The rise of the Super Rich

July 19, 2006
Talking Points
The Rise of the Super-Rich

By TERESA TRITCH
The gap between rich and poor is unfortunately an old story.

It is the stuff of parables and literature. It is a force in social history and political economy, from electoral campaigns to reform movements and revolutions.

But in the United States today, there’s a new twist to the familiar plot. Income inequality used to be about rich versus poor, but now it’s increasingly a matter of the ultra rich and everyone else. The curious effect of the new divide is an economy that appears to be charging ahead, until you realize that the most of the people in it are being left in the dust. President Bush has yet to acknowledge the true state of affairs, though it’s at the root of his failure to convince Americans that the good times are rolling.

The president’s lack of attention may be misplaced optimism, or it could be political strategy. Acknowledging what’s happening would mean having to rethink his policies, not exactly his strong suit.

But the growing income gap — and the rise of the super-rich — demands attention. It is making America a less fair society, and a less stable one.

I. The Growing Divide

Anyone who has driven through the new neighborhoods filled with “McMansions” that have arisen near most cities, or seen the brisk business that luxury stores are doing, has an anecdotal sense that some Americans are making a lot of money right now.

But there is no need to rely on anecdotal evidence.

Thomas Piketty, of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California at Berkeley recently updated their groundbreaking study on income inequality(pdf), and their findings are striking.

The new figures show that from 2003 to 2004, the latest year for which there is data, the richest Americans pulled far ahead of everyone else. In the space of that one year, real average income for the top 1 percent of households — those making more than $315,000 in 2004 — grew by nearly 17 percent. For the remaining 99 percent, the average gain was less than 3 percent, and that probably makes things look better than they really are, since other data(pdf), most notably from the Census Bureau, indicate that the average is bolstered by large gains among the top 20 percent of households. In all, the top 1 percent of households enjoyed 36 percent of all income gains in 2004, on top of an already stunning 30 percent in 2003.

Some of the gains at the top reflect capitalism’s robust reward for the founders of companies like Microsoft, Google and Dell. But most of it is due to the unprecedented largesse being heaped on executives and professionals, in the form of salary, bonuses and stock options. A recent study done for the Business Roundtable(pdf), a lobbying group for chief executives, shows that median executive pay at 350 large public companies was $6.8 million in 2005. According to the Wall Street Journal, that’s 179 times the pay of the average American worker. The study is intended to rebut much higher estimates made by other researchers, but it does little to quell the sense that executive pay is out of whack. The Journal's Alan Murray pointed out recently, the study’s calculation of executive pay is widely criticized as an understatement because, as a measurement of the median, it is largely unaffected by the eight or nine-digit pay packages that have dominated the headlines of late.

Rich people are also being made richer, recent government data shows, by strong returns on investment income. In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, the top 1 percent of households owned 57.5 percent of corporate wealth, generally dividends and capital gains, up from 53.4 percent a year earlier.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington think tank, compared the latest data from Mr. Piketty and Mr. Saez to comprehensive reports on income trends from the Congressional Budget Office. Every way it sliced the data, it found a striking share of total income concentrated at the top(pdf) of the income ladder as of 2004.

• The top 10 percent of households had 46 percent of the nation’s income, their biggest share in all but two of the last 70 years.

• The top 1 percent of households had 19.5 percent (see graph).

• The top one-tenth of 1 percent of households actually received nearly half of the increased share going to the top 1 percent.

These disparaties seem large, and they are. (Though the latest availabe data is from 2004, there are virtually no signs that the basic trend has changed since then.) The top 1 percent held a bigger share of total income than at any time since 1929, except for 1999 and 2000 during the tech stock bubble. But what makes those disparities particularly brutal is that unlike the last bull market of the late 1990's — when a proverbial rising tide was lifting all boats — the rich have been the only winners lately. According to an analysis by Goldman Sachs, for most American households — the bottom 60 percent — average income grew by less than 20 percent from 1979 to 2004, with virtually all of those gains occurring from the mid- to late 1990's. Before and since, real incomes for that group have basically flatlined.

The best-off Americans are not only winning by an extraordinary margin right now. They are the only ones who are winning at all.

The result has been, as Andrew Hacker, a political science professor at Queens College, has observed in a recent article in the New York Review of Books, “more billionaires, more millionaires and more six-figure families.”

As income has become more concentrated at the top, overall wealth has also become more skewed. According to the latest installation of a survey(pdf) that the Federal Reserve has conducted every three years since 1989, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans accounted for 33.4 percent of total net worth in 2004, compared to 30.1 percent in 1989. Over the same period, the other Americans in the top 10 percent saw their share of the nation’s net worth basically stagnate, at about 36 percent, while the bottom 50 percent accounted for just 2.5 percent of the wealth in 2004, compared to 3.0 percent in 1989.

II. A Brief History of Income Inequality

While it has long been the case that the rich do better than everyone else, it has not always been true that, in the process, the poor get poorer and the middle class gets squeezed. In post-World War II America, between 1947 and the early 1970’s, all income groups shared in the nation’s economic growth. Poor families actually had a higher growth in real annual income than other groups.

Part of the reason was a sharp rise in labor productivity. As workers produced more, the economy grew and so did compensation — wages, salaries and benefits (see graph). This link between productivity gains and income gains was not automatic. Government policies worked to ensure that productivity gains translated into more pay for Americans at all levels, including regular increases in the minimum wage and greater investment in the social safety net. Full employment was also a government priority. And, of course, unions were strong back then, giving workers bargaining power.

From the mid-1970’s until 1995, the trend reversed. The gap between the rich and poor widened at a rapid clip. The upper echelons — generally the top 20 percent of American households — experienced steady gains, while families in the bottom 40 percent were faced with declining or stagnating incomes.

The growing divide coincided with a slowdown in productivity growth and a reversal in the government policies that had been promoting income equality. Legislators balked at raising the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit, a feature of the tax code that rewards the working poor by ensuring that work pays better than welfare. During the “supply side” era in the 1980’s, fostered by the policies of Ronald Reagan, taxes became less progressive. The goal of full employment was eclipsed by a focus on inflation fighting that remains to this day.

As trade began to play an ever bigger role in the American economy, manufacturing jobs diminished and labor unions declined, reducing workers’ clout in setting compensation. Regulatory laxness reached its apex in the fiscal disaster of the savings and loan meltdown, which drained public resources from socially and economically useful programs and polices.

The trend toward increasing inequality was interrupted, briefly, in the late 1990’s. Productivity growth rebounded, and for a half decade, all income groups participated in the prosperity. Even then, the richest Americans had the best run, propelled largely by stock market gains. In fact, when the stock market hit its all time high in 2000, post-war income concentration also peaked.

But government policies of the day helped to ensure that the lower rungs also had a boost. Clinton-era welfare reforms are often cast as a success story of market-based incentives. But in fact, they were supported by a big increase in the earned income tax credit to help solidify the transition from welfare to work. At the same time, budget deficits were conquered by shared sacrifice — a mix of tax increases and spending cuts affecting all groups. The combination of economic growth and fiscal discipline spurred robust hiring and, if it had endured, could also have strengthened the Social Security safety net by allowing the government to pay down its debts.

That seems like ancient history now. Nearly everyone’s income fell in 2001 and 2002, due to the bursting of the Internet bubble in 2000, recession in 2001 and the ensuing jobless recovery.

In the last few years, though, the trend toward inequality has reasserted itself — with a vengeance.

III. Inequality During the Bush Years

For the last few years, the tide has been rising again, but most boats have been staying where they are, or sinking. One key reason is that the link between rising productivity and broad economic prosperity has been severed. Take another look at this graph. During the years that George W. Bush has been in the White House, productivity growth has been stronger than ever. But the real compensation of all but the top 20 percent of income earners has been flat or falling. Gains in wages, salaries and benefits have been increasingly concentrated at the uppermost rungs of the income ladder.

The Bush administration would like you to believe that the situation will correct itself. Most recently, the new Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson, Jr., reiterated the administration’s viewpoint at his confirmation hearing in June when he said that “economic growth, job growth, productivity growth, hopefully will be followed by increases in wage income.”

Well, hoping certainly won’t make it so.

Neither will growth alone. As the post-World War II history of income inequality illustrates, productivity improvement is only one piece of the prosperity puzzle. The economic health of most American families also depends greatly on what government does. If it merely “gets out of the way,” inequality is bound to persist and — if recent results are any indication of future performance — worsen.

The Bush administration, though, has not even done anything as benign as get out of the way. The policies it has pursued — affirmatively and aggressively — have widened the gap between rich and poor.

A. The Tax Wedge

Tax cuts are the most obvious example. The Urban Institute-Brookings Institution Tax Policy Center computed the combined effects of tax cut legislation from 2001, 2003 and 2006. The tax cuts’ contribution to the income gap was significant.

In 2006, the average tax cut for households with incomes of more than $1 million — the top two-tenths of 1 percent — is $112,000 which works out to a boost of 5.7 percent in after tax income. That’s considerably higher than the 5 percent boost garnered by the top 1 percent. It’s far greater than the 2.5 percent increase of the middle fifth of households, and fully 19 times greater than the 0.3 percent gain of the poorest fifth of households.

The disparities are driven by tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the most affluent. In 2006, for instance, a tax cut took effect that allows high income households — those with incomes above $200,000 — to take bigger write offs for their children and other expenses, like mortgage interest on a second home. And increasingly, tax cuts are aimed at allowing America’s wealthiest families to amass dynastic wealth — estates to transfer from one generation to the next virtually untouched by taxes. The most obvious example is the gradual reduction in the estate tax that is scheduled through 2010 (and regular attempts to abolish the estate tax altogether). Another huge, though lesser noted example, is the law passed last May allowing all Americans to shelter money in a tax-favored Roth I.R.A. Under previous law, Roths had been off limits to wealthy Americans, precisely because the government did not want to help people amass big estates under the guise of saving for retirement. That sound principle has now been turned on its head.

B. The Assault on Programs for the Poor and Middle Class

Tax cuts are not the only policies widening the gap between the rich and other Americans. Earlier this year, President Bush signed into law a measure that will cut $39 billion over the next five years from domestic programs like Medicaid and food stamps, and $99.3 billion from 2006 to 2015.

The president and the Republican Congress have also done harm to the finances of the poorest Americans — and to the notion of basic fairness — by not increasing the federal minimum wage — it has been $5.15 since 1997 While C.E.O. salaries have been soaring, the take-home pay of waitresses and janitors has been hit hard by inflation.

The Bush administration has also been trying, with mixed success so far, to pursue other policies that would have the effect of shifting money to the rich. The most ominous is its often-repeated desire to “address our long-term unfunded entitlement obligations.” That’s code for making tax cuts for the wealthy permanent while cutting Social Security, which has for 70 years been a major factor in keeping Americans financially secure in their old age.

Over the objections of Congress, the administration overturned time-and-a-half regulation for overtime. For a brief period after Hurricane Katrina, the president suspended by executive proclamation the law that requires federal contractors to pay workers the locally prevailing wage, until Congress objected. For three months after Katrina, the Labor Department suspended the law requiring federal contractors to have an affirmative action hiring plan — an invitation to discrimination and, as such, to income inequality.

C. The Too-Easy Answer

When confronted with evidence of growing income inequality, Bush administration officials invariably say the answer is more and better education. “We are starting to see that the income gap is largely an education gap,” said Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, in a typical retort last January when tax data showed an increasing concentration of wealth among the highest-income Americans.

Education is critically important to individuals, society, the economy and democracy itself, and deserves strong government support. But it is neither a satisfactory explanation, nor a remedy, for today's income inequality.

There is a strong correlation between one's level of education and one's earning power. The Bush administration is assuming that the correlation will continue to hold in an ever more globalized economy. Writing in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Princeton economist Alan S. Blinder, a former vice-chairman of the Federal Reserve, explains why that view may be mistaken:

Other things being equal, education and skills are, of course, good things; education yields higher returns in advanced societies, and more schooling probably makes workers more flexible and more adaptable to change. But the problem with relying on education as the remedy for job losses is that 'other things' are not remotely close to equal. The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via a wireless connection) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not. And this unconventional divide does not correspond well to traditional distinctions between jobs that require high levels of education and jobs that don’t.
There is already evidence that the benefits of education are not as straightforward as many people seem to believe they are. In his review of “Inequality Matters,” a collection of essays from a conference at New York University conference in 2004, Mr. Hacker, the Queens College political science professor, cited findings from the Bureau of Labor Statistics to show that many college graduates now hold jobs that once required only a high school diploma. Today, according to the bureau, 37 percent of flight attendants have completed college, as have 35 percent of tour escorts, 21 percent of embalmers, and 13 percent of both security guards and casino dealers. Mr. Hacker notes that more people are expected to earn college degrees in preparation for well-paying professions. “But we cannot expect the economy will automatically create better-paid positions to match the cohort acquiring higher education,” he writes.

Underscoring the point, the Bush administration's own Economic Report of the President in 2006 shows that average annual earnings of college graduates fell by 5 percent from 2000 to 2004. In those four years, the difference between the average yearly pay of a college graduate and a high school graduate shrank from 93 percent to 80 percent.

Education is vital. But as Mr. Blinder put it, it “is far from a panacea.”

IV. The Future of Income Inequality

The fast-growing gap between the rich and poor and middle-class Americans is not something that has just happened. The Bush policies are an attempt to dismantle the institutions and norms that have long worked to ameliorate inequities — progressive taxation, the minimum wage, Social Security, Medicaid and so on. The aims that can’t be accomplished outright — like cuts in Social Security — are being teed up by running deficits that could force the shrinkage of government programs, even though the public would not likely condone many such cuts unless compelled to by a fiscal crisis.

Such policies are grounded in an ideology that began taking shape some 30 years ago, when economic policy makers began to disdain the notion of harnessing and protecting society’s collective potential in favor of crafting incentives to align individuals’ interests with those of the market. This campaign has gone by many names — “starve the beast,” or “repeal the New Deal.” Economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, calls that approach “you’re on your own,” or YOYO, and has written a book calling for a new way, dubbed “we’re in this together,” or WITT. (Click here for excerpts from “All Together Now: Common Sense for a Fair Economy,” by Jared Bernstein.)

At issue, in economic terms, is the tradeoff between equality and efficiency: It can be difficult to divide the economic pie more equally without reducing the size of the pie. But it’s not impossible, and doing so is crucial for widespread prosperity. A fair and well-functioning economy will always involve some inequality, which acts a motivator and can be explained by differences in risk-taking, ability and work intensity. But inequality is generally deemed to be dangerous — socially, economically, (and, perhaps, politically) — when it becomes so extreme as to be self-reinforcing, as many researchers suggest is currently the case.

The problem now is that most any attempt to reduce inequality — even a measly increase in the minimum wage — is rejected as misguided. And policies that under one set of economic conditions might allow for a justifiable modicum of inequality are pursued beyond all reason. For instance, the rationale for the tax cuts in 2001 was to return the budget surplus that Mr. Bush inherited from President Clinton. The rationale for the tax cuts in 2002 and 2003 and 2006 was to stimulate the economy. The surplus has long since been replaced by big deficits, the jobless recovery ended three years ago and inequality is on the rise. But tax cutting that overwhelming benefits the rich continues because, we’re told, failure to keep cutting taxes would, somehow, shrink the pie. As Mr. Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute has put it: “Economics, once an elegant and sensible set of ideas and principles devoted to shaping outcomes for the betterment of society, has been reduced to a restrictive set of ideologically inspired rules devoted to an explanation of why we cannot take the necessary steps to meet the challenges we face.”

Hear, hear.

Lela Moore provided research for this article.

The real special relationship: two statesmen speaking!

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Yo, Blair, how are you doing?' - overheard chat reveals the real special relationship
'Yo, Blair, how are you doing?' - overheard chat reveals the real special relationship

During a quiet moment at the G8 summit yesterday, Tony Blair and George Bush swapped candid views on the Middle East. Only after several minutes did Mr Blair realise that a microphone had been left on

Tuesday July 18, 2006
The Guardian

Bush Yo, Blair. How are you doing?
Blair I'm just...

Bush You're leaving?

Blair No, no, no not yet. On this trade thingy ...[inaudible]

Bush Yeah, I told that to the man.

Blair Are you planning to say that here or not?

Bush If you want me to.

Blair Well, it's just that if the discussion arises ...

Bush I just want some movement.

Blair Yeah.

Bush Yesterday we didn't see much movement.

Blair No, no, it may be that it's not, it may be that it's impossible.
Bush I am prepared to say it.
Blair But it's just I think what we need to be an opposition...

Bush Who is introducing the trade?

Blair Angela [Merkel, the German chancellor].

Bush Tell her to call 'em.

Blair Yes.

Bush Tell her to put him on, them on the spot. Thanks for [inaudible] it's awfully thoughtful of you.

Blair It's a pleasure.

Bush I know you picked it out yourself.

Blair Oh, absolutely, in fact [inaudible].

Bush What about Kofi? [inaudible] His attitude to ceasefire and everything else ... happens.

Blair Yeah, no I think the [inaudible] is really difficult. We can't stop this unless you get this international business agreed.

Bush Yeah.

Blair I don't know what you guys have talked about, but as I say I am perfectly happy to try and see what the lie of the land is, but you need that done quickly because otherwise it will spiral.

Bush I think Condi is going to go pretty soon.

Blair But that's, that's, that's all that matters. But if you ... you see it will take some time to get that together.

Bush Yeah, yeah.

Blair But at least it gives people ...

Bush It's a process, I agree. I told her your offer to ...

Blair Well ... it's only if I mean ... you know. If she's got a ... or if she needs the ground prepared as it were ... Because obviously if she goes out, she's got to succeed, if it were, whereas I can go out and just talk.

Bush You see, the ... thing is what they need to do is to get Syria, to get Hizbullah to stop doing this shit and it's over.

Blair Syria.

Bush Why?

Blair Because I think this is all part of the same thing.

Bush Yeah.

Blair What does he think? He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if we get a solution in Israel and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way ...

Bush Yeah, yeah, he is sweet.

Blair He is honey. And that's what the whole thing is about. It's the same with Iraq.

Bush I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to Assad and make something happen.

Blair Yeah.

Bush We are not blaming the Lebanese government.

Blair Is this...? (at this point Blair taps the microphone in front of him and the sound is cut.)

From the Guardian, London

The west must recognise that Israel's agenda is in conflict with its own

The Olmert government, Hizbullah and Hamas are tacitly united in rejection of any moves towards a compromise peace

David Clark
Monday July 17, 2006
The Guardian

Whatever else can be said for or against Israel's escalation of military action against Lebanon, there is little prospect that it will achieve its stated objectives. If Israel couldn't defeat Hizbullah after 18 years in which its army occupied large swaths of Lebanese territory, it is not going to succeed with air strikes and blockades, or even another occupation. The same point applies even more forcefully in the case of Gaza. Every time Israel applies the iron fist in an effort to beat the Palestinians into submission, their resistance simply re-emerges in a more extreme and rejectionist form. Far from fearing Israel's wrath, Hizbullah and Hamas must be rather pleased at their success in provoking it into the sort of over-reaction from which they have always benefited.
Nor does it seem plausible that military action will enable Israel to secure the release of its captured soldiers. The civilian victims of Israel's indiscriminate retaliation have no real influence over the militias that hold them, while the militias themselves are untroubled by the spectacle of public suffering. On the contrary, they thrive on it. In the case of Lebanon, it is possible that acts of collective punishment, such as the destruction of Beirut airport and yesterday's killing of yet more civilians, might divide Hizbullah and its supporters from the rest of the country, but only at the risk of triggering another civil war and creating a vacuum that Israel's enemies in Syria and Iran will find easier to exploit.
In view of all this, it is valid to ask what Israel thinks it is doing. Indeed, this question is implicit in the statements of world leaders at the G8 and elsewhere who have called on Israel to use force proportionately, avoid civilian casualties and refrain from acts that might strengthen Hamas or destabilise Lebanon's fragile political settlement. No one quibbles with Israel's right to defend itself, but doesn't it understand how irresponsible and immoral it is to deliberately escalate the conflict in this way?
The problem is that the premise of the question is false. It assumes that Israel shares our view that a de-escalation followed by negotiation is the best route to a settlement. It assumes, therefore, that when Israeli ministers complain of having "no partner for peace", they actually want one. A much more sensible approach would be to credit them with having the intelligence to know exactly what they are doing and to work backwards from there.
If so, it might become apparent that far from wanting a partner with which to negotiate, the Israeli government is acting with the specific intention of forestalling that possibility. There is nothing particularly new in this. The extremists on both sides have always formed a kind of tacit alliance, with the supporters of "greater Israel" and "no Israel" understanding their joint interest in preventing any moves towards a compromise peace. That is the main reason why Israel encouraged the growth of Hamas as it emerged in the 1980s. Unwilling to negotiate with the secular nationalists of Fatah, even as they were moving towards support for a two-state solution, the Israeli authorities thought it would be a clever idea to promote their Islamist rivals.
In the case of the current crisis, it is no accident that it occurred at precisely the moment when the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, was gaining the upper hand in the latest round of that struggle. By using the threat of a referendum to force Hamas to accept the existence of Israel as the basis for a final settlement, Abbas had created the most promising opening for peace in six years. Faced with internal division and the loss of political initiative, Hamas militants understood that the only way to prevent it would be to trigger another cycle of violence. In turn, the Israel government, whose interests were also threatened by the Abbas initiative, recognised that it had an equally good reason to oblige. The effect of Hizbullah's intervention and Israel's over-reaction has been to put peace even further down the agenda.
The plain truth is that Israel thinks that it can get more by imposing a solution through force than by negotiation and is not interested in any kind of peace process. The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, pays lip service to the road map, but he has already received American endorsement for his fallback position, artfully dubbed "unilateral convergence". George Bush has described it as a "bold idea". Armed with the knowledge that he will continue to enjoy American patronage if the road map fails, Olmert has set out to ensure that it does just that. Bush's diplomacy has been truly inept.
It's high time western governments grasped the fundamental truth that Israel is pursuing an agenda that conflicts directly with their own. In the context of the fight against terrorism and the need to promote international cooperation, the west's interest must be to remove the Palestinian question as a source of grievance among mainstream Muslims in a way that guarantees justice for the Palestinians and security for Israel. A settlement of this kind is perfectly feasible and has been outlined in countless documents and initiatives over the years, most recently in the Geneva accords. But the main reason it has proved illusive is that Israel is not, and never has been, prepared to make the territorial compromises required. It still believes that it is entitled to the victor's spoils by annexing large tracts of Palestinian land.
This situation will persist as long as the west remains in denial about the reasons for the ongoing conflict and until the Israeli political establishment is forced to pay a price for its obstinacy. Yet the US remains entirely complicit in its role as Israel's main strategic ally. In the midst of last Friday's onslaught, in which Israeli bombers killed dozens of Lebanese civilians, the Pentagon announced the export of $210m of aviation fuel to help Israel "keep peace and security in the region". Even Britain and other European countries indulge in a form of diplomatic misdirection by focusing one-sidedly on the roles played by Syria and Iran.
The key to resolving the situation in Lebanon lies, as it did throughout the 1970s and 1980s, in finding a solution to the Palestinian question. A viable and successful Palestinian state would rob Hizbullah and its sponsors of the conceit that they are defending helpless Muslims and make it easier for those in the region who oppose them to gain the upper hand. Mahmoud Abbas is the only leader currently working for the kind of negotiated two-state solution the Middle East and the wider world desperately need. But he is being let down by the west at the moment when he had earned the right to expect better. The Palestinian president needs a partner for peace. If Israel will not play that role, the international community must.
· David Clark is a former Labour special adviser at the Foreign Office dkclark@aol.com

Too high a price!

Too High a Price

[posted online on July 14, 2006]

With the spreading violence in Lebanon and Gaza, the Israeli doctrine of absolute security and massive retaliation--the notion that any attack or threat of attack on Israel will be met with a disproportionate response--is again proving counterproductive to Israel's own security as well as to the larger stability of the region. It makes no sense for Israel to destroy the civil infrastructure of the Palestinians and of Lebanon in response to the kidnapping of its soldiers, or to further weaken the capacity of the governments of Lebanon and the Palestinian Authority while at the same trying to hold them accountable for the actions of groups and militias they cannot reasonably control. This collective punishment of the Palestinian and Lebanese people is not only inhumane and should be condemned but also leads to more radicalization and to more chaos.

That was the lesson of the Israeli siege of the Palestinian Authority in 2002, which severely weakened the PA's ability to govern, helping to pave the way for the political success of Hamas. And it will be the lesson of the increasing destruction of Lebanon. Indeed, the most likely casualty of the latest case of Israel's massive retaliation will be the fragile social peace and the democratically elected government in Lebanon. Ironically, the much-trumpeted Cedar Revolution, the only example of the success of the Bush doctrine that neoconservatives can still point to, could be brought down by the Likudnik policies of Israel that the neocons so champion. It took Lebanon more than twenty years to recover a degree of stability and civil peace after the last major incursion. How long will it take to recover from the unraveling of the stability that American and Israelis policies are helping to bring about?

It is now clear that the American and Israeli strategy of trying to isolate Hamas and Hezbollah, on the one hand, and Syria and Iran on the other, have backfired. Would the situation in Gaza have gotten so out of hand if Israel, the United States and the European Union had tried to work with the democratically elected Hamas government from the outset? And would Hezbollah have felt the freedom to take the reckless action it took--the deplorable firing of rockets on Israeli civilians? As Juan Cole points out today on Informed Comment, "A Lebanon with no Syrian troops and Hizbullah in the government was inherently unstable. With Syria gone, Hizbullah filled a security vacuum and also was less restrained."

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has said that Syria has a special responsibility to resolve this crisis. But the whole thrust of American policy of the last two years has been to reduce unconditionally Syria's influence in Lebanon so as to leave Lebanon to the Lebanese. By what logic does the Administration now seek to hold Syria accountable for the reckless action of Hezbollah militia in southern Lebanon? As Cole suggests, the hasty unplanned departure of Syrian forces may have ironically given Hezbollah more freedom to act than before. A dialogue with Syria together with an effort to have a more careful planned disengagement of Syrian forces would have given the Lebanese government a better chance of establishing control over its sovereignty in southern Lebanon.

The big beneficiaries of American policy have been the more radical wings of Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranians, who more and more look like the champions of the Palestinian people. The big losers are the so-called moderate Arab regimes, which again look helpless in the face of what is seen as Israeli aggression, and the moderate Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese who hoped for some normalcy of life with the prospect of peace, especially when the Hamas leadership appeared to be moving toward recognition of Israel. The United States and the larger world, too, are losers, for no one benefits from this mindless escalation of violence, particularly at a time of growing sectarian violence in Iraq and rising oil prices.

The events of the past two weeks should remind us that the peace and stability of the region is too important to be left to Israel and to Washington. There is a need for much greater and more forceful UN and European Union involvement and for the kind of diplomacy that the Europeans and the UN conducted in the late 1980s and the early '90s that led to the mutual release of prisoners and eventually to the Oslo peace process. The UN Quartet--consisting of the UN, the United States, Russia and the EU--has been far too deferential to the Bush Administration's failed road map strategy, and it is time for more active and comprehensive G-8 and UN-led diplomacy. Secretary General Kofi Annan's dispatch of two representatives to the region is a start, but it must be followed up by G-8 and UN Security Council action to rein in forces on all sides. This diplomacy should be aimed first at establishing a cease-fire and a mutual prisoner exchange and second at recognizing Hamas in Palestine and establishing talks with Syria and Iran. The United States must urgently back this diplomacy as well as make clear to Israel that it cannot support its current military action. The price it will pay in Iraq and in the region as a whole for doing so is just too large.

Friends Don't Let Friends Ruin Lebanon

BLOG | Posted 07/16/2006 @ 5:30pm
Friends Don't Let Friends Ruin Lebanon


Congressional "Friends of Israel" are busy making noises about the "need" for the United States to provide that Middle Eastern land with full support as it assaults its neighbors.

But no genuine friend of Israel can be happy with what is being done in that country's name by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his misguided followers.

Israel's attack on Lebanon, which has already killed and wounded hundreds and destroyed much of that fragile democracy's infrastructure--including airports, seaports, bridges and roads--has done nothing to make Israel safer or more secure from threats posed by the militant Islamic organization Hezbollah. Indeed, the terrorist group's attacks on targets in northern Israel have become more brazen--and deadly--since Israel began striking Lebanon.

No serious participant in the contemporary discourse would deny that Israel has a right to protect itself. But no one in their right mind thinks Israel is going about the mission in a smart manner.


As Henry Siegman, the former head of the American Jewish Congress explains, "In Lebanon as in Gaza, it is not Israel's right to protect its civilian population from terrorist aggression that is at issue. It is the way Israel goes about exercising that right."

"Despite bitter lessons from the past, Israel's political and military leaders remain addicted to the notion that, whatever they have a right to do, they have a right to overdo, to the point where they lose what international support they had when they began their retaliatory measures," adds Seigman. "Israel's response to the terrorist assault in Gaza and the outrageous and unprovoked Hizbollah assault across its northern border in Lebanon, far from providing protection to its citizens, may well further undermine their security by destabilizing the wider region."

Seigman's right. Israel's assault on Lebanon won't bring stability to the Middle East. Instead, it makes a bad situation worse.

Unfortunately, President Bush has chosen to direct his anger over the crisis toward Syria, a largely disempowered player, and Iran, an increasingly powerful player but not one that listens to the U.S. By failing to express blunt concern about Israel's over-the-top response to a genuine problem, Bush has encouraged Olmert to continue on a course that has already proven devastating for Lebanon and that, ultimately, will threaten Israel's stability.

Bush should start listening to wise voices from Israel, voices that are saying Olmert is wrong.

Both Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Public Security Minister Avi Dichter opposed last week's bombings of Hezbollah headquarters and other facilities in Beirut, a move by Olmert and his allies that dramatically increased tensions and violence.

In the Israeli Knesset there is a good deal of opposition to the current strategy.

Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Israeli Cabinet member Yossi Sarid, a well-regarded veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, argues that Israel -- and the United States -- need to recognize that they are going about things the wrong way. Instead of destroying the economic and physical infrastructure of Lebanon and Palestine, Sarid argues that efforts must be made to improve economies and opportunities for those who now see violence as the only way to demand fairness and opportunity.

"Iraq is destroyed, Afghanistan is destroyed, the Gaza Strip is destroyed and soon Beirut will be destroyed for the umpteenth time, and hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested solely in the vain war against the side that always loses and therefore has nothing more to lose. And hundreds of billions more go down the tubes of corruption," wrote Sarid.

"Maybe the time has come to put the pistol into safety mode for a moment, back into the holster, and at high noon declare a worldwide Marshall Plan, so that the eternal losers will finally have something to lose," Sarid added. "Only then will it be possible to isolate the viruses of violence and terrorism, for which quiet is quagmire and which in our eyes are themselves quagmire. And once isolated, it will be possible to eradicate them one day."

Krugman in today's NYT

July 17, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
March of Folly

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Since those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it — and since the cast of characters making pronouncements on the crisis in the Middle East is very much the same as it was three or four years ago — it seems like a good idea to travel down memory lane. Here’s what they said and when they said it:

“The greatest thing to come out of [invading Iraq] for the world economy ... would be $20 a barrel for oil.” Rupert Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), February 2003

“Oil Touches Record $78 on Mideast Conflict.” Headline on www.foxnews.com, July 14, 2006

“The administration’s top budget official estimated today that the cost of a war with Iraq could be in the range of $50 billion to $60 billion,” saying that “earlier estimates of $100 billion to $200 billion in Iraq war costs by Lawrence B. Lindsey, Mr. Bush’s former chief economic adviser, were too high.” The New York Times, Dec. 31, 2002

“According to C.B.O.’s estimates, from the time U.S. forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, $290 billion has been allocated for activities in Iraq. ... Additional costs over the 2007-2016 period would total an estimated $202 billion under the first [optimistic] scenario, and $406 billion under the second one.” Congressional Budget Office, July 13, 2006

“Peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There’s been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia.” Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary of defense and now president of the World Bank, Feb. 27, 2003

“West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighborhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.” The Times of London, July 14, 2006

“Earlier this week, I traveled to Baghdad to visit the capital of a free and democratic Iraq.” President Bush, June 17, 2006

“People are doing the same as [in] Saddam’s time and worse. ... These were the precise reasons that we fought Saddam and now we are seeing the same things.” Ayad Allawi, Mr. Bush’s choice as Iraq’s first post-Saddam prime minister, November 2005

“Iraq’s new government has another able leader in Speaker Mashhadani. ... He rejects the use of violence for political ends. And by agreeing to serve in a prominent role in this new unity government, he’s demonstrating leadership and courage.” President Bush, May 22, 2006

“Some people say ‘we saw you beheading, kidnappings and killing. In the end we even started kidnapping women who are our honor.’ These acts are not the work of Iraqis. I am sure that he who does this is a Jew and the son of a Jew.” Mahmoud Mashhadani, speaker of the Iraqi Parliament, July 13, 2006

“My fellow citizens, not only can we win the war in Iraq, we are winning the war in Iraq.” President Bush, Dec. 18, 2005

“I think I would answer that by telling you I don’t think we’re losing.” Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, when asked whether we’re winning in Iraq, July 14, 2006

“Regime change in Iraq would bring about a number of benefits for the region. ...Extremists in the region would have to rethink their strategy of jihad. Moderates throughout the region would take heart, and our ability to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be enhanced.” Vice President Dick Cheney, Aug. 26, 2002

“Bush — The world is coming unglued before his eyes. His naïve dreams are a Wilsonian disaster.” Newsweek Conventional Wisdom Watch, July 24, 2006 edition

“It’s time for Democrats who distrust President Bush to acknowledge that he will be the commander in chief for three more critical years, and that in matters of war, we undermine presidential credibility at our nation’s peril.” Senator Joseph Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, Dec. 6, 2005

“I cannot support a failed foreign policy. History teaches us that it is often easier to make war than peace. This administration is just learning that lesson right now.” Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, on the campaign against Slobodan Milosevic, April 28, 1999


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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Telegraph | News | Israel fights West's cause against radical Islam

Telegraph | News | Israel fights West's cause against radical Islam
Israel fights West's cause against radical Islam
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor

(Filed: 17/07/2006)

Analysis

It is an axiom of Israeli military operation that its armed forces must hurry to achieve victory before international pressure forces them to stop.


A copy of the Koran burns amid the debris in Beirut
Yet after bombarding Lebanon for five days, and causing pain to ordinary civilians unseen since the civil war ended 15 years ago, the international outcry is surprisingly muted. If anything, as the conflict has intensified and the regional stakes have risen, Israel has found a degree of international sympathy, or at least understanding.

Lebanon has become the battleground between pro-western and radical Islamic forces. Few governments, even Arab states, want to see Hizbollah win the contest.

America's strategic position in the Middle East - and by extension that of the West - has grown increasingly precarious.


The United States is on the defensive in Iraq, Afghanistan is becoming more unstable, Iran's nuclear programme has not been stopped and the radical Hamas movement has come to power in the Palestinian territories in democratic elections encouraged by America. The last thing Washington needs is for Syria and Iran to win a proxy victory in Lebanon.

Walid Jumblatt, the Lebanese Druze leader who had been a strong foe of Israel during the civil war but then became a powerful critic of Syria, summed up the situation as follows: "The war is no longer Lebanon's … it is an Iranian war. Iran is telling the United States: You want to fight me in the Gulf and destroy my nuclear programme? I will hit you at home, in Israel."

Tony Blair yesterday spoke of the need to confront "an arc of extremism" stretching from the Gaza Strip to Iraq.

There is certainly more evidence for the existence of such an alliance - encompassing the Palestinian Hamas movement, Hizbollah, Iraqi insurgents, Syria and Iran - than there ever was for George W Bush's original "axis of evil" of Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

One may debate how strongly the extremist elements co-ordinate their actions, but they certainly feed and support each other.

The latest crisis began three weeks ago with the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, during an attack by Hamas on an army base close to the Gaza Strip.

As the Israelis pounded the Gaza Strip, Hizbollah last week opened up a second front in the north with similar tactics: a cross-border raid that killed Israeli soldiers and captured two of them.

It is no secret that Hizbollah was created, financed and armed by Iran's Revolutionary Guards, and that its operations are facilitated by Syria. Indeed, Hizbollah was the only militia that Lebanon's Syrian overlords allowed to operate after the end of the civil war. It won widespread admiration for driving the Israelis out of Lebanon in 2000, but was the largest obstacle to the "Cedar Revolution" that forced Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon last year.

Syria has long been under pressure from the US, which accuses it of sheltering Iraqi insurgents, and from evidence gathered by United Nations investigators of its role in the assassination of the former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri.

This week, as America and Israel denounced Damascus, Iran joined the fray. "We hope the Zionist regime does not make the mistake of attacking Syria, because extending the front would definitely make the Zionist regime face unimaginable losses," said Iran's foreign ministry spokesman, Hamid Reza Asefi. Iran may be facing the threat of UN sanctions in the coming months because of growing fears that it is trying to make nuclear weapons. But its confidence has been boosted by the failure of America and Britain to bring stability to neighbouring Iraq.

Experts will debate whether Hizbollah's attack on Israel was co-ordinated with Hamas or was carried out opportunistically to catch the wave of sympathy for the plight of Palestinians.

But the effect has been of benefit to the whole "arc of extremism". It has given Hamas a boost, diverted international attention away from Iran's nuclear programme and may have strengthened the position of Syria as envoys plead with it to help restrain Hizbollah. The militant group, an Iranian ally, may gain most of all in the region. It has taken up the great Arab cause of standing up to Israel.

The Israeli ambassador to the UN, Dan Gillerman, on Friday defended the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure by saying: "If we succeed it will be Lebanon that benefits."

The crucial question is how the war will affect the internal balance of power in Lebanon. Will Hizbollah be seen as the only group brave and organised enough to stand up to Israel? Or will it incur the wrath of the Lebanese for dragging the country into a war it did not want?

The outcome of that debate may determine who wins the war, and decide the course of the Middle East for years to come.


Information appearing on telegraph.co.uk is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence. For the full copyright statement see Copyright

The Real Agenda - New York Times

The Real Agenda - New York Times



July 16, 2006
Editorial
The Real Agenda

It is only now, nearly five years after Sept. 11, that the full picture of the Bush administration’s response to the terror attacks is becoming clear. Much of it, we can see now, had far less to do with fighting Osama bin Laden than with expanding presidential power.

Over and over again, the same pattern emerges: Given a choice between following the rules or carving out some unprecedented executive power, the White House always shrugged off the legal constraints. Even when the only challenge was to get required approval from an ever-cooperative Congress, the president and his staff preferred to go it alone. While no one questions the determination of the White House to fight terrorism, the methods this administration has used to do it have been shaped by another, perverse determination: never to consult, never to ask and always to fight against any constraint on the executive branch.

One result has been a frayed democratic fabric in a country founded on a constitutional system of checks and balances. Another has been a less effective war on terror.

The Guantánamo Bay Prison

This whole sorry story has been on vivid display since the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions and United States law both applied to the Guantánamo Bay detention camp. For one brief, shining moment, it appeared that the administration realized it had met a check that it could not simply ignore. The White House sent out signals that the president was ready to work with Congress in creating a proper procedure for trying the hundreds of men who have spent years now locked up as suspected terrorists without any hope of due process.

But by week’s end it was clear that the president’s idea of cooperation was purely cosmetic. At hearings last week, the administration made it clear that it merely wanted Congress to legalize President Bush’s illegal actions — to amend the law to negate the court’s ruling instead of creating a system of justice within the law. As for the Geneva Conventions, administration witnesses and some of their more ideologically blinkered supporters in Congress want to scrap the international consensus that no prisoner may be robbed of basic human dignity.

The hearings were a bizarre spectacle in which the top military lawyers — who had been elbowed aside when the procedures at Guantánamo were established — endorsed the idea that the prisoners were covered by the Geneva Convention protections. Meanwhile, administration officials and obedient Republican lawmakers offered a lot of silly talk about not coddling the masterminds of terror.

The divide made it clear how little this all has to do with fighting terrorism. Undoing the Geneva Conventions would further endanger the life of every member of the American military who might ever be taken captive in the future. And if the prisoners scooped up in Afghanistan and sent to Guantánamo had been properly processed first — as military lawyers wanted to do — many would never have been kept in custody, a continuing reproach to the country that is holding them. Others would actually have been able to be tried under a fair system that would give the world a less perverse vision of American justice. The recent disbanding of the C.I.A. unit charged with finding Osama bin Laden is a reminder that the American people may never see anyone brought to trial for the terrible crimes of 9/11.

The hearings were supposed to produce a hopeful vision of a newly humbled and cooperative administration working with Congress to undo the mess it had created in stashing away hundreds of people, many with limited connections to terrorism at the most, without any plan for what to do with them over the long run. Instead, we saw an administration whose political core was still intent on hunkering down. The most embarrassing moment came when Bush loyalists argued that the United States could not follow the Geneva Conventions because Common Article Three, which has governed the treatment of wartime prisoners for more than half a century, was too vague. Which part of “civilized peoples,” “judicial guarantees” or “humiliating and degrading treatment” do they find confusing?


Eavesdropping on Americans

The administration’s intent to use the war on terror to buttress presidential power was never clearer than in the case of its wiretapping program. The president had legal means of listening in on the phone calls of suspected terrorists and checking their e-mail messages. A special court was established through a 1978 law to give the executive branch warrants for just this purpose, efficiently and in secrecy. And Republicans in Congress were all but begging for a chance to change the process in any way the president requested. Instead, of course, the administration did what it wanted without asking anyone. When the program became public, the administration ignored calls for it to comply with the rules. As usual, the president’s most loyal supporters simply urged that Congress pass a law allowing him to go on doing whatever he wanted to do.

Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, announced on Thursday that he had obtained a concession from Mr. Bush on how to handle this problem. Once again, the early perception that the president was going to bend to the rules turned out to be premature.

The bill the president has agreed to accept would allow him to go on ignoring the eavesdropping law. It does not require the president to obtain warrants for the one domestic spying program we know about — or for any other program — from the special intelligence surveillance court. It makes that an option and sets the precedent of giving blanket approval to programs, rather than insisting on the individual warrants required by the Constitution. Once again, the president has refused to acknowledge that there are rules he is required to follow.

And while the bill would establish new rules that Mr. Bush could voluntarily follow, it strips the federal courts of the right to hear legal challenges to the president’s wiretapping authority. The Supreme Court made it clear in the Guantánamo Bay case that this sort of meddling is unconstitutional.

If Congress accepts this deal, Mr. Specter said, the president will promise to ask the surveillance court to assess the constitutionality of the domestic spying program he has acknowledged. Even if Mr. Bush had a record of keeping such bargains, that is not the right court to make the determination. In addition, Mr. Bush could appeal if the court ruled against him, but the measure provides no avenue of appeal if the surveillance court decides the spying program is constitutional.

The Cost of Executive Arrogance

The president’s constant efforts to assert his power to act without consent or consultation has warped the war on terror. The unity and sense of national purpose that followed 9/11 is gone, replaced by suspicion and divisiveness that never needed to emerge. The president had no need to go it alone — everyone wanted to go with him. Both parties in Congress were eager to show they were tough on terrorism. But the obsession with presidential prerogatives created fights where no fights needed to occur and made huge messes out of programs that could have functioned more efficiently within the rules.

Jane Mayer provided a close look at this effort to undermine the constitutional separation of powers in a chilling article in the July 3 issue of The New Yorker. She showed how it grew out of Vice President Dick Cheney’s long and deeply held conviction that the real lesson of Watergate and the later Iran-contra debacle was that the president needed more power and that Congress and the courts should get out of the way.

To a disturbing degree, the horror of 9/11 became an excuse to take up this cause behind the shield of Americans’ deep insecurity. The results have been devastating. Americans’ civil liberties have been trampled. The nation’s image as a champion of human rights has been gravely harmed. Prisoners have been abused, tortured and even killed at the prisons we know about, while other prisons operate in secret. American agents “disappear” people, some entirely innocent, and send them off to torture chambers in distant lands. Hundreds of innocent men have been jailed at Guantánamo Bay without charges or rudimentary rights. And Congress has shirked its duty to correct this out of fear of being painted as pro-terrorist at election time.

• We still hope Congress will respond to the Supreme Court’s powerful and unequivocal ruling on Guantánamo Bay and also hold Mr. Bush to account for ignoring the law on wiretapping. Certainly, the president has made it clear that he is not giving an inch of ground.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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Go to Venezuela

Published on Thursday, July 6, 2006 by CommonDreams.org
Go to Venezuela, You Idiot!
by Jeff Cohen

I don't usually take the advice of rightwingers. But I did this time. After receiving inflamed email messages from dozens of angry rightists that I should get the hell out of the USA and go to Venezuela, I accepted their challenge and flew to Caracas.

"Would you like me to start a fund to ship your ass down there, Comrade Cohen?"

What had provoked the often-abusive emailers was my 2005 Internet column urging U.S. residents to buy their gasoline at Citgo, a subsidiary of Venezuela's state oil company. I called for a Citgo BUY-cott, to protest Bush's interventionist foreign policy while supporting innovative anti-poverty programs in Venezuela. (Last winter, Citgo started a program that provided discounted home-heating oil to low-income families in the U.S.)

"Hey moron, if you hate America so much and love Venezuela, why don't you go there?"

I'm glad I listened to the conservative chorus. In late June, I headed to Venezuela with a fact-finding delegation sponsored by the respected U.S. human rights group, Witness for Peace. The grueling trip covered much ground and all sides of Venezuela's social/political landscape. It is a complex country, headed by sometimes volatile President Hugo Chavez, a leftist and harsh Bush critic who was first elected in 1998.

As soon as I returned home, I headed to the nearest Citgo to fill up my tank -- more committed than ever to send a few dollars toward Venezuela's poor.

"You, sir, are as un-American as they come."

For decades, Venezuela's vast oil wealth had been squandered and hoarded by its light-skinned elite, while most Venezuelans -- largely of indigenous, African and mixed descent -- lived in dire poverty. Today, oil revenue from Citgo and elsewhere is funneled into social programs (called "missions") to benefit the country's poor majority. They're reminiscent of FDR's New Deal programs. . .born of our economic bust. But Venezuela's missions are fueled by a boom -- a boom in oil prices that is likely to persist for years.

"Because of Chavez, communism is thriving in South America."

From what I could see, capitalism is thriving. Foreign oil interests continue to profit handsomely from Venezuelan petrol, but they now pay a fairer share of taxes and royalties. So do the 80 McDonald's restaurants in Venezuela, which were briefly shut down last year over alleged tax cheating.

Multinational companies and the old elite are doing fine in today's Venezuela. So well that some Venezuelan leftists denounce Chavez -- despite his talk of building "21st century socialism" -- as a tool of corporate imperialism.

Like other oil-exporting countries, Venezuela in the past allowed its domestic productive economy to atrophy. Besides oil, it produced little -- with food largely imported. Today, people in poor areas are organizing themselves into productive and agricultural co-ops, supported by low-interest government loans. We visited a federal bank that underwrites women-run businesses nationwide.

My guess is that if Chavez succeeds in Venezuela -- a big "if" in a country of endemic corruption, poverty and crime, in the backyard of the U.S. superpower -- its economic system will end up looking more like Sweden than Cuba.

What's not debatable is that the poor have found hope in the Chavez administration -- which is why he's perhaps the most popular president in our hemisphere. So popular that Chavez critics in the U.S. government and Venezuelan opposition concede that they won't be able to defeat him in December when he seeks reelection.

"The trouble with all you liberals is that you're anti-American and hate democracy."

Participation in democracy is booming in Venezuela under Chavez. That's partly due to polarization, but also because so many poor people feel empowered enough for the first time to get active in politics. A massive 2005 Latinobarometro poll conducted in 18 Latin American countries showed that Venezuelans are among the top in preference for democracy over all other forms of government, in satisfaction with how their democracy is functioning, and in belief that their country is "totally democratic."

"The oil money never gets to the poor. . . . You must have been paid by Chavez to write what you wrote."

Across Venezuela, it's hard to miss the new investment in public education. Schools are being upgraded in urban and rural areas and are required to offer free breakfasts and lunches, arts, music and after-school activities. Unlike the U.S., these are well-funded mandates. Illiteracy has been virtually wiped out, according to UNESCO, thanks to adult education that has penetrated the poorest neighborhoods.

In poor communities, federally-subsidized stores called "mercals" sell food at half the market price. In the capital of Caracas, thousands of government-funded soup kitchens offer free lunches every weekday to the indigent; our delegation was headquartered in a church that served 150 free lunches per day. Across the country, new housing is being built to replace shantytown "ranchos" that so many Venezuelans live in.

Thousands of free ("Barrio Adentro") medical clinics have been built inside neighborhoods that never had doctors before -- so many clinics that you can spot them from the highway. These are staffed largely by doctors from Cuba; in return, Cuba receives Venezuelan oil. When we asked a community leader how local residents reacted to the Cuban doctors, he explained that most Venezuelan doctors won't serve in poor barrios: "People in our community don't care whether the doctors are French, German, Canadian, Mexican or Cuban -- as long as they're here to help."

"Go to Venezuela and kiss up to the anti-American dictator."

If Venezuela is a dictatorship, it must be the first in world history in which the opposition controls most of the media. And the first in which demonstrations occur regularly outside the presidential palace (organized by various groups, especially low-income activists complaining about broken promises and government inefficiency).

Dissent is alive and well in Venezuela. Any casual viewer can see anti-Chavez criticism all over TV, the country's dominant medium and largely in the hands of conservative business interests. The opposition used its power on TV to support a short-lived military coup in 2002 (strike 1), an employers' oil lockout in 2002-3 (strike 2) and a failed recall election in 2004 (strike 3). Chavez won nearly 60% in the recall vote -- which was monitored closely by international observers.

Efforts to bring down Chavez -- through democratic and undemocratic means -- have been supported by the Bush administration. Which makes it ironic that the American Family Association, a U.S. religious ultra-right group, has organized a Citgo boycott on the basis of its Internet hoax: "Venezuela Dictator Vows to Bring Down U.S. Government." The headline tends to reverse reality; Chavez has made no such vow. But AFA true believers have targeted my email inbox for months with the hoax.

"Try Jesus. If you don't like Him, the devil will always take you back.. . . .What terrorist group are you affiliated with?"

If you think the U.S. is politically polarized, you haven't been to Venezuela. Clinton's impeachment by the religious right over sex is child's play compared to what's gone on in Venezuela, where Chavez has survived near-death experiences at the hands of a conservative opposition that has never accepted his presidency.

Columnist Paul Krugman talks of a "New Class War" in our country. In Venezuela, it's old-fashioned class war. Political and media confrontation between Chavez and the opposition is vicious, personal and bare-knuckled. While independent human rights monitors in Venezuela complain about isolated cases of government intimidation of opposition figures and journalists, they scoff at claims that democracy is in jeopardy or that dictatorship is coming.

Today, Chavez is popular (his approval ratings dwarf Bush's), rambunctious in whipping up his base against both domestic opponents and Bush, and prone to hyperbole in his hours of extemporaneous speaking each day. He has waged a war of words against U.S. Empire and Bush, whom he calls "Mr. Danger." But that's polite in light of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld having compared Chavez to Adolph Hitler. Or Rev. Pat Robertson having called for Chavez to be assassinated.

"You can write your articles about how great he [Chavez] is, but I know, as well as other true Americans, that he is not a good man and he does need to be taken out of power as soon as possible."

To me, the issue is less about Chavez than about the social initiatives his government has unleashed. When I first wrote about Venezuela 14 months ago, I urged a simple economic action: filling up at Citgo so that our money at the pump helps Venezuela's poor instead of Middle East oiligarchs. That remains a good idea.

Nowadays, I also urge political action: that we contact Congress to demand that the U.S. stay out of Venezuela's political contest. That's up to Venezuelans to decide. Not us. The U.S. should stop its efforts to back the conservative opposition and cease all ("National Endowment for Democracy") funding of Venezuelan groups.

And finally, I want to join my rightwing critics in one recommendation: Go to Venezuela. If you can arrange it, examine the social transformations for yourself. Study Spanish there. See the decades of poverty, neglect and corruption that led to the election of Hugo Chavez -- and whether his government is improving things.

There's an added bonus for anyone who can get down there: gasoline at 18 cents per gallon. Expect to hear Venezuelans complaining that the price is too high.

Jeff Cohen is a media critic and former TV pundit. His newest book, "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media," can be pre-ordered at http://jeffcohen.org/.

How Congress Is Shafting the Middle Class

How Congress Is Shafting the Middle Class

From the Guardian, London

America's problem is again a usurping king called George
Bush's determination to impose his own reading of new laws amounts to a power grab and subverts the US constitution
Martin Kettle
Saturday June 17, 2006

Imagine a country with a different kind of monarch from the one we are used to. Forget the nation-binding human monarch whom Archbishop Rowan Williams praised so deftly this week. Imagine instead a monarch who, like many of Elizabeth II's ancestors, routinely reserved the right to override laws passed by the legislature, or who repeatedly asserted that the laws mean something they do not say. Imagine, in fact, King George of America.
On April 30 the Boston Globe journalist Charlie Savage wrote an article whose contents become more astonishing the more one reads them. Over the past five years, Savage reported, President George Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws that have been enacted by the United States Congress since he took office. At the heart of Bush's strategy is the claim that the president has the power to set aside any statute that conflicts with his own interpretation of the constitution.
Remarkably, this systematic reach for power has occurred not in secret but in public. Go to the White House website and the evidence is there in black and white. It takes the form of dozens of documents in which Bush asserts that his power as the nation's commander in chief entitles him to overrule or ignore bills sent to him by Congress for his signature. Behind this claim is a doctrine of the "unitary executive", which argues that the president's oath of office endows him with an independent authority to decide what a law means.
Periodically, congressional leaders come down from Capitol Hill to applaud as the president, seated at his desk, signs a bill that becomes the law of the land. They are corny occasions. But they are a photo-op reminder that American law-making involves compromises that reflect a balance between the legislature and the presidency. The signing ceremony symbolises that the balance has been upheld and renewed.
After the legislators leave, however, Bush puts his signature to another document. Known as a signing statement, this document is a presidential pronouncement setting out the terms in which he intends to interpret the new law. These signing statements often conflict with the new statutes. In some cases they even contradict their clear meaning. Increasing numbers of scholars and critics now believe they amount to a systematic power grab within a system that rests on checks and balances of which generations of Americans have been rightly proud - and of which others are justly envious.
The Bush administration has often been charged with unilateralism in its conduct of foreign affairs. But a similar disregard for the rule of law underlies this domestic strategy. Article 1, section 1 of the US constitution states: "All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States." Section 7 says that if the president refuses to sign a law, the Congress can override him. But Bush has never vetoed a bill. Instead he signs bills into law and then unilaterally redefines them his way.
The contrast between the rhetoric of the public ceremony and the self-authorisation in the later signing statements is large. Take, for example, the renewal of the USA Patriot Act on March 9. In the signing ceremony Bush stressed that the law had been a bipartisan effort involving Congress and the White House. In the subsequent signing statement, however, he states that he does not feel bound to report to Congress (as the act requires) and would "withhold information the disclosure of which could impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative processes of the executive, or the performance of the executive's constitutional duties".
Or take the contrast after Bush signed an overwhelmingly supported congressional bill last year outlawing the torture of detainees. On the face of it the new law was explicit, strengthening what Bush described as "values we hold dear" and extending a domestic ban on torture to cover US actions around the world. But the signing statement on December 30 carefully undermined that claim. It asserted that "the executive branch shall construe [the law] in a manner consistent with the constitutional authority of the president ... as commander in chief," adding that this approach would "assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and the president ... of protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks". In other words, circumstances might arise in which torture might still be authorised.
The Bush White House did not invent the presidential signing statement; it goes back to the 19th century. But the frequency and ambition of Bush's signing statements go far beyond his predecessors. Whereas earlier presidents issued signing statements of a highly specific nature, those of Bush are repeatedly broad and unspecific. Above all, they make claims to enhanced executive power that impinge on profound issues of liberty such as torture or wiretapping.
Too late in the day for comfort, Bush's approach is coming under greater scrutiny. In February the bipartisan Constitution Project warned of "the risk of permanent and unchecked presidential power". Last week the American Bar Association announced an independent inquiry into the practice. A powerful article in the New York Review of Books by the veteran writer Elizabeth Drew has also given the subject higher saliency.
To their credit, even some Bush supporters are alarmed. If Bill Clinton had done what Bush is doing, the Republican senator Chuck Hagel has pointed out, Congress would be up in arms. If Bush were to bequeath the powers he claims to Hillary Clinton, the right would soon go berserk with indignation at the threat to American values. Which is why the most pertinent comment so far on the president's strategy has come from the anti-tax conservative Grover Norquist. He told Drew: "If you interpret the constitution's saying that the president is commander in chief to mean that the president can do anything he wants and can ignore the laws, you don't have a constitution: you have a king."
It is not anti-American to warn about what Bush is doing. On the contrary, it is profoundly pro-American. In 1776 Americans issued their declaration of independence. They demanded a new form of government in place of the "repeated injuries and usurpations" to which they had been subjected. In the long list of grievances that followed, the first was that King George had "refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good". That suddenly has a contemporary ring. Now, as then, America's problem is a usurping king called George.
martin.kettle@guardian.co.uk

David Sirota on PBS

PBS - 6/16/06

Trivializing Corruption

By David Sirota

Ninety thousand dollars in a Democratic Congressman's freezer. A
Republican House Majority Leader indicted for money laundering, and a
senior Republican thrown in jail for accepting bribes. Washington's
biggest lobbyist thrown in jail for trying to buy off lawmakers. This
is what the Washington Establishment and the media want America to
believe is the worst form of corruption: a few dirty political hacks
who had the nerve to violate our supposedly pristine democracy.

Certainly, these examples are egregious. But the intense focus on
them by political leaders and the media to the exclusion of the real
corruption destroying our democracy trivializes what corruption
really is. That's not by accident -- it is a deliberate tactic of
distraction, and shows just how bought off our political system
really is.

Today, the lifeblood of American politics is money. Candidates must
raise enormous sums of private cash to run for office -- sums that
the wealthy and corporate interests are only too happy to provide in
exchange for legislative favors. We are told by politicians that this
system is "the greatest democracy in the world" when, in fact, it is
very clearly the same form of bribery that has marked every corrupt
regime looked down on by history books.

Money, of course, does not just buy favors -- it makes sure that the
concept of corruption is only presented to the public by political
leaders as anecdotes about a few bad apples, not a narrative about a
broken system. Why? Because an indictment of the pay-to-play system
that produced the bad apples could mean structural campaign finance
reforms that challenge the power of the Big Money interests that
underwrite our politicians. Thus, in the aftermath of recent
congressional scandals, all we get is a pathetical discussion about
weak lobbying "reform" proposals and even weaker sanctions against
individual lawmakers.

Such narrowing of our political discourse is the most nefarious form
of corruption of all. It shows how we now live in a country where the
very boundaries of public policy debates are designed to ensure
outcomes that never challenge Big Money interests. The truly corrupt
interests that own American politics long ago realized that they do
not have to pervasively violate our weak anti-corruption laws to get
what they want. All they have to do is shower cash on as many
lawmakers as possible. These lawmakers, uninterested in biting the
hand that feeds them, consequently make sure the overall debate is
rigged.

So, for instance, as America faces an impending energy crisis, the
political debate emanating from Washington has been largely limited
to a discussion of which new tax breaks to give to which major oil
companies -- all of whom have doled out millions in campaign
contributions to politicians.

Any serious discussion of a windfall profits tax on oil companies has
been marginalized, even though polls show the public strongly supports
the concept. Proposals to improve anti-trust enforcement as a way of
slowing down oil industry consolidation -- that's not even talked
about. And any consideration of a tough federal price gouging law has
been met with propaganda claiming it is not needed. Just last week,
the Federal Trade Commission -- headed by a former ChevronTexaco
lawyer -- claimed there is no evidence of oil industry price gouging.
This is occurring as Americans are paying more than $3-per-gallon for
gas at the very same time ExxonMobil made more money than any
corporation in history and gave its outgoing CEO a $400 million
retirement bonus.

The same is true when it comes to health care. As health insurance
premiums skyrocket and more Americans are forced to go with no
insurance at all, polls consistently show that Americans want a
universal health care system -- and are willing to make sacrifices to
get one. Yet, almost no politicians in Washington are willing to
support a government-sponsored, single-payer system like the one the
rest of the industrialized world has. The reason? Because such a
proposal could threaten the bottom line of the private health
insurance industry, which makes massive donations to political
candidates. Instead, the debate is limited either to proposals like
Massachusetts' that simply forces citizens to pay high health
premiums, or to proposals in Congress that would just hand over
billions of taxpayer dollars to the private health insurance industry
to minimally expand coverage.

Even on hot button issues like immigration, the debate is narrowed to
fit Big Money's agenda. Think about it -- the political Establishment
is having a supposedly intense debate over illegal immigration
without even mentioning the corporate-written North American Free
Trade Agreement. This is the pact that, more than a decade ago, was
sold to Americans by President Clinton and Republicans in Congress as
a way to improve the Mexican economy and drive down illegal
immigration, but which actually drove millions more Mexicans into
poverty and increased pressure at our southern border. Almost no
politicians have even raised the concept of adding wage or workplace
protections to the pact as a way to improve the Mexican economy and
give Mexicans a better incentive to remain in their country --
because to raise that concept would be to challenge politicians'
corporate campaign donors who want access to Mexico's impoverished,
exploitable workforce.

To be sure -- politicians will continue their efforts to focus
attention exclusively on the bad apples within their midst. They will
then cite their own outrage as proof they are true "reformers." Just
as they feed us false storylines about supposedly working for us when
they are working for Big Money, they will tell us they are serious
about fixing our broken political system, when they really are not.
Because, as we see, when the cameras shut off, Washington's
bipartisan establishment still refuses to embrace systemic reforms
like public financing of elections that would actually end the
pay-to-pay political culture.

We, the public, can hope and pray for change, and we can delude
ourselves into thinking that a simple change in party control will
fix our problems. But the simple truth is that until we go to the
ballot box and punish representatives from both parties who are part
of this consensus, we will continue to live not in a democracy -- but
in a system of legalized bribery that makes our problems worse.

From the Washington Post

Fresh from his triumphal visit to Baghdad -- a place so dangerous he had to sneak in without even telling the Iraqi prime minister -- George W. Bush is full of new resolve to stay the course in his open-ended "global war on terror." That leaves the rest of us to wonder, in sadness and frustration, just what that course might be and where on earth it can possibly lead.
This is a "war" in which three men held for years without due process at the Guantanamo Bay prison kill themselves by hanging, and their jailers are so unnerved and self-absorbed that they see the suicides as an attack. Rear Adm. Harry Harris's all-about-me lament -- "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetrical warfare waged against us" -- was worthy of delivery from Oprah's couch.
Bush claimed at his news conference the other day that he'd "like to close Guantanamo" if only the people being held there weren't so "darn dangerous." These bad people, in other words, are forcing him to hold them indefinitely under conditions that mock international norms. But if the inmates are indeed beyond redemption, why order them to be hog-tied and force-fed when they go on hunger strikes? Why not just let them starve? Why freak out when three of the evildoers hang themselves? Why not pass out rope and tell the rest to bring it on?
This is a "war" in which the United States drops two 500-pound bombs with the express intent of assassinating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, a group that wouldn't have existed if Bush hadn't decided to invade. But when the world learns that Zarqawi briefly survived the bombing, and rumors circulate that U.S. forces shot him dead, officials rush to release an autopsy report showing that the butcher with a $25 million bounty on his head died from blast injuries. An American medic, we are told, was about to administer first aid when Zarqawi mumbled something unintelligible and expired.
Why do your best to kill an enemy leader -- a bad, bad man, the worst of the worst -- and then try to revive him? Didn't you want him dead?
In this amorphous, open-ended "war" that we're spending precious lives and billions of dollars to wage, the rules of engagement seem to be shoot first and apologize later.
We're sorry if U.S. Marines massacred 24
civilians in Haditha. We're even more sorry than we were after U.S. military personnel tortured and humiliated those prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Bush's stalwart ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, is sorry if London police, conducting an
anti-terrorist raid this month, shot and wounded an innocent man whose only "crime" was to come downstairs in his underwear to see who was breaking into his house. But not as sorry as Blair was after the London subway bombings, when commandos shot dead an innocent Brazilian electrician whom they mistook for a possible, potential, just-might-be terrorist.
Nobody's sorry, though, about secret CIA prisons or extralegal detention or interrogation by brutal "waterboarding" or an Orwellian blanket of domestic surveillance. After all, we're at "war."
The military announced yesterday that the number of U.S. troops killed in Iraq has reached 2,500, another of those awful, round-number milestones. It is widely expected that the new Iraqi government will consider an amnesty for some of the insurgents who killed some of those American servicemen and women -- drawing a distinction between roadside bombs placed by Sunni Muslims in "resistance" to the U.S. occupation and those placed by foreign al-Qaeda jihadists. If this happens, we'll have taught the Iraqis well. They'll be saying "pardon me" just like their American tutors.
Today's generation of jihadists was forged in Afghanistan fighting the Soviet occupation. How long will the next generation, being forged in Iraq fighting the American occupation, be with us?
Iraq is just one theater in Bush's "war." Elsewhere, Afghanistan is once again ablaze as the resurgent Taliban counterattacks. Somalia is coming under the sway of an Islamic militia that may harbor al-Qaeda militants. America's popularity in the world continues to fall.
But George W. Bush forges ahead, trying vainly to kill a poisonous, retrograde ideology with bullets and bombs. His "war" is self-perpetuating, and no one even knows what victory would look like. Long after he's gone, we'll still be looking for a way to end the mess he began.
eugenerobinson@washpost.com © 2006 The Washington Post Company

As Death Stalks Iraq, Middle-Class Exodus Begins - New York Times

May 19, 2006
As Death Stalks Iraq, Middle-Class Exodus Begins

By SABRINA TAVERNISE
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 18 — Deaths run like water through the life of the Bahjat family. Four neighbors. A barber. Three grocers. Two men who ran a currency exchange shop.

But when six armed men stormed into their sons' primary school this month, shot a guard dead, and left fliers ordering it to close, Assad Bahjat knew it was time to leave.

"The main thing now is to just get out of Iraq," said Mr. Bahjat, standing in a room heaped with suitcases and bedroom furniture in eastern Baghdad.

In the latest indication of the crushing hardships weighing on the lives of Iraqis, increasing portions of the middle class seem to be doing everything they can to leave the country. In the last 10 months, the state has issued new passports to 1.85 million Iraqis, 7 percent of the population and a quarter of the country's estimated middle class.

The school system offers another clue: Since 2004, the Ministry of Education has issued 39,554 letters permitting parents to take their children's academic records abroad. The number of such letters issued in 2005 was double that in 2004, according to the director of the ministry's examination department. Iraqi officials and international organizations put the number of Iraqis in Jordan at close to a million. Syrian cities also have growing Iraqi populations.

Since the bombing of a shrine in Samarra in February touched off a sectarian rampage, crime and killing have spread further through Iraqi society, paralyzing neighborhoods and smashing families. Now, on the brink of a new, permanent government, Iraqis are expressing the darkest view of their future in three years. "We're like sheep at a slaughter farm," said a businessman, who is arranging a move to Jordan. "We are just waiting for our time." The Samarra bombing produced a new kind of sectarian violence. Gangs of Shiites in Baghdad pulled Sunni Arabs out of houses and mosques and killed them in a spree that prompted retaliatory attacks and displaced 14,500 families in three months, according to the Ministry for Migration.

Most frightening, many middle-class Iraqis say, was how little the government did to stop the violence. That failure boded ominously for the future, leaving them feeling that the government was incapable of protecting them and more darkly, that perhaps it helped in the killing. Shiite-dominated government forces have been accused of carrying out sectarian killings.

"Now I am isolated," said Monkath Abdul Razzaq, a middle-class Sunni Arab, who decided to leave after the bombing. "I have no government. I have no protection from the government. Anyone can come to my house, take me, kill me and throw me in the trash."

Traces of the leaving are sprinkled throughout daily life. Mr. Abdul Razzaq, who will move his family to Syria next month, where he has already rented an apartment, said a fistfight broke out while he waited for five hours in a packed passport office to fill out applications for his two young sons. In Salheyah, a commercial district in central Baghdad, bus companies that specialize in Syria and Jordan say ticket sales have surged.

Karim al-Ani, the owner of one of the firms, Tiger Company, said a busy day last year used to be three buses, but in recent months it comes close to 10. "Before it was more tourists," he said. "Now we are taking everything, even furniture."

The impact can be seen in neighborhoods here. While much of the city bustles during daytime hours, the more war-torn areas, like in the south and in Ameriya, Ghazaliya, and Khadra in the west, are eerily empty at midday. On Mr. Bahjat's block in Dawra, only about 5 houses out of 40 remain occupied. Empty houses in the area are scrawled with the words "Omar Brigade," a Sunni group that kills Shiites.

Residents have been known to protest, at least on paper. In an act of helpless fury this winter, a large banner hung across a house in Dawra that read, "Do God and Islam agree that I should leave my house to live in a camp with my five children and wife?"

"Shadows," said Eileen Bahjat, Mr. Bahjat's wife, standing with her two sons and describing what is left in the neighborhood. "Shadows and killing."

In Dawra, one of the worst areas in all of Baghdad, public life has ground to a halt. Four teachers have been killed in the past 10 days in Mr. Bahjat's area alone, and the Ahmed al-Waily primary school where the Bahjat boys, ages 12 and 8, studied, may not be able to hold final exams because of the killings. And three teachers from the Batoul secondary school were shot in late April.

Trash is collected only sporadically. On April 3, insurgents shot seven garbage collectors to death near their truck, and their bodies lay in the area for eight hours before the authorities could collect them, said Naeem al-Kaabi, deputy mayor for municipal affairs in Baghdad. In all, 312 trash workers have been killed in Baghdad in the past six months.

"Sunnis, Shiites, Christians," said Mr. Bahjat, a Christian who this month moved his family to New Baghdad, an eastern suburb, to live with a relative, before leaving for Syria. "They just want to empty this place of all people."

"We must start from zero," he said. "Maybe under zero. But there is no other choice. Even with more time, the security will not improve."

It is more than just the killing that has sapped hope for the future. Iraqis have waited for five months for a permanent government, after voting in a national election in December, and though political leaders are on the brink of announcing it, some Iraqis say the amount of haggling it took to form it makes them skeptical that it will be able to solve bigger problems.

Abd al-Kareem al-Mahamedawy, a tribal sheik from Amara in southern Iraq who fought for years against Saddam Hussein, compared the process to "giving birth to a deformed child."

As if to underscore the point, a scene of sorrow unfolded just outside Mr. Mahamedawy's gate, where an extended family gathered, full of nervous movement, and absorbed the news of the strangling death of their 13-year-old boy by kidnappers. A woman brought her hands to her head in the timeworn motion of mourning.

Even with the resolve to leave, many departing Iraqis said they consider the move only temporary and hope to return if Iraq's fractious groups are united and stem the tide of the killings.

Cars and furniture are sold, but those who can afford it, like the Abdul Razzaq family, hang on to their properties. In Khadra in western Baghdad, Nesma Abdul Razzaq, Mr. Abdul Razzaq's wife, has spent the past months carefully wrapping their photographs, vases and furniture in cloth and packing them in boxes. She spoke of the sadness of the empty rooms and the pain of having to build a new life in a strange place.

"I have a rage inside myself," Mrs. Abdul Razzaq said by telephone, as her area, since last autumn, has become unsafe for a Western reporter to visit. "I feel desperate."

"I don't want to leave Iraq. But I have to for the kids. They have seen enough."

In a quiet block in Mansour, a wealthy neighborhood in central Baghdad, where stately, gated homes are lined with pruned hedges, the Kubba family spends most of its time indoors. They have hung onto their lifestyle: three of their children study violin, flute, and ballet in an arts school outside the neighborhood despite encroaching violence.

Last fall, a foul smell led neighbors to the bodies of seven family members in a house several doors down from the Kubbas. They had been robbed. Fehed Kubba, 15, went to buy bread last year and saw a crowd near the bakery that he assumed was watching a backgammon game. When he pushed in to look, he saw a man who had just been shot to death.

But it was the increasingly sectarian nature of the violence, deeply painful to Iraqis who are proud of their intermarried heritage, that tipped the scales as Falah Kubba and his wife, Samira, considered leaving with Fehed, Roula, 13, and Heya, 12.

"The past few months convinced us," said Mr. Kubba, a businessman whose wife is Sunni. "Now they are killing by ID's. The killing around Americans was something different, but the ID's, you can't move around on the streets."

"At the beginning we said, 'Let's wait, maybe it will be better tomorrow,' " Mr. Kubba said.

"Now I know it is time to go."

Mona Mahmoud, Sahar Nageeb and Qais Mizher contributed reporting for this article.


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Privacy Policy

Who is behind the flu scare?

"Bird Flu"

Do you know that 'bird flu' was discovered in Vietnam 9 years ago?

Do you know that barely 100 people have died in the whole world in all that time?

Do you know that it was the Americans who alerted us to the efficacy of the human antiviral TAMIFLU as a preventative.

Do you know that TAMIFLU barely alleviates some symptoms of the common flu?

Do you know that its efficacy against the common flu is questioned by a great
part of the scientific community?

Do you know that against a SUPPOSED mutant virus such as H5N1, TAMIFLU barely allev! iates ! the illness?
Do you know that to date Avian Flu affects birds only?

Do you know who markets TAMIFLU?

ROCHE LABORATORIES.

Do you know who bought the patent for TAMIFLU from ROCHE LABORATORIES in 1996?

GILEAD SCIENCES INC.

Do you know who was the then president of GILEAD SCIENCES INC. and
remains a major shareholder to this day?

DONALD RUMSFELD, the present Secretary of Defence of the USA.

Do you know that the base of TAMIFLU is crushed aniseed?

Do you know! who c! ontrols 90% of the world's production of this tree?
ROC HE.

Do you know that sales of TAMIFLU were over $254 million in 2004 and
more than $1000 million in 2005?

Do you know how many more millions ROCHE can earn in the coming months
if the business of fear continues?

So the summary of the story is as follows:

Bush's friends decide that the medicine TAMIFLU is the solution for a pandemic that has not yet occurred and that has caused a hundred deaths worldwide in 9 years. This medicine doesn't so much as cure the common flu.

In normal conditions the virus does not affect humans. Rumsfeld sells the patent for TAMIFLU to ROCHE for which they pay him a fo! rtune.!

Roche acquires 90% of the global production of crushed aniseed, the base for the antivirus.
The governments of the entire world threaten a pandemic and then buy industrial quantities of the product from Roche.

So we end up paying for medicine while Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush do the business.

ARE WE CRAZY or WHAT?

AT LEAST PASS THIS ON SO THAT IT CAN BE KNOWN!!