New URL for blog: William Burton
Fewer links to other articles, more original analysis by yours truly.

John McCain lays out ways to make business more honest in America.

Salon.com Politics | The McCain solution

Patriotism in this country is not nor should it ever be merely a sentimental attachment to blood and soil. Our love of country is a love of ideals. The values of freedom inspire our patriotism: government derived from the consent of the governed; an economic system that is an open market for creativity, innovation, competition, and self-improvement.

Americans have proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that a nation conceived in liberty will always be stronger, wealthier, more just, and happier than any nation that rations liberty to exalt the few at the expense of the many. We are the greatest nation in history because we trust in freedom. We trust that a people who are free to act in their self-interest will perceive their interest in an enlightened way, and use their wealth and power to create a civilization in which all people can share in the opportunities and responsibilities of freedom.

Read thi for a perfect example of why Larry King is the most incompetent man in show business:

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall

Good article by one of McCain's key people on the corporate-owned and coroporate-controlled Bush administration:

NDOL: Under the Corporate Influence by Marshall Wittman

Republicans had a big problem going into the 2000 election. The anti-government and anti-communist glue that had bound the conservative movement was dissolving. Whatever his weaknesses, Clinton had taken away the easy targets for conservative attacks on Democrats. After years of denying there were any New Democrats or that there was any Third Way, most Republicans knew they had to change.

They were offered two paths. The first, provided by Sen. John McCain, was to recapture the legacy of President Theodore Roosevelt, by advocating government as an agent of "national greatness" and insisting on reform of government and of corporate influence on government. The second, provided by Bush (and backed by conservative ideologues, K Street, and the Christian right), was to change the face of the Republican Party rather than its ideology. The Republican faithful -- or more accurately, a few thousand primary voters in South Carolina -- chose the path of least resistance.

Excellent rant about what's wrong with the major American political viewpoints: Conservatives couldn't care less about anyone but themselves. Libertarians are unrealistic fantasists. Liberals are incompetents without the courage of their convictions.

Willamette Week Online | Cover Story | Candidates for Metro president.

I hate your politics.

Each of you carries baggage from your political affiliation, and all of that baggage has a punky smell to it, like one of your larger species of rodent crawled in and expired in your folded underwear. Listening to any of you yammer on about the geopolitical situation is enough to make one want to melt down one's dental fillings with a beeswax candle and then jam an ice pick into the freshly exposed nerve, just to have something else to think about.

The editors of The New Republic on Bush abandoning his free market "principles" for political gain and to help big business fatcats.

The New Republic Online: Making Hay

These recent deviations from free-market orthodoxy have been dramatic enough that it's tempting to conclude the president has no coherent economic philosophy at all. But that isn't quite true. A clear pattern has lately emerged: When intervention in the market would benefit a wide range of Americans--say, a substantive patients' bill of rights or a prescription-drug plan--Bush opposes it. Ditto for an intervention that would actually make the economy run more smoothly--as in the case of reforms to the accounting industry. Indeed, it seems only when a market intervention lacks a compelling economic rationale and helps the few at the expense of the many--as in the steel, energy, and agriculture decisions--that the president sets aside his free-market principles. Call it "uncompassionate unconservatism."

The reason is that while only intermittently pro-market, Bush is steadfastly pro-business. Just how far the president is willing to bend the former principle in service of the latter can be seen in the farm bill he is preparing to sign into law.

Jonathan Chait responds to David Broder's slamming of the idea of John McCain switching parties to run for the Presidency as a Democrat, and his apparently willful misreading of people who advocate a switch:

The New Republic Online: No More Mr. Nice Columnist .

I find McCain admirable because he has embraced a worldview that, on issue after issue, elevates the broader good above narrow self-interest: on tax cuts, pork, environmental and gun regulations, foreign policy, and so on. It's all lost on Broder.

EJ Dionne on why we should all want the government to set aside money for social insurance programs like Medicare and Social Security:

Why the Lockbox Won't Die (washingtonpost.com)

All of us hope we'll save so much that we won't need to rely on Social Security checks. But we can never be absolutely sure we won't need them -- what if your portfolio is bulging with Enron stock? -- so we're glad Social Security is there for everyone.

We'd like to think we won't get sick. But even the fittest in our ranks will need more medical care as they age. We subsidize and socialize health care for the elderly through Medicare because we know the dangers, as Franklin Roosevelt once put it, of having "a rich man's security and a poor man's security."

These programs, in other words, insure all of us, and insure society against having a large class of destitute elderly people.

Text of Al Gore's speech to the Florida Democratic Party:

algore04.com - The Grassroots Site Dedicated to Re-electing Al Gore

Now, here in America patriotism does not mean keeping quiet. It means speaking up. It means speaking out. It means exercising our freedom of speech. It means drawing the line where we have strong differences with the administration. It means debating what we believe is right, and what we believe is wrong. It is in this sprit of patriotism that I appear before you here today to engage in the debate that we so vitally need to build a brighter future for our country.

The time has come to speak out boldly, not only when we believe the administration is right, but to offer constructive alternatives when we believe what they're doing is wrong for America. And a lot of what they're doing, I believe, is wrong for America........

........In each of these areas, the Administration is following the same pattern: selling out America's future in return for short term political gains. They've returned us to the days of deficits and debt, the days of irresponsible tax cuts for the wealthy; the days of loosening environmental safeguards to satisfy the polluters. And they've turned their back on America's covenant with our greatest generation, raiding the Social Security and Medicare trust funds without pause, without remorse, and seemingly without even a thought to the long-term consequences of what they're doing.

Much has been made about the increasing dominance of the Republican Party in the South and the Democratic Party on the Coasts, but the area of greatest dominance seems to be the Republican lock on the Southwest and Mountain West. Of the 20 Senators representing TX, OK, NM, AZ, UT, NV, CO, MT, WY, and ID, only 3 are Democrats. As long as this is true, the hard right will only need 24 out of the remaining 80 Senators to be able to filibuster any laws they don't like and 34 out of 80 to control the Senate.

This area, which gave us Mo Udall, Gary Hart, and Frank Church, now seems to be a wholly owned subsidiary of the right wing of the Republican Party. There seem to be three major reasons:
1) The rise of a poltically active Religious Right
2) Backlash against environmental policies which many see as imposed by elitist Easterners
3) Guns

The Religious Right has been able to dominate debate on "moral" issues for over two decades, since the Left won on their biggest moral issues: Women's Lib, Vietnam and Civil Rights (and, no, I'm not implying that there isn't any work left to do on Civil Rights or Women's Lib). They've defined the debate so well that anyone who considers themselves a "moral" person (especially devout Christians) will automatically identify themselves with the Republican Party solely on social issues. While the Left should never try to out-pander or out-bigot (and there are still a lot of bigots out there) the Religious Right, there is a way to defuse their rhetoric:

1) Emphasize economics above all else. Make the case that the Party of "family values" is the one that makes it easier for people to raise their families with some economic security, not the one that spews platitudes and then votes with the corporations every time. Sell economic populism as "family friendly" politics. This'll take a lot of sting out of the attacks of the Right.

2) Emphasize the "personal freedom" platform of the Left. Sell gay rights and abortion rights (the two biggest remaining social battlegrounds) as guarantees of liberty. Make the case that the government shouldn't be telling people what they can do in the privacy of their own homes and what they can do with their own bodies. Making the case in this way will play to natural distrust of intrusive government, and should be far more effective than trying to convince people to actively approve of homosexuality and abortion (which may be a good thing to do on its own, but is a political loser).

3) Make the case that protecting the environment is in the interest of Westerners themselves. Emphasize the economic benefits of a cleaner enviroment (especially tourism), the better quality of life (cleaner air and water), and the harm done to future generations by destruction of the environment. Like most Americans, Westerners will sacrifice immediate gain for the future of their children, but they won't do it just to make Joe Lieberman happy. We also need to point out that a lot of environmentally destructive activity makes no sense from a financial point of view. We spend more building roads for loggers than we get from selling the trees (this won't convince the loggers, but it will other people who only hear one side now). Let's also stop using the shorthand word "environment", which lots of Westerners have come to think doesn't apply to anything they care about. Instead, talk about "clean air", "clean water" and "beautiful countryside". Give people something tangible to imagine.

4) Tilt government spending more towards local schools, local hospitals, and other things that people experience every day. If folks think that none of their tax dollars go to help them, they'll vote for the people who want to dismantle government. If they see their tax dollars at work, they won't. This is also, frankly, what government is supposed to be doing with its money. Slash corporate welfare, spend it on schools, and you'll have the thanks of the people who have kids.

5) To people who live on ranches and in small towns, guns are more often thought of as the solution rather than the problem. 911 doesn't help much if the police are a 30 minute drive away. You'll never convince these people that guns should be banned, so stop trying. Completely abandon any attempts to ban guns, which would be a disaster to enforce anyway. If the single issue gun voters knew for a fact that their guns wouldn't be taken away, they wouldn't have nearly the same aversion to reasonable attempts to keep guns away from kids, ex-cons, and the insane. Until they know this, they'll keep voting solely on guns for the people who hurt them economically.

Tom Vilsack (Gov of Iowa) wrote this Op-Ed after vetoing a budget that cut millions from education and healthcare:

DesMoinesRegister.com | News

I have heard the argument that the road fund is sacrosanct - even though we used those revenues in the general fund as recently as the year 2000. We are told that those funds are off-limits, because roads mean jobs and economic development.

But businesspeople and academic experts tell us again and again: The single most important component in attracting growth and investment is the quality of the work force. That is our advantage in Iowa. We have a highly educated population. We value learning and knowledge, and our budgets and policies have always reflected that.

This budget breaks faith with that tradition. It undermines our greatest economic advantage by disinvesting in students, teachers, training, technology, community colleges and universities.

It all comes down to kids or concrete............

..........Today, the Legislature can choose either to stand with Iowa's children and families, or to stand on the side of powerful interests at their expense. I implore you to make the right choice for Iowa's families and Iowa's future.

The people are watching. Will it be kids . . . or concrete?

John Kerry on transforming our economy from one dependent on foreign fossil fuels to one using domestic renewable energy:

Earth Island Institute: Earth Island Journal - Summer 2002

America has a choice between two competing visions. The Administration sees a world where our principal effort is to drill our way out of our problem. I see a world where our primary focus shifts to exciting a new marketplace for alternative and renewable energy sources.........

...........I respectfully suggest that it is time to pursue a national Strategic Energy Initiative. Its goal is quite simply to initiate a transition from our heavy dependence on polluting and insecure fossil fuels to more efficient, clean and reliable energy.

America has made exactly this sort of energy transition more than once before. For much of the 1800s our primary source of energy was wood. By the late 1800s, coal was king. That changed when the automobile went into mass production and demand for gasoline soared. Natural gas was added to the energy mix in the '40s. Nuclear power came online in the '50s. Now we need to prepare our nation for the 21st Century and begin a transition to domestic, clean and reliable energy technologies.......

.......I believe we should set a national goal of having 20 percent of our electricity come from domestic alternative and renewable sources by the year 2020. Twenty-twenty - I think it's a vision worthy of America; a goal I believe our citizens are ready to embrace........

.......The growth of wind, solar and geothermal would spark a surge in production resulting in a net gain to our national economy, a net gain in employment, and a net gain in wages. There are simply more jobs-per-megawatt in the renewable industries than in fossil-fuel sectors.

Domestic, renewable sources are entirely under our control. No foreign government can embargo them. No terrorist can seize control of them. No cartel can play games with them. No American soldier will have to risk his or her life to protect them.

Joshua Green on why McCain should switch parties to run for President.

"The Big Switch" by Joshua Green In fact, the best Democrat may be someone who's no Democrat at all: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).

As a war hero who's hawkish on foreign policy, he more than matches Bush on the military front. As a reform-minded foe of corporate welfare, Big Tobacco, and the Republican right, he is peerless. McCain is Bush's most vociferous critic, voted against the president's tax cut, forced his hand on campaign finance reform, and federalized airport security in the face of White House opposition. He has co-sponsored numerous bills with Democrats--many of them in the presidential-aspirant class--requiring background checks at gun shows (Lieberman), a patients' bill of rights (Edwards), better fuel-efficiency standards in cars and SUVs (Kerry), and expanded national service programs (Bayh). He is even drafting a bill with Lieberman to reduce greenhouse gasses and mitigate global warming. As Ronald Brownstein remarked recently in the Los Angeles Times, "[McCain] has become the most hyphenated name in Washington."............

...............The prospect of a McCain switch seems a surprisingly popular topic of discussion among Democrats. In my conversations with party leaders and activists, from the most moderate to the most liberal, an interesting pattern emerged. After citing their personal admiration for McCain and offering boilerplate ideologically concerns, nearly everyone asked to speak off the record, and confessed to fantasizing about a switch, as if yielding to some forbidden indulgence. McCain's appeal to Democratic politicians as a legislative collaborator is not quite so secret. But the mounting concern among party insiders that Al Gore will try again has prompted some discreet political infidelity. "You don't know how many Democrats come up to me and say, 'I wish we could get [McCain] to run,'" says a top adviser to McCain. "Some of them are pretty prominent [figures]."

Missed this the first time around:
Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader
Asked whether the administration now recognizes Mr. Chávez as Venezuela's legitimate president, one administration official replied, "He was democratically elected," then added, "Legitimacy is something that is conferred not just by a majority of the voters, however."

If there's anybody who's likely to be touchy about legitimacy coming only from a majority of the voters, it's a Bush administration official.

Jonathan Chiatt on why John McCain should run for President as a Democrat:

The New Republic Online: What's in a Name?

McCain's domestic agenda increasingly consists of bold reforms that expand the scope of the federal government. During the campaign, McCain paid lip service to anti-government bromides while supporting government intervention in specific instances. In the last year though, his ideology has grown coherently progressive. "We have had regulatory agencies always to curb the abuses or potential abuses of the capitalist system," he said earlier this year on cbs's "Face the Nation." "This is not a totally laissez-faire country." McCain, in other words, now believes in progressive government to counteract the excesses of the market and recognizes that the mere fact that business interests complain about such intervention does not by itself make it wrong. There is a term for people who think like this: Democrats.

Article by David Talbot on the Democrats' need to get tough in the face of increasingly brutal tactics from their political opponents.

Salon.com Politics | Fight or flight?

Confronted with these relentless opponents, the Democrats have all too often caved in. When Al Gore blasted Bush last week, it was a painful reminder of what he and Joe Lieberman didn't do in Florida, when GOP bullies simply ripped the presidency out of their hands. Until the Democrats learn to fight for what they believe in as tenaciously as their opponents, they will never be an effective political force.........

.........The Old Testament fervor that inflamed the GOP and the conservative movement throughout the Clinton era is still very much alive, from the attack ads on Tom Daschle comparing him to Saddam Hussein for his opposition to Alaska oil drilling to John Ashcroft's suggestion that anyone who opposed his attempts to shortcut the Constitution was on the side of terrorism. The excesses of the current conservative crusade may not match the outrages documented by Brock -- but only because Bill Clinton, or any other Democrat, does not occupy the White House. And it's not necessary for the GOP to go scorched-earth when, ever since Sept. 11, the Democrats have obligingly turned themselves into "war wimps," in Rich's phrase.

But now that even chronically cautious Al Gore has begun raising his voice against the Bush administration, it seems that political life might be coming back in America. This means the holy warriors of the right will once again be on the march, eager to put any moral or political enemy (generally one and the same) to the torch. With the Bush political operation run by the win-at-any-cost heirs of Lee Atwater, and the GOP ranks filled by passionate Christian activists, the Republican cause still carries the air of a religious war, even without revolutionary prophets like the disgraced Newt Gingrich (who undoutedly is plotting a Nixonian resurrection)..........

...........Politics is a blood sport, but it doesn't have to be so savage that it subverts our political system, as Republican zealots like Bob Barr, Ted Olson and Robert Bork did when they began intriguing for Clinton's impeachment long before the nation heard of Monica Lewinsky. The problem for Democrats in recent decades is that the party's national standard bearers have often felt unsuited or uncomfortable at playing this sport, preferring governance over politics. But as John Kennedy observed, you can't have one without the other. When JFK was reminded of Eisenhower's disdain for the very word "politics," he responded, "I do have a great liking for the word 'politics.' It's the way a president gets things done." The Democratic candidates who obviously were more enamored of policy than politics proved to be losers -- Dukakis and Gore. The ones who thrived at the game of politics -- JFK, LBJ, Clinton -- have been the party's winners. And they knew how to play the game hard........

........."Whereas Gore regarded the battle as primarily legal, Clinton saw it as political -- and fierce," writes Toobin. "Gore wanted no demonstrators in the streets; Clinton wanted lots of them. Gore worried about pressing his case in court; Clinton thought the vice president should have sued everybody over everything. Gore believed in muting racial animosities about the election; Clinton thought that Democrats should have been screaming about the treatment of black voters. Gore believed in offering concessions, making gestures of good faith; Clinton thought the Republicans should be given nothing at all but should rather be fought for every single vote. 'He got more votes -- more people wanted to vote for him. This is the essence of democracy. But the fix is in. This thing stinks.'"

Good article on how stupid it is to lock up people for smoking pot when we've got many more things to be worried about.

Deroy Murdock on Marijuana on National Review Online

The NYPD's arrests for possession and/or public smoking of marijuana have swelled from 1,362 in 1993 to 50,830 in 2000, equal to 15 percent of that year's total arrests. (NORML correctly prefers citations and fines to apprehension for public smoking.) In 2000, 734,498 Americans were arrested nationwide for breaking marijuana laws, 646,042 of them for mere possession.

Using U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics data, the Marijuana Policy Project calculates that 37,500 federal, state, and local inmates were imprisoned for cannabis violations in 1998, 15,400 of them for possession alone. At an average cost of $20,000 each, the government spent $750 million to incarcerate these offenders. MPP estimates that the war on marijuana costs taxpayers $9.2 billion annually.

This shopworn policy devours scarce public resources, even as authorities struggle to prevent future airline hijackings, bioterrorist attacks or even the detonation of a "dirty nuke" in Times Square. Every law-enforcement asset arrayed against nonviolent potheads is one less asset that can be deployed against al Qaeda sleeper cells.

Good article on the fact that the September 11th hijackings aren't related to immigration at all.

Daniel T. Griswold on Immigration on National Review Online

In his April 22 article ("May We Get Serious Now?"), John O'Sullivan declares that "the [September 11] hijackers were all immigrants." Dead wrong. None of them were. They were all here on temporary "non-immigrant" tourist or student visas. They never applied to the INS for green cards or any other permanent status.....

........O'Sullivan and other anti-immigrant crusaders blur this distinction for an obvious reason. Their most pressing agenda is not border security but immigration reduction. They are attempting to hijack legitimate concerns about security to advance their pet political cause.

In one of the most stunningly hypocritical speeches in recent memory, George W. Bush referred to his tax cut expiring in 9 years as a "quirk in the law". If you'll recall, they made the tax cut expire so that they could lie about how much it would cost.

Bush Pressing to Make Cut in Tax Rates Permanent

Looking ahead to Thursday, when the House will take up a Republican bill to make the tax-cutting package permanent, Mr. Bush urged Congress to eliminate what he called "a quirk in the law" that would see income tax rates in 2011 go back to their 2000 levels and the federal tax on large estates be eliminated in 2010 and then spring back to life in 2011.

Ehud Barak on what Israel should be planning for the future:

Israel's Security Requires a Sturdy Fence

For Israel, this struggle involves making clear that our enemy is not the Palestinian people but only Palestinian terror. The focus of our struggle is not on smashing Yasir Arafat to the wall; it is about trying to push the Palestinian leadership toward the resumption of negotiations.

There is an urgent need to shape a coherent Israeli strategy, which is now absent. Such a strategy should be based on three pillars: a tough campaign against terror, an open door for resumption of negotiations and physical disengagement from the Palestinians.

The Bush administration must really miss the bad old days, when the CIA and State Department interfered at will in Latin American politics, giving the hemisphere decades of Augusto Pinochet and central American death squads. They have apprently been talking with the Venezuelan plotters for months.

Bush Officials Met With Venezuelans Who Ousted Leader

Senior members of the Bush administration met several times in recent months with leaders of a coalition that ousted the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, for two days last weekend, and agreed with them that he should be removed from office, administration officials said today.

But administration officials gave conflicting accounts of what the United States told those opponents of Mr. Chávez about acceptable ways of ousting him.......

.........But a Defense Department official who is involved in the development of policy toward Venezuela said the administration's message was less categorical.

"We were not discouraging people," the official said. "We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don't like this guy. We didn't say, `No, don't you dare,' and we weren't advocates saying, `Here's some arms; we'll help you overthrow this guy.' We were not doing that."

Paul Krugman on the aborted coup in Venezuela, and hos stupid and shortsighted Bush's support for it truly was:

Losing Latin America

Here's how the BBC put it: "Far from condemning the ouster of a democratically elected president, U.S. officials blamed the crisis on Mr. Chávez himself," and they were "clearly pleased with the result" — even though the new interim government proceeded to abolish the legislature, the judiciary and the Constitution. They were presumably less pleased when the coup attempt collapsed. The BBC again: "President Chávez's comeback has . . . left Washington looking rather stupid." The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, didn't help that impression when, incredibly, she cautioned the restored president to "respect constitutional processes."

Surely the worst thing about this episode is the betrayal of our democratic principles; "of the people, by the people, for the people" isn't supposed to be followed by the words "as long as it suits U.S. interests."

But even viewed as realpolitik, our benign attitude toward Venezuela's coup was remarkably foolish.

It is very much in our interest that Latin America break out of its traditional political cycle, in which crude populism alternated with military dictatorship. Everything that matters to the U.S. — trade, security, drugs, you name it — will be better if we have stable neighbors.

Fouad Ajami on why we shouldn't coddle terrorists to score points with Arab regimes.

OpinionJournal - Extra

The Arab regimes that tell us that they are about to fall are conceding their own illegitimacy. The Arabs should be granted no special waiver from the imperatives of political reform--especially not by an America with its own quest for a just retribution against terror. For the good part of a decade, American policy averted its gaze from the malignant anti-Americanism at play in Arab lands, in pursuit of an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. An American "Balfour Declaration" was granted the Palestinians by President Clinton, but the anti-American terror paid that diplomacy no heed.........

........We can't impose a "settlement" of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle: That would be hubris. And we can't fall for the myth that Palestine is what ails Egypt, for example, or Iraq, and that al Qaeda's adherents are driven also by the passions of Palestine. We can't hold our own war hostage to Arafat's campaign of terror. That world is what it is, and we shall not be given a warrant for a strike against Iraq, or a reprieve from anti-Americanism, by accommodating Arafat or the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

Good article on the inability of Conservatives to back Moderate Republicans, even when they're the only ones who can win.

The New Republic Online: Off Center

Last fall, conservative Republican nominees for governor--beloved by the grass roots but unappealing to the broader electorate--lost to centrist, relatively nonideological Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia. And that losing trend may continue this fall--not only in New Jersey and Virginia, but also in California, Illinois, Ohio, and even the president's beloved Texas.

Eleven organizations--including the Ohio Christian Coalition, Ohio Right to Life, and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum--have called on conservatives to sit out the election. Stephen Hartkop, executive director of the Ohio Christian Coalition, says, "We think it is disenfranchisement of conservatives. We are saying why should we be supporting someone who runs counter to our views."

Imagine the Republican-fanned outrage if this had been a group associated with the Democratic Party and, say, James Carville.

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | FBI raids pro-Republicans
The target of an anti-terrorist raid in the United States last week provided funds for an Islamic group with close ties to the Republican party and the White House.
The Safa trust, a Saudi-backed charity, has provided funds for a political group called the Islamic Institute, which was set up to mobilise support for the Republican party. It shares an office in Washington with the Republican activist Grover Norquist.
The institute, founded in 1999 to win influence in the Republican party, has helped to arrange meetings between senior Bush officials and Islamic leaders, according to the report in Newsweek magazine. Its s chairman, Khaled Saffuri, and Mr Norquist cooperated to arrange the meetings.

Good short article on Chuck Hegel, one of the few Republicans in the Senate not in thrall to the Orwellian Party Line.

TAP: Web Feature: Hagel vs. Cant. by Brendan Nyhan. March 8, 2002.

However, far too much partisanship these days consists of appeals to emotion or outright irrationalism. Ideologues on both sides assume every action of their opponent is taken in bad faith; viciously stereotype, caricature, and ridicule them; and try systematically to distort policy debates to their advantage. None of this is new, and much of it is inherent to politics. But it has become far more pervasive, and professionalized, in recent years.

That's why we need leaders on both sides of the aisle who can rise above the slash-and-burn partisan tactics that drag down our democracy. That's why we need more Chuck Hagels.

I know accounting can be a problem, but this is ridiculous.

CBS News | The War On Waste | Wed, 30 Jan 2002 16:20:05 EST
Its own auditors admit the military cannot account for 25 percent of what it spends.

"According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," Rumsfeld admitted.

EJ Dionne points out how the Enron fiasco should shape out attitudes about government regulation.

End of an Era (washingtonpost.com)

The era that's ending saw regulators as nothing but meddlers getting in the way of genius. But capitalism doesn't work without regulation. Powerful people will take advantage of their muscle unless someone -- like it or not, that usually includes the government -- keeps an eye on them...........

.........That is why Enron has ended an era. For a very long time, we've assumed that the fundamental conflict in capitalism is between the owners and the workers. Enron proves that the real conflict is between insiders and outsiders. The losers in the Enron case are both stockholders and workers.

Jackpot. Enron start to spill the beans.

Yahoo! - Former Employee Says Enron Manipulated California Power Market
LOS ANGELES -- A former Enron Corp. employee has written a letter to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer claiming that he has knowledge the company's trading arm manipulated wholesale electricity prices in California.

Reality Denial 101. The Bushies continue to push privatization and self-regulation as if Enron and Arthur Andersen weren't still stinking up the landscape.

Utne Reader Online: Money

At a time when the Enron scandal is bringing intense Congressional scrutiny on corporate auditors, SEC chairman Harvey Pitt is quietly proposing to pass the enforcement buck from government back to the private sector. The investing public is sadly mistaken if it thinks that either government, auditors, or companies will back reliable financial disclosure that is legally enforceable.........

..........Don't be fooled. No authority, public or private, now enforces the public's interest in either reliable disclosure or auditor independence-and none will. That's the price of deregulation. But today it's clear that deregulation has backfired. Only a government auditor-regulator as fully independent as the Federal Reserve would have any hope of restoring credibility to the securities industry.

Article by Bill Allison, author of "The Cheating of America", on how American corporations and millionaires legally avoid billions in taxes.TOMPAINE.com - Perfectly Legal
In researching our book, we found that the top 1 percent of tax filers, in terms of income, claimed 15 percent of all itemized deductions. They enjoyed 40 percent of the tax-exempt interest that municipal bonds and the like pay. They claimed half of the write-offs for losses from partnerships and closely held corporations. According to the IRS's most recent statistics, there were 101 returns filed by millionaires who paid absolutely nothing in federal income taxes.

Book excerpt from Lester Brown of the WorldWatch Institute. He points out how market signals ignore both benefits and harms of economic activity that affect anyone but the people directly involved in the transaction.

TOMPAINE.com - Book Excerpt The Value Of A Tree Standing
A forest in the upper reaches of a watershed may provide services such as flood control and the recycling of rainfall inland that are several times more valuable than its timber yield. Unfortunately, market signals do not reflect this, because the loggers who are cutting the trees do not bear the costs of the reduction in services. National economic policies and corporate strategies are based largely on market signals. The clearcutting of a forest may be profitable for a logging firm, but it is economically costly to society.

Jason Vest details the projects that Bush wants to pump more money into, despite their either not being needed or history of (sometimes lethal) mechanical problems. These include the Osprey, the Raptor, the Comanche, and the Crusader.

TAP: Vol 13, Iss. 5. Costs a Bundle and Can't Fly. Jason Vest.

The V-22 Osprey, a tilt-rotor aircraft under the aegis of the U.S. Marine Corps, has killed more Marines than the Taliban has. It's perennially in an "experimental" stage. Four prototypes have crashed in the past 10 years, killing a total of 30 men, including the program's most experienced hand. Not long after the last crash, which occurred in December 2000, a report from the Pentagon understated in calling the Osprey program "not operationally sustainable." Even Dick Cheney, as defense secretary under the elder George Bush, tried to quash it. The current administration could have followed the March 2000 recommendation by the Congressional Budget Office to find safer and better applications for the technology developed in the program--a move that the CBO estimated would save $6.6 billion over the next decade. President Bush, however, wants Congress to give the Marines another $2 billion for the program. Meanwhile, the Air Force has requested $124 million for work on its own version of the disaster-prone aircraft.

The Bush tax cuts start to hurt national security. As part of the general belt tightening in the Federal government caused by the return of deficits, security funding for the Department of Energy's Nuclear Security Administration is actually being reduced by $51 million. That's right! In the wake of 9/11, Bush is actually proposing to make our nuclear stockpiles less secure.

Nuclear Insecurity - Why is the president's budget downsizing security at our nuclear weapons labs? By Eric Umansky
Maybe the budget cuts are for good reasons. After Sept. 11, nearly every federal agency has had to rethink its security procedures, and maybe the Department of Energy figured out how to tighten security, thwart terrorists, and save a few bucks. Or just maybe, they're penny-pinching in the wrong place.

The Washington Post gives some juicy details about the relationship between Enron and Ralph Reed and some insight into the way lobbyists pimp their political and social connections for clients.

washingtonpost.com: Bush 2000 Adviser Offered To Use Clout to Help Enron
Just before the last presidential election, Bush campaign adviser Ralph Reed offered to help Enron Corp. deregulate the electricity industry by working his "good friends" in Washington and by mobilizing religious leaders and pro-family groups for the cause.
For a $380,000 fee, the conservative political strategist proposed a broad lobbying strategy that included using major campaign contributors, conservative talk shows and nonprofits to press Congress for favorable legislation. Reed said he could place letters from community leaders in the opinion pages of major newspapers, producing clips that Reed would "blast fax" to Capitol Hill.

The Washington Post gives some juicy details about the relationship between Enron and Ralph Reed. Also gives details of how lobbyists like Reed pimp their political and social connections to clients.

washingtonpost.com: Bush 2000 Adviser Offered To Use Clout to Help Enron
Just before the last presidential election, Bush campaign adviser Ralph Reed offered to help Enron Corp. deregulate the electricity industry by working his "good friends" in Washington and by mobilizing religious leaders and pro-family groups for the cause.
For a $380,000 fee, the conservative political strategist proposed a broad lobbying strategy that included using major campaign contributors, conservative talk shows and nonprofits to press Congress for favorable legislation. Reed said he could place letters from community leaders in the opinion pages of major newspapers, producing clips that Reed would "blast fax" to Capitol Hill.

Eric Alterman points out how Bush is using the War on Terrorism in a cynical ploy to push policies that don't have anything at all to do with it.

Axis Me No Questions...
George W. Bush's State of the Union address has laid bare his Administration's political strategy. It is to manipulate the grief, anger and patriotism inspired by September 11 to fit the contours of the right-wing Republican agenda of September 10. What that Day of Infamy means to George W. Bush & Co. is more tax cuts for the wealthy, more money for wasteful weapons schemes and the back of their proverbial hand to those who suffer the misfortune of not being rich in Bush's America.

The Smoking Gun has posted dozens of letters between George W Bush and Ken Lay, going back years. Of course, Bush has inistsed that he hardly knew the guy.

The Smoking Gun: Archive
While the White House has repeatedly described former Enron chairman Kenneth Lay as simply a "supporter" of George W. Bush, extensive correspondence between the two men paints a far cozier picture of their relationship, according to copies of letters obtained this afternoon (2/15) by The Smoking Gun.

Jonathan Chait discusses Bush's budgetary dishonesty. He talks as if we have to make tough choices between national defense, domestic spending, and deficits, but never mentions taxes as part of the equation. Wouldn't an honest person at least mention that he prefers to cut taxes even if it means domestic budget cuts or deficts, rather than pretend that they had nothing to do with each other?

The New Republic Online: Hide and Sneak
Bush and his staffers speak as if tax revenues and defense spending were somehow not fungible. Instead, the administration will only discuss trade-offs between defense, domestic spending, and deficits--never taxes. When they discuss spending cuts or deficits, they take care to associate them with the war........

...........It's true that Bush's budget forecasts just a small deficit next year. So why not just cut a little more and avoid the embarrassment of deficits altogether? Because the president doesn't intend to make the spending cuts in his budget stick. We've seen this before. Last year Bush announced he would allow federal spending to rise at 4 percent, and he made a show of slashing wasteful subsidies. But he put little effort into it, and in the end Congress restored most of his cuts--ending up with a 7 percent hike, even before September 11. This year the White House is again pretending to cut pork, but it has again signaled its lack of seriousness.

Michael Moore hits one out of the park with his indictment of Bush's ties to Enron:

George W. in the Garden of Gethsemane
You not only let Kenny Boy decide who would head the regulatory agency that oversaw Enron, you let him hand-pick the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission--a former lawyer for his accountant, Arthur Andersen!

Kenny and the boys at Andersen also worked to make sure that accounting firms would be exempt from numerous regulations and would not be held liable for any "funny bookkeeping" (don't you wish you were this forward-thinking?). Then the rest of Kenny Boy's time was spent next door with his old buddy, Dick Cheney (Enron and Halliburton, as you'll recall, got the big contracts from your dad to "rebuild" Kuwait after the Gulf War). Lay and Dick formed an "energy task force" (Operation Enduring Graft) which put together the county's new "energy policy." This policy then went on to shut down every light bulb and juicer in the state of California. And guess who made out like bandits while "trading" the energy California was in desperate need of? Kenny Boy and Enron! No wonder Big Dick doesn't want to turn over the files about those special meetings with Lay!

Good article in the LA Times detailing the long relationship between Enron and the Bush family, from George W lobbying the government of Argentina while his father was President to Ken Lay raising millions for Bush Sr in '92 and Bush Jr in 2000.

The Company Presidency
How much the Bush family and its close political entourage actually collected from Enron and its executives since the company was organized is a matter of definition--reportable political contributions, soft money for the Republican Party, finders' fees, joint investments, inauguration funding, presidential-library donations, speech money, capital gains, consulting fees, directors' fees or what? If you combine what the multiple Bush generations received with what loyalists Vice President Dick Cheney, Baker, Mosbacher, political advisor Karl Rove, economic advisor Lawrence B. Lindsey and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick got, you certainly have $6 million to $8 million, and depending on the success of the Baker-Mosbacher-Enron joint investments, perhaps $20 million to $30 million.

Bush has managed to single-handedly torpedo peace between North and South Korea. If I were cynical, I'd say it's been done on purpose as a way of justfying Bush's missile defense plans (which have always been less about defense and more about paying back big donors in the defense industry). If I were a little less cynical, I'd say they just wanted to undo everything Clinton did, and peace in Korea was on the list. I'd guess a little from Column A and a little from Column B with a big splash of clumsy bluster for good measure.

U.S. News: On his Far East trip, the president's harsh words on North Korea will be tested (2/18/02)
If there was any doubt that the era of good feelings had come to an end, it was erased the night President Bush popped Pyongyang during his State of the Union address. After labeling North Korea a member–along with Iran and Iraq–of a new "axis of evil," he proceeded to paint Kim Jong Il's government as "a regime arming with missiles and weapons of mass destruction, while starving its citizens." True to form, Pyongyang responded that Bush's comments were "little short" of a declaration of war and hinted it might reinforce its 1.1 million-strong People's Army.......

.......For eight years, the strategy for managing this goliath has been to talk, not shout. The two Koreas had appeared to be heading toward reconciliation after holding a groundbreaking North-South summit in June 2000. They organized reunions of families separated during the Korean War, their diplomats held a series of high-level talks, and they began to address American concerns about the North's missile program. Pyongyang has imposed a moratorium on the testing of long-range missiles, has apparently honored a 1994 accord to freeze its nuclear weapons program, and agreed to sign United Nations antiterrorism conventions after September 11. The country will also open its doors to unprecedented numbers of tourists during its widely promoted Arirang Festival this spring.

Bad blood. Relations began to falter last March, when Bush voiced skepticism about the North during a Washington summit with the South's Kim. After that, Pyongyang froze talks and called off the last set of family reunions planned for late last year.

Interesting article from the NY Times (requires registartion). George W Bush is trying to duck the public disclosure rules in Texas, which require information to be released within 10 days. He's transferred all the records from his term as Governor to his Daddy's Presidential Library, and is claiming that they aren't subject to the disclosure law since they're on Federal property. In those records are notes of his meetings with fatcat contributors from Enron and elsewhere.

Battling Over Records of Bush's Governorship
In the meantime, news organizations and a public interest group, Public Citizen, have petitioned the Bush library for the 60 or so Enron- related documents believed to be in the governor's files, many dating from 1997 to 1999 when Texas was debating utility deregulation.

Good article on the Enron influence machine. They calculate how any regulation or government action would affect them, then pressure legislators to change any that they didn't like. Also, in what may yet become a big scandal, the executives at Enron were pressured to contribute money to Geroge W Bush and other candidates favored by Ken Lay:

Hard Money, Strong Arms And 'Matrix' (washingtonpost.com)
With each proposed change in federal regulations, lobbyists punched details into a computer, allowing Enron economists in Houston to calculate just how much a rule change would cost. If the final figure was too high, executives used it as the cue to stoke their vast influence machine, mobilizing lobbyists and dialing up politicians who had accepted some of Enron's millions in campaign contributions......

........Sally Ison didn't realize the presidential race had begun until April 1999, when a letter arrived bearing the signature of Enron Corp. Chairman Kenneth L. Lay. The letter asked for contributions to the Bush campaign and included what she recalls as a menacing reference to her husband Jerry's compensation as a highly paid vice president.

"We didn't even know if we liked this guy," she said of Bush. "I didn't know if I was going to vote Republican."

Yet there was no debate. Nearing 50, Jerry Ison felt vulnerable in Enron's crushingly competitive culture. The Isons gave $2,000.

Sean Wilenz makes the same point I did earlier:
The collapse of Enron points out the failure of Market Fundamentalism as an ideology.

TAP: Vol 13, Iss. 4. A Scandal for our Time:. Sean Wilentz.
The Enron affair is shaping up as quite possibly the largest political and financial scandal in American history. Untold billions of dollars have vanished down the drain in the biggest bankruptcy filing ever. Political connections ensnare every level of the Bush administration. Even more fearsomely than in the past, Americans will learn some hard lessons: that business corrupts politics, that capitalism cannot be trusted simply to the capitalists, and that without government safeguards, the public trust and the public treasury are always at grave risk.

Enron dwarfs the momentous insider infamies of the Gilded Age and the Jazz Age. But it is also special for other historical reasons. It signals a crisis in modern conservative thinking and politics -- a crisis that has less to do with bad character than it does with scandalously bad federal policy. Enron is the belated culmination of the age of Ronald Reagan, George Bush the elder, and Newt Gingrich. It stands as a monument to the era of deregulation and laissez-faire business politics that has endured for more than 20 years.

Good artilce from Robert Samuelson on how stock options give a huge incentive for executives to keep the stock high, no matter the cost in honesty or the long term health of the business.

Stock Option Madness (washingtonpost.com) Stock options foster a corrosive climate that tempts many executives, and not just those at Enron, to play fast and loose when reporting profits........

......To influence stock prices, executives can issue optimistic profit projections. They can delay some spending, such as research and development (this temporarily helps profits). They can engage in stock buybacks (these raise per-share earnings, because fewer shares are outstanding). And, of course, they can exploit accounting rules. Even temporary blips in stock prices can create opportunities to unload profitable options.

The point is that the growth of stock options has created huge conflicts of interest that executives will be hard-pressed to avoid.

The response to the SOTU by Gephardt struck the right tone, just aggressive enough on defense (but not bloodthirsty) and sticking up for the litle guy at home. But the guy still doesn't have a Presidency in his future, even though (or maybe because) I agree with him on most of the issues. We're both pro-Labor, both pro-Environment, and both strike a balance somewhere between the Hawks (Lieberman) and the Doves (Wellstone) of the Democratic Party.
I could never figure out why I didn't feel comfortable with Gephardt. Then it was pointed out to me (by the lovely and talented Emilia): He's got no eyebrows! We Americans may be able to tolerate philandering (Clinton), semi-literate (Bush), inattentive (Reagan) Tories (Bush Sr) in the White House. But, dammit, the Prez has got to have eyebrows, but not too thick.

'Real Security': Justice Abroad, Jobs at Home (washingtonpost.com)
Our values call for tax cuts that promote growth and prosperity for all Americans. Our values call for protecting Social Security, and not gambling it away on the stock market. Our values call for helping patients and older Americans -- not just big HMOs and pharmaceutical companies -- ensuring that seniors don't have to choose between food and medicine. Our values call for helping workers who have lost their 401(k) plans and protecting pensions from corporate mismanagement and abuse. Our values call for helping the unemployed -- not just large corporations and the most fortunate.
These same values guide us as we work toward a long-term plan for our nation. We want to roll up our sleeves and work with our president to end America's dependence on foreign oil while preserving our environment -- so we don't see gas prices jump every year.

Salon.com details how Enron insiders made millions from the limited partnerships that were losing billions for the company they were supposed to be representing:

Salon.com Technology | How to be an Enron millionaire
Working with Fastow, Mordaunt and Enron treasurer Ben Glisan had invested around $6,000 apiece in LJM, one of the limited partnerships Enron had established to hide its debt. Within a few weeks, they each made approximately $1 million from those investments. Enron later revealed that Fastow himself, the financial wizard behind the partnerships scheme, earned as much as $30 million from his role in managing the partnerships.

Mickey Kaus pointed me to this tidbit from Fox News (We report, you Deride):
FOXNews.com

When compared to Bush, 42 percent think Gore, if he had been elected, would be doing a better job or the same job handling the war on terrorism as Bush is doing and 46 percent think he would be doing worse than Bush. The numbers are more favorable to Gore on handling the economy — 53 think Gore would be doing a better or the same job as Bush and 34 think he would be doing worse.

If the 2004 presidential election were held today, do you think you would be more likely to vote (to re-elect President Bush) or (for the Democratic candidate)?
Re-elect Bush: 49%
Vote for Democrat: 21%
Depends on Democrat: 14%
Undecided: 16%

At the absolute height of his popularity (approval rating at 83% in this same poll), even Fox couldn't get half the people to say that they'd definitely vote for Bush. That's very bad news for him. The popularity of the war may not be helping his reelection at all by the time 2004 comes around (shades of Poppy, once again).

Check out these poll results from the NY Times(requires registration), listed with a bunch of previous poll results. Doesn't look like Bush's good PR on the war front is carrying over to domestic issues. The Republicans get high marks on defense and foreign policy, but savaged on most domestic issues. As the next elections are still 10 months away, expect this to become even more important.
The New York Times/CBS News Poll

Do you approve or disapprove of the way George W. Bush is handling the economy?
Approve: 56%
Disapprove: 33%
The disapproval rating is actually 5 points higher than it was back in March.

Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to improve education?
Republican: 39%
Democratic: 42%

Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to make the right decisions about Social Security?
Republican: 31%
Democratic: 48%

Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to make sure the tax system is fair?
Republican 36%
Democratic 49%

Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to improve the health care system?
Republican 28%
Democratic 51%

Regardless of how you usually vote, do you think the Republican party or the Democratic party is more likely to protect the environment?
Republican 23%
Democratic 57%
(that 23% represents the hard base of the Republican Party, the same people who voted for Poppy in '92)

Do you think the recent tax cuts are fair to all Americans or unfair because they mostly benefit the rich?
Fair: 36%
Unfair: 56%

Do you think using a significant portion of the budget surplus to cut taxes was the best thing to do or would it have been better to spend the money on programs like Social Security and Medicare?
Tax Cut: 27%
Social Security: 65%
(this could be devastating, the Tax Cut was Bush's one real claim to fame. If people turn against that, he'll suffer)

Do you think risking a budget deficit now in order to cut taxes over the next few years is a good way to manage the federal budget or would it be better to postpone cutting taxes and not risk a budget deficit?
Risk Deficit: 28%
Postpone Tax Cut: 61%

Would you be more likely to vote for a Congressional candidate who thought it was more important to cut taxes, or for a Congressional candidate who thought it was more important to balance the budget?
Cut Taxes: 18%
Balance Budget: 73%
(even part of the Republican base is ready to abandon them over Tax Cuts)

From what you know so far, do you think the executives of the Enron corporation had closer ties to members of the Republican party or closer ties to members of the Democratic party?
Republican: 45%
Democratic: 10%

When it comes to their dealings with Enron executives prior to Enron's bankruptcy, do you think members of the Bush Administration are telling the entire truth, are mostly telling the truth but hiding something, or are they mostly lying?
Entire Truth: 17%
Hiding: 58%
Lying: 9%
Don't Know: 16%

If the 2002 election for United States House of Representatives were being held today, would you vote for the Republican candidate or the Democratic candidate in your district?
Republican: 37%
Democratic: 39%
Depends: 10%
Don't Know: 12%

As the war on terrorism simmers down and as memories of Spt 11th begin to take a back seat to worries about the future, look for Bush's poll numbers on domestic issues to drop even further.

Interesting complication for those favoring posting the Ten Commandments in schools: which Ten Commandments?

GreenvilleOnline.com - News
The big difference is between Nos. 2 and 10. Jews and Orthodox and Protestant Christians forbid making graven images in No. 2, and forbid coveting in No. 10.

But Catholics and Lutherans make no mention of graven images, and divide the coveting: No. 9 bans coveting a neighbor's wife, No. 10, his goods........

.........."I don't have any preference of one version over another," he said. "I've never tried to micromanage this, but just to say it should be the Ten Commandments as Moses brought them down from the mountain."

Actually, that would represent a third alternative -- entire passages from Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5, where the Ten Commandments are given at some length. Nowhere in either book is the abbreviated form we've come to picture on Sunday school walls

This has always been my biggest question about prayer in schools. Whose prayer?
I really don't think that a bunch of Southern Baptists are gonna be just fine with a Muslim leading their kids in prayer, or a Hindu teaching them about Vishnu. Hell, I know Baptists who consider Catholicism to be a cult. One Wiccan teaching Freshman English would be enough to convince most parents that school prayer wasn't such a hot idea.

Lots of people like the idea of prayer in schools. It's one of those unthinking feel-good "solutions" that won't do a damn bit of good but won't hurt much either (kinda like Bush Sr's Constitutional Amendment to keep people from burning flags; if flag burning is the biggest problem in your life, you need to shut up and start enjoying your magically blessed life). I generally don't have a problem with most of these useless feel-good ideas (the V-chip, et al), but we need to draw the line when they start violating the Constitution or causing all sorts of unnecessary friction. Prayer in schools (and, to a lesser extent, posting the Ten Commandments) does both.
There aren't many things we're likely to do which would more strongly "establish" a religion than a teacher leading kids in prayer. That prayer would make the religion it represents the de facto established religion. Anyone who remembers school (or has a teenager as I do), knows how much pressure there is to conform among kids. One who didn't believe in the same God as other kids, or in any God at all, would suffer a lot from being labelled as different or an unbeliever. There's enough BS involved with being a kid, we don't need to invent more.

If you want your kids to pray, pray with them at home and in church. If you want them to stay out of trouble, spend so much time with them that they couldn't get into trouble without you knowing. If you want them to grow up to be responsible adults, make them work hard for the things they have and teach them to treat others with respect. If we all did these things, we wouldn't need school prayer to make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If we don't do these things, then all the prayer in the world won't help.

Jonathan Alter has a real good article on the greater meaning of the Enron collapse, and how it points to greater rot within our system:

Which Boot Will Drop Next?
Enron may be bankrupt, but the underlying disease lives on, in the fig-leaf accountability proposals of the new SEC chief; the refusal of the White House to embrace real campaign-finance reform; the lame protestations that this is all some tragic aberration.
If only it were so. Does anyone seriously believe that those off-shore shelters and off-books partnerships are somehow unique to Enron? Might not Arthur Andersen have offered a few of its other clients the same tips for scamming the IRS, the SEC and the average investor just trying to make sense of quarterly earnings reports written in corporate Sanskrit? Maybe accountants at the other Big Five firms aren’t dumb enough to hold shredding parties, but Andersen’s basic recipes for cooking the books seem to be, in the argot of the trade, “generally accepted.......

.......”Why did Vice President Cheney refuse to see elected representatives of the people—like the state attorneys general—but open the door to corporate America in the secret formulation of the Bush energy plan? Why did 11 senators, including Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman, crudely strong-arm Levitt on behalf of the accounting firms? Why did Enron (with the help of Ed Gillespie, a key Bush operative and company lobbyist) get to help write Tom DeLay’s stimulus bill?

David Ignatius practically breaks his arm patting America on the back over Enron:

All-American Flameout (washingtonpost.com)
Seen from abroad, what's striking about the Enron scandal isn't simply the duplicity of the company's executives and auditors but the speed of its collapse. Enron went from Master of the Universe to bankruptcy in a few weeks. That sort of instant demise simply doesn't happen most places -- especially not to politically powerful people like Ken Lay.

What he misses, of course, is that all these bad things have happened to the company named Enron, not to the people who caused the problems. The company is bankrupt, and its shareholders (who'd been lied to for years) are out billions of dollars. The people who lied and cheated are almost all incredibly wealthy and will remain so. Yes, Ken Lay resigned, but he's still worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
The executives who got rich while driving Enron into the ground almost all bailed out with millions in profits. They even gave themselves more millions in bonuses before filing bankruptcy. The people stuck with stock when it went into the toilet are the victims, not the perpetrators; but they're the ones facing bankruptcy.

The collapse of Enron points out the need for government oversight of corporations. We should be striving to catch crooks as soon as they start to cheat, not patting ourselves on the back when they're forced to bail out as millionaires after getting caught.

Time has an article about how the Bush White House can't shake Enron as an issue:

TIME.com: Enron Spoils the Party
Over the last year, the Bush team had quietly performed a host of political sacraments for the Texas company before it began to go bust, and vice versa: there was the $1.76 million in contributions that Enron executives sent to the G.O.P. during the 2000 campaign; there was the energy policy Vice President Dick Cheney drafted in 2001 after meetings with Enron officials, portions of which seem to have sprung directly from Enron's wish list; there were ex-Enron chiefs and consultants salted around the Bush Administration, from the Army Secretary Thomas White to the U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick. And last summer Bush chose Pat Wood--a man strongly backed by Lay--to be his top energy-price regulator.

The Bull Moose comes up with the State of the Union that he'd like to give, but which we'll never hear from the current resident of the White House (or anyone else likely to occupy it in our lifetime).

The Project for Conservative Reform
Finally, the Moose offers you no new benefits, no new entitlements, no new loopholes. Our fiscal house is no longer in order and we must husband our resources for the war. Although the Moose has nothing for you, he will ask much of your children. America's youth must see it as their rite of passage into citizenship to give a year of their life in service to their country.

You are blessed to live in a land of liberty. As our brave service people go into harm's way to protect your rights, safety and freedom, consider your debt by serving in a civilian or military capacity. Let us replace the Enron ethic of amoral materialism with one of vigorous patriotic service to country.

A story a while back in The New Republic details how instrumental Ed Gillespie, who was paid $525,000 as a lobbyist for Enron (below), was in the Republican Revolution of 1994 and in George W Bush's presidential campaign. As a lobbyist, his influence has grown even more. Look for his name to come up when people start using terms like "influence peddling" and "revolving door".

TNR Online | The Insider by Ryan Lizza (print)
When Gillespie left Capitol Hill, he didn't simply become a lobbyist; he began moving seamlessly between the worlds of campaigning, governing, and lobbying........

.......After the convention, Gillespie's importance to the campaign only grew. September 2000 is remembered among Bushies as "Black September," the month of "rats, moles, and bad polls." In response, Hughes invited him to move down to Austin to help sharpen Bush's message and step up the attacks on Gore...he was at the center of the successful plan to transform Gore's misstatements during the debates into a national story about Gore's credibility.........

......Back in washington, the White House considered Gillespie for a number of jobs, including director of congressional affairs. But Gillespie declined, agreeing only to serve as spokesman for the Presidential Inaugural Committee and then as a transition adviser to Bush buddy Don Evans at Commerce--a department that, in 1995, Gillespie had helped Armey try to eliminate. There he helped install Jim Dyke, a Quinn Gillespie lobbyist, as Evans's spokesman.

When Gillespie left Commerce to return to his lobbying firm in mid-February, he took with him a Rolodex full of administration contacts. Indeed, while many lobbyists advised the campaign or served on transition teams, no one on K Street has served side by side with as many Bushies as Gillespie has over the past year.

Amory and Hunter Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute have a great article about energy security in the latest American Prospect. They go into a lot of detail how a combination of better energy efficiency and widely distributed energy generation (mostly through renewable resources, like wind and solar) will be far more efficient, more secure, cheaper, and cleaner than our current emphasis on remote generation of electricity using fossil fuels and fossil fuel based transport. Read it.

TAP: Vol 13, Iss. 3. Energy Forever. Amory B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins.
Fortunately, there are faster, cheaper, and surer alternatives. We can achieve energy security by using less energy far more efficiently to do the same tasks--and then by supplying what is still needed from sources that are inherently invulnerable because they're dispersed, diverse, and increasingly renewable. These options reduce the need to transport energy by vulnerable long-distance pipelines and transmission lines, and usually cost much less than expanding those links.

In the case of tasks now reliant on oil, the change would be relatively easy. Energy efficiency is the rapid-deployment resource, and huge amounts of it are available. Just a 2.7-mpg gain in the fuel economy of this country's light-vehicle fleet could displace Persian Gulf imports entirely, and this is no pipe dream. The National Academy of Sciences reported last year that the fuel economy of conventional cars and light trucks could be raised vastly more than that without compromising safety, performance, or affordability.........

......On-site and neighborhood micropower generated in or near customers' premises can solve both problems, offering diverse, decentralized, and thus nearly invulnerable supplies of electricity. Because microgeneration is also more flexible and quickly built than large power plants--and because it benefits from the valuable financial and engineering advantages of electric sources that are the right size for the job--it is favored in the market as well.

Frank Rich in the NY Times (requires free registration) takes aim at all the false appeals to patriotism floating around. We're being told that it's unpatriotic to question corporate breaks, but politicians are apparently not willing to touch their pet projects or sacrifice anything they've promised their owners (ahem, contributors).


Patriotism on the Cheap
There has been a lot of talk about patriotism and sacrifice since Sept. 11, but talk is cheap. Real airline security is expensive, and you get what you pay for. Congress, exercising its favorite form of bipartisanship, that which serves its corporate donors, did hand the airlines a $15 billion bailout in September but it allotted nothing like that sum to putting teeth into the airline security bill passed with such fanfare in November........

.......We all applaud our selfless men and women in uniform, whether at ground zero or in battle, but we are not inclined to make even a fractionally commensurate sacrifice of our own. We have no interest in reducing our dependence on the oil from the country that nurtured most of the hijackers, Saudi Arabia, or revisiting an upper-brackets-skewed $1.35 trillion, 10-year tax cut to find the serious money needed to fight future hijackers and bioterrorists effectively.......

.........if Donald Rumsfeld is good at his job, that's his talent, not a magic spell that automatically rubs off on John Ashcroft and Norman Mineta. If George W. Bush has been a strong practitioner of war, that doesn't elevate his pettier domestic policies, whether an Enron-friendly energy plan or an inequitable economic "stimulus," to the holy grail or brand his critics as evildoers.

Enron has been taking advantage of a big, fat tax dodge that other companies have also been using. They set up offshore subsidiaries to shelter their profits from American taxes. Unfortunately, this is completely legal and will remain so for a long time, because Congress and the Bush administration aren't going to change a thing. Corporations are throwing around way too much money for the tax laws to be changed to keep them from cheating.

Corporate Tax Avoidance by Enron: CTJ Analysis
Enron paid no corporate income taxes in four of the last five years-- although the company was profitable in each of those years.
Over the five-year period from 1996 to 2000, Enron received a net tax rebate of $381 million. This includes a $278 million tax rebate in 2000 alone.
Over the same period, the company’s profit before federal income taxes totaled $1.785 million. In none of these years was the company’s pretax profit less than $87 million.

BuzzFlash pointed out this from the Washington Post. They buried this major tidbit in the middle of an article:

GAO Vows to Sue For Cheney Files (washingtonpost.com)
Former Enron executives disclosed yesterday that a top Bush campaign adviser, Edward Gillespie, served as the company's key conduit to the White House and House leaders. Gillespie's firm received $525,000 over nine months last year from Enron for lobbying that included the energy task force and economic stimulus legislation with tax provisions that would have helped Enron.

Arianna Huffington points out the differences between Bush's rhetoric and his actions:
January 10, 2002 - Compassionate Conservatives vs. Enron Conservatives
During his run for the White House, Bush fought long and hard to convince us that he was a new breed of conservative -- a Compassionate Conservative. But recent events make clear that he is actually the standard bearer of a far more coldhearted breed. Call them the Enron Conservatives.

Enron Conservatives are people who use political money and connections as levers to free themselves of all accountability to laws, regulations and responsibility -- even to their own employees. Simply put, they are people who consistently, shamelessly and aggressively put their self-interest above the public interest. And when the lives of others are destroyed in the process, they just look the other way and hope that the law does, too.

It probably is too much to expect the Federal Trade Commission to hop on the Enron investigation bandwagon and look into whether Bush violated truth-in-labeling laws during his campaign, when his pledges of compassionate conservatism were stump speech favorites.

A lot of people (but not all of them) seem to be missing the real lesson of the Enron scandal. They act as if it only dealt with one instance of corporate behavior, and that the lack of obvious illegailty by our government should be the end it. It's not, and it shouldn't be.

I, for one, doubt that a "smoking gun" will be found. Most of the politicians involved are either too careful to do anything that might get them busted or too paranoid to leave a paper trail if they did. On the level of personal behavior by government officials, I doubt anything illegal was done (though we could debate the legality of pushing legislation in return for campaign contributions, it's never been prosecuted). That's not the real point.

What the collapse of Enron should show us is the complete failure of Market Fundamentalism as an ideology. Just as Communism couldn't survive the test of actual behavior by real people in real life, neither can this quasi-religious faith in completely unregulated markets as the only proper way to run our economy.

The belief that any government regulation of the behavior of corporations and corporate executives is always a bad idea has been espoused by an increasingly powerful group of people for the last 20 years. Deregulation of the marketplace has been treated as always a good idea, and increased regulation as always a bad one. This only makes sense if, given a marketplace free of government oversight, corporations and individuals would act responsibly and honestly without being forced to do so. Ken Lay and Enron have put this fallacy to rest.

Enron, due in part to generous campaign contributions, operated in an atmosphere almost free of regulation. The markets in which traded were too new to be subject to the regulatory agencies set up to deal with the aftereffects of the Depression. The accounting firm auditing it, Arthur Anderson, was employed at its discretion and stood to lose millions in revenue if it displeased Enron's executives. Enron, quite literally, could do anything it wanted.

What it did, of course, is lie about its profitability in order to jack up its stock price. The executives then cashed out billions in stock at the inflated price, leaving their employees and their investors holding the bag. There's no particular reason to believe that this is an abberation. Executives at Ford and Firestone lied about the safety of Ford Explorers in order to save their companies the cost of a recall while hundreds died in accidents. Executives at tobacco companies lied for years about the evidence their scientists had of tobacco's cancer causing and addictive properties. Executives at W.R. Grace buried information about how asbestos was killing their employees, and the employees died by the thousands (Libby's Deadly Grace). Given an incentive big enough, any goup of people will produce some willing to do the wrong thing. Corporate executives are no different than the rest of us.

Communism eventually collapsed under the weight of human nature. Any system operating under the assumption that all people would rather work than sit around drinking coffee all day was bound to fail. It just took enough people not doing their share of the work for long enough to bring it down.

Market Fundamentalism is also doomed to the dustbin of history, it's just a matter of how long it will take. Any system operating under the assumption that no one would cook the books or act irresponsibly given the chance to makes themselves wealthy is also bound to fail. The only question is this: do we act now and move to sensibly regulate corporate behavior, or do we construct an entire society around a faulty premise and suffer the consequences when it collapses?

Peter Beinart makes a good point about the future of the Republican Party. If they hope to compete in the states that are trending Democratic (California, New Jersey, et al), they'll have to nominate candidates who are much more liberal than the mainstream of the GOP. They'll have to learn to accept ideological diversity, in much the same way as the Democratic Party has learned to accept the kinds of candidates who can win state-wide races in the South and Great Plains.

TNR Online | TRB: West Wing by Peter Beinart
But Riordan can't win unless conservatives turn out on Election Day, and unless the national Republican Party aggressively assists his campaign. And therein lies the GOP's fateful decision. If it abandons Riordan, it will remain moribund in California, putting Republican presidential candidates at a permanent disadvantage. What's more, it will have rejected perhaps the best model for long-term success in a host of other states--for instance, New Jersey, where the national GOP's rightward drift is increasingly making Republicans an endangered species--that are following California's demographic lead.

If Riordan wins, on the other hand, the most powerful Republican outside Washington will disagree with core Republican principles. As governor of America's largest state, Riordan would have the political platform that his ideological soulmate Rudy Giuliani lacked. And he could conceivably launch the first serious liberal Republican presidential bid in a generation, a bid that would shake the GOP to its bones. Instead of Republican expansion, a Riordan governorship could produce Republican fratricide.

In response to the American announcement that we are no longer going to force off-duty women in the Armed Forces to cover themselves from head to toe, the Saudis have apparently announced that it's not our decision to make:Salon.com News | Saudis want U.S. servicewomen veiled

Saudi officials warned Thursday they would not allow U.S. servicewomen to go around without a head-to-toe robe, and criticized Washington for lifting the requirement that its female troops wear the garment.

A member of the Committee for the Preservation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, a government agency for enforcing Islamic law, said all women must wear the robe, or "abaya" in Arabic, irrespective of religion, nationality or profession.

"Everybody is considered equal under Islam. Whoever doesn't like it, let them go back home," a committee official said on condition of anonymity.

I, for one, would like us to tell the Saudis to kiss our fat, coed, secular asses. I'm sick of coddling rulers who shit on us and on their own people. I know we can't flip off everyone who annoys us, but we can certainly stand up to their petty bullying (in the short term) and pave way for the day when we can tell them off (in the long term).

In under one generation, we could break our dependence on fossil fuels through a combination of conservation technology and alternative energy sources. Not only would we be able to tell the bigoted despots that rule the Middle East that we no longer care what they think, but we would also be positioned to lead the biggest export market of the next century and wipe out our trade deficit (almost all of which is due to importation of energy). Freeing ourselves from fossil fuels is not only a good thing to do from an environmental standpoint, but it should also be a key ingredient to National Security in the next century.

As for the short term, maybe we should just tell the Saudi religious police that they're free to assault the heavily armed females in our military, but recommend that they make their peace with Allah first.

They say that you can tell who watches a TV show or reads a magazine by looking at the ads, and that makes sense. You see ads for beer and Doritos on Monday Night Football, not on Ally McBeal. You see ads for luxury cars and stock brokerages on golf broadcasts, not on roller derby ones. If this is true, if you can tell who pays attention to something by the companies that advertise on it, then we know one thing about the people who listen to Rush Limbaugh.

They're suckers.

To be more precise, they're impotent, balding suckers with bad teeth and small penises.

I know this because I forced myself to listen to his radio show today. Every fly by night piece of crap that the National Enquirer is too proud to advertise, that's what is advertised on Limbaugh's show: herbal Viagra substitutes, crappy hair-replacement products, get-rich-quick schemes, guys who fix crooked or stained teeth on the installment plan, even some sort of pump that supposed to lengthen "masculine tissue" (which I've gotta assume means the penis). The target audience for Rush Limbaugh's radio show has got to be the biggest collection of suckers the world has ever known. It's like a holiday feast for con men.

I guess they just know an easy mark when they see one.

William Greider breaks down the way cronyism and backscratching in banks and corporate boardrooms come to hurt us all in this article:Crime in the Suites (1)

The rot in America's financial system is structural and systemic. It consists of lying, cheating and stealing on a grand scale, but most offenses seem depersonalized because the transactions are so complex and remote from ordinary human criminality........

.......The evolving new forms of finance and banking, joined with the permissive culture in Washington, produced an exotic structural nightmare in which some firms are regulated and supervised while others are not. They converge, however, with kereitzu-style back-scratching in the business of lending and investing other people's money. The results are profoundly conflicted loyalties in banks and financial firms--who have fiduciary obligations to the citizens who give them money to invest. Banks and brokerages often cannot tell the truth to retail customers, depositors or investors without potentially injuring the corporate clients that provide huge commissions and profits from investment deals.

Found a really good article on farm policy from TomPaine.com. TOMPAINE.com - Modern Day SharecroppersIt talks about how consolidation among chicken companies and the new wave of contracted farming have reduced many farmers to virtual sharecroppers.
The farmer takes out massive loans to build the giant chicken houses the packers require and supply the labor. The packers supply the chickens, the feed, and the medicine, then pay the farmer based on the weight the chickens have gained (minus the death rate) over the six weeks or so they have the chickens.
This is a dream for agribusiness. The farmer takes all the risks of weather and disease, and takes a beating if yield is down. The corporation gets a guaranteed price, even when supply is tight and open-market prices would go up (since they've locked the farmers into exclusive contracts).

This contract farming is most common with chickens and beef cattle, but look for it to spread to grains, sheep, and vegetables very soon. If you're wondering why the farmers don't just tell the companies to take a hike and sell their chickens on the open market, it's simple. There is no open market. A handful of companies process almost all the chickens raised in America, and they only buy from their contractors. A farmer raising chickens on his own wouldn't have anyione to sell them to.

This is another good example of how the interest of agribusiness is almost diametrically opposed to that of farmers and consumers (we don't even want to get into how unhealthy many of these factory raised chickens are). But, since small farmers and consumers don't give much to PACs and can't hire former civil servants to fat consulting contracts, you can figure out who Congress and the Dept of Agriculture are going to shaft.

Todd Gitlin rips into the kind of people (Noam Chomsky, please pick up the white courtesy phone) who always rip American foreign policy and American actions no matter what they.

Blaming America First
Motherjones.com -- Magazine
In this cartoon view of the world, there is nothing worse than American power—not the woman-enslaving Taliban, not an unrepentant Al Qaeda committed to killing civilians as they please—and America is nothing but a self-seeking bully. It does not face genuine dilemmas. It never has legitimate reason to do what it does. When its rulers' views command popularity, this can only be because the entire population has been brainwashed, or rendered moronic, or shares in its leaders' monstrous values.

More from The Economist on how Bush's tax plan (most of which won't take hold for years) has eliminated the budget surplus and will keep us from running one for the forseeable future:

Politics by numbers
Economist.com | American fiscal policy
GEORGE BUSH'S political fortunes have improved enormously in the past few months. But his stewardship of the public finances took another knock on January 23rd with the release of new forecasts from the independent Congressional Budget Office (CBO). The government's budget is now projected to be in deficit in the current fiscal year, which ends on September 30th, and it will remain in the red next year as well. Perhaps more significantly, the CBO has slashed its estimates of the budget surpluses for later years......

......The CBO says 60% of the revisions made reflect legislation, including the tax cut, enacted since last January and its knock-on effect on the size and cost of the government's debt.

Joshua Micah Marshall goes after the White House Press Secretary for lying to the Press once more:
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall
Can Ari Fleischer tell the truth? Let's make this the first installment of the Ari Fleischer Ridiculous Mistatement Watch.


He caught Fleischer saying that Cheney's supersecret Energy Taskforce met with the Sierra Club several times (while trying to deflect questions about Enron's access to the Taskforce). As it turns out, the Taskforce had already issued a report and disbanded before Cheney met with them damn tree-huggers so they could gripe about what he'd already put forward. That's nothing like the access that Enron got (6 meetings with the Taskforce while they were still writing their report) for their millions in contributions.

Good article in The Economist about Every white bigot's favourite black

The dangerous quest of Al Sharpton
Economist.com | Lexington
Mr Sharpton also has something else on his side: the media's voracious desire for controversy. The Reverend is a gift-horse for the political talk-shows that fill so many hours of cable television. It is a safe bet that, given a choice between interviewing a serious black politician about local services in Atlanta and interviewing Mr Sharpton about reparations for slavery, the moguls of cable television will choose the showman every time.
This is depressing news for black America. It helps to obscure the fact that America boasts a plethora of successful black politicians. It reinforces the impression that black America is still mired in the politics of protest and victimhood. Black America may now be too successful and sophisticated to need a single spokesman. But the same cannot be said of either mainstream America or the media. Al Sharpton's greatest strength is not his ability to lead his own people. It is his ability to reinforce the prejudices of the white majority.

From John Lewis to Jesse Jackson Jr, we've got tons of black elected leaders with credible resumes and serious ideas about what America should be. It's too bad that the media has to fixate on one charalatan in a cheap suit who's never been elected to anything. Giving this clown a platform not only cheapens our political discourse, it makes it that much harder for black Americans to be accepted by everyone else.