Molly Ivins
Creators Syndicate
workingforchange.com

AUSTIN, Texas — With the Bush administration, it’s important to have in mind the old carnival con game: Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it.

Among the many curious aspects of the administration’s approval of the Dubai Ports World takeover of operations at six major ports (and as many as 21) is this exemption from normally routine restrictions: The agreement does not require DP World to keep copies of its business records on U.S. soil, which would place them within the jurisdiction of American courts. Nor does it require the company to designate an American citizen to accommodate requests by the government. So what’s that about?

It makes DP World harder to sue and less subject to American regulation. The lovely thing about the ports deal causing such a commotion is that it allows us to bring attention to this fairly obscure provision, which is, in fact, part of a wave of similar special exemptions that’s starting to turn into a flood.

Here’s a lovely example of how it works: Just before Christmas last year, in a spectacular example of a straight power play, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled off a backroom legislative deal to protect pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits. The language was slipped into a Defense Department appropriations bill at the last minute without the approval of members of the House-Senate conference committee meeting on the bill.

Lots of players were outraged at the short- circuiting of the legislative process. “It is a travesty,” said Thomas Mann of The Brookings Institution. Rep. David Obey, D-Wis., who had specifically checked to make sure the language was not included, was enraged, calling Frist and Hastert “a couple of musclemen in Congress who think they have the right to tell everybody else that they have to do their bidding.” Rep. Dan Burton said succinctly, “It sucks.”

The way this was done was outrageous, but so is what it did. Frist has received over $270,000 in contributions from the drug industry and has long advocated liability protection for vaccine makers. As the Gannett News Service reports, the provision allows the secretary of health and human services to issue a declaration of a public health emergency, or threat of an emergency, or declaration of “credible risk” of an emergency in the future, thereby protecting the industry against lawsuits involving the manufacture, testing, development, distribution, administration or use of vaccines or other drugs.

In order to prove injury from a drug, a person would have to prove “willful misconduct,” not just actual harm.

But this putrid performance is part of a much larger pattern to protect corporations from the consequences of the damage they cause. The Los Angeles Times reports:

— “The highway safety agency … is backing auto industry efforts to stop California and other states from regulating tailpipe emissions.”

— “The Justice Department helped industry groups overturn a pollution-control rule in Southern California that would have required cleaner-running buses, garbage trucks and other fleet vehicles.”

— “The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency has repeatedly sided with national banks to fend off enforcement of consumer protection laws passed by California, New York and other states.”

— “The Food and Drug Administration (claims) FDA-approved labels should give pharmaceutical firms broad immunity from most types of lawsuits.”

Because of repeated problems with roof- crush incidents that have crippled drivers in rollover accidents, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration at last proposed a beefed-up safety standard for car roofs — but the proposal also provides legal protection for the manufacturers from future roof-crush lawsuits. So your car roof may be less liable to crush during a rollover, but if it does and leaves you paraplegic, but you won’t be able to sue.

Sometimes I’m not sure what planet these people live on — they must think the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal represents reality.

Gee, would a fine, upstanding American corporation actually make a product that would hurt someone? Knowingly? Would they ever lie to cover it up after they find out about the problem and continue manufacturing whatever it is until finally forced to stop? Well, would they do that if it was really, really profitable? Could that happen in our great nation?

The trouble with the people who write The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is that they never read their own newspaper, which still does the best job of business reporting anywhere. Business interests have done a splendid job of vilifying trial lawyers and pretending the only people hurt by limiting the right to sue are trial lawyers.

Look, the trial lawyer is not the one in a wheelchair after a roof-crush rollover leaves someone paraplegic. Do you drive a car?
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side note: this will make your stomach churn. I mean, Bush loves to talk about the economy, but what he doesn’t tell you is when he’s talking about how great things are here, and starts with his numbers, remember he’s referring to the top 1% of this country, that’s it. When you start reading between the lines, when you start digging deeper and looking at stats that matter to the middle class, like average income per household after inflation. And the worse thing, productivity is up, which means Americans are working harder, longer hours for less pay. So you have to ask yourself, who’s making the money?

Abid Aslam
OneWorld US

The average American family has taken a financial tumble and millions in the country go hungry despite President George W. Bush’s sunny assessment of the U.S. economy, say federal data and economists.

Bush talked up the nation’s wealth last week during a speech in Milwaukee. ”We’re doing fine,” he said and described the economy as ‘’strong and gaining steam.”

Economic growth had clocked a respectable 3.5 percent, unemployment had been held down to 4.7 percent with more than four million new jobs created in the past 30 months, and after-tax income had risen eight percent since 2001, he said.

Within days, however, the Federal Reserve reported that average incomes after adjusting for inflation actually had fallen between 2001 and 2004.

At the same time, the number of Americans who need emergency food aid to survive had swollen to more than 25 million even before hurricanes Katrina and Rita struck, the nation’s largest network of food banks said in a separate report.

Many families continued to struggle in the wake of the 2000 stock market collapse and 2001 recession, the central bank said in its latest triennial ”Survey of Consumer Finances,” released Thursday.

Inflation helped to eat away at the average American family’s income, reducing the total to $70,700 in 2004–a loss of 2.3 percent from 2001. That followed a 17.3 percent gain in average incomes between 1998 and 2001 and 12.3 percent in 1995-98, the Fed said.

Median family income showed a slight increase of 1.6 percent to reach $43,200 in 2004, up from $42,500 in 2001.

Half of all households are understood to stand above, and half to fall below, the median point, which is used to represent the ”typical” rather than ”average” family.

Economic analysts said the latest Fed’s findings confirmed earlier research showing that the average American family’s finances were deteriorating.

”Every American should be able to achieve middle class economic security, a hallmark of national and household stability in this country,” said Tamara Draut, director of the economic opportunity program at research and advocacy group Demos.

”But the Federal Reserve’s findings spotlight trends that are causing economic fragility in today’s middle class and are closing the door on low-income Americans.”

The income situation appears to be worsening.

Last year proved to be the worst one on record for inflation-adjusted income, said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

”Wages and compensation for the average worker are lagging inflation despite strong productivity growth,” Bernstein said, citing figures from last month’s ”Employment Cost Index” report from the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.

”Averaging over all of 2005, real wages fell 0.9 percent–the lowest annual result on record–while compensation’s essentially unchanged rate from 2004 provides its worst year on record as well,” Bernstein added in an analysis of the BLS report. The term ”compensation” refers to wages plus benefits.

Draut, at Demos, said she was worried by the latest Fed report’s findings that ”growing numbers of American households face mounting debt and financial instability.”

In particular, more than 76 percent of households carry debt, up since 2001. Of households in debt, the median amount of debt, $55,300, amounts to 128 percent of the median household income.

”A greater number of people reported not saving money in 2004 than in 2001. Only 41 percent save regularly,” Draut said, citing the Fed’s figures. ”That’s a foreboding number for a nation with 76 million people reaching retirement age over the next 25 years.”

The Fed found that four in 10 senior citizens older than 75 years shouldered debts in 2004, up from 29 percent in 2001.

Americans also have been piling up credit card debt, which grew 10 percent in the median household and 15.9 percent in the average household. Most of the increase occurred in the ”middle class,” which the Fed defined as the fifth of the population with a median income of $42,500.

”Stagnant wages and skyrocketing healthcare, education and housing costs, plus greater job instability has pushed America’s families right to the limit, and they’re borrowing on high-cost credit just to make ends meet,” said Draut.

Home equity loans also have become bigger and more common, with many homeowners using the cash-out refinancing to pay down their credit card debts and to recover expenses they can’t cover with their earnings, she added.

Rising household debt and stagnant real wages sapped median net worth, a tally of assets and liabilities. Median net worth grew by 1.5 percent in 2001-04, down from 10.3 percent in 1998-2001, the Fed report said.

The gap between wealthy and poor also has widened, the Fed said. America’s wealthiest 10 percent saw their net worth rise by 6.1 percent to an average of $3.1 million while the bottom 10 percent saw theirs fall from zero in 2001 to minus $1,400–meaning they owed this much more than the value of all their assets–in 2004.

Data on net worth would have proven even more anemic were it not for big gains in the notional value of real estate–something that, at least hypothetically, boosted homeowners’ financial standing, the Fed and analysts agreed.

”Americans are keeping their families afloat by putting their greatest asset at risk,” said Draut.

Yet they appear to be among the fortunate, according to America’s Second Harvest, which supports 50,000 food-aid charities nationwide.

More than 25 million Americans were forced to resort to food donations from the organization’s affiliates last year, an 8 percent increase over 2001, it said.

Nine million children younger than 18 and three million senior citizens stood among the hungry, America’s Second Harvest said in its ”Hunger in America 2006” report.

”About 70 percent of the clients seeking emergency food assistance are living below the federal poverty line,” the private philanthropy said.

”Nearly 40 percent have at least one adult working in their household,” it added.

Those figures suggest that increasing numbers of working Americans do not earn enough to feed their families.
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MSNBC staff and news service reports

Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, followed in quick succession by Rita, in the most destructive hurricane season in U.S. history. But six months and billions of dollars in relief later, it’s clear that Katrina will be with the region, indeed the country, for a long time to come.

Perhaps nowhere did the spirit of survival and the ongoing frustration mix more poignantly than in New Orleans during its first post-Katrina Mardi Gras.

Even as displaced residents flooded back to New Orleans to celebrate, determined to rejuvenate the spirit of the place, tens of thousands of residents in the region were struggling with insurance companies, searching for new jobs, or trying to get more aid from the government. Psychologists report high rates of post-traumatic stress, especially among police officers.

Meanwhile, the images of desperate people trapped in sweltering convention centers, and on bridges surrounded by rising water are etched in the country’s collective conscience. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill remain embroiled in angry debate over what went wrong and who is to blame for the poor government response to this epic disaster.
see rest of article

By Norman Solomon
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Evidently the president’s trip to India created an option too perfect to pass up: The man who has led the world in violence during the first years of the 21st century could pay homage to the world’s leading practitioner of nonviolence during the first half of the 20th century. So the White House announced plans for George W. Bush to lay a wreath at the Mahatma Gandhi memorial in New Delhi this week.

While audacious in its shameless and extreme hypocrisy, this PR gambit is in character for the world’s only superpower. One of the main purposes of the Bush regime’s media spin is to depict reality as its opposite. And Karl Rove obviously figured that mainstream US media outlets, with few exceptions, wouldn’t react with anywhere near the appropriate levels of derision or outrage.

Presidential rhetoric aside, Gandhi’s enthusiasm for nonviolence is nearly matched by Bush’s enthusiasm for violence. The commander in chief regularly proclaims his misty-eyed pride in US military actions that destroy countless human lives with massive and continual techno-violence. But the Bushian isn’t quite 180 degrees from the Gandhian. The president of the United States is not exactly committed to violence; what he wants is an end to resistance.

“A conqueror is always a lover of peace,” the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz observed. Yearning for Uncle Sam to fulfill his increasingly farfetched promise of victory in Iraq, the US president is an evangelist for peace – on his terms.

Almost two years ago, in early April 2004, the icy cerebral pundit George Will engaged in a burst of candor when he wrote a column about the widening bloodshed inside Iraq: “In the war against the militias, every door American troops crash through, every civilian bystander shot – there will be many – will make matters worse, for a while. Nevertheless, the first task of the occupation remains the first task of government: to establish a monopoly on violence.”

The column – headlined “A War President’s Job” in the Washington Post – diagnosed the problem and prescribed more violence. Lots more: “Now Americans must steel themselves for administering the violence necessary to disarm or defeat Iraq’s urban militias, which replicate the problem of modern terrorism – violence that has slipped the leash of states.” For unleashing the Pentagon’s violence, the rationales are inexhaustible.

In an important sense, it’s plausible to envision Bush as a lover of peace and even an apostle of nonviolence – but, in context, those sterling invocations of virtues are plated with sadism in the service of empire. The president of the United States is urging “peace” as a synonym for getting his way in Iraq. From Washington, the most exalted vision of peace is a scenario where the occupied no longer resist the American occupiers or their allies.

The world has seen many such leaders, eager to unleash as much violence as necessary to get what they want, and glad to praise nonviolence whenever convenient. But no photo-op can change the current reality that the world’s most powerful government is also, by far, the most violent and the most dangerous.

original article

Why we can no longer afford George W. Bush
By Lewis H. Lapham.
Harpers Magazine

A country is not only what it does—it is also what it puts up with, what it tolerates. —Kurt Tucholsky

On December 18 of last year, Congressman John Conyers Jr. (D., Mich.) introduced into the House of Representatives a resolution inviting it to form “a select committee to investigate the Administration’s intent to go to war before congressional authorization, manipulation of pre-war intelligence, encouraging and countenancing torture, retaliating against critics, and to make recommendations regarding grounds for possible impeachment.” Although buttressed two days previously by the news of the National Security Agency’s illegal surveillance of the American citizenry, the request attracted little or no attention in the press—nothing on television or in the major papers, some scattered applause from the left-wing blogs, heavy sarcasm on the websites flying the flags of the militant right. The nearly complete silence raised the question as to what it was the congressman had in mind, and to whom did he think he was speaking? In time of war few propositions would seem as futile as the attempt to impeach a president whose political party controls the Congress; as the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee stationed on Capitol Hill for the last forty years, Representative Conyers presumably knew that to expect the Republican caucus in the House to take note of his invitation, much less arm it with the power of subpoena, was to expect a miracle of democratic transformation and rebirth not unlike the one looked for by President Bush under the prayer rugs in Baghdad. Unless the congressman intended some sort of symbolic gesture, self-serving and harmless, what did he hope to prove or to gain? He answered the question in early January, on the phone from Detroit during the congressional winter recess.

“To take away the excuse,” he said, “that we didn’t know.” So that two or four or ten years from now, if somebody should ask, “Where were you, Conyers, and where was the United States Congress?” when the Bush Administration declared the Constitution inoperative and revoked the license of parliamentary government, none of the company now present can plead ignorance or temporary insanity, can say that “somehow it escaped our notice” that the President was setting himself up as a supreme leader exempt from the rule of law.

A reason with which it was hard to argue but one that didn’t account for the congressman’s impatience. Why not wait for a showing of supportive public opinion, delay the motion to impeach until after next November’s elections? Assuming that further investigation of the President’s addiction to the uses of domestic espionage finds him nullifying the Fourth Amendment rights of a large number of his fellow Americans, the Democrats possibly could come up with enough votes, their own and a quorum of disenchanted Republicans, to send the man home to Texas. Conyers said:

“I don’t think enough people know how much damage this administration can do to their civil liberties in a very short time. What would you have me do? Grumble and complain? Make cynical jokes? Throw up my hands and say that under the circumstances nothing can be done? At least I can muster the facts, establish a record, tell the story that ought to be front-page news.”

Which turned out to be the purpose of his House Resolution 635—not a high-minded tilting at windmills but the production of a report, 182 pages, 1,022 footnotes, assembled by Conyers’s staff during the six months prior to its presentation to Congress, that describes the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq as the perpetration of a crime against the American people. It is a fair description. Drawing on evidence furnished over the last four years by a sizable crowd of credible witnesses—government officials both extant and former, journalists, military officers, politicians, diplomats domestic and foreign—the authors of the report find a conspiracy to commit fraud, the administration talking out of all sides of its lying mouth, secretly planning a frivolous and unnecessary war while at the same time pretending in its public statements that nothing was further from the truth.[1] The result has proved tragic, but on reading through the report’s corroborating testimony I sometimes could counter its inducements to mute rage with the thought that if the would-be lords of the flies weren’t in the business of killing people, they would be seen as a troupe of off-Broadway comedians in a third-rate theater of the absurd. Entitled “The Constitution in Crisis; The Downing Street Minutes and Deception, Manipulation, Torture, Retribution, and Coverups in the Iraq War,” the Conyers report examines the administration’s chronic abuse of power from more angles than can be explored within the compass of a single essay. The nature of the administration’s criminal DNA and modus operandi, however, shows up in a usefully robust specimen of its characteristic dishonesty.

* * *

That President George W. Bush comes to power with the intention of invading Iraq is a fact not open to dispute. Pleased with the image of himself as a military hero, and having spoken, more than once, about seeking revenge on Saddam Hussein for the tyrant’s alleged attempt to “kill my Dad,” he appoints to high office in his administration a cadre of warrior intellectuals, chief among them Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, known to be eager for the glories of imperial conquest.[2] At the first meeting of the new National Security Council on January 30, 2001, most of the people in the room discuss the possibility of preemptive blitzkrieg against Baghdad.[3] In March the Pentagon circulates a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts”; the supporting maps indicate the properties of interest to various European governments and American corporations. Six months later, early in the afternoon of September 11, the smoke still rising from the Pentagon’s western facade, Secretary Rumsfeld tells his staff to fetch intelligence briefings (the “best info fast…go massive; sweep it all up; things related and not”) that will justify an attack on Iraq. By chance the next day in the White House basement, Richard A. Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, encounters President Bush, who tells him to “see if Saddam did this.” Nine days later, at a private dinner upstairs in the White House, the President informs his guest, the British prime minister, Tony Blair, that “when we have dealt with Afghanistan, we must come back to Iraq.”

By November 13, 2001, the Taliban have been rousted out of Kabul in Afghanistan, but our intelligence agencies have yet to discover proofs of Saddam Hussein’s acquaintance with Al Qaeda.[4] President Bush isn’t convinced. On November 21, at the end of a National Security Council meeting, he says to Secretary Rumsfeld, “What have you got in terms of plans for Iraq?…I want you to get on it. I want you to keep it secret.”

The Conyers report doesn’t return to the President’s focus on Iraq until March 2002, when it finds him peering into the office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, to say, “Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.” At a Senate Republican Policy lunch that same month on Capitol Hill, Vice President Dick Cheney informs the assembled company that it is no longer a question of if the United States will attack Iraq, it’s only a question of when. The vice president doesn’t bring up the question of why, the answer to which is a work in progress. By now the administration knows, or at least has reason to know, that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, that Iraq doesn’t possess weapons of mass destruction sufficiently ominous to warrant concern, that the regime destined to be changed poses no imminent threat, certainly not to the United States, probably not to any country defended by more than four batteries of light artillery. Such at least is the conclusion of the British intelligence agencies that can find no credible evidence to support the theory of Saddam’s connection to Al Qaeda or international terrorism; “even the best survey of WMD programs will not show much advance in recent years on the nuclear, missile and CW/BW weapons fronts…” A series of notes and memoranda passing back and forth between the British Cabinet Office in London and its correspondents in Washington during the spring and summer of 2002 address the problem of inventing a pretext for a war so fondly desired by the Bush Administration that Sir Richard Dearlove, head of Britain’s MI-6, finds the interested parties in Washington fixing “the intelligence and the facts…around the policy.” The American enthusiasm for regime change, “undimmed” in the mind of Condoleezza Rice, presents complications.

Although Blair has told Bush, probably in the autumn of 2001, that Britain will join the American military putsch in Iraq, he needs “legal justification” for the maneuver—something noble and inspiring to say to Parliament and the British public. No justification “currently exists.” Neither Britain nor the United States is being attacked by Iraq, which eliminates the excuse of self-defense; nor is the Iraqi government currently sponsoring a program of genocide. Which leaves as the only option the “wrong-footing” of Saddam. If under the auspices of the United Nations he can be presented with an ultimatum requiring him to show that Iraq possesses weapons that don’t exist, his refusal to comply can be taken as proof that he does, in fact, possess such weapons.[5]

Over the next few months, while the British government continues to look for ways to “wrong-foot” Saddam and suborn the U.N., various operatives loyal to Vice President Cheney and Secretary Rumsfeld bend to the task of fixing the facts, distributing alms to dubious Iraqi informants in return for map coordinates of Saddam’s monstrous weapons, proofs of stored poisons, of mobile chemical laboratories, of unmanned vehicles capable of bringing missiles to Jerusalem.[6]

By early August the Bush Administration has sufficient confidence in its doomsday story to sell it to the American public. Instructed to come up with awesome text and shocking images, the White House Iraq Group hits upon the phrase “mushroom cloud” and prepares a White Paper describing the “grave and gathering danger” posed by Iraq’s nuclear arsenal.[7] The objective is three-fold—to magnify the fear of Saddam Hussein, to present President Bush as the Christian savior of the American people, a man of conscience who never in life would lead the country into an unjust war, and to provide a platform of star-spangled patriotism for Republican candidates in the November congressional elections.[8]

* * *

The Conyers report doesn’t lack for further instances of the administration’s misconduct, all of them noted in the press over the last three years—misuse of government funds, violation of the Geneva Conventions, holding without trial and subjecting to torture individuals arbitrarily designated as “enemy combatants,” etc.—but conspiracy to commit fraud would seem reason enough to warrant the President’s impeachment. Before reading the report, I wouldn’t have expected to find myself thinking that such a course of action was either likely or possible; after reading the report, I don’t know why we would run the risk of not impeaching the man. We have before us in the White House a thief who steals the country’s good name and reputation for his private interest and personal use; a liar who seeks to instill in the American people a state of fear; a televangelist who engages the United States in a never-ending crusade against all the world’s evil, a wastrel who squanders a vast sum of the nation’s wealth on what turns out to be a recruiting drive certain to multiply the host of our enemies. In a word, a criminal—known to be armed and shown to be dangerous. Under the three-strike rule available to the courts in California, judges sentence people to life in jail for having stolen from Wal-Mart a set of golf clubs or a child’s tricycle. Who then calls strikes on President Bush, and how many more does he get before being sent down on waivers to one of the Texas Prison Leagues?

* * *

The above is a brief excerpt from the complete essay, available in the March 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

original article

By MICHAEL FREUND
www.jpost.com

The parent company of a Dubai-based firm at the center of a political storm in the US over the purchase of American ports participates in the Arab boycott against Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The firm, Dubai Ports World, is seeking control over six major US ports, including those in New York, Miami, Philadelphia and Baltimore. It is entirely owned by the Government of Dubai via a holding company called the Ports, Customs and Free Zone Corporation (PCZC), which consists of the Dubai Port Authority, the Dubai Customs Department and the Jebel Ali Free Zone Area.

“Yes, of course the boycott is still in place and is still enforced,” Muhammad Rashid a-Din, a staff member of the Dubai Customs Department’s Office for the Boycott of Israel, told the Post in a telephone interview.

“If a product contained even some components that were made in Israel, and you wanted to import it to Dubai, it would be a problem,” he said.

A-Din noted that while the head office for the anti-Israel boycott sits in Damascus, he and his fellow staff members are paid employees of the Dubai Customs Department, which is a division of the PCZC, the same Dubai government-owned entity that runs Dubai Ports World.

Moreover, the Post found that the website for Dubai’s Jebel Ali Free Zone Area, which is also part of the PCZC, advises importers that they will need to comply with the terms of the boycott.

In a section entitled “Frequently Asked Questions”, the site lists six documents that are required in order to clear an item through the Dubai Customs Department. One of them, called a “Certificate of Origin,” “is used by customs to confirm the country of origin and needs to be seen by the office which ensures any trade boycotts are enforced,” according to the website.

A-Din of the Israel boycott office confirmed that his office examines certificates of origin as a means of verifying whether a product originated in the Jewish state.

On at least three separate occasions last year, the Post has learned, companies were fined by the US government’s Office of Anti-boycott Compliance, an arm of the Commerce Department, on charges connected to boycott-related requests they had received from the Government of Dubai.

US law bars firms from complying with such requests or cooperating with attempts by Arab governments to boycott Israel.

In one instance, according to a Commerce Department press release, a New York-based exporter agreed to pay a fine for having “failed to report in a timely manner its receipts of requests from Dubai” to provide certification that its products had not been made in Israel.

The proposed handover of US ports to DP World has provoked a political storm in Washington, where Republicans and Democrats alike have expressed hostility to the plan, citing national security concerns.

In an attempt to stave off opposition, DP World agreed over the weekend to a highly unusual 45-day second federal investigation of potential security risks.
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side note: pay close attention to the numbers. This port deal should be a big wake up call for all americans. Our so-called leaders are selling us down a river, so they can continue to steal and rape us of everything we’ve worked for, and the generations who’ve come before us.

by Thom Hartmann
www.commondreams.org

The Dubai Ports World deal is waking Americans up to a painful reality: So-called “conservatives” and “flat world” globalists have bankrupted our nation for their own bag of silver, and in the process are selling off America.

Through a combination of the “Fast Track” authority pushed for by Reagan and GHW Bush, sweetheart trade deals involving “most favored nation status” for dictatorships like China, and Clinton pushing us into NAFTA and the WTO (via GATT), we’ve abandoned the principles of tariff-based trade that built American industry and kept us strong for over 200 years.

The old concept was that if there was a dollar’s worth of labor in a pair of shoes made in the USA, and somebody wanted to import shoes from China where there may only be ten cents worth of labor in those shoes, we’d level the playing field for labor by putting a 90-cent import tariff on each pair of shoes. Companies could choose to make their products here or overseas, but the ultimate cost of labor would be the same.

Then came the flat-worlders, led by misguided true believers and promoted by multinational corporations. Do away with those tariffs, they said, because they “restrain trade.” Let everything in, and tax nothing. The result has been an explosion of cheap goods coming into our nation, and the loss of millions of good manufacturing jobs and thousands of manufacturing companies. Entire industry sectors have been wiped out.

These policies have kneecapped the American middle class. Our nation’s largest employer has gone from being the unionized General Motors to the poverty-wages Wal-Mart. Americans have gone from having a net savings rate around 10 percent in the 1970s to a minus .5 percent in 2005 – meaning that they’re going into debt or selling off their assets just to maintain their lifestyle.

At the same time, federal policy has been to do the same thing at a national level. Because our so-called “free trade” policies have left us with an over $700 billion annual trade deficit, other countries are sitting on huge piles of the dollars we gave them to buy their stuff (via Wal-Mart and other “low cost” retailers). But we no longer manufacture anything they want to buy with those dollars.

So instead of buying our manufactured goods, they are doing what we used to do with Third World nations – they are buying us, the USA, chunk by chunk. In particular, they want to buy things in America that will continue to produce profits, and then to take those profits overseas where they’re invested to make other nations strong. The “things” they’re buying are, by and large, corporations, utilities, and natural resources.

Back in the pre-Reagan days, American companies made profits that were distributed among Americans. They used their profits to build more factories, or diversify into other businesses. The profits stayed in America.

Today, foreigners awash with our consumer dollars are on a two-decades-long buying spree. The UK’s BP bought Amoco for $48 billion – now Amoco’s profits go to England. Deutsche Telekom bought VoiceStream Wireless, so their profits go to Germany, which is where most of the profits from Random House, Allied Signal, Chrysler, Doubleday, Cyprus Amax’s US Coal Mining Operations, GTE/Sylvania, and Westinghouse’s Power Generation profits go as well. Ralston Purina’s profits go to Switzerland, along with Gerber’s; TransAmerica’s profits go to The Netherlands, while John Hancock Insurance’s profits go to Canada. Even American Bankers Insurance Group is owned now by Fortis AG in Belgium.

Foreign companies are buying up our water systems, our power generating systems, our mines, and our few remaining factories. All because “flat world” so-called “free trade” policies have turned us from a nation of wealthy producers into a nation of indebted consumers, leaving the world awash in dollars that are most easily used to buy off big chunks of America. As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:

· Sound recording industries – 97%
· Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage – 79%
· Motion picture and sound recording industries – 75%
· Metal ore mining – 65%
· Motion picture and video industries – 64%
· Wineries and distilleries – 64%
· Database, directory, and other publishers – 63%
· Book publishers – 63%
· Cement, concrete, lime, and gypsum product – 62%
· Engine, turbine and power transmission equipment – 57%
· Rubber product – 53%
· Nonmetallic mineral product manufacturing – 53%
· Plastics and rubber products manufacturing – 52%
· Plastics product – 51%
· Other insurance related activities – 51%
· Boiler, tank, and shipping container – 50%
· Glass and glass product – 48%
· Coal mining – 48%
· Sugar and confectionery product – 48%
· Nonmetallic mineral mining and quarrying – 47%
· Advertising and related services – 41%
· Pharmaceutical and medicine – 40%
· Clay, refractory, and other nonmetallic mineral products – 40%
· Securities brokerage – 38%
· Other general purpose machinery – 37%
· Audio and video equipment mfg and reproducing magnetic and optical media – 36%
· Support activities for mining – 36%
· Soap, cleaning compound, and toilet preparation – 32%
· Chemical manufacturing – 30%
· Industrial machinery – 30%
· Securities, commodity contracts, and other financial investments and related activities – 30%
· Other food – 29%
· Motor vehicles and parts – 29%
· Machinery manufacturing – 28%
· Other electrical equipment and component – 28%
· Securities and commodity exchanges and other financial investment activities – 27%
· Architectural, engineering, and related services – 26%
· Credit card issuing and other consumer credit – 26%
· Petroleum refineries (including integrated) – 25%
· Navigational, measuring, electromedical, and control instruments – 25%
· Petroleum and coal products manufacturing – 25%
· Transportation equipment manufacturing – 25%
· Commercial and service industry machinery – 25%
· Basic chemical – 24%
· Investment banking and securities dealing – 24%
· Semiconductor and other electronic component – 23%
· Paint, coating, and adhesive – 22%
· Printing and related support activities – 21%
· Chemical product and preparation – 20%
· Iron, steel mills, and steel products – 20%
· Agriculture, construction, and mining machinery – 20%
· Publishing industries – 20%
· Medical equipment and supplies – 20%

Thus it shouldn’t surprise us that the cons have sold off our ports as well, and will defend it to the bitter end. They truly believe that a “New World Order” with multinational corporations in charge instead of sovereign governments will be the answer to the problem of world instability. And therefore they must do away with quaint things like unions, a healthy middle class, and, ultimately, democracy.

The “security” implications of turning our ports over to the UAE are just the latest nail in what the cons hope will be the coffin of American democracy and the American middle class. Today’s conservatives believe in rule by inherited wealth and an internationalist corporate elite, and things like a politically aroused citizenry and a healthy democracy are pesky distractions.

Everything today is driven by profits for multinationals, supported by the lawmaking power of the WTO. Thus, parts for our missiles are now made in China, a country that last year threatened us with nuclear weapons. Our oil comes from a country that birthed a Wahabist movement that ultimately led to 14 Saudi citizens flying jetliners into the World Trade buildings and the Pentagon. Germans now own the Chrysler auto assembly lines that turned out tanks to use against Germany in WWII. And the price of labor in America is being held down by over ten million illegal workers, a situation that was impossible twenty-five years ago when unions were the first bulwark against dilution of the American labor force.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote of King George III in the Declaration of Independence, “He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitutions and unacknowledged by our laws, giving his assent to their acts of pretended legislation…” he just as easily could have been writing of the World Trade Organization, which now has the legal authority to force the United States to overturn laws passed at both local, state, and federal levels with dictates devised by tribunals made up of representatives of multinational corporations. If Dubai loses in the American Congress, their next stop will almost certainly be the WTO.

As Simon Romero and Heather Timmons noted in The New York Times on 24 February 2006, “the international shipping business has evolved in recent years to include many more containers with consumer goods, in addition to old-fashioned bulk commodities, and that has helped lift profit margins to 30 percent, from the single digits. These smartly managed foreign operators now manage about 80 percent of port terminals in the United States.”

And those 30 percent profits from American port operations now going to Great Britain will probably soon go to the United Arab Emirates, a nation with tight interconnections to both the Bush administration and the Bush family.

Ultimately, it’s not about security — it’s about money. In the multinational corporatocracy’s “flat world,” money trumps the national good, community concerns, labor interests, and the environment. NAFTA, CAFTA, and WTO tribunals can – and regularly do – strike down local and national laws. Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man” are replaced by Antonin Scalia’s “Rights of Corporate Persons.”

Profits even trump the desire for good enough port security to avoid disasters that may lead to war. After all, as Judith Miller wrote in The New York Times on January 30, 1991, quoting a local in Saudi Arabia: “War is good for business.”

Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning best-selling author of over a dozen books and the host of a nationally syndicated noon-3pm ET daily progressive talk show syndicated by Air America Radio. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are “What Would Jefferson Do?” and Ultimate Sacrifice.
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side note: this is directly from zogby’s website. quite a few of the numbers stand out…but one that specifically caught my eye was: While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.” this shows us that our troops bought into this war like the american people did, but since then have not received the true facts about it…and that it was based on lies that the bushie administration told!

Zogby.com

* Le Moyne College/Zogby Poll shows just one in five troops want to heed Bush call to stay “as long as they are needed”
* While 58% say mission is clear, 42% say U.S. role is hazy
* Plurality believes Iraqi insurgents are mostly homegrown
* Almost 90% think war is retaliation for Saddam’s role in 9/11, most don’t blame Iraqi public for insurgent attacks
* Majority of troops oppose use of harsh prisoner interrogation
* Plurality of troops pleased with their armor and equipment

An overwhelming majority of 72% of American troops serving in Iraq think the U.S. should exit the country within the next year, and nearly one in four say the troops should leave immediately, a new Le Moyne College/Zogby International survey shows.

The poll, conducted in conjunction with Le Moyne College’s Center for Peace and Global Studies, showed that 29% of the respondents, serving in various branches of the armed forces, said the U.S. should leave Iraq “immediately,” while another 22% said they should leave in the next six months. Another 21% said troops should be out between six and 12 months, while 23% said they should stay “as long as they are needed.”

Different branches had quite different sentiments on the question, the poll shows. While 89% of reserves and 82% of those in the National Guard said the U.S. should leave Iraq within a year, 58% of Marines think so. Seven in ten of those in the regular Army thought the U.S. should leave Iraq in the next year. Moreover, about three-quarters of those in National Guard and Reserve units favor withdrawal within six months, just 15% of Marines felt that way. About half of those in the regular Army favored withdrawal from Iraq in the next six months.

The troops have drawn different conclusions about fellow citizens back home. Asked why they think some Americans favor rapid U.S. troop withdrawal from Iraq, 37% of troops serving there said those Americans are unpatriotic, while 20% believe people back home don’t believe a continued occupation will work. Another 16% said they believe those favoring a quick withdrawal do so because they oppose the use of the military in a pre-emptive war, while 15% said they do not believe those Americans understand the need for the U.S. troops in Iraq.

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

“Ninety-three percent said that removing weapons of mass destruction is not a reason for U.S. troops being there,” said Pollster John Zogby, President and CEO of Zogby International. “Instead, that initial rationale went by the wayside and, in the minds of 68% of the troops, the real mission became to remove Saddam Hussein.” Just 24% said that “establishing a democracy that can be a model for the Arab World” was the main or a major reason for the war. Only small percentages see the mission there as securing oil supplies (11%) or to provide long-term bases for US troops in the region (6%).

The continuing insurgent attacks have not turned U.S. troops against the Iraqi population, the survey shows. More than 80% said they did not hold a negative view of Iraqis because of those attacks. About two in five see the insurgency as being comprised of discontented Sunnis with very few non-Iraqi helpers. “There appears to be confusion on this,” Zogby said. But, he noted, less than a third think that if non-Iraqi terrorists could be prevented from crossing the border into Iraq, the insurgency would end. A majority of troops (53%) said the U.S. should double both the number of troops and bombing missions in order to control the insurgency.

The survey shows that most U.S. military personnel in-country have a clear sense of right and wrong when it comes to using banned weapons against the enemy, and in interrogation of prisoners. Four in five said they oppose the use of such internationally banned weapons as napalm and white phosphorous. And, even as more photos of prisoner abuse in Iraq surface around the world, 55% said it is not appropriate or standard military conduct to use harsh and threatening methods against insurgent prisoners in order to gain information of military value.

Three quarters of the troops had served multiple tours and had a longer exposure to the conflict: 26% were on their first tour of duty, 45% were on their second tour, and 29% were in Iraq for a third time or more.

A majority of the troops serving in Iraq said they were satisfied with the war provisions from Washington. Just 30% of troops said they think the Department of Defense has failed to provide adequate troop protections, such as body armor, munitions, and armor plating for vehicles like HumVees. Only 35% said basic civil infrastructure in Iraq, including roads, electricity, water service, and health care, has not improved over the past year. Three of every four were male respondents, with 63% under the age of 30.

The survey included 944 military respondents interviewed at several undisclosed locations throughout Iraq. The names of the specific locations and specific personnel who conducted the survey are being withheld for security purposes. Surveys were conducted face-to-face using random sampling techniques. The margin of error for the survey, conducted Jan. 18 through Feb. 14, 2006, is +/- 3.3 percentage points.

original article

By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

The flap over the United Arab Emirates taking control of several American ports, the subject of much hot talk over the last several days, is born of several factors. It is only partially about global economics. America’s trade relationship with the UAE is the third largest in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia and Israel, so the gospel of “free trade” is definitely in play.

This flap is also only partially about national security. There is, of course, concern that a nation connected to the 9/11 attacks will manage several vital entry points to the country. There is also the quid pro quo aspect to this deal; the UAE docks more American warships than any other Middle Eastern nation, and the thinking apparently goes that if they can do this safely, they can manage ports over here.

By the by, this UAE deal is also about standard issue straight-out-of-central-casting Bush administration cronyism. Two major players in the establishment of this deal were John Snow and David Sanborn. Snow, the Treasury Secretary, was chairman of the CSX railroad firm before joining the administration. In 2004, CSX sold its international port operations to Dubai Ports World, the UAE-backed company tapped to run our ports, for $1.15 billion. Sanborn used to run Dubai Ports World’s European and Latin American operations. He was tapped last month by Bush to head the US Maritime Administration. Convenient, that.

So there’s some economics, some national security concern, and some good old fashioned insider horse trading going on here, but none of these alone or combined tells the whole story here. The administration has swallowed a 45-day “review” of this deal, so as to temporarily avoid the need for Bush to veto any legislation blocking it, and so as to avoid the very real possibility that his veto could be overridden in Congress. In the interim, we can take a look at what is truly motivating the noise surrounding this issue.

The true basis of the scandal is based upon two things: politics, and the boomerang.

The politics part is easy. Democrats, ever fretting over looking “weak” on national security, are going full hawk on this deal to make Bush and Congressional Republicans look weak on the issue of protecting America. Given the fact that very few Americans know much of anything about how our ports are managed – it bears noting that a large number of our ports are already managed by foreign countries like China and Singapore – it is a tactic that has some traction.

There is also a legitimate security concern that cannot be overlooked. The deal, when originally announced, had Dubai Ports World taking control of six major ports. In point of fact, DP World will be taking control of 21 American ports: 11 on the East Coast from Portland, Maine to Miami, Florida, and 10 on the Gulf Coast, from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Corpus Christi, Texas. Calls to ensure that security will not be compromised in this process are well founded.

Republicans, on the other hand, are yelling about this ports deal in order to put some daylight between themselves and a congenitally unpopular president during a midterm election year.

Are they nervous? Bet on it. David Horowitz hosted his Restoration Weekend in Phoenix last weekend, an annual right-wing confab where conservative banner-carriers gather to plot the overthrow of church-state separation and Roe v. Wade. According to reports, the attendees this weekend are seeing blood on the moon.

“We have to acknowledge we have a President who is not popular,” said former congressman Pat Toomey, head of the Club for Growth, during the weekend festivities. “The war in Iraq is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room and a major downturn could drown anything we do. We won in 1994 because we promised small government and going into the 2006 elections this is key idea we have abandoned.”

“I feel the Republican Party in my state and nationally is a party that has lost its way,” said former Colorado state senator John Andrews. “We need to find our way back to a reason to vote Republican.”

“I believe these scandals are the end of the 1994 Revolution,” said conservative congressman John Shaddeg, in reference to Jack Abramoff. “All this seriously threatens the Republican majority. It might be hard to shrink government as we promised. But it’s not that hard to be honest and we haven’t.”

“The demoralization of the base is real,” said Missouri Lt. Governor Pete Kinder. “I hear it everywhere.”

So there it is. Both parties are making hay off this ports deal to position themselves for the midterm elections. It isn’t much of a political surprise that the Democrats are attacking the administration over this, but it is telling indeed to see Republicans running scared from the president they have stapled themselves to for the last five years.

Which brings us to the boomerang, the real reason why this ports deal has become a scandal.

Since September 12, 2001, George W. Bush and his administration have used every available opportunity to scare the cheese out of the American people in order to get what they want. Fake elevations of the security alert to cover political messes, plastic sheeting and duct tape, mushroom clouds, weapons of mass destruction, and all cloaked in a none-too-subtle message that all Muslims and every Arab nation are to be feared and reviled – this has been the ticket for the passing of every budget, the basis for every campaign, and the establishment of the false rationale for an invasion of Iraq.

Some have claimed opposition to this ports deal stems from anti-Arab racism. If this is true, that racism can be laid upon the doormat in front of the White House door. When a president spends every day of five years terrorizing his own people about potential attacks from west Asia, frightening them on an hourly basis for no other reason than that it makes the populace easier to govern, a degree of anti-Arab racism is bound to flower.

In short, the administration bought this scandal with five years’ worth of hard propaganda work. Observed from a distance, it should not surprise anyone that this issue has blown up on them. It is a wonder, frankly, that the administration didn’t see this coming. They didn’t and here we are.

There are a lot of boomerangs flying around these days. The invasion and occupation of Iraq was begun on false premises. It has caused the deaths of 2,293 American soldiers, the grievous injury of tens of thousands more American soldiers, the deaths of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and police officers, and the death and maiming of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. It disgraced the United States across the globe when pictures of torture in Abu Ghraib prison were released. It has ruptured the federal budget to such a degree that basic, vital services are being cut to pay for it.

And now it has led to the doorstep of the civil war that so many have warned about. The bombing of one of Shi’ite Islam’s holiest shrines in Samarra last week has led to an explosion of sectarian violence across Iraq. Worse, the Shi’ite-Sunni divisions that exist in nine Middle Eastern nations, including Kuwait, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, could be exacerbated to the point of violence by what is happening in Iraq. In other words, we are looking at the real potential of a regional conflagration over religion that will make the Catholic-Protestant carnage in Ireland look like a quaint tea party by comparison.

That is a boomerang which could wind up smacking us all in the end.

original article

From 2001 to 2004, median income fell 8 percent for householders under 35, a survey shows.

By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

In the race to get ahead economically, America’s young workers are falling behind.

A new survey shows that median incomes fell for householders under 45, even as they rose for older ones, between 2001 and 2004.

Income fell 8 percent, adjusted for inflation, for those under 35 and 9 percent for those aged 35 to 44. The numbers add new weight to longstanding concerns about whether younger generations of Americans will achieve living standards that are better – or at least equal to – those of their parents.

“It’s a scary question,” says Carrie Brown, who runs the Blue Frog Bakery in Boston. She says that for now, at least, she’s not keeping pace. And if she and her husband have children, she says she’s not sure if her children will enjoy the same lifestyle she did while growing up.

Her concern is shared by many Americans who follow the baby-boom generation. One often-voiced worry is about generational fairness in tax burdens, given the prospect of a soaring federal tab in coming decades for Medicare and Social Security as the number of elderly Americans rises.

But today, even long before any such fiscal shock arrives, younger workers are already feeling squeezed by other trends. An increasingly competitive global economy, the rising cost of higher education and healthcare, and changing patterns of family life are among the factors that have combined to make the career environment tougher, economists say.

“There’s no guarantee” that US living standards will continue to rise, says Laurence Kotlikoff, a Boston University specialist in generational economics.

For now, the prospect of a generation underperforming their parents may be more of a fear than a reality. By many measures, America continues to grow more prosperous with each passing decade.

A long-term trend of falling interest rates since the 1980s, for example, means that even after the recent runup in home prices, houses are generally more affordable today than they were 20 years ago. And homes today contain gadgets – from a child’s video-game system to an adult’s pocket e-mail device – that didn’t exist a generation ago.

At the same time, however, evidence of economic challenges also abounds.

The signs include:

• Rising debt levels. Over the past decade, the volume of federal student loans tripled, reaching $85 billion in new loans last year, according to a new book by Anya Kamenetz, “Generation Debt.” Nearly a quarter of college students are using credit cards to pay some of their tuition costs, she writes.

• The median income for men under age 44 was significantly lower in 1997 than in 1970, after adjusting for inflation, according to a long-term analysis by the Census Bureau in the late 1990s. For those over 45, incomes barely held their own during that period.

• The entry of women into the workforce in those decades has helped push median family incomes up over time. But even when men and women are included together, younger workers (age 25-34) are earning well below what they did in 1970. And at all ages, evidence suggests that families are putting in more hours of work to make their household incomes rise.

• Even with extra time at work, median family income has barely budged since 1995 for householders below 45, up about 5 percent after inflation through 2004.

Those aged 45 to 54 did better, with family incomes rising 23 percent during that period, according to the numbers released last week from the Federal Reserve Board.

And since the end of 2001, at the outset of the current economic expansion, younger workers again have underperformed, with incomes generally falling while their older counterparts have seen incomes rise.

That all helps explain the subtitle of Ms. Kamenetz’s book: “Why now is a terrible time to be young.” The book is partly a manifesto on generational politics, as she eyes the cost of baby boomers’ retirement for her generation.

It’s unfair, some economists say, to blame the baby boom generation, since the larger issue is that healthcare costs keep rising and people keep living longer in general. Rising healthcare costs are hitting younger workers in another way, too. As benefit costs rise, employers often have less left to boost wages.

Another factor behind the weak incomes for younger generations may be shifts in household composition.

The past few decades have seen a rise of single-parent and nonfamily households, which typically have lower incomes than married-couple households.

Perhaps most significant, though, is a labor market that has become tougher on workers, especially those with lower skills. Global competition has compressed wage gains.

Thus, despite a boom in worker productivity, “what the typical family or typical worker has to show for it has been remarkably little,” says Dean Baker, an economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington.

In his view, the biggest issue is the rising inequality of incomes during the past quarter century.

At the Blue Frog Bakery, Ms. Brown sees that trend among her own peers. “People are either doing phenomenally well or living paycheck to paycheck,” she says, as the smell of fresh croissants wafts through the air.

Still, many economists say progress is possible.

“In the long run I’m optimistic,” says Michael Shields, an economist who specializes in demographics at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant.

What worries him most, he says, is the long work hours for his children who are just out of college. “When are they going to be able to take a break?” he asks. “I don’t see it.”

By Steve Connor
www.nzherald.co.nz

Men who are blessed with a sunny disposition and a predilection for a cup of cocoa before bedtime are also likely to live longer, scientists have discovered.

Two separate studies in the Netherlands have found that regular cocoa drinkers have lower blood pressure than non-drinkers and that an optimistic outlook helps you to avoid heart disease.

Both studies looked at large numbers of men between the ages of 64 and 85 who were interviewed about their lifestyles in order to tease out any associations with potentially lethal diseases.

Brian Buijsse of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Bilthoven investigated the cocoa-drinking habits of 470 elderly men, whereas Erik Giltay of the Institute of Mental Health in Deft looked at levels of optimism among 545 men of a similar age.

Dr Giltay said that optimism was assessed in questionnaires given out in 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000 which asked the men to rate their agreement with statements such as “I still expect much from life” or “I do not look forward to what lies ahead of me in the years to come”.

During the 15 years of follow-up, Dr Giltay and his colleagues found that optimism was linked with about a 50 per cent lower risk of cardiovascular disease.

“Optimism can be estimated easily and is stable over long periods. It is yet to be established whether interventions aimed at improving an older individual’s level of optimism may reduce the risk of cardiovascular mortality,” Dr Giltay said.

Meanwhile, over the 15 years of the study looking at cocoa drinking, the scientists found that the men with the highest consumption levels had significantly lower blood pressure than those who hardly drank the beverage.

The study also found that regular cocoa drinkers were also at half the risk of developing serious heart disease compared to non-drinkers and were more likely to live longer, according to Dr Buijsse and his colleagues.

“The lower cardiovascular mortality risk associated with cocoa intake could not be attributed to the lower blood pressure observed with cocoa use,” the scientists write in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

“Our findings therefore suggest that the lower cardiovascular mortality risk related with cocoa intake is mediated by mechanisms other than lowering blood pressure.”
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side note: 1300 dead in a few days! we can only hope the violence ends, but as all the middle east experts have been saying for years, a civil war was inevitible, and it’s now starting to rear it’s ugly head. there have obviously been signs for years…but this bombing and 1300 dead is clear a sign as any!

Morgue Count Eclipses Other Tallies Since Shrine Attack

By Ellen Knickmeyer and Bassam Sebti
Washington Post Foreign Service

BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 — Grisly attacks and other sectarian violence unleashed by last week’s bombing of a Shiite Muslim shrine have killed more than 1,300 Iraqis, making the past few days the deadliest of the war outside of major U.S. offensives, according to Baghdad’s main morgue. The toll was more than three times higher than the figure previously reported by the U.S. military and the news media.

Hundreds of unclaimed dead lay at the morgue at midday Monday — blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bags still over their heads. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound — and many of them had wound up at the morgue after what their families said was their abduction by the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.

“After he came back from the evening prayer, the Mahdi Army broke into his house and asked him, ‘Are you Khalid the Sunni infidel?’ ” one man at the morgue said, relating what were the last hours of his cousin, according to other relatives. “He replied yes and then they took him away.”

Aides to Sadr denied the allegations, calling them part of a smear campaign by unspecified political rivals.

By Monday, violence between Sunni Arabs and Shiites appeared to have eased. As Iraqi security forces patrolled, American troops offered measured support, in hopes of allowing the Iraqis to take charge and prevent further carnage.

But at the morgue, where the floor was crusted with dried blood, the evidence of the damage already done was clear. Iraqis arrived throughout the day, seeking family members and neighbors among the contorted bodies.

“And they say there is no sectarian war?” demanded one man. “What do you call this?”

The brothers of one missing man arrived, searching for a body. Their hunt ended on the concrete floor, provoking sobs of mourning: “Why did you kill him?” “He was unarmed!” “Oh, my brother! Oh, my brother!”

Morgue officials said they had logged more than 1,300 dead since Wednesday — the day the Shiites’ gold-domed Askariya shrine was bombed — photographing, numbering and tagging the bodies as they came in over the nights and days of retaliatory raids.

The Statistics Department of the Iraqi police put the nationwide toll at 1,020 since Wednesday, but that figure was based on paperwork that is sometimes delayed before reaching police headquarters. The majority of the dead had been killed after being taken away by armed men, police said.

The disclosure of the death tolls followed accusations by the U.S. military and later Iraqi officials that the news media had exaggerated the violence between Shiites and Sunnis over the past few days.

The bulk of the previously known deaths were caused by bombings and other large-scale attacks. But the scene at the morgue and accounts related by relatives indicated that most of the bloodletting came at the hands of self-styled executioners.

“They killed him just because he was a Sunni,” one young man at the morgue said of his 32-year-old neighbor, whose body he was retrieving.

Much of the violence has centered on mosques, many of which were taken over by Shiite gunmen, bombed or burned.

In the Shiite holy city of Najaf, aides to Sadr denied any role in the killings.

“These groups wore black clothes like the Mahdi Army to make the people say that the Shiites kidnapped and killed them,” said Riyadh al-Nouri, a close aide to Sadr.

Sahib al-Amiri, another close aide, said: “Some political party accused [Sadr's political party] and the Mahdi Army because they considered us as competitive to them. So they recruited criminals to kill Shiites and Sunnis.”

After Wednesday’s mosque attack in Samarra, Sadr and other Shiite clerics called on their armed followers to deploy to protect shrines across Iraq.

Clutching rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic rifles, the militias rolled out of their Baghdad base of Sadr City. Residents of several neighborhoods reported them on patrol or in control of mosques. U.S.-backed Iraqi security forces did not appear to challenge the militias, which are officially outlawed.

Sunni leaders charged that more than 100 Sunni mosques were burned, fired upon or bombed in the retaliatory violence after the attack on the Samarra mosque.

Iraqi officials, at the urging of Sunni leaders, imposed what became a round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad to try to quell the violence.

Sunnis speaking at the morgue said many of the dead had been taken away at night, when security forces were supposed to have been enforcing the curfew.

By Monday, the reported violence had subsided. Four mortar rounds hit a Shiite neighborhood of Baghdad, killing four people, news agencies reported. More mortar attacks boomed in other parts of the capital.

Also Monday, Iraq’s interim government lifted the round-the-clock curfew in Baghdad. The new curfew orders residents inside from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.

Residents rushed out of their homes to refill gas tanks and kitchen shelves. Lines at gas stations stretched for miles and sometimes clogged both sides of highways. One motorist in the line was seen clutching a blanket and pillow, apparently anticipating an overnight wait for gas.

Making their way through the traffic were a few cars with plastic-wrapped corpses in crude wooden coffins strapped to the roofs.

During two hours at the morgue on Monday, families brought in two more victims of the violence to receive death certificates. Other families carried away 10 dead. Most of the victims were Sunni.

At the blue steel doors of the morgue, dozens more bloody bodies could be seen on the floor or on gurneys. Two hundred were still unidentified and unclaimed, morgue workers said.

Claiming the dead has become automated. Morgue workers directed families to a barred window in the narrow courtyard outside the main entrance. A computer screen angled to face the window flashed the contorted, staring faces of the dead: men shot in the mouth, men shot in the head, men covered with blood, men with bindings twisted around their necks.

Men and a few women in black abayas pressed up to the window’s black bars as the reek of the bodies inside spilled out.

“What neighborhood?” a morgue worker asked one waiting man.

“Adhamiyah,” the man said, naming a predominantly Sunni neighborhood.

Tapping at the keyboard, the morgue worker fast-forwarded through the scores of tortured faces.

“Criminals. How can you kill another human for nothing?” someone clutching the bars asked.

“Good news, we found the body,” another man called out. “We found him.”

Special correspondents K.I. Ibrahim in Baghdad and Saad Sarhan in Najaf, staff writer Nelson Hernandez and other Washington Post staff contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

original article

BBC.com

At least 30 people have been killed and 130 injured by three bomb attacks in Baghdad, only a day after the lifting of a curfew imposed following violence.

In the eastern New Baghdad district, 20 people were killed and 100 injured when a suicide bomber blew himself up next to a petrol station.

Ten others were killed and 30 wounded in two car bomb attacks in New Baghdad and in the central Karrada district.

The attacks came as the trial of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein resumed.

The former president and seven co-defendants are charged with killing 148 people in Dujail after a failed assassination attempt against him.

In other developments:

–The bodies of nine Iraqis, including a Sunni Arab tribal leader, were found, riddled with bullets, in Tarfaya, south of the city of Baquba.
–Two British soldiers were killed and another was injured by a roadside bomb on the outskirts of Amara, in southern Iraq, the Ministry of Defence said.
–A US soldier was killed by small-arms fire in the west of Baghdad, the US military said.
–A bomb went off at a mosque erected by Saddam Hussein over his father’s grave in his hometown of Tikrit. The mosque’s dome was damaged.

Blasts

The BBC’s Jim Muir in Baghdad says the attacks were an apparently coordinated onslaught aimed at killing and injuring as many people as possible.

It comes amidst growing fears of a slide towards sectarian strife that has gathered momentum sharply since last week’s attack on the Shia shrine in Samarra, our correspondent says.

The first car bomb exploded near a market and the Shia Timimi mosque in the mainly Shia area of Karrada, killing six and wounding 18.

The market would have been fairly busy at the time, police said.

The eastern district of New Baghdad was hit by two simultaneous explosions minutes afterwards.

A second car bomb exploded near the main post office in a busy street in a mixed area of eastern Baghdad, killing four and injuring 12.

Then a suicide bomber who had strapped explosives to his body blew himself up among a queue of people waiting for petrol nearby.

“If the government cannot do anything, let it step back. We have suffered enough,” Firas Hassan Illiwi, who witnessed the attack, told the Reuters news agency.

“Why does all this happen to us? Is it because we are Shias? Our crime is being Shias.”

On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported that the Iraqi police said 1,020 people had been killed in the sectarian violence that followed the bombing of the Shia shrine at Samarra on 22 February, but officials at Baghdad’s morgue told the newspaper they had logged 1,300 deaths.

The head of the Baghdad central morgue, Dr Qais Hassan, told BBC Arabic.com that the Washington Post’s figures could not be correct. He told the BBC that the morgue’s records for the 23 to 26 February showed that 249 people had died in the violence.

US and Iraqi officials have said the media exaggerated the number of Iraqis killed in recent violence.

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side note: next time you have a discussion with a righty and they tell you that you don’t support the troops…ask them if they even know what the troops’ opionion is. it’s not what they think!!!

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
When President Bush held a public meeting with troops by satellite last fall, they were miraculously upbeat. And all along, unrepentant hawks (most of whom have never been to Iraq) have insisted that journalists are misreporting Iraq and that most soldiers are gung-ho about their mission.

Hogwash! A new poll to be released today shows that U.S. soldiers overwhelmingly want out of Iraq — and soon.

The poll is the first of U.S. troops currently serving in Iraq, according to John Zogby, the pollster. Conducted by Zogby International and LeMoyne College, it asked 944 service members, “How long should U.S. troops stay in Iraq?”

Only 23 percent backed Mr. Bush’s position that they should stay as long as necessary. In contrast, 72 percent said that U.S. troops should be pulled out within one year. Of those, 29 percent said they should withdraw “immediately.”

That’s one more bit of evidence that our grim stay-the-course policy in Iraq has failed. Even the American troops on the ground don’t buy into it — and having administration officials pontificate from the safety of Washington about the need for ordinary soldiers to stay the course further erodes military morale.

While the White House emphasizes the threat from non-Iraqi terrorists, only 26 percent of the U.S. troops say that the insurgency would end if those foreign fighters could be kept out. A plurality believes that the insurgency is made up overwhelmingly of discontented Iraqi Sunnis.

So what would it take to win in Iraq? Maybe that was the single most depressing finding in this poll.

By a two-to-one ratio, the troops said that “to control the insurgency we need to double the level of ground troops and bombing missions.” And since there is zero chance of that happening, a majority of troops seemed to be saying that they believe this war to be unwinnable.

This first systematic look at the views of the U.S. troops on the ground suggests that our present strategy in Iraq is failing badly. The troops overwhelmingly don’t want to “stay the course,” and they don’t seem to think the American strategy can succeed.

It’s tempting, but not very helpful, to repeat that the fatal mistake was invading Iraq three years ago and leave it at that. That’s easy for a columnist to say; the harder thing for a policy maker is to figure out what we do next, now that we’re already there.

I still believe that while the war was a dreadful mistake, an immediate pullout would also be a misstep: anyone who says that Iraq can’t get worse hasn’t seen a country totally torn apart by chaos and civil war. Mr. Bush is right about the consequences of an immediate pullout — to Iraq, and also to American influence around the world.

But while we shouldn’t rush for the exits immediately, we should lay out a timetable for withdrawal that would remove all troops by the end of next year. And we should state clearly that we will not keep any military bases in Iraq — that’s a no-brainer, for it costs us nothing, but our hedging on bases antagonizes Iraqi nationalists and results in more dead Americans.

Such a timetable would force Iraqis to prepare — politically and militarily — to run their own country. The year or two of transition would galvanize Iraqi Shiites to find a modus vivendi with Sunnis while undermining the insurgents’ arguments that they are nationalists protecting the motherland from Yankee crusaders.

True, a timetable is arbitrary and risky, for it could just encourage insurgents to hang tight for another couple of years. But we’re being killed — literally — because of nationalist suspicions among Iraqis that we’re just after their oil and bases and that we’re going to stay forever. It’s crucial that we defuse that nationalist rage.

For now, we’ve become the piñata of Iraqi politics, something for Iraqi demagogues to bash to boost their own legitimacy. Moktada al-Sadr, one of the scariest Iraqi leaders, has very shrewdly used his denunciations of the U.S. to boost his own political following and influence across Iraq; that’s our gift to him, a consequence of our myopia. And many ordinary Iraqis are buying into this scapegoating of the U.S. Edward Wong, one of my intrepid Times colleagues in Baghdad, quoted a clothing merchant named Abdul-Qader Ali as saying: “I can tell you the main reason behind all our woes — it is America. Everything that is going on between Sunnis and Shiites, the troublemaker in the middle is America.”

Will a timetable work? I don’t know, but it’s a better bet than our present policy of whistling in the dark. And it’s what the troops favor — and they’re the ones who have Iraq combat experience. It’s time our commander in chief stopped stage-managing his troops and listened to them.

The New York Times Company

By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
yahoo.com

WASHINGTON – Poor prewar planning left the United States without enough skilled workers to efficiently rebuild Iraq’s economy and public works, according to a report issued Monday.

The study by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction provided a new explanation for the lagging reconstruction effort. Surveys by the Bush administration and congressional auditors have blamed insurgent attacks and the high cost of security.

Thanks to inadequate planning, the report said, early occupation officials lacked enough reconstruction staffers who knew what they were doing.

It recommended the government establish a “civilian reserve corps” to deploy around the world for postwar rebuilding.

While reconstruction has cost American taxpayers about $30 billion three years after the overthrown of
Saddam Hussein, the country still lacks reliable electricity, water and other services. Monday’s report — covering the time the country was under control of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority — said early efforts were greatly affected by personnel problems.

“Pre-war reconstruction planning assumed that Iraq’s bureaucracy would go back to work when the fighting stopped,” it said. “When it became clear that the Iraqi bureaucracy was in widespread disarray,” occupation authorities “had to find coalition personnel to perform these tasks.”

“The U.S. government workforce planning for Iraq’s reconstruction suffered from a poorly structured, ad-hoc personnel management processes,” the report said, calling hiring practices “haphazard.”

At one point, officials asked civilian and military agencies for personnel “but did not prepare detailed job descriptions because of time constraints,” the report said.

In late summer 2003, a new recruiting team was set up in the Pentagon’s White House Liaison Office, based in part on the “transition team” model used to staff new presidential administrations. The team quickly hired hundreds of new temporary employees, “but some possessed what proved to be inconsistent skill sets,” the report said.

It also criticized the Bush administration for failing to get government employees from outside the State and Defense departments to work in Iraq.

And it said many people who were supposed to work there a year ran up so much overtime that they hit salary caps in six to eight months — and left.

“You had these 90-day workers getting their tickets punched that indicated, ‘I’ve been to Baghdad,’” said a former senior U.S. official in Iraq who is quoted in the report.

The episode “demonstrated the U.S. government’s critical need for a reserve civilian corps of talented professionals, with the proper expertise, willing to work in a hostile environment during post-conflict stabilization and reconstruction periods,” the report said. Legislation to form such a corps was introduced last year but did not pass.

“The United States can deploy military people quite easily,” said James P. Mitchell, spokesman for the inspector general’s office. “But when they need to deploy civilians, it’s very difficult and complicated and there is no system to do it.”
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