably to an even worse disaster:

The Bush administration has failed to capture or kill Osama bin Laden or to win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, the administration has also missed the chance to maintain a stable nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Rich Must Pay Bulk of Climate Change Bill, Oxfam Says

May 29, 2007 — By Jeremy Lovell, Reuters

LONDON -- Coping with the ravages of global warming will cost $50 billion a year, and the rich nations who caused most of the pollution must pay most of the bill, aid agency Oxfam said on Tuesday.

The call, barely 10 days before a crucial Group of Eight (G8) summit in Germany which has climate change at its core, is likely to make already tense negotiations even tougher.

Rigging The Marketplace Of Ideas

Rick Perlstein

May 30, 2007

Last week, sane people everywhere celebrated the withdrawal of Michael Baroody as nominee to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission, because he had made his living fighting against the commission of consumer product safety. This scion for the clan I've called the Corleone family of the right did so as lobbyist for the National Association of Manufacturers, which reacted thus: "The withdrawal of Michael Baroody’s nomination to chair the Consumer Product Safety Commission is a sad day for consumers and everyone who cares about good government."

Such public relations absurdities are par for the National Association of Manufacturer's course. I'm glad, in fact, for this teachable moment: There is nothing more fundamental to what NAM than hustling the public about what is good for them. If you love E. coli conservatism, lift a glass daily in honor of NAM.

Fitzgerald Again Points to Cheney

By Dan Froomkin

Special to washingtonpost.com
Wednesday, May 30, 2007; 9:14 AM

Special counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald has made it clearer than ever that he was hot on the trail of a coordinated campaign to out CIA agent Valerie Plame until that line of investigation was cut off by the repeated lies from Vice President Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby was convicted in March of perjury and obstruction of justice. Fitzgerald filed a memo on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, who will sentence Libby next week, to put him in prison for at least two and a half years.

Democratic Spin Won't End the War in Iraq

Submitted by John Stauber on Thu, 05/24/2007 - 12:13.
Topics: activism | internet | Iraq | U.S. Congress

After several months of empty posturing against the war in Iraq, politicians in Washington have made what Democratic congressman James P. Moran called a "concession to reality" by agreeing to give President Bush virtually everything he wanted in funding and unrestricted license to continue waging the increasingly detested war that has made Bush the most unpopular president since Richard Nixon.

This is the outcome that we warned against two months ago when we wrote "Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?" In it, we criticized MoveOn for backpedaling on its previously claimed objective of ending the war in Iraq immediately. Anti-war sentiment was the main factor behind last year's elections that brought Democrats to power in both houses of Congress. Once in power, however, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushed through a "compromise" bill, supported by MoveOn, that offered $124 billion in supplemental funding for the war. To make it sound like they were voting for peace, the Democrats threw in a few non-binding benchmarks asking Bush to certify progress in Iraq, coupled with language that talked about withdrawing troops next year.

The Religious Left is Left Out by the Commercial Media

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet
Posted on May 30, 2007, Printed on May 30, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52567/

People can attach a thousand different meanings to words like "faith" and "values," yet when it comes to religion and politics, we've been conditioned to understand that they have a narrow and decidedly right-wing tilt. When pundits speak the phrase -- often in reverent tones -- we know they're not talking about the pacifism valued by Quakers, the environmental stewardship valued by Wiccans or the act of caring for the hungry, poor and sick that's valued by almost all faiths.

So after the 2004 election, when exit polls found that more people identified "moral values" as their most important issue than any other, it led to endless hand-wringing among liberals and Democrats about how they could win back "values voters" and a thousand columns about how progressive America is largely a secular, even God-hating America and would therefore always be a marginal part of the body politic. The electorate, we were told, was divided between pro-choice, gay-tolerant "blue," and anti-choice, gay-bashing "red."

Conductive plastics made from natural, renewable, environmentally friendly soybeans

Electrical properties of acrylated epoxidized soybean oil polymers based composites

Polymer matrix composites with carbon black are very interesting materials. This is because the carbon black can be used as filler material and can beneficially modify the electrical and mechanical properties of the used matrixes. The polymer components of these composites are traditionally made using oleo-polymers; however, an alternative is to use natural and renewable sources as soybean oil, linseed oil, sunflower oil, etc.

Polymers derived from those natural oils can be tailored for engineering and aeronautical applications by reinforcing them with natural and synthetic fibers and clays.

Workplace bullying 50 percent higher in the US than Scandinavia

New research to be published in Journal of Management Studies reveals that US employees are bullied up to 50 percent more often than workers in Scandinavia. However, just 9 percent of employees are aware that negative acts they experience constitute bullying, suggesting that bullying behaviour is ingrained in US workplace culture. The study is one of the first to investigate the impact of bullying on non-bullied employees, and finds employees witnessing others being bullied suffer secondary harm.

Glenn Greenwald: The complete myth driving our Iraq "debate"

In Newsweek, Jonathan Alter has a long article defending -- as lamentably necessary -- the decision of the Democrats to fund the Iraq war without any limitations. Both Barbara O'Brien and Big Tent Democrat, among others, have very thorough replies to Alter's argument, so I want to focus on one specific (and, in my view, central) point Alter makes:

The whole "support the troops" meme has become a terrible problem for Democrats. Even though, as Glenn Greenwald has argued in Salon, cutting off funding doesn't mean soldiers will have their guns and bullets and armor taken away in the middle of a battle, Americans have been convinced that it does. They want to end the war and support the troops at the same time -- i.e., send back the food and still eat.

America Dishonors Her War Dead On Memorial Day - And Replies

posted May 28, 2007

This is Memorial Day, 2007, the last day of a three-day weekend that America sets aside every year to honor its war dead and its war veterans.

We here in America carry this out with speeches and ceremonies and the playing of Taps at our cemeteries. We hold festive entertainments with patriotic music and songs.

This general celebration, which includes a lot of flag waving and displays of Old Glory in front of our homes and along our streets, is the centerpiece and purpose of this three-day weekend.

Net taxes could arrive by this fall

By Declan McCullagh
http://news.com.com/Net+taxes+could+arrive+by+this+fall/2100-1028_3-6186193.html

Story last modified Thu May 24 06:25:25 PDT 2007

The era of tax-free e-mail, Internet shopping and broadband connections could end this fall, if recent proposals in the U.S. Congress prove successful.

State and local governments this week resumed a push to lobby Congress for far-reaching changes on two different fronts: gaining the ability to impose sales taxes on Net shopping, and being able to levy new monthly taxes on DSL and other connections. One senator is even predicting taxes on e-mail.

At the moment, states and municipalities are frequently barred by federal law from collecting both access and sales taxes. But they're hoping that their new lobbying effort, coordinated by groups including the National Governors Association, will pay off by permitting them to collect billions of dollars in new revenue by next year.

Bad Medicine: Ruthless Health Care Policy in America

By Julie Winokur, AlterNet
Posted on May 29, 2007, Printed on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52446/

When one of us hurts, all of us hurt. That's the message in Collateral Damage: Bad Medicine in Tennessee, a compelling 25-minute film by Julie Winokur of Talking Eyes Media. Collateral Damage captures the suffering caused by the single largest Medicaid cuts in history. It exposes the injustice of a ruthless health care policy that refuses to regulate the managed care organizations and puts people's lives at risk.

In 2005, when Governor Phil Bredesen of Tennessee announced he would reform his state's Medicaid program, people took him at his word. Little did they know that Bredesen's idea of reform meant cutting 170,000 people off the program almost overnight.

The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis

By Jonathan Cohn, Harper Collins Publishers, Inc.
Posted on May 29, 2007, Printed on May 29, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/52448/

The following is an excerpt from Jonathan Cohn's latest book Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis -- and the People Who Pay the Price.

April 10, 2007 -- It was 4:43 on a clear November afternoon when the paramedics found Cynthia Kline, pale and short of breath, slumped against a bedpost in her double-decker Cambridge home. Although Kline was in obvious pain, she seemed keenly aware of what was happening inside her 55-year-old body. One of her blood vessels had closed off, blocking the flow of blood to her heart. Minutes before, she had phoned 911, taken the nitroglycerin tablets prescribed for such an emergency, then waited for help to arrive -- an ordeal that stretched out an agonizing extra few seconds while the rescue workers, having found the front door locked, scampered in through an open second-story window. Now, while the paramedics worked busily over her, noting vital signs consistent with cardiac distress, Kline turned to one of them with an anxious plea: "Take me to Mount Auburn Hospital."

Digby (catching up)

Liberation

The video is shaky, but the brutality is clear.

A slender, black-haired girl is dragged in a headlock through a braying mob of men. Within seconds, she is on the ground in a fetal position, covering her head in her arms in a futile attempt to fend off a shower of stones.

Politics and Pleasure

Watching James Sensenbrenner whine about the cost of this "fishing expedition" (Goodling's testimony)and say "when I was chairman I never issued a subpoena unless I had to" is just too rich coming from one of the rabid impeachment circus managers who promptly went into a coma for the first six years of the Bush administration. Indeed, it's quite a show watching all of those mighty House Managers who were once warriors in defense of the "rule 'o law" when illicit sex was involved now being very, very disturbed by the prospect of this DOJ "witchhunt" against fine upstanding Republicans.

Risky Business

I've been reluctant to write about the Iraq funding "deal" because it's just so depressing --- and yet so predictable. Democrats don't have the votes, which we always knew. But they apparently also didn't feel the desire to fight it out over the summer anyway and keep the pressure on those GOP moderates in difficult races. I honestly don't think it was that risky. Bush's approval ratings keep going down, down down and this way is getting more unpopular by the day. And even if there is no chance of a veto-proof Senate, you have to keep advancing the argument in an environment like this.

Shhhh

I know we're not supposed to bring up this topic, but it's becoming so common that I think we probably need to have a little public chat about it.

From Rick Perlstein:

Stop it, stop it right now. Stop pretending Islamicists - or environmentalists or animal rights activists (which are, ridiculously, federal law enforcement and non-governmental terrorism-watchers' next most obsessive concern) - are the only imminent terrorist threats to our nation. We now know that students at Liberty University were ready to napalm protesters at Jerry Falwell's funeral. One of the suspects is a soldier at Fort Benning. [UPDATE: Falwell gave the kid a scholarship.]

Welcome Back To Bizarroworld

The more I think about this the more stunned I am. Back in 2002 I wrote somewhere else (can't find it unfortunately) that there was no margin in any of the presidential contenders voting for the Iraq resolution. I understood they were leary of doing it after the first Gulf War went so well and they all had egg on their faces for opposing it --- some of them had been unable to run in 1992 because of it. I got it.

xxxx

Cheney At West Point

A reader writes

Read the speech more carefully. He didn't just attack the Geneva Conventions. He attacked the Constitution of the United States of America. The reality is in fact much worse than your original post would indicate.

Here's the key passage:

As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.

What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq's Oil for US Companies

By Ann Wright
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor

Saturday 26 May 2007

On Thursday, May 24, the US Congress voted to continue the war in Iraq. The members called it "supporting the troops." I call it stealing Iraq's oil - the second largest reserves in the world. The "benchmark," or goal, the Bush administration has been working on furiously since the US invaded Iraq is privatization of Iraq's oil. Now they have Congress blackmailing the Iraqi Parliament and the Iraqi people: no privatization of Iraqi oil, no reconstruction funds.

This threat could not be clearer. If the Iraqi Parliament refuses to pass the privatization legislation, Congress will withhold US reconstruction funds that were promised to the Iraqis to rebuild what the United States has destroyed there. The privatization law, written by American oil company consultants hired by the Bush administration, would leave control with the Iraq National Oil Company for only 17 of the 80 known oil fields. The remainder (two-thirds) of known oil fields, and all yet undiscovered ones, would be up for grabs by the private oil companies of the world (but guess how many would go to United States firms - given to them by the compliant Iraqi government.)

Paul Krugman: Trust and Betrayal

By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

Monday 28 May 2007

"In this place where valor sleeps, we are reminded why America has always gone to war reluctantly, because we know the costs of war." That's what President Bush said last year, in a Memorial Day ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Those were fine words, spoken by a man with less right to say them than any president in our nation's history. For Mr. Bush took us to war not with reluctance, but with unseemly eagerness.

Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address

Michael Roston
Published: Saturday May 26, 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney criticized the notion of applying the Geneva Conventions to individuals captured in the course of the war on terrorism in a Saturday commencement address at the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York.

"Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States," the Vice President said in the Saturday morning speech. "Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."

The Story of the Smithfield Raid

By David Bacon

t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Friday 18 May 2007

This story was originally published in the web edition of American Prospect.

Red Springs, North Carolina - To organizer Eduardo Peña, "The raid was like a nuclear bomb." Or more precisely, a neutron bomb, that ingenious weapon of the Cold War whose radiation was meant to kill a city's residents, but leave its buildings standing. After the immigration raid of January 24 at the Smithfield pork slaughtering plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, the factory was still intact, the machinery of the production lines ready to clank and clatter into its normal motion. But many workers were gone, and much of the plant lay still.

That day, the migra (agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Homeland Security Department) picked up 21 people while trying not to alert the rest of the plant's laborers. One by one, supervisors went to Mexicans on the line. You're needed in the front office, they'd say. The workers would put down their knives, take off their gloves and walk through the cavernous building to the human resources department. There, ICE agents took them into custody, put them in handcuffs and locked them up in a temporary detention area. Later, they were taken out in vans and sent to immigration jails as far away as Georgia.

Abortion decision could pave way for more restrictions

By Michael Doyle, McClatchy Newspapers

Every Supreme Court opinion has an afterlife, especially when it comes to abortion. A closely watched decision last month upholding a federal ban on so-called partial birth abortions is just starting to populate the legal landscape.

Slump in NIH Funding Is Taking Toll on Research

By Christopher Lee

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 28, 2007; Page A06

Stanford University biochemist Roger D. Kornberg won a Nobel Prize last year for work he began in the 1970s, but he is pretty sure that if he had been born a generation later, he never would have had the chance.

The scientist, 60, is convinced that his groundbreaking research, in which he figured out how information in the DNA of a gene is copied to provide instructions for building and running a living cell, would never have gotten the necessary funding support in today's tight budget environment at the National Institutes of Health.

From Brooks Brother Rioter to Judge

By Paul Kiel - May 25, 2007, 12:34 PM

Monica Goodling says she was given the green light to hire immigration judges based on their political qualifications. So how'd that happen? And who's been getting the gig?

As a story in The Legal Times last year explained, immigration judges are different from other federal judges in that they're civil service employees -- meaning that there's a formal application process with the Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review.

US housing market deteriorates at faster pace than expected

By Stephen Foley in New York
Published: 26 May 2007

The deterioration in the US housing market is accelerating, new figures showed yesterday, and at a faster rate than Wall Street had been expecting.

With the number of house sales in April down 2.6 per cent on the same month last year, the average selling price for homeowners who do find a buyer has started to fall. And the data contained little evidence to support the economic optimists who argue that the worst is almost over, since the backlog of unsold homes also climbed.

Frank Rich: Operation Freedom From Iraqis

The New York Times, May 27, 2007

When all else fails, those pious Americans who conceived and directed the Iraq war fall back on moral self-congratulation: at least we brought liberty and democracy to an oppressed people. But that last-ditch rationalization has now become America’s sorriest self-delusion in this tragedy.

However wholeheartedly we disposed of their horrific dictator, the Iraqis were always pawns on the geopolitical chessboard rather than actual people in the administration’s reckless bet to “transform” the Middle East. From “Stuff happens!” on, nearly every aspect of Washington policy in Iraq exuded contempt for the beneficiaries of our supposed munificence. Now this animus is completely out of the closet. Without Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz to kick around anymore, the war’s dead-enders are pinning the fiasco on the Iraqis themselves. Our government abhors them almost as much as the Lou Dobbs spear carriers loathe those swarming “aliens” from Mexico.

Lawsuit in outsourced U.S. war is moved out of court

By Bernd Debusmann, Special Correspondent

Reuters
Friday, May 25, 2007; 11:43 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - After years of high-stakes legal wrangling, a lawsuit stemming from the gruesome deaths of four U.S. contractors in Iraq is moving behind closed doors in an action seen as an important precedent for the booming private security industry.

The suit, for wrongful death and fraud, was filed in January 2005 against Blackwater Security Consulting, one of scores of companies now fielding close to 130,000 civilians who work alongside the U.S. military in Iraq. Generally their contracts stipulate the contractors assume all risks -- injury, death, disability -- and waive their right to sue.