Fold/Spindle/Mutilate 2.1

Will the GOP’s campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president?

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. & GREG PALAST

• Video: Behind the Story With Kennedy Jr. and Palast

These days, the old west rail hub of Las Vegas, New Mexico, is little more than a dusty economic dead zone amid a boneyard of bare mesas. In national elections, the town overwhelmingly votes Democratic: More than 80 percent of all residents are Hispanic, and one in four lives below the poverty line. On February 5th, the day of the Super Tuesday caucus, a school-bus driver named Paul Maez arrived at his local polling station to cast his ballot. To his surprise, Maez found that his name had vanished from the list of registered voters, thanks to a statewide effort to deter fraudulent voting. For Maez, the shock was especially acute: He is the supervisor of elections in Las Vegas.

Maez was not alone in being denied his right to vote. On Super Tuesday, one in nine Democrats who tried to cast ballots in New Mexico found their names missing from the registration lists. The numbers were even higher in precincts like Las Vegas, where nearly 20 percent of the county’s voters were absent from the rolls. With their status in limbo, the voters were forced to cast “provisional” ballots, which can be reviewed and discarded by election officials without explanation. On Super Tuesday, more than half of all provisional ballots cast were thrown out statewide.

This November, what happened to Maez will happen to hundreds of thousands of voters across the country. In state after state, Republican operatives — the party’s elite commandos of bare-knuckle politics — are wielding new federal legislation to systematically disenfranchise Democrats. If this year’s race is as close as the past two elections, the GOP’s nationwide campaign could be large enough to determine the presidency in November. “I don’t think the Democrats get it,” says John Boyd, a voting-rights attorney in Albuquerque who has taken on the Republican Party for impeding access to the ballot. “All these new rules and games are turning voting into an obstacle course that could flip the vote to the GOP in half a dozen states.”

Suppressing the vote has long been a cornerstone of the GOP’s electoral strategy. Shortly before the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Paul Weyrich — a principal architect of today’s Republican Party — scolded evangelicals who believed in democracy. “Many of our Christians have what I call the ‘goo goo’ syndrome — good government,” said Weyrich, who co-founded Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell. “They want everybody to vote. I don’t want everybody to vote. . . . As a matter of fact, our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.”

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Mark Jacoby, who owns a firm hired by the California Republican Party, violated state laws with his own registration, authorities say.

By Evan Halper, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

SACRAMENTO — The owner of a firm that the California Republican Party hired to register tens of thousands of voters this year was arrested in Ontario over the weekend on suspicion of voter registration fraud.

State and local investigators allege that Mark Jacoby fraudulently registered himself to vote at a childhood California address where he no longer lives so he would appear to meet the legal requirement that all signature gatherers be eligible to vote in California. His firm, Young Political Majors, or YPM, collects petition signatures and registers voters in California and other states.

• Voters say they were duped into…

Jacoby’s arrest by state investigators and the Ontario Police Department late Saturday came after dozens of voters said they were duped into registering as Republicans by people employed by YPM. The voters said YPM workers tricked them by saying they were signing a petition to toughen penalties against child molesters.The firm was paid $7 to $12 for every Californian it registered as a member of the GOP.

Dan Goldfine, an attorney for Jacoby, on Sunday denied any wrongdoing by his client and called the charges “baseless.”

He said the arrest outside an Ontario hotel, which involved seven squad cars and nine police officers, was part of a “long pattern of harassment against Mr. Jacoby for an entirely valid voter registration effort.”

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Leaf envy: MIT chemist Daniel Nocera has mimicked the step in photosynthesis in which green plants split water.

Credit: Christopher Harting

With catalysts created by an MIT chemist, sunlight can turn water into hydrogen. If the process can scale up, it could make solar power a dominant source of energy.

By Kevin Bullis

“I’m going to show you something I haven’t showed anybody yet,” said Daniel Nocera, a professor of chemistry at MIT, speaking this May to an auditorium filled with scientists and U.S. government energy officials. He asked the house manager to lower the lights. Then he started a video. “Can you see that?” he asked excitedly, pointing to the bubbles rising from a strip of material immersed in water. “Oxygen is pouring off of this electrode.” Then he added, somewhat cryptically, “This is the future. We’ve got the leaf.”

What Nocera was demonstrating was a reaction that generates oxygen from water much as green plants do during photosynthesis–an achievement that could have profound implications for the energy debate. Carried out with the help of a catalyst he developed, the reaction is the first and most difficult step in splitting water to make hydrogen gas. And efficiently generating hydrogen from water, Nocera believes, will help surmount one of the main obstacles preventing solar power from becoming a dominant source of electricity: there’s no cost-effective way to store the energy collected by solar panels so that it can be used at night or during cloudy days.

Solar power has a unique potential to generate vast amounts of clean energy that doesn’t contribute to global warming. But without a cheap means to store this energy, solar power can’t replace fossil fuels on a large scale. In Nocera’s scenario, sunlight would split water to produce versatile, easy-to-store hydrogen fuel that could later be burned in an internal-combustion generator or recombined with oxygen in a fuel cell. Even more ambitious, the reaction could be used to split seawater; in that case, running the hydrogen through a fuel cell would yield fresh water as well as electricity.

Storing energy from the sun by mimicking photosynthesis is something scientists have been trying to do since the early 1970s. In particular, they have tried to replicate the way green plants break down water. Chemists, of course, can already split water. But the process has required high temperatures, harsh alkaline solutions, or rare and expensive catalysts such as platinum. What Nocera has devised is an inexpensive catalyst that produces oxygen from water at room temperature and without caustic chemicals–the same benign conditions found in plants. Several other promising catalysts, including another that Nocera developed, could be used to complete the process and produce hydrogen gas.

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By Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writer

A legal opinion allowing the Justice Department to dole out a $1.5 million grant to a Christian aid group that makes religious belief a condition of employment is shining new light on an obscure office that interprets laws across the government.

The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, which issued the interpretation last year to little notice, has been a target of congressional Democrats for its blessing of detainee interrogation techniques and a warrantless eavesdropping program that nearly provoked a mass resignation of top law enforcement officials four years ago.

Much of the work of the office remains secret. But legal experts predict that more rulings will be made public in the waning days of the Bush administration, as officials try to lock in policies they favor before a successor takes the stage.

Dawn E. Johnsen, an Indiana University law professor and a former acting chief of the OLC, asserted that the Bush administration’s broad view of executive power and its tendency to bypass Congress made it all the more important for the next president to begin reviewing legal opinions right after the November election.

Johnsen, who handled such reviews for President Bill Clinton’s transition team, said that she “definitely would put” the religious freedom opinion on a list of interpretations to be analyzed by the new president.

Faith-based initiatives have been a priority for President Bush. Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee, supports the efforts of religious organizations to win federal grants, while his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, has indicated that at least some forms of discriminatory hiring would be impermissible were he to win the presidency.

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by Steve Coll

Between the industrial revolution and the nineteen-thirties, financial panics occurred regularly in America. Busted speculative bubbles usually caused them. The asset on which people speculated varied; often, it had something to do with land, but later, financiers promoted magical thinking about railroads, too. As the years passed and the financial system grew more robust, investors could borrow more money to speculate when certain assets became fashionable and rose in price, and this additional leverage amplified the booms and busts, making them more consequential to the real economy. When speculative investors using enormous amounts of borrowed money produced the stock market crash of 1929, which was then followed by the failure of policymakers to respond with needed rescue measures, we had the Great Depression.

The financial regulatory system that emerged from the New Deal was meant to protect us from the recurrence of such a catastrophe by reducing the amount of borrowed money used by major financial institutions in speculative schemes. It was also meant to create much greater transparency about the facts underlying stock and bond prices, so that investors, as a whole, would make more rational decisions and prevent asset bubbles from getting completely out of hand. That regulatory system was never designed to banish greed or eliminate asset bubbles, but it seemed for a long while to moderate the impacts of speculative fevers on the real economy. Transparency of information allows markets to work off busted bubbles fairly quickly, and it gives policymakers the confidence and direction necessary to inject relieving shots of new money. The tech-stock boom of the nineteen-nineties, for example, was demonstrably crazy while it was going on–but it was crazy in plain sight, in the sense that all of the relevant information about tech-stock prices, including the fact that many companies with high share prices had no earnings and no convincing business model, was disclosed to the public.

The tech boom and bust seemed to show that central bankers had learned how to respond quickly and effectively when bubbles burst. Alan Greenspan, for one, concluded that it was easier and better for the economy overall to clean up bubbles after they busted than to intervene heavily to prevent them from inflating in the first place. Thus he stood by passively during the housing bubble of the past few years. This bubble, too, took place in plain sight, in the sense that by 2006 or so it was clear by historical measures of housing prices, price-to-rent ratios, and so on, that a bubble had inflated. If the housing bubble had inflated entirely inside a transparent, well-regulated financial system, its end might have been painful, as the tech bust was, but it probably would not have been unusually consequential. The problem, however, was that the bubble inflated inside both the old regulatory system and, simultaneously, inside a new financing system that grew up during the Bush Administration outside of all government scrutiny.

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How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.

by Jane Mayer

In 2007, Palin entertained top conservative pundits at the governor’s mansion.

“Here’s a little news flash,” Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska and the Republican candidate for Vice-President, announced in September, during her début at the Party’s Convention, in St. Paul. “I’m not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I’ve learned quickly these past few days that if you’re not a member in good standing of the Washington élite then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone.” But, she added, “I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion.”

In subsequent speeches, Palin has cast herself as an antidote to the élitist culture inside the Beltway. “I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need,” she recently told Fox News. During her first interview as John McCain’s running mate, with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, Palin was asked about her lack of experience in foreign policy. She replied, “We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.”

Palin’s sudden rise to prominence, however, owes more to members of the Washington élite than her rhetoric has suggested. Paulette Simpson, the head of the Alaska Federation of Republican Women, who has known Palin since 2002, said, “From the beginning, she’s been underestimated. She’s very smart. She’s ambitious.” John Bitney, a top policy adviser on Palin’s 2006 gubernatorial campaign, said, “Sarah’s very conscientious about crafting the story of Sarah. She’s all about the hockey mom and Mrs. Palin Goes to Washington—the anti-politician politician.” Bitney is from Wasilla, Palin’s home town, and has known her since junior high school, where they both played in the band. He considers Palin a friend, even though after becoming governor, in December, 2006, she dismissed him. He is now the chief of staff to the speaker of the Alaska House.

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Climate change is happening much faster than the world’s best scientists predicted and will wreak havoc unless action is taken on a global scale, a new report warns.

Arctic sea-ice in September 1979 and 2007, showing the biggest reduction since satellite surveillance began. Photo: Fugro NPA Ltd

By Paul Eccleston
wwf.org.uk

‘Extreme weather events’ such as the hot summer of 2003, which caused an extra 35,000 deaths across southern Europe from heat stress and poor air quality, will happen more frequently.

Britain and the North Sea area will be hit more often by violent cyclones and the predicted rise in sea level will double to more than a metre, putting vast coastal areas at risk from flooding.

The bleak report from WWF – formerly the World Wildlife Fund – also predicts crops failures and the collapse of eco systems on both land and sea.

And it calls on the EU to set an example to the rest of the world by agreeing a package of challenging targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions to tackle the consequences of climate change and to keep any increase in global temperatures below 2C.

The agency says that the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a study of global warming by 4,000 scientists from more than 150 countries which alerted the world to the possible consequences of global warming – is now out of date.

WWF’s report, Climate Change: Faster, stronger, sooner, has updated all the scientific data and concluded that global warming is accelerating far beyond the IPCC’s forecasts.

As an example it says the first ‘tipping point’ may have already been reached in the Arctic, where sea ice is disappearing up to 30 years ahead of IPCC predictions and may be gone completely within five years – something that hasn’t occurred for a million years.

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By Molly Bernhart

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The Dow Jones news ticker is reflected on a window at NASDAQ, in New York’s Times Square, just before the closing bell on Monday, Oct

By Titus Levi

The argument over the health of financial markets has careened across the economic tarmac like a car driven by a drunk. The shouting and wailing reached a fever pitch after two of the five big investment houses—Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch—collapsed in a span of only two days, and before anyone could catch his breath, insurance giant AIG had to be bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Something had to be done, and quickly.

Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson and his advisers crafted a $700-billion bailout plan by the end of the week, and on Monday, Sept. 29, the U.S. House of Representatives told them to get stuffed. In response, the stock market abruptly tanked, falling by 778 points. Then, the House leadership promptly changed direction again by playing Monty Hall and hammering out a bailout deal, spiced with $150 billion in pork, that passed on the following Friday. Everyone breathed a big sigh of relief and thought that all was well in Mudville.

Not so.

Wall Street swerved wildly once again on Monday, Oct. 6, shedding about 800 points at one point, before rebounding to close at 9,962.03, or down 3.5 percent for the day. The rest of the week followed the same pattern: up, down, up, down … but mostly down. By the end of the week, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had settled in at 8451.19.

Clearly, traders have yet to feel confident. Why? Two problems. One we already know: The “plan,” even with revisions, is deeply flawed. The second problem has not been mentioned all that much because it’s pretty scary: Put simply, we have no idea what we’re doing.

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By PAUL KRUGMAN

The Dow is surging! No, it’s plunging! No, it’s surging! No, it’s …

Nevermind. While the manic-depressive stock market is dominating the headlines, the more important story is the grim news coming in about the real economy. It’s now clear that rescuing the banks is just the beginning: the nonfinancial economy is also in desperate need of help.

And to provide that help, we’re going to have to put some prejudices aside. It’s politically fashionable to rant against government spending and demand fiscal responsibility. But right now, increased government spending is just what the doctor ordered, and concerns about the budget deficit should be put on hold.

Before I get there, let’s talk about the economic situation.

Just this week, we learned that retail sales have fallen off a cliff, and so has industrial production. Unemployment claims are at steep-recession levels, and the Philadelphia Fed’s manufacturing index is falling at the fastest pace in almost 20 years. All signs point to an economic slump that will be nasty, brutish — and long.

How nasty? The unemployment rate is already above 6 percent (and broader measures of underemployment are in double digits). It’s now virtually certain that the unemployment rate will go above 7 percent, and quite possibly above 8 percent, making this the worst recession in a quarter-century.

And how long? It could be very long indeed.

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By Tim Simmers

As public anxiety about the teetering economy deepens, author Naomi Klein is gaining listeners with her pronouncements on the failings of American-style capitalism.

“We’ve been living in a fairy tale” that deregulation and privatization serve the common good, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism” said Thursday.

Naomi Klein in this undated file photo. Speaking at Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium on Thursday evening as part of the Aurora Forum, Klein minced no words. She insists that deregulating the financial system has created bubbles and busts, and she called the current $700 billion bailout, or rescue plan, a “stickup.”

Klein’s book paints a dark, troubling picture of a form of capitalism that lets people in power cash in on chaos, catastrophes, wars and financial crises and snatch up lucrative contracts.

Speaking at Stanford University’s Kresge Auditorium on Thursday evening as part of the Aurora Forum, Klein minced no words. She insists that deregulating the financial system has created bubbles and busts, and she called the current $700 billion bailout, or rescue plan, a “stickup.”

This financial crisis and the Iraq war are examples of how economic shocks and global disasters are used to boost the profits of the elite, she said.

“The president goes on TV and dangles a plan to Congress, saying if we don’t get it we’re going down, and banks are going to close in your neighborhood,” she said. “That’s deeply crazy if you look at it. Especially about a plan that almost all economists said couldn’t fix the problem.”

Klein said the Bush administration’s plan was reckless. She bristled at the “comfort level” Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and President Bush have exhibited with the crisis.

“It’s like they’re saying, ‘Hey, stuff happens,’”‰” she said. “And then a week later the whole idea of buying toxic debt they were pushing died.”

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Hollis McLoughlin, an executive of DCI, watches a Washington Capitals hockey game Saturday, Oct. 11, 2008, in Washington. Freddie Mac secretly paid DCI, a Washington-based Republican consulting firm, $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse

PETE YOST |

WASHINGTON — Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.

In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI’s chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain’s campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

Freddie Mac’s payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel’s bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.

In the midst of DCI’s yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote.

“If effective regulatory reform legislation … is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole,” the senators wrote in a letter that proved prescient.

Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign targeting 17 Republican senators in 13 states, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The states and the senators targeted changed over time, but always stayed on the Republican side.

In the end, there was not enough Republican support for Hagel’s bill to warrant bringing it up for a vote because Democrats also opposed it and the votes of some would be needed for passage. The measure died at the end of the 109th Congress.

McCain, R-Ariz., was not a target of the DCI campaign. He signed Hagel’s letter and three weeks later signed on as a co-sponsor of the bill.

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The Huffington Post |  Rachel Weiner

Via Romenesko, the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reveals in an online chat that the Secret Service is stopping people reporters from interviewing people at Palin rallies:

Arlington, Va.: The Secret Service has now labeled the “kill him” report as unfounded. Why isn’t The Post giving this report as much coverage as the original false report received?
Dana Milbank:

Glad you asked, because I saw this earlier. This is actually about the incident in Scranton, not the one in Clearwater, Fla, that I wrote about here.

I wasn’t at the Scranton event, but I have to say the Secret Service is in dangerous territory here. In cooperation with the Palin campaign, they’ve started preventing reporters from leaving the press section to interview people in the crowd. This is a serious violation of their duty — protecting the protectee — and gets into assisting with the political aspirations of the candidate. It also often makes it impossible for reporters to get into the crowd to question the people who say vulgar things. So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it’s unfounded because the reporters can’t get close enough to identify the person.

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Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed. And those who predicted that the old brand, the unfettered, American-promoted system, was a danger to the world, are being vindicated. They include Karl Marx, whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days.

By Bernd Debusmann

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Capitalism as we used to know it is on its deathbed. And those who predicted that the old brand, the unfettered, American-promoted system, was a danger to the world, are being vindicated. They include Karl Marx, whose thinking on banks seems oddly contemporary these days.

The credit crisis that began in August last year and turned into near-catastrophe this month is not over, despite the hundreds of billions of dollars that governments are spending to save banks in the United States and Europe from collapse and thereby prevent a global depression. But there is an emerging consensus that capitalism needs a 21st century overhaul, not just emergency rescues, to save it from itself.

When that will happen is not clear. “What we are seeing right now looks like a very slow train wreck,” says James Boughton, the historian of the International Monetary Fund, or IMF.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has suggested an international meeting on the pattern of the 1944 Bretton Woods conference that resulted in the post-World War II financial order and created the IMF and the World Bank. That system was dominated by Washington.

The United States, from where the credit crisis spread like a virulent epidemic, is not likely to play as large a role in whatever new “financial architecture” world leaders construct. As Peer Steinbrueck, the German finance minister, put it: “One thing seems probable … The U.S. will lose its status as the superpower of the global financial system.”

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This multimedia snapshot brings together coverage of the mounting crisis and its impact on the markets through links to in depth packages, interactive maps, audio, video and blogs.

The rising defaults on subprime mortgages in the US triggered a global crisis for the money markets. Many of the world’s leading investment banks have collapsed as a result and the US government has proposed a massive bail-out.

The crisis has become one of the most radical reshapings of the global banking sector, as governments and the private sector battle to shore up the financial system following the disappearance of Lehman and Merrill as independent entities and the $85bn government rescue of AIG. – Oct 13 2008

Related content and features

Multimedia

Bank Street

Take a walk down Bank Street and follow the fortunes of some of the world’s largest banks as they navigate the global financial crisis

Government interventions to stem the financial crisis

Governments across the world have stepped up their interventions to stem the worst financial crisis in decades. This graphic examines the rescue measures in detail

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How did the actions of subprime mortgage borrowers in the US affect global financial markets and lead to the ongoing liquidity crisis – and will the resulting fallout hurt the wider economy? Gillian Tett, capital markets editor, narrates FT.com’s interactive feature explaining the credit squeeze.

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He exposed the My Lai massacre, revealed Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia and has hounded Bush and Cheney over the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib… No wonder the Republicans describe Seymour Hersh as ‘the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist’. Rachel Cooke meets the most-feared investigative reporter in Washington

by Rachel Cooke

Every so often, a famous actor or producer will contact Seymour Hersh, wanting to make a movie about his most famous story: his single-handed uncovering, in 1969, of the My Lai massacre, in which an American platoon stormed a village in South Vietnam and, finding only its elderly, women and children, launched into a frenzy of shooting, stabbing and gang-raping. It won him a Pulitzer prize and hastened the end of the Vietnam war. Mostly, they come to see him in his office in downtown Washington, a two-room suite that he has occupied for the past 17 years. Do they like what they see? You bet they do, even if the movie has yet to be made. ‘Brad Pitt loved this place,’ says Hersh with a wolfish grin. ‘It totally fits the cliché of the grungy reporter’s den!’ When last he renewed the lease, he tells me, he made it a condition of signing that the office would not be redecorated – the idea of moving all his stuff was too much. It’s not hard to see why. Slowly, I move my head through 180 degrees, trying not to panic at the sight of so much paper piled so precipitously. Before me are 8,000 legal notepads, or so it seems, each one filled with a Biro Cuneiform of scribbled telephone numbers. By the time I look at Hersh again – the full panorama takes a moment or two – he is silently examining the wall behind his desk, which is grey with grime, and striated as if a billy goat had sharpened its horns on it.

American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. Photograph: Martha Camarillo

And then there is Hersh himself, a splendid sight. After My Lai, he was hired by the New York Times to chase the tail of the Watergate scandal, a story broken by its rival, the Washington Post. In All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about their scoop, they describe him – the competition. He was unlike any reporter they’d ever seen: ‘Hersh, horn-rimmed and somewhat pudgy, showed up for dinner in old tennis shoes, a frayed pinstriped shirt that might have been at its best in his college freshman year and rumpled, bleached khakis.’ Forty years on, little has changed. Today he is in trainers, chinos and a baggy navy sweatshirt and – thanks to a tennis injury – he is walking like an old guy: chest forward, knees bandy, slight limp in one leg. There is something cherishably chaotic about him. A fuzzy halo of frantic inquiry follows him wherever he goes, like the cloud of dust that hovers above Pig Pen in the Charlie Brown strip. In conversation, away from the restraining hand of his bosses at the New Yorker, the magazine that is now his home, his thoughts pour forth, unmediated and – unless you concentrate very hard – seemingly unconnected. ‘Yeah, I shoot my mouth off,’ he says, with faux remorse. ‘There’s a huge difference between writing and thinking.’ Not that he has much time for those who put cosy pontification over the graft of reporting: ‘I think… My colleagues! I watch ‘em on TV, and every sentence begins with the words: “I think.” They could write a book called I Think.’

But we must backtrack a little. Before the office, there is the breakfast joint. Hersh and I meet at the Tabard Inn, a Washington hangout so gloomily lit I could do with a torch. He has poached eggs and coffee and ‘none of that other stuff, thanks’. (I think he means that he doesn’t want potatoes with his eggs). Like everyone in America just now, he is on tenterhooks. A Democrat who truly despises the Bush regime, he is reluctant to make predictions about exactly what is going to happen in the forthcoming election on the grounds that he might ‘jinx it’. The unknown quantity of voter racism apart, however, he is hopeful that Obama will pull it off, and if he does, for Hersh this will be a starting gun. ‘You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],’ he says, with relish. ‘[They say:] “You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then.” So that is what I’ll do, so long as nothing awful happens before the inauguration.’ He plans to write a book about the neocons and, though it won’t change anything – ‘They’ve got away with it, categorically; anyone who talks about prosecuting Bush and Cheney [for war crimes] is kidding themselves’ – it will reveal how the White House ’set out to sabotage the system… It wasn’t that they found ways to manipulate Congressional oversight; they had conversations about ending the right of Congress to intervene.’

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Pay and bonus deals equivalent to 10% of US government bail-out package

Demonstrators protesting in New York before the $700bn Wall Street bail-out earlier this month.

Simon Bowers

Financial workers at Wall Street’s top banks are to receive pay deals worth more than $70bn (£40bn), a substantial proportion of which is expected to be paid in discretionary bonuses, for their work so far this year – despite plunging the global financial system into its worst crisis since the 1929 stock market crash, the Guardian has learned.

Staff at six banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are in line to pick up the payouts despite being the beneficiaries of a $700bn bail-out from the US government that has already prompted criticism. The government’s cash has been poured in on the condition that excessive executive pay would be curbed.

Pay plans for bankers have been disclosed in recent corporate statements. Pressure on the US firms to review preparations for annual bonuses increased yesterday when Germany’s Deutsche Bank said many of its leading traders would join Josef Ackermann, its chief executive, in waiving millions of euros in annual payouts.

The sums that continue to be spent by Wall Street firms on payroll, payoffs and, most controversially, bonuses appear to bear no relation to the losses incurred by investors in the banks. Shares in Citigroup and Goldman Sachs have declined by more than 45% since the start of the year. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley have fallen by more than 60%. JP MorganChase fell 6.4% and Lehman Brothers has collapsed.

At one point last week the Morgan Stanley $10.7bn pay pot for the year to date was greater than the entire stock market value of the business. In effect, staff, on receiving their remuneration, could club together and buy the bank.

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