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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/6/2003 11:16:26 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Read Between the Lines of Those 28 Missing Pages _______________________________________ Even censored, 9/11 report shows the focus was on the wrong nation. By Robert Scheer COMMENTARY The Los Angeles Times July 29, 2003 Love the truth; it ultimately bows to no master. Even for the president of the United States, the commander in chief of the world's most powerful propaganda machine, deceptions inevitably unravel. In the last week we've moved from the 16 deceitful words in George W. Bush's State of the Union speech to the 28 White House-censored pages in the congressional report that dealt with Saudi Arabia's role in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the United States. Yet even in its sanitized version, the bipartisan report, long delayed by an embarrassed White House, makes clear that the U.S. should have focused on Saudi Arabia, and not Iraq, in the aftermath of Sept. 11. As we know, but our government tends to ignore, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia; none came from Iraq. Leaks from the censored portions of the report indicate that at least some of those Saudi terrorists were in close contact with — and financed by — members of the Saudi elite, extending into the ranks of the royal family. The report finds no such connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda terrorists. It is now quite clear that the president — unwilling to deal with the ties between Saudi Arabia and Osama bin Laden — pursued Hussein as a politically convenient scapegoat. By drawing attention away from the Muslim fanatic networks centered in Saudi Arabia, Bush diverted the war against terror. That seems to be the implication of the 28 pages, which the White House demanded be kept from the American people when the full report was released. Even many in Bush's own party are irritated that the president doesn't think we can be trusted with the truth. "I went back and read every one of those pages thoroughly," Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), former vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on "Meet the Press." "My judgment is 95% of that information could be declassified, become uncensored so the American people would know." Asked why he thought the pages were excised, Shelby, a leading pro-administration conservative, said, "I think it might be embarrassing to international relations." Quite an embarrassment if the censored pages reveal that the Bush administration covered up the Saudi connection to the terrorist attacks. Obviously alluding to Saudi Arabia, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said Sunday, "High officials in this government, who I assume were not just rogue officials acting on their own, made substantial contributions to the support and well-being of two of these terrorists and facilitated their ability to plan, practice and then execute the tragedy of Sept. 11." On Monday, Graham, responding to reports that Saudi Arabia would welcome making public some of the pages, called on Bush to fully declassify "the currently censored pages." Newsweek, relying on anonymous government sources, reported Monday that the "connections between high-level Saudi princes and associates of the hijackers" included helping Al Qaeda operatives enter the U.S. and financing their residence in San Diego, where they plotted their infamous attacks. Remember too that it was well known that Saudi charities with ties to the royal House of Saud were bankrolling the Al Qaeda operation in Afghanistan — even as George H.W. Bush visited the kingdom shortly after his son was elected, eager to secure contracts for his then-employer, the Carlyle Group. The fact is, Riyadh, unlike Baghdad, has long been a key hotbed of extremist Muslim organizing. By shielding and nurturing our relationship with the Saudi sheiks, Bush & Son have provided cover for those who support terror. After all, is it really likely that career-conscious FBI and CIA officers would be willing to criticize possible Al Qaeda-House of Saud links when the president's father is out hustling business ties with the same family? Even after Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration immediately protected Saudis in the United States, including allowing members of the large Bin Laden family who were in this country to be spirited home on their government's aircraft before they could be questioned. This at a time when many immigrants from all over the world were being detained arbitrarily. Bush has used Sept. 11 as an excuse to turn this country upside down, making a hash of civil liberties and bankrupting our federal government with unprecedented deficit spending on war and its materiel. Before we do any more irrevocable damage in the name of an open-ended "war against evil," we have a right and a responsibility to confront the uncensored truth of what happened that black day — no matter what powerful people are brought to account. latimes.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 12:23:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Despair of the Jobless __________________________ By BOB HERBERT Columnist The New York Times August 7, 2003 The folks who put the voodoo back in economics keep telling us that prosperity is just around the corner. For the unemployed, that would mean more jobs. Are there more jobs just around the corner? This alleged economic upturn is not just a jobless recovery, it's a job loss recovery. The hemorrhaging of jobs in the aftermath of the recent "mild" recession is like nothing the U.S. has seen in more than half a century. Millions continue to look desperately for work, and millions more have given up in despair. The stories have been rolling in for some time about the stresses and misfortunes that are inevitably associated with long-term joblessness: the bankruptcies, foreclosures and evictions, the dreams deferred, the mental difficulties — anxiety, depression — the excessive drinking and abuse of drugs, the family violence. There are few things more miserable than to need a job and be unable to find one. How bad is it? The Economic Policy Institute in Washington reported last week that "since the business cycle expansion began in November 2001, payrolls have contracted by 1 million (1.2 million in the private sector), making this the weakest recovery in terms of employment since the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] began tracking monthly data in 1939." John A. Challenger, who runs the outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said it is taking an average of 20 weeks for job seekers to find employment, and many are unable to match their previous salary. "Employers have all the cards," he said. "Not only are they sharpening their salary pencils, but the screening of candidates is probably the toughest it has ever been." The official jobless rate, now 6.2 percent, does not come close to reflecting how grim the employment situation really is. The official rate refers only to those actively seeking work. It does not count the "discouraged" workers, who have looked for jobs within the last 12 months but have given up because of the lack of offers. Then there are the involuntary part-timers, who would like full-time jobs but cannot find them. And there are people who have had to settle for jobs that pay significantly less than jobs they once held. When you combine the unemployed and the underemployed, you are talking about a percentage of the work force that is in double digits. That's an awful lot of lost purchasing power for a society that needs broad-based wage growth among its consumers to remain economically viable. Most Americans depend on their paychecks to get from one week to the next. If you cut off that paycheck, everything tends to go haywire. Right now there is no plan, no strategy for turning this employment crisis around. There is not even a sense of urgency. At the end of July the Bush administration sent its secretaries of commerce, labor and treasury on a bus tour of Wisconsin and Minnesota to tell workers that better days are coming. But they offered no real remedies, and the president himself went on a monthlong vacation. The simple truth is that the interests of the Bush administration's primary constituency, corporate America, do not coincide with the fundamental interests of workaday Americans. On the business side of this divide, increased profits are realized by showing the door to as many workers as possible, and squeezing the remainder to the bursting point. Productivity (based primarily on improvements in technology) is way up. Hiring, of course, is down. Part-time and temporary workers are in; full-time workers with benefits are out. And then there's the ominous trend of sending higher-skilled jobs overseas to low-wage places like India and China, an upscale reprise of the sweatshop phenomenon that erased so many U.S. manufacturing jobs over the past quarter century. Working Americans need jobs just to survive. But the Bush administration equates the national interest with corporate interests, and in that equation workers can only lose. There are ways to spark the creation of good jobs on a large scale in the U.S. (I will explore some of them in a future column.) But that would require vision, a long-term financial investment and, most important, a commitment at the federal level to the idea that it is truly in the nation's interest to keep as many Americans as possible gainfully employed. nytimes.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 12:26:54 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 89467

But does he know anything about government? I doubt it. I didn't know he was anti- gun. How anti-gun is he?

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 1:14:57 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

An excellent article on the Service Economy -- from 1987, but still quite relevant IMO... "This paper seeks to explain why concern over the emergence of the service economy in the United States is, for the most part, unwarranted and misplaced. Far too much has been read into data on trends in service- and goods-producing employment such as those shown in Figure 1. Many of the assumptions about the economic value (or lack thereof) of services are wrong. The growth in the service sector has been misunderstood, in part because of the arbitrary division of the nation's outputs into "goods" and "services"; a largely unexplored reason for it is the fragmentation of firms into smaller and more independent production units. A major hypothesis of this article is that the growth in the service sector, even in typically low-wage industries, has contributed to the growth in American workers' income, even income created in the goods-producing industries. From that perspective, it is clear that the presumed polarization of America is a political issue that has been the object of a misguided and vain search for empirical and conceptual justification." regulation.net

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 1:32:50 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

An interesting employment chart that illustrates the current "jobless recovery"... chartoftheday.com

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 6:20:48 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

ENRON STYLE MANAGEMENT COMING FROM THE WHITE HOUSE Message 19186582

To: Lizzie Tudor who wrote (24466)	8/7/2003 6:50:19 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

Fixing California's Recall ________________________________ by Robert Richie and Steven Hill Published on Wednesday, August 6, 2003 by CommonDreams.org California has become home to this year's biggest political circus. Governor Gray Davis may be booted out in a special recall election. His replacement could be...almost anyone, ranging from previous Republican losers Bill Simon and Bill Riordan to Arnold "The Terminator" Schwarzenegger to pornographer Larry Flynt to the Green Party's Peter Camejo. One of the reasons for the chaotic uncertainty of Davis' possible replacement is that the first-place finisher will take office no matter how small the percentage of their vote. Twenty percent, fifteen percent, no amount is too small, in this "highest vote-getter wins" roll of the dice. For a sense of what that means, how does "President Pat Buchanan" sound? In 1996, Buchanan "won" the New Hampshire primary with barely 25% of the vote. If the Republican field had remained divided, Buchanan could have ridden similar plurality victories to the Republican nomination despite clearly not being the party's majority choice. As happens in every big-candidate field with plurality voting, this fall much attention will focus on which California candidates are "spoilers." Did independent John Anderson "spoil" Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential race? How much did Ross Perot hurt George Bush in 1992? Did Ralph Nader elect George W. Bush in 2000? Having a range of strong candidates participate seemingly should strengthen democracy, providing voters with more opportunity to consider issues, a wider range of political debate, and greater incentives to vote. But the plurality voting system makes it possible for the highest vote-getter to win, even if that candidate is not preferred by a majority of voters. That turns democratic principles on their head. We should no longer accept a system where credible candidates are dismissed as mere spoilers, and where voting for your favorite presidential or gubernatorial candidate can contribute directly to the election of your least favorite -- particularly if that candidate is opposed by a majority. Even as California showcases the bizarre realities of plurality voting, sensible alternatives exist. Other cities and nations use a method known as instant runoff voting. With the instant runoff, voters select their favorite candidate, and at the same time can indicate their runoff choices by ranking their choices as 1, 2 and 3. If a candidate receives a majority of first choices, the election is over. If not, the candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and a runoff round of counting occurs. In this runoff round, your ballot counts for your top-ranked candidate still in the race. Runoff rounds continue until there is a majority winner. By adopting instant runoff voting in all of our big races for executive offices, we would determine a true majority winner in one election and banish the spoiler concept. Voters would not have to calculate possible unintended consequences of voting for their favorite candidate, and ending up with their least favorite. Voters would be liberated to vote for the candidates they truly like, because if their first choice didn't win their runoff vote would go to their second choice. Under this system, in 2000 those liberals who liked Ralph Nader but worried about George Bush could have ranked Nader first and Al Gore second. Similarly, hard-line conservatives that year could have ranked Pat Buchanan first and George Bush second. Rather than contributing to Gore's or Bush's defeat, Nader and Buchanan instead could have stimulated debate and mobilized new voters. And the winner would have had to demonstrate majority support, as neither Bush nor Gore won a majority of the vote in Florida or the nation. Our primitive voting system is our elections' real spoiler. Instant runoff voting would give us a more participatory, vital democracy, where candidates could be judged on their merits, and the will of the majority would prevail. Voters would be free to vote their hopes, instead of their fears. California has led the nation many times in the past. The nightmare of the impending recall should spur California to lead in changing its "plurality wins all" method to a fairer, more sensible method like instant runoff voting. ___________________________ Robert Richie is executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy and Steven Hill is the Center's senior analyst and author of "Fixing Elections: The Failure of America's Winner Take All Politics" commondreams.org