Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1
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By Daren Fonda
Time Magazine
Even as one company gives up on US ports, a different Middle Eastern firm remains a major contractor for the Navy.
With midterm elections approaching, no politician wanted to go home and explain to voters why a company controlled by the government of Dubai was taking over operations at six US ports-without so much as a meow of protest from Congress. As it turns out, that won’t be necessary. Dubai Ports World, the firm at the center of the controversy, announced today that it would give up its bid to manage US ports, agreeing to transfer the contracts to a “US entity.”
Yet while one Dubai company may be giving up on US ports, another one shows no signs of quitting the US-or of giving up a contract with the Navy to provide shore services for vessels in the Middle East. The firm, Inchcape Shipping Services (ISS), is an old British company that last January was sold to a Dubai government investment vehicle for $285 million. ISS has more than 200 offices around the world and provides services to clients ranging from cruise ship operators to oil tankers to commercial cargo vessels. In the US, the company operates out of more than a dozen port cities, including Houston, Miami and New Orleans, arranging pilots, tugs, linesmen and stevedores, among other things. The firm is also a defense contractor which has long worked for Britain’s Royal Navy. And last June, the US Navy signed on too, awarding ISS a $50 million contract to be the “husbanding agent” for vessels in most Southwest Asia ports, including those in the Middle East, according to an unclassified Navy logistics manual for the Fifth Fleet and a press release from ISS.
Why is a Dubai shipping services company doing business with the Pentagon when handing over US port operations to the emirate would supposedly compromise national security? Because it makes sense. Call it the reality of living in a globally connected business world. Your IBM laptop is now manufactured by a Chinese company that may outsource customer support to an Indian firm and the logistics to FedEx. Dubai companies aren’t just buying overseas assets like hotels in New York and wax museums in London; they’re providing jobs and business for US companies. Boeing, for one, can only hope it doesn’t receive a frosty reception the next time it wants to sell airplanes to Dubai’s booming airline, Emirates. Rival Airbus would be more than happy to take advantage of Washington’s creeping protectionism.
by Molly Ivins
Mah fellow progressives, now is the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party. I don’t know about you, but I have had it with the D.C. Democrats, had it with the DLC Democrats, had it with every calculating, equivocating, triangulating, straddling, hair-splitting son of a bitch up there, and that includes Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I will not be supporting Senator Clinton because: a) she has no clear stand on the war and b) Terri Schiavo and flag-burning are not issues where you reach out to the other side and try to split the difference. You want to talk about lowering abortion rates through cooperation on sex education and contraception, fine, but don’t jack with stuff that is pure rightwing firewater.
I can’t see a damn soul in D.C. except Russ Feingold who is even worth considering for President. The rest of them seem to me so poisonously in hock to this system of legalized bribery they can’t even see straight.
Look at their reaction to this Abramoff scandal. They’re talking about “a lobby reform package.” We don’t need a lobby reform package, you dimwits, we need full public financing of campaigns, and every single one of you who spends half your time whoring after special interest contributions knows it. The Abramoff scandal is a once in a lifetime gift—a perfect lesson on what’s wrong with the system being laid out for people to see. Run with it, don’t mess around with little patches, and fix the system.
As usual, the Democrats have forty good issues on their side and want to run on thirty-nine of them. Here are three they should stick to:
Every Democrat I talk to is appalled at the sheer gutlessness and spinelessness of the Democratic performance. The party is still cringing at the thought of being called, ooh-ooh, “unpatriotic” by a bunch of rightwingers.
Despite his primary victory — and his enduring ability to shake down GOP donors — a DeLay victory in November is far from assured.
By Joe Conason
Judging by the mainstream media’s coverage of Tuesday’s primary in Texas, Tom DeLay won a new lease on his congressional district by inflicting a decisive defeat on his Republican challengers. When the ballots were counted that evening, the former House majority leader and current Travis County criminal defendant had won 62 percent of the vote, against a combined total of 38 percent cast for his three opponents.
Appropriately enough, he celebrated at a fundraising party hosted by Washington power couple Bill Paxon and Susan Molinari, both of whom happen to be former members of Congress turned corporate lobbyists. Nothing better symbolized his confidence that the voters of his state’s 22nd Congressional District would ignore his indictment by district attorney Ronnie Earle for corporate fundraising violations, his three ethics admonishments by fellow Republicans in Congress, his forced resignation as majority leader or his extensive involvement with convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
In that sense DeLay was at least partially vindicated. Most of the Republicans he represents simply don’t care about his transgressions.
Yet as the longtime incumbent surely understood, he had little reason to gloat as he raked in still more money from the influence peddlers. Within hours after the primary results were reported, Congressional Quarterly magazine revised its rating of his district’s likely November outcome from “leans Republican” to “tossup.” To C.Q.’s analysts, the Hammer still seems highly vulnerable to his Democratic adversary in the general election, former U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson. Indeed, despite his overwhelming primary victory, those professionals consider him more endangered now than ever.
By Erich Wiedemann
Global warming isn’t necessarily the catastrophe it’s made out to be — at least not for multinational oil companies. Shrinking ice caps would reveal the Arctic’s massive energy sources and shorten tanker routes by thousands of miles.
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| AFP
This NASA handout satellite image shows the minimum concentration of Arctic sea ice in 2005, when the sea ice extent dropped to the lowest level ever recorded. |
Ice-cap melting may be bad news for the polar bears in Manitoba, Canada, but it is great news for Pat Broe of Denver. When the ice melts in the Arctic, the polar predators have to search for new hunting grounds or starve — but Broe doesn’t mind. He figures global warming will make him around $100 million a year.
His friends laughed at him when he bought the run-down port in Churchill — a tiny outpost of a thousand souls on the Hudson Bay. What could he possibly want with a harbor in one of the most deserted places on the planet that’s frozen over a big chunk of the year?
Wait and see, said Broe. He only paid a symbolic price of seven dollars — not a bad price for a port. He knew that time was on his side. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are rising twice as fast as in the southern half. The summers are getting longer and the pack ice is getting thinner. By 2015 the North Pole is expected to be navigable for normal ships six months out of the year. It’s then that a golden age will dawn upon Churchill.
Via Arctic waterways, an oil tanker only needs a week to make it from the Russian port city Murmansk on the Barents Sea to the east coast of Canada. That’s only half the time it takes from Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf to Galveston, Texas. And from Churchill to Chicago on the Hudson Bay Railway, it’s not much further than from Texas to the Windy City. Tankers from Venezuela to Japan can even save some 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) by traveling over the pole.
Of course, with rising ocean temperatures comes an increased danger of icebergs, but at least the Arctic oil fields aren’t in a region plagued by political instability. No suicide bombers, no kidnappings, no explosions. What risk there is up north, is nothing big oil companies aren’t happy to take on.
“The Country Has Already Collapsed”
With sectarian violence on the rise and a stable government nowhere in sight, things are not going well for Iraq at the moment. SPIEGEL ONLINE spoke with Iraq expert Marina Ottaway about chances for government legitimacy, how to establish stability in Iraq and why the police force in Iraq is a fiction.
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| REUTERS
Violence in Iraq continues as many fear a coming civil war. Here, the aftermath of a March 2 attack on Sunni political leader Adnan al-Dulaimi in Baghdad.
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SPIEGEL ONLINE: Headlines from Iraq seem to be getting progressively worse. Not only are suicide attacks and bombings a daily occurrence, but particularly after the February attack on the Golden Mosque in Samarra — a Shiite holy site – deadly sectarian violence has increased. Are we witnessing a country falling apart?
Marina Ottaway: At this point in Iraq, you do not have a central government — so you don’t have a legitimate authority running the country. You don’t have a government with the power to establish or maintain order. What you have is a nominal government that can only stay in power because the Americans are there. The government is supposed to have derived legitimacy from the constitution and the elections. But I think the government we end up with, won’t have much legitimacy either.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why not? After all, the Iraqis went to the polls and chose their representatives. That seems pretty legitimate, does it not?
Ottaway: It is now almost three months after the elections and there is still no government. The Iraqis continue postponing the opening of parliament because according to the constitution, after they open parliament, they only have two months to form the government. They don’t think they can form a government that quickly. A government that takes over five months to form is not a government that is going to have very much legitimacy in the end. The country has already collapsed. Now the challenge is figuring out a way to deal with this fact.
SPIEGEL ONLINE: The idea, of course, was that the United States was going to help the Iraqis with security until they could help themselves, hopefully providing an atmosphere in which the Iraqis could build a democratic state. What went wrong?
by Hendrik Hertzberg
According to a CBS News poll released last Monday, the “favorability” rating of Vice-President Dick Cheney has sunk to a new low. How low a low? Well, that evening, Jon Stewart, as part of the buildup to the “Daily Show” star’s going global on Oscar Sunday, was the guest on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” When King barked out the number—“Cheney eighteen per cent”—Stewart, citing another well-known poll result, observed solemnly, “Four out of five dentists surveyed recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum.” That is, the proportion of Americans who have a favorable opinion of Cheney is outweighed by the proportion of dentists who recommend sugary gum for their patients who chew gum.
The Vice-Presidency isn’t what it used to be. No one bothered to rate the favorability of Garret Hobart, Charles Dawes, or Alben Barkley. But the clout of that once legendarily insignificant office has been growing for half a century. In his time, Walter Mondale was history’s most powerful Vice-President. So was Al Gore in his. But Cheney is an order of magnitude different. For a number of reasons—his bureaucratic ruthlessness, his domineering influence over a feckless President who seems fated to remain forever inexperienced, his will to power combined with an alleged lack of ambition to succeed his nominal boss—he is universally agreed to be one of the two most powerful officials in the executive branch of the federal government, though it is not universally agreed which one. Truly, this is the Bush-Cheney Administration, in alphabetical order. The hyphen looks like a coy equal sign—not the towhook it was for Clinton-Gore, Reagan-Bush, Carter-Mondale, and Nixon-Agnew, to say nothing of Hoover-Curtis and Roosevelt-Garner.
That same CBS News poll put President Bush’s favorability rating at twenty-nine per cent, also a personal worst. It would be natural to attribute the eleven-point gap to the unpleasantness two weeks earlier at the Armstrong ranch, in Texas. Among respectable commentators, the predominant view of that unfortunate occurrence has been that it was much ado about not very much. As scandals go, this was, like the Vice-President’s lunchtime refreshment, small beer. An accident, nothing more. A private matter, essentially.
When Claude Allen, the former Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, resigned suddenly a few weeks ago, the White House gave its official explanation for the departure:
President Bush’s domestic policy advisor, Claude A. Allen, has resigned to spend more time with his family, the White House said.
Many were skeptical of the White House
Filed by RAW STORY
In a message posted on his Focus on the Family website, Dr. James Dobson’s group has denied lobbying outgoing Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton on behalf of fallen lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
“There is no connection,” Dobson’s site says flatly.
However, in already public e-mails and letters sent in early 2002 between former Christian Coalition head Ralph Reed and Abramoff, Reed insists that he has secured Dobson’s support for Abramoff’s gaming interest clients in Louisiana, in opposition of allowing competing tribes to expand the state’s access to legal gambling.
By Robert Parry
Consortium News
Despite a dip in his opinion polls, George W. Bush’s transformation of the United States into an authoritarian society continues apace, with new “compromises” with Congress actually consolidating his claims to virtually unlimited executive power.
Bush’s latest success came as part of a supposed “concession” to Congress that would grant two new Republican-controlled seven-member subcommittees narrow oversight of Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.
While “moderate” Republican senators - Mike DeWine of Ohio, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska - hailed the plan as a retreat by the White House, the deal actually blesses Bush’s authority to bypass the courts in spying on Americans and imposes on him only a toothless congressional review process.
Indeed, the congressional plan may make matters worse, broadening the permissible scope of Bush’s wiretaps to include Americans deemed to be “working in support of a terrorist group or organization.”
Given Bush’s record of stretching words to his advantage - and his claim that anyone who isn’t “with us” is with the terrorists - the vague concept of “working in support” could open almost any political critic of the Bush administration to surveillance.
Plus, the only check on abuses would be the closed-door oversight work of the seven-member panels, which would only be informed of a warrantless wiretap after it had been in place for 45 days. Republicans also would have four of the seven seats on each subcommittee and any dissent from the minority Democrats would be kept secret.
In other words, the plan would let Bush and his Republican congressional loyalists conduct wiretaps of anyone whose activities might be called supportive of terrorists, while any Democratic critic would be muzzled from saying anything publicly under penalty of law.
By Edward Alden and Holly Yeager in Washington
President George W. Bush’s defeat over the Dubai ports deal has put him in the weakest political position of his presidency.
Some of his former supporters are now questioning whether the president can regain the initiative during his remaining three years in the White House.
“If this was a European parliamentary system, it would have been a vote of no-confidence,” said Ed Rollins, a top political adviser to President Ronald Reagan and now a Republican strategist.
An AP/Ipsos poll on Friday found that confidence in the president continued to fall, even among Republicans. Two-thirds of Americans said the country was now on the wrong track, up from 61 per cent a month ago, and 77 per cent believed a civil war would break out in Iraq.
On Thursday, Dubai Ports World, the state-owned company which had acquired five US port terminal facilities as part of its $6.8bn purchase of P&O, was ordered by the ruler of Dubai to divest the ports in the face of congressional opposition.
That may not be enough to end the controversy, however. A person close to the deal said last night that DP World would not necessarily sell all of its interest in P&O’s US assets and could retain as much as 49 per cent.
NPR’s Nina Totenberg aired an amazing story this morning about a talk that just-resigned Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor gave at Georgetown University. The first woman to serve on the High Court wouldn’t allow her actual words to be broadcast, and that’s a shame, because — based on Totenberg’s report — every American needs to hear what she said. The Reagan appointee who became a moderate and an American icon — Bush v. Gore notwithstanding — all but named names in thinly veiled attacks on former House majority leader Tom DeLay and Texas Sen. John Cornyn, and ended with a stunning warning.
O’Connor told her Georgetown audience that judges can make presidents, Congress and governors “really really mad,” and that if judges don’t make people angry, they aren’t doing their job. But she said judicial effectiveness is “premised on the notion that we won’t be subject to retaliation for our judicial acts.” While hailing the American system of rights and privileges, she noted that these don’t protect the judiciary, that “people do”:
Listen here.
Read some of the transcript here.
by Paul Krugman
Ben Bernanke’s maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn’t put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.
But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that “the most important factor” in rising inequality “is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education.”
That’s a fundamental misreading of what’s happening to American society. What we’re seeing isn’t the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we’re seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
I think of Mr. Bernanke’s position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It’s the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don’t have these skills.
The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
So who are the winners from rising inequality? It’s not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
by Will Bunch
One of the reasons the American Prospect had asked me last fall to research Sen. Rick Santorum’s ethics is because he’d just been named the Senate GOP “point man” on ethics reform. Now, this interesting story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette this morning: “Santorum no longer in forefront of efforts to revamp lobbying“:
WASHINGTON — Though Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., charged Sen. Rick Santorum with the task of spearheading Republican efforts to tighten rules on lawmakers’ contact with lobbyists, Pennsylvania’s junior senator is taking more of a backstage role as that legislation begins moving through the chamber this week.
“What I was asked by the leader to do was to start a process to see if we could get a bipartisan bill,” Mr. Santorum said yesterday after the Senate Rule Committee voted 17-0 to approve new restrictions on members. “I understand the game here; I understand that they [Democrats] don’t want Santorum’s name on anything that’s going to pass. So I’m not worried about getting my name on a bill that’s going to pass; I’m worried about making sure we do the right thing from an ethics point of view.”
by Will Bunch
Once again, Attytood gives you tomorrow’s news today. Here’s our piece that will appear in tomorrow’s Philadelphia Daily News:
The largest known giver to a controversial charity founded by U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum made its $25,000 donation as the senator was working to win as much as $8.5 million in federal aid for the donor
Sports Illustrated has a weekly feature in which it identifies a “Sign that the Apocalypse is Upon Us.” We can’t have one of those here in War Room — it would be stealing, and we’d never be able to limit ourselves to just one sign a week, anyway.
Take this week. Please.
We thought surely we saw the sign of the fiery end when we checked out the results of a poll of U.S. troops serving in Iraq: Eighty-five percent of them, apparently, believe that a major reason for the U.S. mission there is “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
But when it comes to predictors of our untimely demise, the poll of U.S. troops just might have to take a back seat to a new poll of the good folks back home. The McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum conducted a random poll of 1,000 American adults to test their knowledge of the First Amendment. The thingy at the beginning of the Bill of Rights? The one that talks about free speech and stuff? The good news is, 69 percent of the respondents knew that much.
What else does the First Amendment protect?
Unprompted, 24 percent of the respondents managed to say freedom of religion. Eleven percent said freedom of the press — the same percentage that claimed, incorrectly, that the First Amendment protects the right to bear arms. Ten percent got freedom of assembly, and a whopping 1 percent managed to remember the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.
Truth be told, that one always gets us, too.
But it’s not like Americans are ignorami or anything: While only 28 percent of those polled could name two or more rights protected by the First Amendment, 41 percent could name two out of three “American Idol” judges, and 52 percent could name two or more characters from “The Simpsons.”
Aside from the end-of-the-world aspect of it all, we’re not sure what it all means — except that maybe Democrats who hope to win back the White House ought to spend a little less time on the separation of powers and the unitary executive and a little more on power ballads and fart jokes.
It’s the doughnuts, stupid.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Fold, Spindle, Mutilate, endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
