Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1
An Online Dowser and Filter Of Important Information
by James Roosevelt Jr.
IN HIS inaugural address, President George W. Bush invoked the name of my grandfather, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, as part of his campaign to privatize Social Security. Similarly, a political organization supporting that drastic change recently ran a television commercial using a newsreel clip showing President Roosevelt signing the Social Security Act into law. The implication that FDR would support privatization of America’s greatest national program is an attempt to deceive the American people and an outrage.
President Roosevelt founded Social Security for very basic but important reasons. He believed that the only enemy that could ever defeat the United States was fear itself. He and my grandmother, Eleanor, looked at America and found fear of want — particularly after retirement or loss of a parent. Today, thanks in large part to Social Security, the number of older Americans below the poverty line has dropped from almost 50 percent to only 8 percent.
FDR believed that Social Security should be simple, guaranteed, fair, earned, and available to all Americans. President Roosevelt was adamant that Social Security was an insurance program to provide basic needs in retirement.
Radical Conservative group Concerned Women for America issued a press release timed for the SOTU. I expected a laundry list of items they wanted (damanded) Bush to touch upon, and I expected the list to be dominated by gay marriage and abortion. I know they feel emboldened, so I guess I should not be surprised at this:
New MoveOn Ads Reaching Media, Congress and the Public with Focused Message
See the new MoveOn Social Security Ad HERE (wmv).
In a phone conference today with progressive news sites and bloggers, MoveOn.org announced the launch of new hard-hitting TV and print ads on Social Security, the methodology behind those ads, and the ways Democrats can win this fight.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo discussed the political and policy landscape of the Social Security fight, and MoveOn.org Executive Director Eli Pariser discussed the grassroots plan.
“It is difficult to overstate the power of a highly disciplined White House with majorities in both houses of Congress. Everything is at stake,” said Marshall. “Everything is on the line for Democrats and people who support Social Security. The upside is obvious. If we can beat Bush on this, it will be a shattering blow to Bush. If he wins, the same thing can be said for the Democrats.”
Marshall outlined two key points in the fight to save Social Security:
(Read the article)
Environmentalists Sue Feds to Stop Mining Companies from Dumping Mountain Tops into Valleys
By Roger Alford ….The Associated Press
PIKEVILLE, Ky. – Environmentalists have sued the federal government in an attempt to stop coal mining companies from lopping off the tops of mountains and dumping the rocks and dirt into valleys.
The lawsuit seeks to stop the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from issuing permits for the dumping, which environmentalists claim will destroy Kentucky’s streams.
“This is an absurd and outrageous abuse of their power and neglect of their duty to protect the nation’s waterways,” said Teri Blanton, a member of Kentuckians For The Commonwealth, one of three groups that filed the suit Thursday in Lexington.
The mining industry has increasingly relied on mountaintop removal to expose coal seams because it’s a quick and efficient process.
By Alan Clendenning ……The Associated Press
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil (AP) – Sporting a red shirt embossed with a picture of the revolutionary Che Guevera, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez received a hero’s welcome Sunday at the World Social Forum, where activists greeted him with hugs and cries of “Here comes the boss!”
Tens of thousands of people attending the six-day gathering held to protest the simultaneous World Economic Forum in Switzerland consider Chavez their strongest voice against the U.S.-sponsored spread of liberalized trade in Latin America, a move they say benefits multinational companies while enslaving workers.
By Steve Weissman …t r u t h o u t | Perspective
President Bush looks like he’s tripping out on a freedom high, but the rest of the country could Just Say No.
As he made clear in his inaugural speech last week, George W. Bush has set the country on a course as audacious as any in American history.
“It is the policy of the United States,” he declared, “to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”
He never said how he would spread America’s view of freedom, or exactly where – and where not, though we can probably guess. Perhaps he plans to fill in the blanks this Wednesday night when he speaks to Congress on the State of the Union.
Still, from what he has told us so far, this supposedly humble, plain-spoken man is either enjoying a freedom high or suffering from enormous hubris. His supporters should take heed. To quote his favorite book, “Pride goeth before destruction, and haughtiness before the fall.”
Mr. Bush’s logic, if I may use the word, runs like this: Only the success of liberty in other lands can stop the growth of hatred and violence, which – in the form of terrorism – will cross our borders, no matter how we defend them, and mortally threaten the survival of liberty in our land.
Ergo and Abracadabra, he voices the magic equation: “America’s vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one.”
By William Rivers Pitt …t r u t h o u t | Perspective
“United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional processes in South Vietnam.”
- Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled, ‘U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,’ September 4, 1967.
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In all the media hoopla over Sunday’s “election” in Iraq, a few details got missed.
The powerful and influential Association of Muslim Scholars is not buying the idea that there was some great democratic breakthrough with this vote. AMS spokesman Muhammad al-Kubaysi responded to the election by saying, “The elections are not a solution to the Iraqi problem, because this problem is not an internal dispute to be resolved through accords and elections. It lies in the presence of a foreign power that occupies this country and refuses even the mere scheduling of the withdrawal of its forces from Iraq.”
“We have consistently argued,” continued al-Kubaysi, “that elections can only occur in a democracy that enjoys sovereignty. Our sovereignty is incomplete. Our sovereignty is usurped by foreign forces that have occupied our land and hurt our dignity. These elections… are a means of establishing the foreign forces in Iraq and keeping Iraq under the yoke of occupation. They should have been postponed.”
Al-Kubaysi likewise raised grave concerns about low turnout in Sunni areas such as Baghdad, Baquba and Samarra, and stated flatly that the deep secrecy that shrouded the candidates themselves invalidated the process. “The voter goes to the polling stations not knowing who he is voting for in the first place,” he said. “There are more than 7,700 candidates, and I challenge any Iraqi voter to name more than half a dozen. Their names have not been announced but have been kept secret. Elections should never have been held under these present circumstances.”
The American media is painting these newly-minted Iraqi voters as flush with the thrill of casting a ballot. In truth, however, some other more pressing motivations lay behind their rush to the polling places. Dahr Jamail, writing for Inter Press Service, reported that “Many Iraqis had expressed fears before the election that their monthly food rations would be cut if they did not vote. They said they had to sign voter registration forms in order to pick up their food supplies. Just days before the election, 52 year-old Amin Hajar, who owns an auto garage in central Baghdad, had said, ‘I’ll vote because I can’t afford to have my food ration cut. If that happened, me and my family would starve to death.’”
‘Will Vote For Food’ is not a spectacular billboard for the export of democracy.
By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar …Times Staff Writer
WASHINGTON — Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century.
In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers — instead of looking to employers for health insurance — would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible “catastrophic” insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts.
Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed.
With Democratic strength reduced, President Bush, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Bill Thomas (R-Bakersfield) are pushing for action.
Supporters of the new approach, who see it as part of Bush’s “ownership society,” say workers and their families would become more careful users of healthcare if they had to pay the bills. Also, they say, the lower premiums on high-deductible plans would make coverage affordable for the uninsured and for small businesses.
“My view is that this is absolutely the next big thing,” said former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose consulting firm focuses on healthcare. “You are going to see a continued move to trying to get people involved in the process by owning their own health accounts.”
Critics say the Republican approach is really an attempt to shift the risks, massive costs and knotty problems of healthcare from employers to individuals. And they say the GOP is moving forward with far less public attention or debate than have surrounded Bush’s plans to overhaul Social Security.
By William Rivers Pitt …t r u t h o u t | Perspective
From the Archives… Monday 09 August 2004
I sat with a photographer from Reuters who had just returned from a six-month tour of Iraq. He had been tagging along with the Kellogg Brown & Root operation, subsidiary of Halliburton, and saw everything there was to see. He went from new military base to new military base, from the oil work in the north and back to the south, observing how busy were the contactors for Halliburton.
“I feel like I compromised every one of my principles by even being over there,” he told me after the story had been spun out a bit. His eyes, which had seen too many things through the lens of his camera, were haunted.
It was two years ago that talk about invading Iraq began to circulate. Reasons for the invasion were bandied about – they had weapons of mass destruction, they had a hand in September 11, they will welcome us as liberators – but it wasn’t until the Project for the New American Century got dragged into the discussion that an understanding of the true motives behind all this became apparent.
The Project for the New American Century, or PNAC for short, is just another right-wing think tank, really. One cannot swing one’s dead cat by the tail in Washington D.C. without smacking some prehensile gnome, pained by the sunlight, scuttling back to its right-wing think tank cubicle. These organizations are all over the place. What makes PNAC different from all the others?
The membership roll call, for one thing:
By Henry Schuster …CNN
Editor’s Note: Henry Schuster, a senior producer in CNN’s Investigative Unit, has been covering terrorism for more than a decade. Each week in “Tracking Terror,” he reports on the people and organizations driving international and domestic terrorism and efforts to combat those. He is the author of the forthcoming book, “Hunting Eric Rudolph.”
(CNN) — One of my bosses asked me a stumper this week. Who, she wanted to know, was the one person in the U.S. government in charge of going after Osama bin Laden and other terrorists? Good question. And as I discovered, there’s no easy answer. The short answer is no one — at least not until someone is appointed to the newly created post of national intelligence director and confirmed by the Senate. The longer answer is what I got when I made a couple of calls. The first one was to an official pretty high up on the food chain in counterterrorism.
By Dahr Jamail ….Inter Press Service
BAGHDAD – Voting in Baghdad was linked with receipt of food rations, several voters said after the Sunday poll.
Many Iraqis said Monday that their names were marked on a list provided by the government agency that provides monthly food rations before they were allowed to vote.
“I went to the voting centre and gave my name and district where I lived to a man,” said Wassif Hamsa, a 32-year-old journalist who lives in the predominantly Shia area Janila in Baghdad. “This man then sent me to the person who distributed my monthly food ration.”
Mohammed Ra’ad, an engineering student who lives in the Baya’a district of the capital city reported a similar experience.
Ra’ad, 23, said he saw the man who distributed monthly food rations in his district at his polling station. “The food dealer, who I know personally of course, took my name and those of my family who were voting,” he said. “Only then did I get my ballot and was allowed to vote.”
“Two of the food dealers I know told me personally that our food rations would be withheld if we did not vote,” said Saeed Jodhet, a 21-year-old engineering student who voted in the Hay al-Jihad district of Baghdad.
There has been no official indication that Iraqis who did not vote would not receive their monthly food rations.
Many Iraqis had expressed fears before the election that their monthly food rations would be cut if they did not vote. They said they had to sign voter registration forms in order to pick up their food supplies.
By Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, AlterNet
It is never easy choosing the 10 Worst Corporations of the Year – there are always more deserving nominees than we can possibly recognize. One of the greatest challenges facing the judges is the directive not to select repeat recipients from last year’s 10 Worst designation.
The no-repeat rule forbids otherwise-deserving companies – like Bayer, Boeing, Clear Channel and Halliburton – from returning to the 10 Worst list in 2004. Of the remaining pool of price gougers, polluters, union-busters, dictator-coddlers, fraudsters, poisoners, deceivers and general miscreants, we chose the following – presented in alphabetical order – as the 10 Worst Corporations of 2004: Abbott Laboratories: Drug-Pricing Chutzpah Chutzpah. Webster’s defines the Yiddish term now incorporated into English slang as: 1. unmitigated effrontery or impudence; gall. 2. audacity; nerve. In the next edition, they may want to add: 3. See Abbott. In December 2003, the company raised the U.S. price of its anti-AIDS drug Norvir (generic name ritanovir) by 400 percent. That is, unless the product is used in conjunction with other Abbott products – in which case the price increase is zero. Norvir has become an increasingly important treatment in recent years. Scientists have discovered that while Norvir is generally too toxic for safe use as a protease inhibitor (one category of anti-AIDS drugs), in lower doses it works well as a booster to increase the efficacy of other protease inhibitors. As a result, Norvir is frequently prescribed along with other protease inhibitors. The Norvir price increase does not apply when the product is used as a booster with another Abbott protease inhibitor (in the combined product Kaletra). Thus the impact of the Norvir price increase is to make Kaletra far cheaper than rival combinations of Norvir and non-Abbott protease inhibitors.
A Mixed Story
Juan Cole
I’m just appalled by the cheerleading tone of US news coverage of the so-called elections in Iraq on Sunday. I said on television last week that this event is a “political earthquake” and “a historical first step” for Iraq. It is an event of the utmost importance, for Iraq, the Middle East, and the world. All the boosterism has a kernel of truth to it, of course. Iraqis hadn’t been able to choose their leaders at all in recent decades, even by some strange process where they chose unknown leaders. But this process is not a model for anything, and would not willingly be imitated by anyone else in the region. The 1997 elections in Iran were much more democratic, as were the 2002 elections in Bahrain and Pakistan.
Moreover, as Swopa rightly reminds us all, the Bush administration opposed one-person, one-vote elections of this sort. First they were going to turn Iraq over to Chalabi within six months. Then Bremer was going to be MacArthur in Baghdad for years. Then on November 15, 2003, Bremer announced a plan to have council-based elections in May of 2004. The US and the UK had somehow massaged into being provincial and municipal governing councils, the members of which were pro-American. Bremer was going to restrict the electorate to this small, elite group.
(Read the article)
By Samuel Loewenberg
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil –
The exclusive ski resort of Davos, Switzerland, is on the other side of the globe from the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. This week, both are host to conferences of people trying to change the world.
The two could hardly be more different. While the World Economic Forum in Davos is filled with business elites hoping to hobnob with Bill Gates, Bill Clinton or Bono, the World Social Forum conference in Porto Alegre is for everybody else.
Since Wednesday, more than 100,000 activists, agitators, intellectuals and trade unionists from scores of countries have gathered in Brazil to spend six days talking about how to save the world, or at least to try to figure out where to begin.
Created five years ago as the left’s answer to the Davos gathering, Porto Alegre now has its celebrities too. Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva spoke the first day of the conference, announcing his endorsement for a global campaign to end poverty. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is arriving Saturday and will visit Brazilian poor trying to lay claim to unused land. The forum also has attracted a handful of Nobel Peace Prize and Nobel literature winners and more than 100 indigenous tribes from throughout the world.
Celebrities aside, the core theme of the more than 500 meetings a day is about building bridges between organizations, across nations and disciplines.
“We think in this age of globalization we can no longer work only in one country,” said Dieter Eich, a representative of the Confederation of German Trade Unions. Just as corporations span many borders and governments negotiate multilateral trade agreements, unions and advocacy groups also must form transborder alliances, he said.
The United States has essentially stopped trying to build a democratic order in Iraq, and is simply trying to gain stability and legitimacy
By Fareed Zakaria
Feb. 7 issue – By the time you read this, you will know how the elections in Iraq have gone. No matter what the violence, the elections are an important step forward, for Iraq and for the Middle East. But it is also true, alas, that no matter how the voting turns out, the prospects for genuine democracy in Iraq are increasingly grim. Unless there is a major change in course, Iraq is on track to become another corrupt, oil-rich quasi-democracy, like Russia and Nigeria.
In April 2003, around the time Baghdad fell, I published a book that described the path to liberal democracy. In it, I pointed out that there had been elections in several countries around the world
Shadow war: The elections won’t stop the bombers, but quality intel
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